The Tourist's Maritime Provinces/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
WINDSOR—GRAND PRÉ—WOLFVILLE
BLOMIDON
∵
One of the oldest communities in the Province which Sam Slick called "good above and better below; surface covered with pastures, meadows, woods and a nation sight of water privileges, and under the ground, full of mines" is Windsor. The "water privileges" of this immediate region comprise those of the spreading Avon, which flows high, or ebbs low, at the beck of lunar laws. The river drains into the Basin of Minas. The latter is affected by the tides of the Bay of Fundy of which it forms the northeastern fork. Twice a day the tide of the Atlantic sets from Cape Sable northwestward through the broad gate of the Bay of Fundy at a speed of two to three knots. The vast body of water rushing up, and the Bay narrowing suddenly opposite St. John, causes the Basin of Minas and Chignecto Bay to fill with tremendous rapidity. The rise at Grand Manan is 15 feet; at Eastport, 20 feet; at St. John, 30 feet; at Parrsboro and Windsor, 40 to 50 feet. From Truro to Yarmouth the Fundy tides provide alternating scenes of plenty and desolation. Vessels running in at the flood are left careening on the ground when the tide slips from their keels. One goes to sleep with the moon shining on the wave, and wakens to a terra cotta waste bared by truant waters to the glare of the sun. Little boys paddle about the glistening bed of bay or river digging for shell-fish; an hour or two later, perched on a pier, they are angling for trout newly arrived from the sea. . . .
A few years after the eviction of the Acadians, the village of Windsor was populated by British officers who had completed their term of service. Formerly, Windsor and Falmouth were known by the name the Indians had bestowed, Piziquid, "joining of the waters." In 1789 Bishop Inglis and seventeen clergymen organised Kings College, a sectarian institution whose matriculants were originally required to sign and subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Established Church. The main building was completed in 1794. Early in the next century the college received the royal charter of George III. It is not only the oldest of Canadian universities but also of all colonial universities within the Empire.
The present group of buildings, comprising the original hall, with pillared portico and a new wing, the Chapel, the Convocation Hall, the Library, the dormitory, the gymnasium, the houses of the professors and the Collegiate or Preparatory School, occupy a height on the skirts of the town that is shaded by fine elms and overlooks the river-harbour and meadows burdened with opulent farms. Many of the 15,000 volumes contained in the Library were contributed by English patrons when the college was first chartered, and form a collection of great value. The Chapel communion plate includes a chalice and a paten over two hundred years old.
The university offers courses in Arts, Theology, Science and Law. The Quinctilian and the Haliburton Societies are student organisations that are imbued with tradition. The college roll of about a hundred pupils includes the names of a few young women. Among famous alumni are Judge Haliburton, Sir John Inglis, defender of Lucknow, Sir Fenwick Williams, hero of Kars, and litterateurs of our day well known in the United States and Canada.
"Edgehill," a school for girls founded in 1890, whose faculty is composed of English mistresses, is near the Parish Church and the Boys' Collegiate School.
Judge Thomas Haliburton could scarcely have found a more congenial spot than this in which to conjure the characters whose banter and irony, wit and shrewd judgments piqued and amused the New and Old Worlds four score years ago. Canada's first illustrious man of letters was born in Windsor,[1] shortly after the founding of Kings College and was graduated from its halls when he was nineteen. He married an English lady and practised law in Annapolis Royal. Nine years after being admitted to the bar he was appointed Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas for the Middle Division of Nova Scotia. In 1841 he first sat on the bench of the Supreme Court. He resigned his seat in 1856 and sailed for England, there to make his home until his death in 1865. For the last four years of his life he represented Launceston in the House of Commons, where he exerted a needed influence against the separation of Canada from the Empire, a measure advocated by Gladstone.
Haliburton wrote and published an Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia in 1829. The papers which introduced his canny-thinking, lean and sharp-nosed Connecticut Yankee pedlar to a delighted audience were first printed anonymously in Joe Howe's Nova Scotian in 1835. "Sam Slick of Slickville, Onion County," was created in the genial mansion which Judge Haliburton erected on an estate of forty acres near the college grounds, and which is the goal, even today, of every visitor to Windsor. Sam Slick, the Clockmaker, was an itinerant vendor of wooden time-pieces with whom the Squire (Judge Haliburton) rode along the Nova Scotia roads and discussed policies, politics, traits and failings 
peculiar to the Americans and the Provincials.
Following the popular success of the papers, a small bound edition was put out by Howe, and later by Bentley of London. Other Sam Slick books were added, but not until the author went to England did he announce himself as the progenitor of the "first Yankee of literature." He himself was called by Artemus Ward, "the founder of the American school of humour." Said a critic in La Revue des Deux Mondes in 1850, "Haliburton is a caricaturist as good as Dickens, better than Thackeray." The London Illustrated News thought his Sam Slick Sayings "one of the few really original productions of the day." An American edition of The Clockmaker, published in New York and sold at five cents the copy, bears this encomium on the paper cover: "Sam Slick the Clockmaker is a recognised American humorous classic; it is still more—it is part of American history, like the Biglow Papers of James Russell Lowell, affording pictures of life and character, representing a time and a class better than they can be found depicted, probably in any other book." Among the dissenters from this rule of praise which governed nearly all the humorous works of Haliburton was a critic in the North American Review of 1844, who declared Sam Slick "badly conceived . . . no proper representative of the Yankees . . . an impostor, an impossibility." George William Curtis decried the Sam Slick creations as "extravaganzas . . . drawn without skill or sympathy."
Certainly, natives of the United States have cause to deplore the vogue of the slangy, cheating braggart who for nearly a century has biassed European judgment in determining "the American type."
In his preface to The Old Judge, or Life in a Colony (American edition, 1849), Haliburton accounts for the derivation of the term "Blue Nose" as applied to the Nova Scotians. He affirms it to be "a sobriquet acquired from a superior potato of that name, of the good qualities of which he (the Nova Scotian) is never tired of talking, being anxious, like most men of small property, to exhibit to the best advantage the little he had." In confirmation of this theory we have an old invoice which records the shipment to Boston in the year 1787 of a consignment of potatoes which consisted in part of "roses" and "blue noses." The name is given to all Nova Scotians but especially, says another writer, to that portion of the population descended from the pre-loyalists, that is, those who emigrated from New England before and during the Revolutionary War, as distinguished from those who came after it.
To the tourist the most telling possession of the old green town of Windsor is the ruined rampart on the rise above the railway station. Fort Edward was an English stronghold during the troublous period when both England and France were contending for the Minas country. It commanded the river highways of the St. Croix and the Avon, was a refuge from maurauding Indians, a sally-point for avenging troops and, at the last, a prison for Acadians who had escaped deportation.
From the town of Piziquid, de Villiers and his aides planned the attack on the detachment of Massachusetts volunteers in command of Colonel Noble who, in the winter of 1747, were quartered among the Acadian inhabitants of Grand Pré, then the chief town of this region. The settlement of French farmers extended in those days from the station called Horton's Landing, about 20 miles west of Windsor, toward the present village of Grand Pré. The church, the burying-ground and a well that served part of the population were in a meadow edged now by the railroad track. From the Dominion Atlantic station at Grand Pré a stone may be cast to the fabled Normandy willows which witnessed the invasion of Winslow's troops, and the scenes of dismay that follow in the autumn of 1755.
The eviction of the Acadian subjects of George II is excused by English historians as an act necessary to the peace of the country and one too long deferred by lenient governors. They maintain that the French inhabitants who remained in Nova Scotia after the articles signed at Utrecht had given the territory to Great Britain in 1713, purposely evaded their pledges, connived with the French of Cape Breton and Canada, and hearkened to the treasonable admonition of priests to spy upon and betray their masters. French and Acadian authors present the Neutrals as a people of integrity, desirous of peace, and possessed of tragic and unparalleled forbearance under conditions which would have roused another race to revolution and blood-shed.
The traveller's attitude toward the story of the exiles will largely depend upon the historical documents to which he has had recourse. If one has had access to recent revelations that have been gleaned from records hitherto suppressed or neglected, his sympathies will go without reserve to the simple folk whose industry and devotion to church and home were proverbial, and who, according to authentic accounts, would have evaded trouble by withdrawing from English territory to French had they been permitted to depart with their cattle and their household goods untrammelled by harsh stipulations.
They wished to secure themselves against the necessity of bearing arms against the French with whom the English were almost constantly at war. They agreed to submit themselves to the representatives of the British Sovereign and "to do no hostile act against the right of His Majesty while in his dominion." They believed that to give an unqualified oath of allegiance would be to expose them to the revenge of the Micmacs, who would resent their friendship for the enemies of the French and the Indians.
Evidence cited by a recent writer[2] indicates that Philipps, who was Governor in 1720, opposed the departure of the Acadians, who had repeatedly expressed themselves as willing to forsake their well-nurtured farms rather than bind themselves to take up arms against their own countrymen. Philipps wrote: "We cannot let them go just now; their departure would render our neighbours too powerful; we need them to erect our fortifications, and to provision our forts till the English are powerful enough of themselves to go on, and they must not withdraw before a considerable number of British subjects be settled in their stead. . . . What is to be apprehended in the resettling of these farms is disturbance from Indians, who do not like the Acadians going off, and will not want prompting mischief."
Eventually the Neutrals of Annapolis and Minas were promised that it should not be required of them to bear arms against any one and that they should be free to withdraw whithersoever they thought fit. In return they gave their pledge to be faithful to His Majesty the British King. Mascarene, a Huguenot who became a naturalised English citizen and Lieutenant-Governor at Annapolis in 1740, said in a letter to the Lords of Trade, "without the neutrality of the Acadians, this province would have been lost (to the English)." Yet the grievous charge laid against them was one of deceit and treachery. Frequently all the Acadians—of Chignecto, Annapolis, Piziquid, Minas—were harried in punishment for the acts of a few. Often they were called upon to renew their vows of allegiance. This they did by word and by deed. When the French were at war with the English in 1744 they called on their brothers for aid which was steadfastly denied, despite threats from their priests and the menace of Indians.
In 1746 began the struggle of the English to hold what they had gained and of the French to regain what they had lost. A mighty fleet of seventy ships and ten thousand men left Brest in June, but tempest and disease so weakened the French forces assembled under the Duc d'Anville that intended attacks on Louisbourg (which had been surrendered to the Colonials the previous year) and Boston were abandoned. A remnant of the fleet sailed for Annapolis, but this also met with disaster. Meantime, a land invasion planned against Annapolis by Ramezay had been delayed until spring. Hannay recites that Governor Shirley of Massachusetts sent troops "to overawe the Acadians and check the attack of the detachment from Canada." These soldiers were billeted upon the inhabitants of Grand Pré and wintered there, with Colonel Noble in command.
Some historians assert that it was the Acadians of Minas who informed Ramezay of the presence of the English in their houses. Immediately a detachment of four hundred Canadians and Souriquois, or Micmacs, left Chignecto under de Villiers and after a journey over the snow epic in its fortitude arrived at Piziquid.
Whether or not Ramezay had his information from Acadian messengers, it is certain that the villagers of Grand Pré warned Colonel Noble of the Frenchmen's approach, but he was not sufficiently alarmed to guard against their attack. On a snowy night, Noble and his men were surprised in their beds and after desperate resistance many of them were massacred. Those who escaped the bayonet were seized as prisoners. This has been called by Parkman "the most stubbornly contested fight that ever took place in Acadie." The graves of Colonel Noble and his soldiers lie in fields bordering the road which climbs the hill to Grand Pré Post Office.
Ever since the Treaty of Utrecht the French had been at issue with their enemies concerning the boundaries of the Acadian land which had been ceded to the English. They contended that only Nova Scotia had been surrendered, whereas the English affirmed their right to those parts of New Brunswick and Maine to which the name Acadia had for a century been applied. The French built a fort on the Missequash River near the New Brunswick frontier. The English built Fort Lawrence to offset it. In 1755, though peace had been confirmed between the mother countries seven years before, troops from Boston set out from Fort Lawrence and captured the French garrison at Beauséjour. During the assault the Neutrals of Chignecto were forced to give assistance to the French, and for this, all the Acadians were placed under suspicion of treachery. Though pressed to do so they still refused, each one, to take an oath which should involve their having to fight against either the French or the English. At the same time they were the prey of bigoted ecclesiastics to whom their untutored minds turned for instruction, and among whom the Government had out-spoken enemies.
In the early part of 1755 came the peremptory demand of Governor Lawrence that the Acadians of every district should surrender their weapons to the commandants of neighbouring forts. Says one Canadian writer, "For forty years they had been treated by England with a patience which had long ceased to be a virtue. . . . They refused to take the oath of allegiance, which they were legally bound to do, or to allow themselves to be considered otherwise than enemies. Allied with the Indians, and disguised as Indians, some of their bolder spirits indulged in bloody raids on the English settlements . . . At the same time England—which then meant the thirteen colonies as well—was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with her greatest rival, France; and the Acadians were her enemies within her gate. They were warned, exhorted, threatened, but they obstinately and blindly closed their ears. So it came that this unhappy people were ground to powder between the upper and nether mill-stone. They were removed from their homes with such humanity as was possible under the piteous circumstances and were scattered abroad among the nations."
Against this we have the words of another Canadian: "Lawrence has the unenviable reputation of having caused the expatriation of the Acadians, and of having done it with great cruelty. These facts have come to light only within a few years, through the researches of French writers. . . . The Acadians had been threatened with various forms of punishment by almost all the governors, and had learned the lesson of humility and patience . . . In the light of later facts thrown upon their condition, it is almost beyond belief that a people should be so patient and quietly persevering in their effort to remain upon their lands under all the imposition practised upon them. . . . Unfortunately for them they were found too submissive. Their homes were their all, and they bore insult and indignity for forty years in a vain hope that a time would come when they would be finally secure on the lands their fathers had taken from the sea, and made beautiful and rich beyond any other in America. . . . Every argument has been made in our own day to influence opinion against these people, and to excuse or palliate the brutalities of men because of their connection with the British Government."
The same author charges that when finally the people were taken from their homes, "it was done without the sanction of the English Government, . . . and that orders forbidding this action were received too late to prevent it."
Lawrence chose to take umbrage at the presentation of a petition in which the habitants sought to define their reasons for remonstrating against surrendering their weapons of defence against the wild animals which frequently attacked their cattle. The men commissioned to carry the memorial to Lawrence at Halifax were adjured to take the oath as an incontestable sign of their submission. They declared they could not without first learning the wishes of those they represented. Lawrence, for all his arrogance and insistence, was unable to break their resolution. The delegates were imprisoned because, according to the Abbé Daudin, they would not answer affirmatively the question: "Will you or will you not swear to the King of Great Britain that you will take up arms against the King of France, his enemy?"
CABINS OF THE KEDGEMAKOOGEE CLUB, ON KEDGEMAKOOGEE LAKE, IN THE HEART OF NOVA SCOTIA
This was in the early part of July. By the end of the month Lawrence had arranged that Colonel Winslow should embark his New Englanders from a port near Fort Beauséjour and assume control of the movement to forever rid the Minas dyke-lands of the unwelcome Acadians. At this time there were about five thousand descendants of the original settlers of Nova Scotia on the banks of the numerous rivers which flowed through flat and abundant valleys to the Basin. In August the marshlands, reclaimed after the methods of their ancestors, companions of Razilly, Charnisay and Denys, who in their own Brittany had known how to thwart the invading sea, were yellow with ripening grain. The orchards of Normandy apple-trees were weighted with fruit. In the door-ways of the cottages that filed over the hill toward the church, closed now for want of a priest, sat the women of Grand Pré in kirtle and bonnet, busy with distaff and needle. On their breasts were folded white kerchiefs; their ornaments were silver crosses and hearts. The men, vigorous, uneducated peasants, strongly religious but undemonstrative,[3] were in the fields mending the dykes or cutting hay, or in some near-by woodland loading ox-wains with fuel for the hearth. Their deputies, about fifty in number, were kept in duress on an island in Halifax harbour. Rumours of some new activity on the part of the Government had disquieted but not frightened those who remained at home. They were bred to alarms and affronts. Even the arrival of ships bearing Winslow and his men and the sight of tents pitched near the churchyard did not greatly disturb the ingenuous villagers of Grand Pré. On the fifth of September the males young and old were commanded to present themselves in the village church and they did so, wonderingly. They saw Winslow seated before a table in the aisle. They perceived that he held in his hands a document, from which, when they were all assembled, he began to read. Still they did not understand until the words surged to their ears—"Your Lands and Tenements, Cattle of all kinds, and Live Stock of all Sorts are Forfeited to the Crown with all your other Effects, saving your money and Household Goods, and . . . the whole French Inhabitants of these Districts to be removed . . . whole Families Shall go in the Same Vessel. . . . It is His Majesty's Pleasure that you remain under the Inspection and Direction of the Troops that I have the Honour to Command." . . . And still they could not believe. . . . Lands, cattle forfeited . . . inhabitants removed . . . by vessel . . . under the direction of the troops . . .
Summoning voices and rough hands at their elbows roused the stupefied peasants of Minas. They thought of their women . . . a few were allowed to go under escort to tell them. . . . Spread in the village the tidings of ill, and on all sides
Wandered, wailing, from house to house the women and children.
The message was carried to all the settlements on the rivers Canard, Pereau, Habitant, Gaspereau. Fathers and sons, even little boys of ten, were to be kept in restraint. The wives must prepare the goods for departure, and compose their minds for the endurance of woe beyond describing. For so long they had planted these meadows and fended them laboriously from the sea, for so long they had tended the fruit-trees planted by their fathers, and watched the flocks on the hills, and built and repaired their rude homes over-looking marsh and river and the Basin beyond . . .
Five days after the governor's edict had been read in the church, two hundred and fifty of the younger men were embarked upon transports which had arrived in the harbour. At the bayonet's point they were separated from their families. Their plea to be deported to Cape Breton or Canada had been ignored. They knew nothing of the country to which they were bound except that it was peopled by the same race as that which was at this moment despoiling them of everything in life.
When the men had been put aboard and more transports had arrived, the embarkation of the women and little children began. By Christmas sufficient vessels had arrived to carry away all the Acadians of the Minas district. In the haste and turmoil attendant oftentimes upon final departure, families were dispersed, some of them never to be reunited. Six thousand Acadians escaped banishment by fleeing to the woods or to distant French settlements. Of the twelve thousand transported to New England and the Southern colonies, many hundreds perished in the holds of ships, and in prisons, or died of exposure and exhausting fevers in unfriendly lands. A few of the exiles reached the West Indies, the Miquelon Islands and France.
The Bostonians, whose soldiers had been sent against the Neutrals, bitterly resisted their being quartered in Massachusetts. They hated them "for love of God because they were Catholics, and for love of England because they were French." In 1756—7 a number of Acadians were held in jail on Staten Island and Governor's Island, New York. Others were distributed in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Carolina and Louisiana.
There followed a prolonged period of misery during which the outcasts became "too wretched to be feared, too poor to be despoiled." When peace was made between the Crowns in 1763, groups of Acadians struggled back, hopeful of finding their meadows still untenanted. Houses and bams had been fired immediately after their departure; the smoke of the burning villages had misted their eyes as they sailed past Blomidon and out to the Bay of Fundy. Now they decried new cottages, and unfamiliar forms moving upon the marshlands. With resignation they turned back from Minas, and on the shores of la baie Saincte Marie, in the Clare District south of Digby, and in territory east of Yarmouth took up the broken strands of their existence as tillers of the earth and ploughers of the sea.
To-day the Acadians are a nation within a nation. In the Maritime Provinces, 150,000 descendants of the French pioneers of 1632 dwell at peace. Their emblem, the tri-colour with the Virgin's Star in the blue, floats below the English flag. Unmolested they observe national forms. Their youths attend Acadian colleges. Every four years conventions are held at the Feast of the Virgin to vote upon issues of mutual interest. Four Acadian journals are published.[4] A national literature is maturing. Jacques et Marie, a story of the Exile, is the best-loved prose classic. No poetical work is so much read as Longfellow's Evangeline.
Judge Haliburton as a young man represented in the Provincial Assembly the old County of Annapolis which then included Digby and Clare townships. He declared before the Legislature that the Acadians were "unambitious and frugal, they live within their means; devoted to their old form of worship, they are not divided by religious discords; and being cheerful in their disposition, and moral in their habits, they enjoy perhaps as much happiness as is consistent with the frailties of human nature."
About the time Haliburton made this speech he was preparing his History for publication, in which he referred at length to the Acadians. Longfellow had access to this volume for the historical data upon which his narrative was founded. It is related that the tale of the parted lovers came to the poet from his brother-in-law, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a clergyman, the Rev. Horace Conolly, of whose congregation a Mr. and Mrs. Haliburton had been members when residing in Boston. Mr. Haliburton was connected with the Nova Scotia family of that name. His wife had heard the story of "a young couple in Acadie.[5] On their marriage day all the men of the province . . . were seized and shipped off to be distributed through New England, among them the new bridegroom. His bride . . . wandered about New England . . . and at last when she was old found her bridegroom on his death-bed. The shock was so great that it killed her likewise." This romance Mrs. Haliburton had repeated to her rector. And thus we trace to its source the legend which inspired Evangeline a tale of the grand dérangement idealised and in certain minor points at variance with actual conditions, but consummate in its portrayal of the sufferings of the Acadians.
The poem, whose heroine Longfellow first had the intention to call "Gabrielle," was begun in November, 1845. By the following April it was completed. In October, 1846, it was published, and immediately given recognition as one of the master-pieces of American literature. Grounded upon history and limned against an existing background, the incidents created by the poet are easily confused in the mind of the visitor with reality. The well in the field is called "Evangeline's well" though no maiden of that name actually dwelt with her father Benedict Bellefontaine, "on goodly acres," "somewhat apart from the village." No youth called Gabriel lived in the village, son of Basil, the blacksmith. Yet it helps one to better understand the tragedy enacted on this upland to read the poet's graphic "Tale of Love in Acadie."
Distant, secluded . . . the little village of Grand Pré Lay in the fruitful valley
..........
Strongly built were the houses
..........
Thatched were the roofs, with dormer-windows; and gables projecting
Over the basement below protected and shaded the doorway.
..........
Columns of pale blue smoke, like clouds of incense ascending,
Rose from a hundred hearths . . .
Thus dwelt together in love these simple Acadian farmers.
The road followed by the banished to the waiting vessels led over the rise from the church and the willows to the mouth of the Gaspereau. One may yet descend to the shore by the highway which bore forward those driven forms—those sorrow-weighted feet. And on the strand depict in fancy
… The evening fires …
Built of the driftwood thrown on the sands from wrecks in the tempest.
Round them shapes of gloom and sorrowful faces … gathered.
Voices of women … and of men, and the crying of children.
••••••••••
… The stir and noise of embarking;
And with the ebb of the tide the ships…
Leaving behind them the dead on the shore, and the village in ruins.
Two ways lead from the old English village of Grand Pré to Wolfville. One crosses the Great Meadow to "Long Island," diverges to Evangeline Beach, then continues along the banks of the Cornwallis estuary to the classic seat of Acadia University. This drive discloses in its full beauty the tranquil reaches of the prairie, two miles wide and three miles long, which French artisans reclaimed by draining the salt marshes and damming the tidal Gaspereau with a staunch lattice of tree trunks stopped with clay. The lands which lie behind the dykes below the level of the sea have an average yield of three to four tons of hay per acre. The Grand Pré meadows are owned by farmers who live perhaps several miles away, on South Mountain or in the valleys. After the grass is cut,
. . . where two centuries of swath
Have fallen to earth before the mower's path
the cattle are turned on to browse, the number of head allowed to each owner being in proportion to the acreage he possesses. All the animals are branded, and here they range free until the winter comes on. Piles driven in the ground hoist the garnered hay high above an accident of tide. Such ricks dot all the marshes with shapes like a Hottentot house.
The road which passes through the hamlet above Grand Pré station is bordered by cottages, some of them dating from the earliest days of English occupancy and sentinelled by Norman poplars. One of the very oldest is on the corner diagonally opposite the post office. The Scotch Covenanter church on the hill was begun over a hundred years ago. Every Sunday afternoon service is held in its exceedingly quaint auditory, the congregation entering by a side door which opens to the rear of the stiff-necked pews, the minister addressing his hearers from a lofty pulpit roofed by a sounding-board.
Two miles beyond lies Wolfville through the apple orchards, which in their June-time blooming remind one of the newer though vaster California fruit valleys. Rows of trees, leagues long, ascend the breast of South Mountain and advance into the plain that reaches to the Gaspereau.[6] This expanse of orchard-land is the northern division of the great apple domain which extends through the Annapolis Valley.
The vale of the Gaspereau, inspiration of unnumbered sonneteers, is best viewed from the road which mounts northward to Wolfville. Ranks of shimmering trees, squares of green and yellow fields, groups of large barns and small white houses compose a scene which a Rasselas might covet. This valley is peculiarly Nova Scotian. It has no startling cliffs nor rushing waters. Threaded by
A grievous stream, that to and fro
Athrough the fields of Acadie
Goes wandering,
it spreads in peaceful plenitude to overlooking heights, which in turn survey other pastorals and meandering rivers, so that all this part of the province may be said to form a park of valleys, mellow, opulent, exhaling a perfume of legend and romance.
Wolfville was originally called "Mud Creek" for the stream which detaches itself from the Cornwallis River and flows along the docks of the town. In 1830 the nieces of the postmaster, who bore the honoured patronymic of Dewolf, influenced him to petition Halifax to relieve so delightful a village of so blighting an appellation. A generation before, Judge Elisha Dewolf had entertained the King's son on his way from Halifax to Annapolis. Perhaps this affected the decision of the powers at the Capital. At all events Wolfville appeared upon the map,—and Mud Creek trickled off'. The house where Royal Edward stayed is called Kent Lodge and opens its colonial doorway to discriminating travellers in this day when Wolfville is a centre of tourism. Grand Pré is usually visited from here; and Blomidon on the Minas shore, and Parrsboro across the Basin.
In itself the town has much to offer the vacationist. The streets are sightly, the homes unusually pretty, the hotels hospitable, the shops and public buildings quite surprisingly attractive and commodious. Many do not hesitate to pronounce Wolfville the pearl of Nova Scotia villages. A knoll on the rim of the town was chosen in 1829 as the site of Horton Academy, out of which grew Acadia College, a Baptist institution whose first students were enrolled in 1836. "Let us go up to the mountain and bring wood and build the house!" said the elders, quoting Haggai. Of money they had none. The men gave labour and timber from their woodlands, the women knitted and cooked to secure funds. At last a big white building of harmonious architecture rose on the hillside and an alley of trees was laid to the principal street. One of the first pupils of the infant college was an awkward youth named Charles Tupper, who apprenticed himself to the village cobbler to help earn his tuition. Thirty years afterwards he was hailed as the Founder of the Dominion for his successful advocating of Confederation. Philosophers, poets, college presidents, doctors and ministers are numbered among Acadia alumni who have brought fame to themselves and their mater in both Canada and the United States. A coterie of modern buildings now supplements the facilities of the original hall. On a knoll of its own beyond the new Emmerson Library is the roomy Seminary building which houses besides other departments, a reputed Conservatory of Music for young women. The Boys' Collegiate School is distant a discreet acre or two.
Recitals and lectures and gay college functions while the winter away. Wolfville would seem a diverting place at any season of the year.
The present proprietor of Acadia Villa used to conduct a hotel in the Seminary during the summer but now maintains an all-the-year hostelry in a one-time private mansion a little way below College Hill. A great many tourists prolong their stay under Mr. Rockwell's roof for sheer enjoyment of his unaffected hospitality. No one knows better than he how to plan the innumerable walks and drives that reveal the beauties of the Minas country with Wolfville as a base; and no one has laboured more efficiently than he to keep intact the meagre relics of French Grand Pré.
Mr. Herbin, whose store is on the corner below the Villa, is another fine-spirited citizen who for distinguished reasons has taken the Neutrals' story to heart. He is the only one of his race now dwelling above the dykes of Acadie. His adequate History of Grand Pré is dedicated to his mother's people. He has also written many verses that reflect in poetic strain the melancholy of the marshlands. Mr. Herbin's windows are a museum of Acadian relics taken from old cellars and disused wells. Here are night-cap frillers and warming-pans, loaf sugar cutters, and strange implements for crimping the hair. Ah, vain Evangeline! For one's admiration there is also displayed a lovely collection of jasper, agate and amethyst, the jewels of Blomidon. Besides, there are absorbing specimens of crystals less familiar,—heulandite, stilbite, cairngorm, orange-shaded acadialite,—which come from bluffs on the Cumberland shore of the Basin, and from Partridge Island. All the Minas cliffs are of volcanic origin. The cooling of the molten rock developed fissures which presently were bridged with crystalline deposits of many hues, with facets like cut gems.
A VIEW OF DIGBY AND THE GAP
The frost even now opens up hidden seams of amethyst on Cape Blomidon each winter.
A little way down the main street from the Herbin museum-shop is the plot where beneath the apple-trees the town's ancestors lie—the Bishops, Lovelesses, Reeds, Ratchfords, Reids, Martins, Miners . . . Hic jacet Edward Dewolf who departed this life in 1796. Silvanus Miner was born in 1699 and died eighty-seven years later. His epitaph warns:
Death is a debt that is Nature's due
Which I have paid and so must you.
William Alline passed away in 1799, aged eighty-five. There are other Allines, few of them deceased before their seventy-fifth year. Their stones are traced with vines and conventionalised cherubs. One bids us
who pass this way
Stand still awhile, these lines survey—
but weeds and lichens long ago obscured what it was intended for us to read.
The drive by way of Kentville and Canning to Look-off and Cape Blomidon is remarkable for the interchanging views of water and land—views doubly beautiful because charged with tradition immemorial. Kentville, in a narrow green vale, is the seat of a Government Fruit Station and the headquarters of the only railway system in Acadia. If preferred, a shorter route may be taken to Canning by way of Port Williams and Starr's Point. The latter is a slender point of land where famous apples grow, Gravensteins and Kings and Nonpareils. Trees set out by the Normans more than two hundred years ago are still bearing. One old tree may even now be counted upon for upwards of thirty barrels a year.
The great Wellington Dyke bars the tide from the broad meadows of the Canard and Habitant Rivers. Canning was once known as Apple-tree Landing, and later as Habitant Corner,—names so suggestive as to need no explaining. Then in violent contrast the little river port took the surname of two Governors of India. Once, many ships were built here. The first one to leave the Canning yards was a brig of 200 tons which was baptised Sam Slick.
Canning is the home of Sir Frederick Borden, Ex-Minister of Militia and cousin to Sir Robert. On the public square is an awkward but patriotically intentioned memorial to a son of the family who fell in the Boer War. This little town is also the birth-place of Benjamin Rand, Ph.D., historian, economist. Professor and Librarian of Philosophy at Harvard, of whom a critic has said that the "range of his scholarship is wider than that of any living Canadian."
The Cornwallis Valley Branch of the Dominion Atlantic passes this way from Kentville to Kingsport, on the Basin shore (14 miles). The latter is an attractive summer town and is a port of call for the steamer which plies between Wolfville and Parrsboro.
From Canning begins the abrupt ascent to North Mountain. The vista broadens from the wharves and rivulets of leafy villages to the wide blue haze of Minas waters, to the scar of Blomidon and the hills of the Cumberland shore. North Mountain is the elongated barrier which stretches a hundred miles from Blomidon to Digby Gut (the gate in the wall which admits the flood that forms Annapolis Basin). Between North and South Mountain, the latter extends from Horton to Bear River, reposes the plain made fruitful by the beneficent mud of tidal rivers. From a tower on the outstanding ledge of Look-off we see into five counties. Kings, Hants, Annapolis, Cumberland and Colchester, and glimpse the beds or estuaries of six rivers,—the Pereau, below us, the Habitant flowing past Canning, the Canard, the Cornwallis, the Gaspereau and the distant Avon. This is the View of a Thousand Farms—farms acres-wide which from this height appear like tinted patches in which trees are silver bushes wound about by streams that gleam and waver.
If the tide is at the ebb, a ruddy margin marks the contour of the bay. At the risen tide, cliff and beach are washed high with water of a baffling hue that is neither green nor indigo, grey nor brown, but all these colours underlaid with red, and misted by a chalky radiance.
The Basin was Glooscap's own Beaver Pond. At Blomidon the god of the Micmacs contended with a rival giant; they hurled rocks down which formed Five Islands across the Basin. It was Glooscap's might that shaped Blomidon, which he "strewed with gems." The Indians call the promontory Glooscap's week or home. He was a preternatural being in the body of an Indian who watched over the welfare of the aboriginals.
Formerly, water covered the Annapolis and Cornwallis Valleys but Glooscap cut a passage at Cape Split and at Digby Gate, and thus drained the pond and left the bottom dry. The outlet of the Beaver Pond was at Cape Split, the broken tip of a peninsula shaped like a crane's bill which thrusts its narrow ridge of rock into Minas Channel.
Glooscap, after many noble exploits, became offended at the intrusion of white men. When he determined to depart from the Land of the Miggamaks he called up a whale to carry him off to a far-away shore. The Indians expect his return in due time, and look for the end of their troubles when he comes back. It was he who taught them how to hunt and fish, how to cultivate the ground. He was sober, wise and good and his people mourn his long absence.
The Legends of Glooscap were collected by Reverend Silas Rand, a Baptist minister who for half his life-time lived as a missionary among the Nova Scotia Indians. He was born in the village of Cornwallls, near Kentville, in 1810. Seventy-nine years later he died at Hantsport on the banks of the Avon. Of the twelve languages he spoke, the Micmac tongue gave him the greatest pleasure. He thought it "one of the most marvellous of all languages, ancient or modern." Translations of parts of the Bible, a Micmac Dictionary, and many tracts and hymns put into Malicite were among the achievements of his pen.
Blomidon's aspect from the deck of the little steamer which crosses to and fro between Wolfville and Parrsboro contradicts the impression gained of it from the land—a riven red bluff jutting from the coast, aloof and unshielded. Actually the cape is but the southerly outpost of a curving buttress that receives the brunt of tides and wind as they beat in past Cape Split. Geologists relate that this coast was rended by a volcanic convulsion which deposited a hot flow of lava on the earth whose base is rock of the Triassic period. Minas Basin and Cobequid Bay form a wedge-shaped body of water which divides lower Nova Scotia from the neck of land to the north. Parrsboro is on this farther shore, sheltered by Partridge Island, which, like Blomidon, is renowned for its lashing tides, its stores of semiprecious crystals, and deeds of Glooscap.
The Prince Albert of the Dominion Atlantic Company leaves Wolfville and Parrsboro every week day, but each day at a different hour, due to tidal whims. Parrsboro is the terminus for the Cumberland Railway which traverses a coal mining country to Springhill Junction, and there joins the Intercolonial main line.
In 1767, Benjamin Franklin commissioned "Mad Anthony Wayne" to survey land about the site of Parrsboro, but eventually sent a brig-full of emigrants to Pictou County instead.
Wolfville—Annapolis Royal, 66 miles, via Dominion Atlantic Railway. The intervening country is diversified with apple orchards and with winding streams that drain the fertile champaign of the Annapolis Valley. At Aylesford, the first Bishop Inglis had his seat on an estate called Clearmont. Middleton is on the Annapolis River. Near-by are the Nictaux Falls of local fame, the station being on the Halifax and Southwestern Railway (Lunenburg—Bridgewater—New Germany—Middleton branch) which crosses the line of the Dominion Atlantic at Middleton and proceeds down the west side of Annapolis Basin to Port Wade, on Digby Gut.
Middleton—Port Wade via Granville, 38 miles. An accommodation train runs Mondays and Fridays only.
Bridgetown is a thriving port on the Annapolis River. Fourteen miles beyond is Annapolis, at the head of the Basin.
Annapolis—Digby, 20 miles by Dominion Atlantic.
- ↑ December 17, 1796.
- ↑ See the History of Grand Pré, by John Frederic Herbin.
- ↑ It is said that Acadian children rarely kissed their mothers after the first communion, it being a Brittany custom to restrain emotion.
- ↑ Le Courier des Provinces—Maritimes, Bathurst, l'Evangeline, Moncton, l'Impartial, Tignish, P. E. I., and Moniteur—Acadien, Shediac.
- ↑ From Hawthorne's American Note-books, 1838.
- ↑ The original French spelling is gasparot, an ale-wife. The ale-wife is a fish resembling a herring which is found in great numbers in certain parts of Nova Scotia.