The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Author explores communities that shaped the province’s interior
With the help of historic maps, some dating back to French explorer Samuel de Champlain, author Joan Dawson has traced Nova Scotia’s historic waterways, early coastal settlements, lost highways, and most recently the province’s inland communities.
“They developed rather differently from coastal communities,” said Dawson during a recent interview from her home in Halifax.
Along the province’s long coastline, fishermen and their families settled, and communities sprung up. These settlements grew spontaneously with the development of the fishing industry and then the boat-building industry. It wasn’t the same for the interior of the province. Covered with dense forest, the development of these communities was more gradual.
“Our often overlooked inland and cross-country roads run alongside scenic lakes and rivers, forests and farmlands, and through communities that were established far from the ocean as people gradually discovered resources in the interior from which they could make a living,” Dawson writes in her latest book, Nova Scotia's Historic Inland Communities: The Gathering Places and Settlements that Shaped the Province (Nimbus Publishing).
“Early French and British settlers rarely penetrated far inland and instead clustered around the harbours that sheltered their fishing vessels and trading ships. They ventured into the forest only to cut wood for shelter and fuel.
As more settlers arrived looking for land in what would become the province, opportunities for inland development increased, and communities grew up along roads and rivers farther from the sea. The Acadians created the first European inland communities toward the end of the seventeenth century, establishing small villages of families and friends when they dyked and drained marshlands along the Annapolis River and the rivers draining into the Minas Basin.”
Dawson begins the story of Nova Scotia’s inland communities with the Mi’kmaq, who were equally at home in the interior and on the coast of Mi’kma’ki. Originally, they did not settle in one place year-round but moved seasonally between inland forests and coastal beaches. But they did establish traditional gathering places. One of those places was around Kejimkujik Lake, a place of ceremonial and spiritual significance.
“They would return again and again,” said Dawson. “It was a gathering place rather than a settlement.”
Archaeologists have found evidence that Indigenous people have occupied the area around Kejimkujik Lake for as long as six thousand years.
From the Mi’kmaq, Dawson traces the early Acadian settlements. Paradise, situated on a bend in the Annapolis River between today’s Bridgetown and Lawrencetown, is one of Nova Scotia’s earliest recorded Acadian settlements, explains Dawson.
But the French weren’t the first people to visit the area and discover its resources.
“For thousands of years, the Mi’kmaq had used the Annapolis River as a travel route. The location of Paradise today was known to them as Nisoqe’katik, sometimes translated as “place of eel weirs.” This was a traditional encampment site where Nova Scotia’s Indigenous inhabitants caught an important part of their diet by constructing stone weirs that directed the eels into woven traps,” writes Dawson in her book that includes more than 40 historical photos.
After tracing the province’s Acadian and French origins, she moves to what she calls the building of the Nova Scotian Mosaic exploring the development of the Protestant communities of Blockhouse and New Germany, the Loyalist communities of Bridgetown, Berwick and Kentville, the African Nova Scotian communities of North Preston and Hammonds Plains and Scottish settlements in Cape Breton and Queens County.
Several of the province’s inland communities were deliberately settled following the War of 1812. After the war, the colonial government offered land to disbanded soldiers and created new communities in previously undeveloped inland areas.
“Beginning with the natural resources of wood and waterways, the communities’ economies developed, and their fortunes rose and fell over time. Their stories, preserved by local historical societies, reflect the arduous labour of the pioneers,” writes Dawson.
“Also, as I was writing I began to realize how much British colonial attitudes had impacted the stories of these communities. They were created by the hard work of their founders, but at the expense of the Indigenous inhabitants of Mi’kma’ki, whose established communities were very different from those of the settlers. Inland settlement encroached on First Nations’ hunting grounds, displacing them and impeding their access to traditional sources of food.”
Born in 1932, Dawson is a member of several historical groups, including the Nova Scotia Archaeology Society and the Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia. She is also a fellow of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. But she doesn’t call herself a historian - instead an historical geographer.
“I start with maps and when I am researching an area, I find the oldest mapsearly road maps- and then go from there,” she said.
A retired librarian and teacher, Dawson first got interested in Nova Scotia history while doing a project for the Fort Point Museum in Lehave. During her research, which took her to Ottawa and Paris, she found interesting French maps; created on old rag paper, some with raggedy edges, they dated back to Champlain’s time.
“That got me hooked,” she said.
Her historical research has produced several books, including The Mapmaker’s Eye and The Mapmakers’ Legacy, as well as Nova Scotia's Historic Rivers and Nova Scotia’s Historic Harbours.
Although she has a deep appreciation for old maps, Dawson credits Google Maps for allowing her to complete her latest book, much of which was written during pandemic lockdowns when she couldn’t go far from home.
“I went on Google Street View and went on a travel,” she said.
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Corr Scott is no stranger to mysterious and magical stories connected to the ocean. She is the creator of The Book of Selkie and the illustrator of The Mermaid Handbook.
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In After it Rains: A Counting Book (Nimbus Publishing), Schwartz, who grew up in Cape Breton and is now a children's librarian in Toronto, takes kids outside to explore their own backyards. They discover the rain brings out: one puddle, four butterflies, and nine wiggly worms.
Angela Doak, a Halifaxbased collage artist and photographer, brings the book’s text alive with her bright artwork. To create her collagestyle illustrations, she used bits of recycled paper and foil wrappers.