because of difficulties in obtaining suitable sites, most remained in Halifax, but around 1,450 (mainly German immigrants) were moved to a location fifty miles west of Halifax, where they founded the town of Lunenburg.
Despite an early riot sparked off by grievances over land allotments and later raids by Native people who were being encouraged by the French authorities at Louisburg to cause trouble, the settlers flourished.18
Map 6. Based on Clark, “Old World Origins and Religious Adherence,” 327.
Since they immediately transferred their religious affiliation from Lutheranism to Anglicanism, the new Lunenburg arrivals gave the Church of England’s mission in Nova Scotia a terrific boost (see Map 6). By 1845 the Anglican minister, sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to Lunenburg County, could take pride in the four Anglican churches, capable of holding 1,900 people, and ten outlying preaching stations.19 When Lord Dalhousie visited in 1817, he noticed that people still spoke their native language: “All here is German, scarcely do they speak English intelligibly. Agriculture is their only pursuit, they are not wealthy, but live very frugally and are all comfortable … there never has yet been a pauper maintained by the parish.” However, he was less approving of nearby Mahone Bay, with its “miserable farms, all in patches, raising potatoes and hay for the Halifax market.”20 Here, too, a committed Anglican minister would deal with the religious needs of its mainly German population, travelling to the various preaching stations which were sometimes twenty miles distant, including the one at Mahone Bay, to the north of Lunenburg town, and the one at New Dublin (now Dublin Shore), just south of it.21
Meanwhile, back in 1755, Britain’s continuing hostilities with France were causing it to revise its military strategy in Nova Scotia. Acadians were now regarded as potential accomplices of the French, and the British solution to this threat was immediate and brutal. The entire Acadian population was deported in 1755, and a third group of land-hungry New Englanders was brought in to take their place.22 The expulsion certainly undermined French power and fighting ability in the region, but the policy was exceedingly inhumane for the people who were displaced. Civilized behaviour was thrown aside, and this terrible, barbaric act would continue to haunt the British for many years.
Launching a generously funded emigration scheme, the government recruited eight thousand New Englanders who mainly originated from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island — areas where good agricultural land was in short supply. Arriving between 1759 and 1762, they came in large family groups and sometimes as entire communities, with farmers settling mainly on the former Acadian lands in the Annapolis Valley, and fishermen along the southwestern coastline.23 The province’s fertile acreages also attracted the attention of highranking officials and politicians. After all, they had the easiest access to the choicest land. John Perceval (second Earl of Egmont), first Lord of the Admiralty and a prominent politician, helped himself to several thousand acres in Nova Scotia and East Florida. He hoped to establish a mansion house, park, and castle on his twenty-two-thousand-acre estate at Egmont Harbour, just east of Halifax, but his silly notions of creating a fiefdom in Nova Scotia bore little relevance to the needs of the province or its prospective settlers.24
Lord Dartmouth, secretary of state for the Colonies from 1772, grabbed forty thousand acres of land in the same area for himself, although he at least intended to find tenants to work his land:
I daresay that your lordship is acquainted with the method practised by proprietors of great territories in the northern district of North America; they lay out their tracts in several hundred lots, ensure some of them are in a favourable place for themselves and then let every 3rd or 4th lot by lease to tenants at a certain rent per annum.25
Ten other prominent people, who included Halifax merchants, a former governor, and a naval commander, claimed tracts of land near to Lord Egmont’s property in Nova Scotia, although few made any serious attempt to recruit settlers or provide funds for commercial development.
Being creatures of the New World, New Englanders refused to have anything to do with European-style leaseholds and insisted on having freeholds. While these aspirations were met, many were disappointed both with the quality of the land they received and the Nova Scotia government’s unwillingness to tolerate a strong local democracy. They became dissatisfied and possibly half of the new arrivals left within a few years of the termination of subsidies. Few had brought much capital with them, and, as a consequence, new communities progressed very slowly. With the great Loyalist influx of the mid-1780s, thousands more Americans came to the province. Many had English ancestry and were drawn mainly from New York and New Jersey. But, unlike the Planters before them who simply took over Acadian farms, they often had the backbreaking task of clearing vast wildernesses, and, feeling dispirited, many left. Like the New Englanders, they, too, insisted on having freeholds.
Cornwallis and Horton (later Wolfville) acquired their settlers from Connecticut in 1760 and became two of the most populated townships in the Annapolis Valley26 (see Map 7). Large numbers of Loyalists later came to the area, as did a few Yorkshire families who had previously settled in Cumberland County. Having been caught in the line of fire during the American Rebellion, men like Nathaniel Smith and his family had left their farms in Fort Cumberland in 1778, hoping for better conditions in Cornwallis. Smith sold his property and stock, for which he obtained five hundred pounds, but he felt as if he had “[fallen] into the hands of worse plunderers than those that break [into] houses and rob shops.”27 In 1775 he had owned more than 1,500 acres of land in Cumberland, but four years later, after falling victim to the swindlers, he was only able to rent land in Cornwallis, and a small amount at that.
By Nathaniel’s time the area was “pretty thickly settled in many places where there [are] rivers, marshes and intervales, and in many places along the shores by the Minas Basin and the Bay of Fundy.”28 The Cornwallis that Lord Dalhousie observed thirty years later had a small Anglican congregation, this being a region where Baptists were in the ascendancy, and the Established Church of England “was scarcely entitled to a name.”29 He was appalled by the people “living poorly or chiefly upon rum … they are idle, insolent and quarrelsome. All in debt … they are strongly tinctured with Yankee manners, ideas and principles — canting and preaching constantly, they have no thought of religion or morality. The state of agriculture is wretched.” However, Lord Dartmouth had to admit that, however poor they were, they could each afford to have a “horse and gig or shay at the church service of the Established Church and that of the Anabaptists; we counted 70 of these buggies hung up to the rails or trees nearby.” 30
Meanwhile, his lordship found Parrsboro, on the opposite side of the Minas Basin, more to his liking. He greatly approved of James Ratchford, who had the entire township under his thumb: “Keeping a shop for every sort of supply the whole population is individually indebted to him. Selling his goods at enormous profit, he makes money of those that pay their accounts and, of those that do not, he takes mortgages on their lands, and takes that in payment.” 31 Lord Dalhousie believed that ordinary people needed to be controlled by someone in authority, irrespective of how much they were exploited, placing him somewhat at odds with the egalitarian ideals of the New World!
The
