It all began in Acadia

In my first post of this autobiographical blog, I gave you a brief and superficial overview of the settlement of Lot 1 and parts of Lot 2 first by Acadian refugees in 1799, and a few years later by a group of Irish immigrants who settled in 1812 along the Northumberland Strait where the Norway Road (Route 182) now runs.

In only 70 years the Acadian and Irish settlers almost completely filled Lot 1, the Acadians around Tignish Harbour and running north across the lot to Nail Pond, and the Irish, along the North Shore and turning inland. As a result of this the Irish settlements were divided into east and west partitions with a heavy concentration near North Cape, as far as the large bog, called the Black Marsh and/or the Hawbush would allow.

 

Finding my Maternal Ancestors

Due to the circumstances of my birth  I lacked completely the genealogical record of my father’s family, the Porters. As a result, until very recently, I had only my maternal ancestors  to fall back on to establish a family history. My mother’s parents, Marie Blanche Poirier and Charles Gaudet, who brought me up for my first fourteen years, were Acadians whose ancestors had settled in Tignish after 1799. These ancestors had escaped the great Deportations of 1755 and 1758 and somehow survived – who knows where? – for about twenty-five years before they settled in Lower Malpeque Bay on lands rented to them by a British landlord. They stayed there, reclaiming the farmland and setting up again fishing stages that their pre-Deportation ancestors had created years before. Everything seemed stable and the landlord was not unreasonable. But rent paid with the results of your harvest, and labour now and then, could easily fall into arrears. Many years ago a brilliant student of mine at UPEI wrote a fascinating essay tracing the footprints of those who had secretly moved to Tignish and he discovered that all were in arrears with their rent, some as many as twenty-years. Any wonder they wanted a new start.

That Prince Edward Island story is interesting, but to me it takes these Acadians out of their original context, which was the moment, in the 1600s, they moved to the Isthmus of Chignecto and began to reclaim vast tidal flats from the high Bay of Fundy tides, and in less than a century, created what we know today as the Tantramar and Amherst Marshes.

This, and other reclamations in Nova Scotia, was the greatest feat of engineering that part of the world had ever seen. So great was this achievement that all those thousands of reclaimed marshlands are alive and well and still today, without a break from the Eighteenth Century, producing a superabundance of marsh hay.

This map drawn by the biologist Ganong for Webster’s book on the events at Beaubassin in the 1750s lays it all out for you. There are two ridges sticking, like fingers, into the base of the Bay of Fundy. One is where the village of Beaubassin was located, and the other, across the Misaguash River, which is now the border between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, is the Beausejour ridge where the French, fearing English attacks on their vast farmland and the people who maintained it, built a fort that you can still visit today – Fort Beausejour. The English version of it, after Acadia has been conquered, has been restored by Parks Canada.

Beyond all this is the Tantramar Marsh, still today covered with green crops as far as the eye can see. To accommodate today’s huge farm equipment the drainage system established by the Acadians and Yorkshiremen who came after them has been greatly simplified.

 

For those of you who are interested in learning much more about this fascinating place I suggest you check out these posts in my PEI Heritage Blog.

https://regporter.com/pei/2020/02/12/my-time-in-acadia-part-1-the-landscape/

https://regporter.com/pei/2020/03/14/my-time-in-acadia-part-2-the-villages-and-the-forts/

 

All sets of my maternal ancestors, both the Poirier’s and Gaudets, were all born in or around the village of Beaubassin built on a finger of land that advanced to the very end of the Bay of Fundy.

 

The Landscape of Chignecto

 

In 1954 the RCAF took infra red photos of the site of Beaubassin, and these appeared to reveal the sites of houses in such a regular order that a “main street” climbing the hill, was revealed. This hand-coloured image of one of the maps drawn from the photos shows you the probable layout of the town. There was a sort of main street climbing the hill from the shore and houses were scattered on either side of it. There is a fine Eighteenth Century description of walking up from the shore which I quote in my PEI Heritage blog in the links above.

There is no doubt that the ancestors of my Acadian forebears in Lot 1 walked this road, interacted with the local administration, and attended the local parish church. And they worked the fields, the endless fields seen in this 1973 aerial photo I took of the Tantramar Marshes looking toward the High Marsh Road that goes from Middle Sackville to Pointe de Bute.

 

I explored the land which my ancestors had created with my car, often driving over rutty and impossible tracks, on foot, and in my last years in Sackville, on horseback! That experience, more than all the others, took me back in time to the days when Gaudets and Poirier’s helped to create and farm these rich acres.

 

As a small child I knew nothing of this complicated story, and it would be another twenty years before the beauty of it would overwhelm me. My connection with Beaubassin inspired me, at this time in my life, to share this story with you.

 

Tracing the Gaudet and Poirier Families.

Finding my mother’s grandparents on Meacham’s map of Lot 1 was very easy, as you can see in this detail of the map. Even though they lived several miles apart the two progenitors were easy to find and include in one small detail of the map. Isidore Gaudet lived about one quarter mile from the centre of Tignish on his 50 acres of land, and Francis Perry (Poirier) who lived in Palmer Road, with his 37 ½ acres, close to the church, with a lovely meadow flowing down from his house to a brook.

 

In the next blog post I will tell you what I know about the Gaudet family and their adventures in the first part of the Twentieth Century. It is both an interesting and a tragic story which witnessed the permanent break-up of the family as various members tried to make a life for themselves in the factories of New England or in New Brunswick. Those who stayed in Tignish had a hard time of it – one might even describe it as appalling.

 

Resources

Butzer, Karl W., “French Wetland Agriculture in Atlantic Canada and Its European Roots: Different Avenues to Historical Diffusion,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 451-470, 2002.

Clark, Andrew Hill, Acadia – The Geography of Early Nova Scotia to 1760, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1968.

Ganong, W. F., “The Vegetation of the Bay of Fundy Salt and Diked Marshes: An Ecological Study,” Botanical Gazette, Vol. 36, No. 3-6, 1903.

Hale, Robert, “Journal of a Voyage to Nova Scotia made in 1731 by Robert Hale of Beverly,” printed from the original manuscript now in possession of the American Antiquarian Society, Historical Collections of the Essex Institute, Vol. XLII, No. 3, July 1906.

Kennedy, Gregory, “Marshland Colonization in Acadia and Poitou during the 17th Century,” Acadiensis, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2013.

Lennox, Jeffers, “Nova Scotia Lost and Found: The Acadian Boundary Negotiation and Imperial Envisioning, 1750-1755,” Acadiensis, XL, No. 2, pp. 3-31, 2011.

Review of archaeological work for the Beaubassin and Fort Lawrence national historic sites

Smith, Jared R. C., Acadia’s Outpost: Beaubassin Before the Deportation, Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honours in History, Acadia University, April, 2014.

Trenholm, Gladys, Trenholm Josephine, Norden, Miep, A History of Fort Lawrence: Times Tides and Towns, Sherwood Printing Limited, Edmonton, Alberta, 1985. (My friend the late Josephine Trenholm grew up on the site of Beaubassin, and Fort Lawrence was once in the cornfield behind her home. With family and friends, she embarked upon the ambitious project of telling the story of her landscape from prehistory to its ultimate settlement by Yorkshire Methodists and American Baptists after the expulsion of the French and Acadians. It took years, and this was the result. It is now a very rare book and one to be savoured with pleasure over many winter nights. The facts are accurate and the story – now unfashionable in works on history – deeply moving.)

Webster, John Clarence, The Forts of Chignecto: A study of the Eighteenth Century conflict between France and Great Britain in Acadia [With Plates, Including Portraits, and Maps], Privately Published, 1930.