William Samuel Wagner was born in Upper LaHave, Nova Scotia, on November 5, 1820. His great grandfather, Phillippus Wager (b. 1707), came over from Germany in 1751 with many other German immigrants to settle in what would be known as Lunenburg. They…

The Black community on Sand Hill was established more than 100 years before Amherst was incorporated in 1889. The sprawling five-kilometer community overlooks beautiful downtown Amherst and encompasses streets such as Albion, Poplar, East Pleasant,…

Archibald Dodd was born sometime between 1740 and 1745 in the North of England. Although he came from a wealthy family, Dodd lost his inheritance, so he became a lawyer. In 1775, Dodd married a woman named Bridget – unhappily, it seems, as soon…

In an isolated clearing in the forest, accessible only by rough logging roads from the TransCanada Highway or from Judique, is the small, white-painted church of St. Margaret of Scotland. Thirty Gaelic-speaking families from the Scottish Highlands…

In 1892, Jean-Jacques Stehelin come to Nova Scotia from France to explore the possibilities of establishing a business here. His father, Émile, knew some of the faculty at Collège Sainte-Anne at Church Point, so this is where his investigations…

Joseph Frederick Wallet DesBarres was born in 1721, probably in Switzerland. He came to North America after studying at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. In 1756 he was commissioned Lieutenant in the Royal American Regiment and took part in the…

Nicolas Denys was born in Tours, France, in 1603. He came to Acadie with Isaac de Razilly in 1632, full of hope. He wanted to develop trade in fish, furs, and lumber, but he was beset by bad luck. He first established a lumber business east of the…

Before the British established the town of Lunenburg in 1753, the site was known to the Mi'kmaq as E’se’katik and to the French as Merliguesche – a name they borrowed from the Mi'kmaw word for the area. Merliguesche was a small Acadian settlement in…

We know that many European fishermen crossed the Atlantic in the 16th century, soon after Cabot made landfall in North America. English, French, Spanish, and Basque ships came to fish off the coast of what is now Nova Scotia where the waters teemed…

Among the passengers on the ship Murdoch that arrived in Halifax Harbour in 1751 was a young officer by the name of Joseph Pernette. The Murdoch was one of several ships bringing German, French, and Swiss immigrants. Known as “Foreign Protestants,”…