Acadians of North Cumberland

The Acadian settlements in North Cumberland County extended through Malagash, North Wallace, Fox Harbour, Wallace Bay and as far west as Pugwash. According to an 1802 map by surveyor William Baker, an old French house was still standing at what is now Pleasure Cove. From Wallace Bay to the western end of the marsh, 576 acres were enclosed by dykes. Eastward to the Livingstone Bridge, 477 acres of marsh were dyked while 250 acres of undyked marsh were used by the Acadians, making a total of 1303 acres of marshland used by them in this area. At Fox Harbour a further 150 acres of reclaimed land have been identified.

Besides the dykes and marsh land, other remnants have been found. A small one-storey building was found on the marsh near Dotten Island by early settlers who moved it upland. It is thought to have been Acadian. It was examined in 1982: the frame was hewed timber assembled in an unusual way. The boards from the roof and walls had been sawed by a horse-powered up-and-down saw. Each board width varied from 1/4 inch to 1 inch. At Fox Harbour, the upper end of the creek was fed by a brook about 150 yards upstream from the highway. It is believed that it was dammed to supply power to a grist mill and a saw mill. It was an earthen dam with a clay core, and the excavation site for the earth was just above the dam. There are several mill stones still on the site. Other remnants such as depressions in fields similar to Acadian cellars near roads used by early settlers were found. Apple orchards existed when the first English settlers came in 1811. Places named from the earliest days are French spring and the French well. Concentrations of shells have been found. All this adds up to a sizeable community, large enough that 7 or 8 men were spared as military recruits in the January 1747 planned attack of the British at Grand Pre. De Villiers, the officer leading the force, marched through Remsheg and picked up these recruits. At Tatamagouche several others joined in.

In Malagash, two cannon balls were ploughed up - remnants of the Battle of Tatamagouche. The massive dykes in that area near the mouth of the Dewar River were perhaps the ridge behind which the Indians took refuge. There are no natural ridges nearby.

Excerpted from an article by Roy M. Kennedy of Tatamagouche

The Expulsion

On the shores of Wallace Bay, where two hundred years ago the Acadians had established a thriving settlement, the dykes alone still stand - a memorial to a vanished people. Ice, storms, and the everlasting ebb and flow of the tides have torn gaps in their banks, and they no longer keep the sea from the marshlands they were built to protect, but here and there some sections are even yet unharmed and serviceable. They stand defiantly, as though determined to forever perpetuate the melancholy tale of those who laboured on them in the long ago.

In building dykes the Acadians followed the custom of their ancestors in the lowlands of France. They preferred to expend their energy in wresting marsh from the tides, rather than the clearing of upland. This course had been followed everywhere they had settled in the new world, and apparently was quite successful as we know they were prosperous farmers. Their system was in direct contrast to that of the Loyalists who followed them on Wallace Bay. The Loyalists at once began to clear the upland. One thing in common to both methods was the enormous amount of work involved: to build dykes with the simple implements of the time, wooden shovels and ox-carts, or to clear away virgin forest for cropping meant a burden of toil we can scarcely appraise today.

A small number of Acadians were also located at the head of Fox Harbour, near where the United Church now stands. There, too, the dykes still remain. It is unlikely that more than two or three families had settled at this point, and they, doubtless, were considered a part of the larger colony on Wallace Bay. With their scanty tools, they left behind evidence of a vast amount of labour invested in the mode of farming they fancied. It was labour invested in an undertakiing that was destined to come to an abrupt and bitter end at a time when it was just beginning to repay in good measure.

Many people believe the Expulsion of the Acadians began at Grand Pre. However, the very first of the Acadians to be torn from their homes were taken from Tatamagouche and Wallace (at that time and until 1825 known as Remsheg or Ramshiek, replaced by Wallace in honour of Sir Michael Wallace). It was another 3 weeks before Grand Pre was visited, but unlike the later incident when all the people were transported, only the adult males were carried off from these first villages to feel the blow. Apparently the commander of the soldiers (Blue-coated New Englanders from Winslow’s Brigade) had no explicit orders as to the disposition of the women and children, and asked the Acadian men if they wished their families taken along or left where they were. The reply was that they begged Captain Willard to permit the women folk and little ones to remain. The wish was granted. No doubt the men hoped to eventually find their way back to homes and loved ones.

It was Aug. 15, 1755, when Willard and his men made prisoners of all the grown men at Tatamagouche, and immediately this was accomplished two detachments hurried on to Remsheg. Twenty men travelled overland, another twenty by canoe. It is likely those who were sent by canoe went first to the tiny settlement at Fox Harbour and secured the men at that point, while the company who went by land probably followed the shore on reaching the bay making a circle around the head of the inlet and meeting with their fellows somewhere on the north side.

As they travelled they visited each home, their number increasing at every dwelling. No record remains of what was done with the buildings at Remsheg, but at Tatamagouche all those in the village were put to the torch, only on the outlying, not readily accessible farms, were any left standing. It seems reasonable to assume that at Remsheg the same course would be followed, and the houses and barn were heaps of glowing ashes before the day ended.

The settlement at Remsheg consisted of around a dozen families. They had built themselves log homes and barns, dug wells, dyked and farmed large areas of marshland, and raised considerable numbers of cattle, sheep, swine and poultry. And it was the produce of their farms which brought about their undoing, as it was all sent to Louisburg, a never sated market with its thousands of mouths to be fed daily.

For many years the Acadians had been urged to take an oath of allegiance to the British Crown but had always evaded the request or refused. They continued to send supplies to that thorn in the British Flesh, Louisburg. Neither persuasion, threat or vigilance had sufficed to stop the forbidden traffic. Of special annoyance was Tatamagouche and the other settlements thereabout because through their hands passed the produce from farms on the Bay of Fundy. Unable to ship around Sable because of fear of interception by the British men of war, they shipped by way of Cobequid and Isgonish across country to Tatamagouche for shipping by water over a much safer route. A situation such as this could not be tolerated and must be brought to an end. Expulsion seemed a good solution to those authorities in closest proximity - the Governor of Massachusetts and the Governor of Nova Scotia.

The little settlement of Remsheg which had so painfully been wrested from the primeval during a period of over a quarter of a century came to a sudden, heart-wrenching end that August day of 1755. It is not hard to imagine the scene - the stunned prisoners guarded by fixed bayonets, the weeping women with babes in their arms and toddlers clinging to their skirts, the reek of smoke, the roar of the flames, the hastily out-flung heaps of chattels hurriedly gathered from the crude but comfortable homes. The women and children were left behind to fend for themselves, and when in October the British finally sent a ship to gather them up, none were to be found. Very likely, tidings of the affair had reached their countrymen on St. John’s Island, and these had come to their aid. As the summer was hardly over, and hard winter at least two months off, it is safe to assume they did not perish.

Today, little remains to show where these first settlers lived, laboured and died. Here and there in the woods, along the north shore of the bay, an old cellar is to be found, over which once rested an Acadian home. On the cleared farmland not a trace of any sort is to be seen in vertification of their initial homesteading. No burial ground can be found, and there would be some of their number die in the thirty-five years or more they spent alongside Baie Remsheg. It is possible their dead were taken to Tatamagouche for interment in sacred soil at the Chapel there, for we know the Abbe le Loutre, that bitter enemy of the English, had a chapel built at that settlement and came often to visit his flock, at their wilderness parish. No doubt the people from Remsheg went, when conditions permitted, to attend mass as there appears to have been no place of worship in their own hamlet.

Fable has it that the gold accumulated from the sales of their produce in Louisburg is buried somewhere along the shore. That could well be as they no doubt expected to be able to return and hid their wealth in safety against that day. But they never did return, and if they buried their gold, it will probably remain undiscovered forever just where those unhappy souls hid it away. The dykes alone carry the secret of their hiding place, and they will keep their counsel well.

And because it was one of the most outstanding though unhappy episodes in the long and colourful history of Nova Scotia and a tragedy beyond compare to those affected, it is perhaps not amiss to draw attention to a little-known fact - it was here at Tatamagouche and Remsheg that the Expulsion of the Acadians began.

Excerpted from an article by Francis W. Grant in The Oxford Journal of August 25, 1955

Aftermath of the Expulsion

In all, from Nova Scotia, over six thousand Acadians were deported in 1755. They were "disposed" of along the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts southward. Indeed there was scarcely a major seaport that did not receive its quota of exiles.

However, despite overwhelming odds, many Acadians escaped deportation. Some survived in safe forest retreats and among friendly Indians. On October 7, 1755, from Fort Cumberland it was reported by Brigadier General Monckton that "86 Frenchmen got away by making a hole underground from the barracks. It is the worse because they are all people whose wives were not come in." It is only to be hoped that some of those were from North Cumberland. Some grouped together, particularly in the Cape Sable area by ambushing search parties sent to get them and making the job impossible for the officer sent to round up the last of them.

Many who did go later returned to Nova Scotia. Often the colonies to which they had been sent openly encouraged them to return. Government in Nova Scotia changed and by 1764, it was legal for Acadians to return if they took an oath of allegiance. From then it was a matter of migration back to Nova Scotia until by 1775, they could once again hold land legally. Many returned to the land from which they had come, but none of the Acadians of North Cumberland County returned to their old settlements.

Excerpted from an article by William B. Hamilton from The Quarterly of Canadian Studies, Volume 5, 1984