Book #3: TOC
The Road To Being Canada (1815-1867)
Chapter 1, Further Settlement

Society, in the first half of the 1800s, in Nova Scotia, was not much different than what might have been observed at the time in "Merry Old England," at least for the white upper class located at the capital city of Halifax. Those residing outside of Halifax, however, were of a different sort. Except for the farmers along the Annapolis Valley, most Nova Scotians made their living from the sea. Best we have an appreciation of the make up of the population in Nova Scotia.

People came to Nova Scotia in waves. An ancient wave brought the Mi'kmaq to Nova Scotia and they alone occupied the land exclusively for many, many years. Only in the early part of the 1600s did a wave of Europeans arrive. These were the French Acadians who dominated the fertile lands of the Annapolis Valley and the shores of the far reaches of the Fundy Basin system. The occupation of the Acadians lasted but for a 150 years when they were rudely put off their lands by the English. Then in 1760 came the New England Planters who took over much of the lands previously worked by the French Acadians. On account of the American Revolution, Loyalists flooded in beginning in 1784. British settlers came throughout the 19th century: a large number from the northwest of Scotland.1

Generally, at the time that those who came to settle during the first half of the 19th century were left with slim pickings when it came to good agricultural lands. Such lands exist only in limited areas of Nova Scotia, and they were taken up by the earlier arrivals.

"Immigrants who reached Nova Scotia in the years between 1831 and 1848 immediately encountered a second major obstacle to successful settlement. Most of the good agricultural land which had so far been discovered in the colony had already been alienated [granted] to resident settlers or absentee proprietors. The accessible land then remaining was predominantly rocky, barren and totally unfit for cultivation, its surface covered by forest, peat bogs and lakes. A map of the colony in 1831 would have shown the alienated lands stretching thinly along the coastal margins of Nova Scotia, and reaching some five or ten miles inland, except where the fertile banks of rivers tempted settlers farther into the interior. Some of the best agricultural lands in the province, and certainly the most heavily alienated areas, were to be found along the Gulf Shore from the Gut of Canso to the New Brunswick boundary. Lands had also been taken up across Cumberland County in lines running from Pictou to Truro and along the New Brunswick border to Amherst. The thin line of alienated land continued around the shores of the Minas Basin, spreading thickly into the Annapolis Valley as the coastline opened out along the Bay of Fundy, and again narrowing after Digby as the shore-line turned southwards past Yarmouth and along the coast of what was then Shelburne County to Cape Sable. Along the Atlantic coast lands had been alienated in a much more scattered and spasmodic fashion fashion. Blocks and clusters of land up to ten miles inland had been taken up at Shelburne, Liverpool and Lunenburg, around Mahone Bay to Chester, St. Margaret's Bay, Halifax, from Dartmouth to Musquodoboit and Jeddore, Ship Harbour, Sheet Harbour and St. Mary's. In addition to this band of settled and granted land around the coast of Nova Scotia, thin lines of settlement had spread their tentacles across country, following the course of streams or rivers or linking the patches of fertile land indicated by their hardwood cover. From Halifax arms of settlement stretched along the Shubenacadie River, and northwards to Windsor. Another thin line ran from Chester to the Avon River, and a fourth up the St. Mary's River to the township of Egerton, inland from Pictou."2