July 12-13, 2016
Our route from Hilden to Annapolis Royal took us near the Grand Pré National Historic Site, the center of Acadian settlement prior to the deportation in 1755. Grand Pré means “great meadow” and the Acadians who settled there made their great meadow by building dikes. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow set the beginning of his poem Evangeline there.
Today the site features displays about dike-building, a memorial church, statues of Evangeline and Longfellow, and Evangeline’s well.
Annapolis Royal itself was settled in the early 1600’s. We toured a cemetery by candlelight, hosted by heritage interpreter Alan Melanson. He told us about graveyard art, the history of the area, and the people, famous and infamous, buried there. We saw the oldest English gravestone in Canada, dated 1720.
We might have thought we were seeing double the next day at the Port-Royal National Historic Site: Our guide was Alan Melanson’s twin brother Wayne!
It was here that Samuel de Champlain founded “L’Ordre de Bon Temps”, North America’s first social club in 1606 and into which we had been inducted our first night in Nova Scotia. The original settlement of Port Royal wasn’t long-lived: It was captured by the English and burned in 1613. Using Champlain’s plans and drawings as well as studies of early 17th century French architecture and construction, the settlement was rebuilt in 1939, giving us a glimpse of what one of the first Frnech settlements in North America might have looked like. It’s ironic that the rebuilt settlement already has stood ten times as long as the original one.
Samuel de Champlain
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