FIFTY YEARS AGO a remarkable woman of vision and energy, Catherine Hennessey, with the help and support of her late friends, Irene Rogers and Dr. John Maloney, conceived the idea of a decentralised museum system for the Province of Prince Edward Island. By 1973 HRH Queen Elizabeth officially opened Beaconsfield, the headquarters of the PEI Heritage Foundation. Catherine also worked without a stop all these years, in many capacities, to preserve and interpret the city of Charlottetown which was designed in 1768 according to classically-inspired principles of the British Enlightenment. It remains intact to this day and Hennessey’s role in this cannot be exaggerated. Eleven years ago the City of…

I had the pleasure of living in one of the most historically concentrated areas of the nebulous region of Acadia for fourteen years! From September 1967 until the end of December 1981 when I moved to Charlottetown, I lived in Sackville, and finally in Point de Bute. That period was the most stimulating time of my life in the areas of personal development, academic achievement, my birth as a good teacher and the skills I acquired as an historical topographer. It is also where my maternal French ancestors made their home in the Seventeenth Century, and helped reclaim the marshes. As I travelled about the Isthmus of Chignecto I became…