Three late Eighteenth Century Central Chimney Houses: the MacDonald House at Monticello in Lot 42, the House at Rock Barra, and the Ronald R. McDonald House in Lot 43 Two central chimney houses used to stand along the north shore of Lots 42 and 46 where Scottish Catholics settled at the end of the Eighteenth Century, east of the larger settlement at Tracadie founded in 1772. They were located at Monticello and Rock Barra before they rotted into the ground in the 1980s and’90s. This detail from Meacham’s Atlas of 1880 shows the locations of the two houses I want to discuss in the first part of this post. Monticello…

Prologue – Memories of Student Days This Bartlett print caught my attention when I was a student, and I set out to obtain a copy for my collection of pictures. The mystery of the deep forest with its crude log house assembled to supply shelter for British colonists caught my imagination, and I fantasied about their struggle.   “A first Settlement,” from Canadian Scenery, Illustrated from drawings by William. H. Bartlett, engraved by J. C. Bentley, with text by Nathaniel Parker Willis, in 2 volumes, with a total of 117 steel plate engravings. London, Virtue & Co., City Road and Ivy Lane, 1842. While I was hunting for this Bartlett print,…

Many of us who love to explore the history of the heritage of our Island, work in isolation, sharing our enthusiastic findings when and how we can. In two days will be the third anniversary of my first blog post, followed by over fifty bursts of enthusiasm in the succeeding 36 months. In my posts I wrote about a series of subjects, starting 20,000 years ago with the retreat of the glaciers and coming of the first indigenous peoples. For the past year and a half I have concentrated on the emergence of the Island on European maps and its successive blossoming into the catographic treasures of the late Nineteenth…