Before I begin this post, I wish to extend my sincere thanks to Ron Garnett at www.airscapes.ca for allowing me to use many photos from his CD collection of aerial photos of the Island.

 

Definitions of Landscape and Topography

LANDSCAPE is an emotional and aesthetic response to the territory around us. Like a work of art, it is a picture.

TOPOGRAPHY is a scientific analysis of the component parts that make up the landscape. It is description and measurement, not emotion.

 

An Island appears…

About 12,000 years ago when the glaciers that covered so much of the northern hemisphere were melting and retreating to the north, a landmass, crescent-shaped, mostly of red sandstone bedrock and glacial detritus, appeared. Not long after human beings, coming either from across the continent from a passage over the Behring Strait, or more probably, across a North Atlantic ice bridge from what is now southwestern France and parts of northwest Spain, arrived and settled. They made their way to what would become the Island and managed to exist for a few thousand years, experiencing dramatic changes in the landscape. They were replaced by another group of aboriginals who used a different technology in the making of their tools and weapons. And finally, perhaps three thousand years ago they were replaced by the ancestors of our present Mi’kmaq population.

The Island belonged to the indigenous people for thousands of years before it was gradually taken from them by French and British colonists in the Eighteenth Century. Of their original settlements we know almost nothing, but sometimes in the landscape, at the edge of the shore, eroding into the sea, are extremely impressive remains of very long-term occupation, such as this massive hearth in Saint Peter’s Bay.

This compacted huge hearth was surrounded by aboriginal architecture, the nature of which we have no idea, perhaps 5 or 6,000 years ago.

 

France in North America

The real exploration of North America began in 1534 when King Francis of France, once again ambitious to explore and take for France as many of the undiscovered territories as possible, discover a Northwest Passage to the Far East, and control the cod-fishing industry, hired a well-travelled explorer from Saint Malo in Brittany named Jacques Cartier (1491-1557). He would make three voyages to what is now the Eastern Canadian region of the New World and gain immortality as the discoverer of Canada and the person who sailed down the Saint Lawrence River to claim Quebec and Montreal for France.

1534

 The first topographical description of the Island

Do you realise that Cartier’s description of the Island is the first attempt by anybody to capture the essence of Island topography in writing. So, our study of Island topography – in a literal sense – begins at this moment.

In Cartier’s first voyage in 1534 he landed in several places on Prince Edward Island, and described in rapturous language the climate, landscape, and plants he found there. He identified North Cape, which he called appropriately Cap Sauvage, saw aboriginals and tried to meet with them, and spent a considerable time, it seems, exploring Cascumpec Bay and even going ashore with longboats in the area of what is now Alberton. Cartier did not know he had landed on an island, believing it to be part of a greater land mass. It would only be near the end of the century that more surveys tried to map this irregular shape.

Cartier’s lovely description of what he saw – just a few words – is powerfully evocative:

All this coast is low and flat, but the finest land one can see, and full of beautiful trees and meadows. Yet we could find along it no harbour, for the shore is low and skirted all along with sandbanks, and the water is shallow. We went ashore in our longboats at several places, and among others of a fine river of little depth, where we caught sight of some savages in their canoes who were crossing the river. On that account we named this river Canoe River [Cascumpec Bay]. But we had no further acquaintance with the savages as the wind came up off the sea, and drove upon the shore, so that we deemed it advisable to go back with our longboats to the ships. We headed northeast until the next morning [Wednesday], the first day of July, at sunrise, at which hour came up fog with overcast sky, and we lowered the sails until about ten o’clock, when it brightened up and we had sight of Cape Orleans [Cape Kildare] and of another cape that lay about seven leagues north, one quarter northeast of it, which we named Cape Savage [North Cape].

To the northeast of this cape, for about half a league, there is a very dangerous shoal and rocky bar [North Cape Reef]. At this cape a man came in sight who ran after our longboats along the coast, making frequent signs to us to return towards the said point. And seeing these signs we began to row towards him, but when he saw that we were returning, he started to run away and to flee before us. We landed opposite to him and placed a knife and a woollen girdle on a branch; and then returned to our ships. That day [1 July] we coasted this shore some nine or ten leagues [between the Tignish River and Cape Kildare] to try and find a harbour, but could not do so, for, as I have already mentioned, the shore is low and the water shallow. We landed that day in four places to see the trees which are wonderfully beautiful and very fragrant. We discovered that there were cedars, yew-trees, pines, white elms, ash trees, willows, and others, many of them unknown to us and all trees without fruit. The soil where there are no trees is also very rich and is covered with pease [now spelled as peas], white and red gooseberry bushes, strawberries, raspberries, and wild oats like rye, which one would say had been sown there and tilled. It is the best-tempered region one can possibly see and the heat is considerable. There are many turtle-doves, wood-pigeons, and other birds. Nothing is wanting but harbours.

(From Ramsay Cook, The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, pp. 16-18.)

 

The Basque Presence.

Cartier, elsewhere in his narrative, hints that Basque fishermen were already in the region by noting, when he communicated with the aboriginals, that they were using Spanish words to describe various things. There is evidence that the Basque set up a half aboriginal/half Basque language to communicate with the native people they frequently encountered. Since he was claiming this new land for France, Cartier could not make an issue of this sensitive fact (Loewen and Goya p 145).

The Basque fishermen sailed out from the home port of Saint Jean de Luz as they set out for the spring to fall fishing season for cod and whale by-products. They went all over the Gulf of Saint Lawrence from Newfoundland to Ile Saint Jean.

https://www.guide-du-paysbasque.com/en/index.html

Serious consideration ought to be given to the possibility that it was the Basques who named Ile St. Jean after their home port.

Google Maps

We know for sure that they were very much present on Ile St. Jean in the Seventeenth Century from the information found in this detail of a regional map produced by the great Basque navigator Pierre Detcheverry. Those five cup-shaped indentations show exactly in which bays they set up their seasonal camps where they could process fish and turn whale blubber into valuable oil.

 

1689 – Pierre Detcheverry – [Carte de Terre-Neuve et Acadie] / Faict à Plesance par Pierre Detcheverry; pour Monsieur Parat gouverneur de plesance en lisle de Terre Neuve, 1689, col. sur parchemin; 32,5 x 57 cm; Bibliothèque nationale de France, /ark:/12148/cb42450851k.

 

c doest – North Cape
caiscoupet – Cascumpec
marpet – Malpeque
guymuybuit – Petit Havre/New London
bauchymy – Rustico

 

 The harbour of Caiscoupet or Cascumpeque is clearly marked and much of the land mass is still the same today except for the dune systems which were/are mobile and reformed again and again. But there were always harbour openings that tempted Cartier to check out the land, which he found ravishing.

Google Maps

 

The French Regime

In 1720 the French colonial authorities moved their ponderous sybaritic behinds and decided to act upon the sudden realisation that Ile Saint Jean was a potentially very valuable fishing and agricultural resource that had never been exploited. Feebly, and with little enthusiasm, they established the capital of the colony at Port la Joye, now Rocky Point in Charlottetown Harbour. With even less energy they tried to entice settlers to the new colony but could not find it in themselves to be creative and resourceful in providing the necessary infrastructure and the supplies required to build such a colony. It struggled and languished until the deportation of 1758.

In 1732 Jean Pierre Roma, a French businessman and a great visionary received, along with two partners, a concession to develop a commercial enterprise that would concentrate on the international trade of Island-produced resources. It was located at Three Rivers. Roma was wildly successful in defining his dream, clearing land, building all necessary structures and making the site even more accessible by building two wharves. There were serious setbacks caused by plagues of mice that destroyed complete harvests and there was Roma’s personality that led to highly unpleasant encounters even with those who supported him at the local level. Just as things were looking bright, and a future seemed ensured,  in 1745 the entire settlement was burned to the ground by privateers from the American colonies.

Such is the essence of the story of the Ile Saint Jean colony which I discussed in detail in my earlier chronological posts.

During the 1720-55 period French cartographers produced a large number of maps and charts of the Island and the region which were stored in the French National Archives and for the most part forgotten. I came across them as I hunted for evidence of the colony of Ile St. Jean, bought high resolution scans of every one I could locate, and published them in some of my earlier posts. They are easy to find and study using the Table of Contents.

 

 

The French Vision of Ile Saint Jean

In the days before accurate surveying techniques had evolved, and it was impossible to draw an accurate contour of any geographical entity, the French cartographers, with varying success, produced credible outlines of Ile St. Jean and indicated the sites of all their settlements. Over the years these were documented in detail by the various censuses so that we know exactly what was going on in these communities, always strung along the shore by the water, and never developed into any kind of village with a centre, and certainly never using the grid plan used by everybody else, Spanish, British and French, in eastern North America.

To begin my discussion of French topography on Ile St. Jean I insert this detail of a regional map which demonstrates an extraordinary amount of sensitivity and knowledge on the part of the unknown cartographer.

All the settlements existing in 1737 are clearly indicated along the coast and on the banks of the great eastern river, now called the Hillsborough. An attempt has been made to sketch in the elevations of the inland topography, and with a generous eye, we might agree that through information garnered from inland forays, and the huge bulk of information received from the aboriginals who had known the Island for thousands of years, their topographical sketch might have some value. The cartographer goes to great lengths – an almost unheard-of thing – using bright red icons to give the precise locations of the Mi’kmaq settlements in Malpec, along the east and west shores and headlands of Malpeque Bay. And this map also contains the first attempt ever to depict a road on Ile St. Jean, the road made by the energetic Roma between St. Peter’s and Three Rivers.

 

Detail of Anonymous, Carte de la coste du nord et/du sud de l’Arcadie/ et de l’isle St. Jean/ avec toutes les Isles, Ports, Havres, Rades, Bayes &c/, ink and wash drawing, 73 x 146 cm, 1737, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ark:/12148/cb436415607.

Many of the French settlers who arrived on Ile St. Jean were probably appalled at the enormity and drama of the cliffs that lined long sections of the coast.

 Years later, in the 1780s, Scottish settlers arriving in what had just been named King’s County, were instantly reminded of home and called the spot where they landed, with its very high cliffs, Rock Barra.

But of course, especially along the north shore, there were endless miles of sand dunes blocking the most inviting bays where settlement could be ideal. These were the barrier dunes formed by the endless tides of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence pounding against the shore, completely indifferent to the complicated topography being continually eroded out of the Island land mass.

This is what the Basque fishermen and Jacques Cartier would have encountered as they approached Cascumpeque Bay.

Further down the coast there was another, much larger bay that the French would call Malpec derived from the Mi’kmaq Makpaak, meaning “big bay” (Rayburn p. 80).

What we see today are the remains of the failed county capital of Prince Town, but, according to the French 1737 map the aboriginals camped in the very area now occupied by the church and village.

 

Saint Peter’s Bay, or Havre Saint Pierre, as the French called it is quite possibly the most anciently occupied part of the entire Island. Near the mouth of the bay, which the English later called Greenwich, traces of human occupation going back at least 10,000 years were found. Halfway down the bay, at Midgell, a site was discovered, which provided evidence of the middle group of early peoples that archaeologists call the Archaic, for lack of a better name.

 

In this aerial view of Morrell, a roadside village dated to 1869, when it was given identity by the opening of a post office, you can look across the bay at the original site of Saint Pierre, divided by the French into the village with its church and cemetery on the rising land along the shore to the left of the harbour mouth, and, across the harbour mouth, its extension as St. Pierre du Nord on the north portion of the land forming the bay.

It is right and just to mention the Vikings at this time who, if they indeed did make it as far as the Island, might have found refuge in this safest and most pleasant of harbours.

 

Another bay enclosed by barrier dunes was Tracadie, a favourite harbour used by the French, and it appears on most of the maps they produced while they had their colony on Ile St. Jean. The name comes from the Mi’kmaq Tulakadik, meaning “camping ground.” On some of the early French maps the port is also called Chimene, Shimene and Trocadie (Rayburn p. 122).

 

 

The British Conquest creates a New Landscape

When France lost her colony to the English it was renamed Saint John’s Island and by 1765 it had been surveyed by Samuel Holland and divided into 67 lots, nearly all of them 20,000 acres in extent. They were to be disposed of by a lottery (hence the word “lot” for the townships) and the winners were obliged to settle these lots in a political system that resembled something from the Middle Ages and its feudal system of land ownership. This story is told in other posts and in the Lockerby and Sobey book.

 

Anon. Samuel Holland. Modern heliogravure of a miniature painting. Circa 1760s. LAC.

As I have discussed in previous posts, and others have written about in great detail, Holland had a particular genius in surveying that consisted essentially in being able to establish longitude points of such accuracy that the maps he drew, for the first time in the history of world map-making, produced outlines that still accord with those produced by the techniques of our day. The skills for establishing accurate longitude were just being born in his day.

Holland’s map of the Island of St. John is not only one of the most precious artefacts of cartographic history; it immediately turned the Island into an artefact where every square inch was accounted for, given an owner, and provided the impetus for subdivision into towns and farms into topographical units of usefulness and often of the greatest beauty.

Holland, quick on the heels of the French, did not indicate any roads, which may seem strange. But I believe that the patterns of inland settlement were by now so overgrown and ephemeral as to be beyond the scope of the survey. And, it must be pointed out, that the moment Holland began his survey, except for ports, all that had come before on the land was now completely irrelevant. He considered it a tabula rasa on which to create the colony that had already been defined in England. It is also probable that Holland fully understood the pace of progress of British settlement in the New World, and may have had reservations about the feudal divisions he had been asked to create, foreseeing perhaps, many troubles ahead.

 

1765 [Samuel Holland] and John Lewis, A Plan of the Island of St. John in the Province of Nova Scotia, 71.5 cm x 148 cm, Reference: MR 1/1785, The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew.

 

The following Garnett aerial photographs will take you on a quick aerial tour of some of the most interesting and significant places on Prince Edward Island. It will be an exercise in the symbolism of topography.

 

Remembering the County Capitals

Holland chose Charlottetown Harbour as the site of his capital for Queen’s County because of its proximity to far-away Prince County. He could have chosen the site of the French capital, Port la Joye at Rocky Point, but chose instead a low-lying sometimes boggy area directly facing the harbour mouth. Port la Joye was a poor site for a settlement as everywhere, beneath the thin sod, was shale.

I have dealt with the city of Charlottetown in some detail in recent previous posts so will not repeat those descriptions. However, I will provide you with a photograph – my own aerial view – that I took in 1983 of the very heart of the city and the colony from high up in the spire of Saint Dunstan’s Basilica, from a vent, way above the bells. Province House is now, and will be for some time, shrouded in the scaffolding of the complete restoration that has been happening for the past five years, so it is good to remind my readers of its beauty and of its place.

Before I fly around and explore parts of the Island that demonstrate its British Colonial topography, and tell its story, it is only proper that I recognise the other two county capitals, even though the previous post was a difficult, perhaps clumsy attempt to begin to understand their place in the landscape as places designed expressly for architecture and the civic space around it.

Malpeque Royalty was oddly situated on the east side of Richmond Bay, where passage to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence is located. The top part of the Royalty (shown here) was a peninsula joined by a narrow neck to the mainland below, where an equal amount of land fulfilled the requirements for future expansion. In the lower right foreground, you can see, outlined by a dirt road, the ephemeral remains of the town grid, now absorbed into nature and huge modern fields. It is a very lovely area in spite of the grotesque fields in such a tiny space, with vistas of the bay and the sea.

 

Georgetown, probably the best location of all for a county capital, has survived and you can walk or drive its grid, for the most part exactly as it was set out in 1768 by Charles Morris. I began a discussion of its grid plan and its evolution in my previous post.

 

The British dream of rich pastures and richly productive fields

This low oblique view, in the whole of the Garnett collection of aerial photos, comes closest to illustrating the ultimate dream of the new colony of Saint John’s Island. On rolling hills, reminiscent of parts of their homeland, the settlers could build a series of houses over the century that followed after they had attacked the virgin forest, and built the barns and sheds necessary to house cows, pigs and sheep.

The rich land was ploughed and tilled and crops necessary for survival of both humans and animals were planted.

The early fields were small and intimate, separated from one another by hedgerows and wooden fences made from felled trees to keep the animals from wandering into the crops.

Everywhere you see lines, all parallel to each other, and if you were to take a compass to them you would discover that they are all ultimately aligned to the magnetic north of 1764, which are the directions of the lot lines on the Holland map. ALL THE FARMS were oriented in this manner. In the early years, for a good fifty years, setting out these farms was a nightmare because of lack of qualified surveyors with properly calibrated instruments. Everything had to be a geometrically correct part of Holland’s grid.

 

The Home Farm takes on Corporate Identity

Starting in the middle of the Twentieth Century when horses began to be replaced by tractors equal to many horses all pulling together, bigger machinery was invented to put onto the fields. It was felt – and the Government supported this idea and helped pay for it – that the old hedgerows were a tiresome encumbrance, that valuable land was lost to something that no longer had relevance and function, and so they had to be ripped out. The photo below perfectly illustrates this assault on the perfect artefact of the Island landscape, based on Eighteenth Century ideals of order and balance. An irrevocable process of change set in and still today, hedgerow after hedgerow is ripped out, not because the huge machines don’t have enough space to manoeuvre, but just, it seems, for the fun of it. Heavy equipment companies do very well from this subsidised pastime.

This is what the destruction of hedgerows looks like. This photo was taken on May 4, 2011, when the last hedgerow in Belle River was torn out of the ground.

And this is the very neat, and even lovely, result of this activity in another county. But it is a mostly unnecessary destruction of our landscape heritage.

 

Once in a while…

Farming techniques introduce a new form in the harvested grain field that has its own particular beauty – and mystery. Take for example these bales of wheat straw in the magical landscape of Newtown Cross. Are they stable? Do they rearrange themselves in the depth of night to create new visual mystery? Is there a universal message in this geometry?

 

Original Early Settlements

The topography of most of the early Island settlements from the British Colonial Period has been altered beyond recognition. But there are still some places where the landscape perfectly reflects the gradual evolution of the family farm dating from its inception in the late Eighteenth Century. Take for example New London.

Although, as might be expected, and accepted as necessary, some fields have been enlarged many times their original size, there is still a pattern of order, of geometry, that fills this photograph.

It was here that in the 1780s the founder of Island Methodism emigrated as an apprentice with his wife  Elizabeth. Benjamin Chappell was what was called an engineer in those days, and this meant that he had the skills to design and build out of wood and iron everything that was required in a new settlement. Today if you go to New London, you can still walk down the street that Chappell and others filled with planned housing for the new settlers.

The location, with its glorious bay, was perfect. The land was rich, but the dream of wealth from import/export shipping quickly died when it was realised that the barrier dunes made it impossible for ships of heavy draft to dock to unload their rich loads. The perfect harbour that had lured settlers was a hoax.

 

It was Holland who named Murray Harbour where the Murray River, from Lots 63 and 64 flows into the sea. The coast is deeply indented with bays and coves where many rivers drain and communication is easy. Perhaps, if the capital of the new colony had been located here, King’s County would have been the richest and most developed part of the Island. That was not the case, but Murray Harbour and the surrounding communities named in the Eighteenth Century prosper well and provide a very good life for their inhabitants, and endless visual delight to visitors.

 

Specialised Architecture

It was understood from the start that settlements in the new colony would have the essentials of civilisation. In 1789 there appeared Additional rules and regulations for the conduct of the Land-Office Department written by J. Williams. It is worth quoting once again to remind ourselves what was deemed absolutely necessary in any settlement of quality. Small towns, at the crossroads, near the water mills, or along the road, would require fewer of these structures.

(I have modernised the spelling.)

VII. As often as the complete execution of the directions, contained in the third Article of these Regulations, shall be prevented^,_‘ by reason of the necessary space for that purpose being already under promises of Grants to individuals, who may be unwilling to relinquish their claims to the same, the Boards are to observe the following order in providing spaces for the general convenience of the Township, viz.

One or more place or places for the public worship of God.
A common burying ground.
One Parsonage house.
A common School house.
(These letter A’s refer to indications on the grid plan that accompanied the text.)
A – Town park for one Minister.
A – for one Schoolmaster, common to the Town.
A – Glebe for one Minister.
A – Glebe for one Schoolmaster, common to the town.
The Court or Town house.
The Prison.
The Poor or Work House.
A Market place.

 

SCHOOLS, obviously, would figure greatly in the requirements of any village in the colony. A literate society was a necessity in this English culture and so every pressure was brought to bear on communities to build a schoolhouse, furnish it, heat it in winter, and find a schoolmaster to provide an elementary education to the local children, who often had to travel long distances to reach the schools.

One of these early schoolhouses survives in Lower Bedeque. It has been restored and moved from this location to the site of the community museum, a place that is more touristically advantageous. A similar schoolhouse survives in the historic village at Orwell Corner. These schoolhouses are precious reminders of the struggle by all classes of Island society to carry the torch of literacy. In my childhood, there were dozens of these schools, completely unchanged from their late Eighteenth Century precursors, even to a lack of plumbing and electricity. The success of these schools is the basis for literacy as we know it today on the Island.

The Bedeque schoolhouse is associated with the great Island writer, Lucy Maud Montgomery who, in her early years, taught for six months in that school from 1897-98. In 1908 she would go on to invent the highly endearing heroine, Anne of Green Gables. The book became, and still is, a massive international success. The Island, desperate for a powerful and lovable image to attract hoards of tourists, over the years poured vast sums of money in making the Anne experience the ONLY one worth having in Prince Edward Island. Anne is the perfect Islander – Scottish, Protestant and Middle Class – what every islander, it would seem, covertly aspires to become. The fictional village of Avonlea described in the book has actually been built – a figment of touristic imagination – and sits obscenely in the real landscape created by Samuel Holland. How does topographic study deal with such a thing? Avonlea is even on Google Maps and so will live forever. One might observe that Islanders, from time to time, prefer fantasy over reality, and in the process ignore, or even destroy, the essence of their real identity.

 

Churches

Something that will not live forever are the many churches built by different Christian denominations on the island, beginning in the French period and carrying on, with increasing intensity and passion, into our own times. But the congregations have shrunk, or disappeared altogether, and now these mostly empty beautiful little structures dot the Island, closed to the admiring visitors, and mostly closed to worship.

Photo courtesy of Osprey Cove Productions

The first churches were constructed with logs, but by the 1830s there was a rush to build frame churches, like miniature Greek temples, in the now wildly favoured Greek Revival style. By the 1840s the Greek style went out of fashion and was replaced by the Gothic Revival style – like this one above – that sprang out of the European Romantic Movement which saw enormous changes in the emotional essence of literature, art, architecture, and music.

Catholic churches proliferated all over the Island in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. This frantic and very grand building activity was the work of one man, Bishop Peter McIntyre, a native of Cable Head on the Greenwich peninsula.

He began his building activity in 1857 while still the parish priest of Tignish, when, following the plans of a very fashionable New York architect, Patrick Keely, he had constructed out of local-made brick the finest Gothic Revival church ever built on the Island.

 

The church has been flawlessly maintained over the years by its large and active congregation. It has a very fine tracker action pipe organ which has been carefully restored, and thanks to the efforts of its organist, summer concert series are put on.

In the photograph below of modern-day Tignish, you can make out the church, the great harbour at Tignish Run which is the source of local prosperity, and along the shore, to the left of the harbour, the original site of Tignish, founded illegally in 1799 by determined Acadian refugees who quickly built a log chapel but replaced it in 1826 by a neoclassical temple. That was not big enough for McIntyre’s dream of future expansion.

Fr. Peter McIntyre was a visionary who, more than any other person, determined the location of modern Tignish where both the Great Western Road and the railway would terminate. Before any of this could happen, he had bought hundreds of acres of the best inland locations, selecting a low hill in this flat landscape on which to build his great church. Soon the railway yard would nudge church lands and on the other side of it a grid town of sorts was built. It had no focus, something which Tignish still lacks today.

By this time Irish settlers had arrived, starting in 1811, and a curious and often incomprehensible blend of Acadians and Irish people emerged in Lot 1 and moved into Lot 2. All this was done without the explicit consent of the landlords. It is worth a drive to Tignish not only to see the church but to breath in that peculiarly powerful admixture of Irish and Acadian air.

Peter McIntyre was made Third Bishop of the Diocese of Charlottetown in 1860, just in time to coerce all the dignitaries who had come for his Consecration to go 100 miles west to Tignish to assist at the consecration of his church of Saint Simon and Saint Jude. In the next 40 years, unstoppable, and full of grand plans for a diocese in a province whose population was largely hostile to Catholics, McIntyre built over a dozen (specific number to be inserted later) churches, starting off with imitations of the one at Tignish, but, through the many-year service of a builder called John McLellan, designs crept in from the widely available American pattern books that were popular at that time.

In 1877 McLellan was the architect and builder of the church of Saint Joachim in Vernon River. It once had a tall, very elegant spire, seen for miles around. Decay, and lack of funds for repairs meant that it had to be taken down. The design for this church was copied from an American pattern book.

There would be many more churches built in the next quarter century, each one, it seems, grander than the previous one.

When the modest church at Indian River burnt to the ground in 1896 the parish took council and in 1901 this splendid and vast wooden structure in the French style was built by the island architect William Critchlow Harris, supposedly to outshine a similar church built by Harris in 1899 in the nearby community of Kinkora.

 

Shipbuilding

Shipbuilding on Prince Edward Island began early in the Nineteenth Century and for a generation there was not a favourable inlet left unused to compete with the great shipyards that had sprung up everywhere. Port Hill was one of the most important shipbuilding centres on the island and great wealth, and corresponding political influence, were generated here.

Settlers from Devon came to the Port Hill area and the story of their massive achievements is told at the provincial shipbuilding museum located on the property of James Yeo, one of the greatest shipbuilders. His fine Italianate centre gable house has been restored and is open to the public in summer.

Here, from Meacham’s ATLAS, is a view of the village of Biddeford in Lot 12, where intense shipbuilding activity took place. The ships built here, and in other places, were filled with fresh-cut lumber and sailed to England where both ship and cargo were sold to eager buyers. Prince Edward Island ships became world-famous.

 

Lighthouses

Lighthouses became increasingly necessary as the shipbuilding industry grew at an amazing rate. The coasts of the Island, with their reefs and shallows, were a constant danger to shipping and travel and at night there was nothing to mark the safe channels. During the French colonial period a sort of lighthouse – a platform on which a bonfire was lit each night – marked the entrance to what is now Charlottetown Harbour, where there were and still are dangerous shoals.

In the British Colonial Period there was tremendous agitation all over the Island about the necessity of lighthouses and the first to be built, using local brick, was designed by Isaac Smith in 1845 at Point Prim, not far from the mouth of Charlottetown harbour. He was the foremost Island architect in the first half of the Nineteenth Century.

The Point Prim lighthouse is an elegant tapering circular structure built, with a fine cornice at the top on which rests the light platform. Sadly inferior local-made brick was used and when it began to deteriorate, it had to be covered with the wooden cladding we see today. The lighthouse is still functional.

Visitors are allowed to explore the fascinating mortice and tenon wooden beam framework of the interior and climb right up to the light housing itself where they can admire the very intricate Fresnel lens which gathers and magnifies and sends out the beams generated by the now modern electric light source. Exhausted by these efforts, they can then go a very short distance to what is considered to be the best seafood restaurant on the island to contemplate what they have experienced and to renew their strength.

 

Arriving and Leaving

From the start, in whatever historical period you want to discuss, there was always an urgent necessity of getting to the Island and then getting off it. For the aboriginals, it was simple. In the warm weather you travelled by canoe; in winter you walked on the ice in snowshoes and pulled your burden in sleds behind you.

With the coming of the Europeans, with the superior technology of sailing ships, coming and going depended on the weather and the favourable winds. That is why all the early maps, from the Middle Ages well into the Nineteenth Century, had ornamental wind roses that, along with the compass points, identified every possible wind in the place in which you found yourself. At the best of times a voyage, even a short one, was unpredictable, and not only because of dangers in the sea, but the possibility of lying becalmed on the water for days because there was no wind at all! And of course in winter, you imitated the Mi’kmaq.

Once the British colony was established on the Island the question of transport for the purpose of moving people from one place to another on the water became an issue. In the Nineteenth Century this quickly intensified to the point where, imitating the European packet boat, the Island wanted similar transport to move goods and people for short distances. Slowly the need increased and as the Island grew in late Victorian times, and steam, not sail, now drove the boats – iron boats to be sure – the idea of ice breakers emerged. The story is long and full of frustrations. When the ice breakers got caught in the ice, the old ice boats dipping into patches of water and then being hauled up by the passengers and crew on a patch of ice would be revived. Harry Holman has a great deal of expert knowledge on all these subjects and he has written about them in his most valuable blog Sailstrait. I urge you to explore its nautical marvels. (https://sailstrait.wordpress.com/ )

In time effective icebreaking ships became more functional, and with the development of the automobile, a bit later the motor bus, and the inevitable appearance of large scale middle- and working-class tourism, car ferries had to be invented. The obvious passage was to the mainland, and the first ferry was from Borden to Cape Tormentine in New Brunswick. Then followed car ferries from Wood Islands to Pictou, Nova Scotia, and at Souris ships sailed to the Magdalene Islands and even Newfoundland. Their impact on the Island landscape was minimal in that all they needed was a harbour – a simple thing. But roads from all vital directions had to converge on the ferry terminal and that caused a great deal of  disruption in the classical pattern of the Island landscape. It caused service towns to come into being because hotels, restaurants, bars, automobile repair shops, gas bars and all sorts of other things had to be crowded in those focal points at the water’s edge.

 

Things have changed. Borden no longer has a car ferry, but Wood Islands, a settlement, albeit a small one, that appears on French Eighteenth Century maps, has a busy season in the ice-free months. The community has hardly grown over the years, and may have shrunk from late Victorian times, but its impact on the landscape is very visible in its roads of approach and the dramatic wharf and breakwater arrangements.

 

Souris has a long history going back to the French period where presumably it got its rodent name. It also had several names from the early British period but only Souris stuck. One wonders why. A number of individuals are involved in research concerning the origins and validity of this name. However, I hardly think it will change back to Colville Point or Red Cliffs. It would confuse the tourists. It developed as a town of considerable size designed to receive goods by railway and human cargo from the roads leading to it. On a hill, of course, is a splendid stone Catholic church watching over all. And you guessed it: it was Bishop McIntyre’s last building project.

 

And what of the harbour at Borden? Well, we now have a 1997 bridge, named, with a strong dose of Island fantasy and hypocrisy, CONFEDERATION BRIDGE. After a nerve-racking trip high up in the air on rather shallow spandrels that are completely devoid of grace, you arrive at Gateway Village. It is utterly sterile and devoid of anything a human being could relate to upon arrival – or departure – from Prince Edward Island. Is it the gateway to Prince Edward Island, or the gateway to the real world? Fantasy depends, for its effect, on ambiguity, so, coming or going, take it as your emotions demand.

The Ubiquitous “Lesser” Harbours

Harbours were a necessary requirement for the colony, and they dot the shore, small and large, all around the Island. Because of the peculiar very irregular pattern of erosion along Island shores the potential for harbours, big or tiny, was endless.

One of the first to be exploited was the Tignish Run [run of the waters] where the Acadians of the 1799 settlement tied up their boats. They were soon joined by the Irish and in no time West Prince County was filled with important harbours – Tignish, Skinner’s Pond, Seacow Pond, Miminigash and Alberton. This happened all around the island and those harbours, often quite tiny, still play a most important role in the fishing economy of today.

Most of the harbours are natural indentations in the coastline, but a few, like this one at Abells Cape in Bay Fortune are constructed out from the shore with wooden wharves protected by large boulders brought over by barge from Nova Scotia. The local sandstone is not used because it is considered too soft to withstand the attack of the waves and tides. As a result large amounts of “foreign” stone are dumped into the Island harbour landscape. It introduces an element of aesthetic discord.

It is worth spending days on a major fieldtrip just visiting every harbour that is to be found on the Island. They are extremely functional and very beautiful. Fishermen are tidy folk, and this is reflected in the neatness of their harbours.

 

The last of the grid plans

It was the assumed intent of the British officials who colonised the Island that all the towns and villages would be constructed on a grid plan. They could not possibly foresee the patterns of settlement that would emerge and the new designs for villages that would emerge as a result.

One of the last villages to be built on a grid plan was Victoria, laid out in the 1850s. It is a small grid, with three blocks flanking a central street, called simply “Main Street’ in the 1863 Lake map.

 

At a place formerly called Green’s Shore near Bedeque a town began to emerge that gradually enveloped Saint Eleanor’s on the road to the West and began to extend across the isthmus that forms the narrowest part of the Island. There was a post office there around 1852 when a sort of grid was laid out. Summerside, as it was called, soon became the county town and was incorporated in 1877.

When we study the 1863 plan of the town published by Lake, we can find no obvious evidence that there was a mind with an idea behind what quickly evolved. A central square could have set the tone for all future development around it, but it was never developed. Later, as seen in the 1880 Meacham map, there was a courthouse, jail and square which still give definition to the city, along with the public park with a splendid war memorial that emerged after World War I.

In time, with the wealth of shipbuilding, merchant enterprises, the rush of the silver fox industry and the passing of both the railways and highway to the western part of the Island, Summerside grew into a huge town that was eventually – after much indignation had been expressed at the delay – made into a city, the island’s second city after Charlottetown. Summerside is filled with leafy streets and with beautifully maintained Late Nineteenth Century houses. There are to be found gems of every eclectic style in architecture that appeared in North America in late Victorian times. Its core residential district in the west part of the city is larger and richer than its counterpart in Charlottetown.

 

The Spread of Road Communities

As more and more roads penetrated the interior of the Island in the late Nineteenth Century, new forms of towns began to appear.

The Crossroads

The most common was that found at crossroads, such as Elmsdale, where miles and miles of mostly empty highways cross and suddenly a very busy intersection becomes a town. All around is farmland, as far as the eye can see. This crossroads attracted other institutions and services such as the RCMP, who have a regional station here, and a great regional high school that buses in students from a vast radius.

 

The Long Road Towns

From time to time, and in many places across the island, for one reason or another towns appeared along very long stretches of highway. A prime example is the town of O’Leary, named after its original early Nineteenth Century landowner. The village was only incorporated in 1951. The road rapidly expanded into a grid where are to be found an important regional hospital, a massive sports centre and the Prince Edward Island Potato Museum, now known as the Canadian Potato Museum. It was the long dream of a local dentist, Dr. George Dewar, whose awareness of the local agricultural landscape – a paradise for potato growing – expanded into a vision that reinterpreted the entire landscape of Lot 6.

 

The Railway Towns

The Prince Edward Island Railway was to have multiple and even spectacular influence on the future development of the Island. It was obvious that the Island needed a railway and so work was begun in 1871. In no time at all approaching provincial bankruptcy caused the Island politicians to make the decision to join the Canadian Confederation in 1873, something which they had unpleasantly resisted since 1864, when the politicians of what would soon become Canada had met in Charlottetown for an historic meeting that defined the nature of what the country would be. In financial desperation the Island became part of Canada and Canada picked up the railway tab. Today Charlottetown is advertised by the province as the “Birthplace of Confederation” and on that fiction alone, has had its historic legislature building, where vital meetings took place in 1864, restored completely by the Federal Government for a sum approaching one hundred million dollars. One never ceases to be sickened by the memory of the Island’s shameless decision to join Canada for purely financial reasons.

The railway system spread from Tignish to East point and carved picturesque loops so that the trains could reach obscure settlements to bring goods to the needy population. It turned out to be quite useful for shipping out canned goods from the state-of-the-art fish factories that had sprung up in many places.

The railway completely altered the topography of the Island as it advanced remorselessly through the countryside, theoretically, in the straightest line possible, but in fact, changing direction to include town after town. In nearly every location the station with its accompanying railyard plunged straight into the heart of the town, dominating everything. Studying the community maps in Meacham’s 1880 ATLAS is a powerful lesson in the destruction of traditional landscape and townscape by the railway’s presence.

Kensington became a major railway centre and the identity of the town was completely reformed by the vast Railway Depot and its extremely wide curve through the grid to head off in another direction. So offensive is the presence of the railway as depicted in Meacham’s map of Kensington that I feel a compulsion to include it in this post.

ILLUSTRATED HISTORICAL/ ATLAS/ OF THE PROVINCE OF/ PRINCE EDWARD/ ISLAND/ From Surveys made under the direction of/ C. R. ALLEN, C.E./ Dedicated by Special Permission to His Excellency/ SIR JOHN DOUGLAS SUTHERLAND CAMPBELL/ K. T. K. M. K. G. Gov. General &c./ J. H. MEACHAM & CO./ PUBLISHERS/ 1880/ Eng. By Worley & Bracher. / 27 So. Sixth St. Phila. Pa./ Printed by R. Bourquin. / 31 So. Sixth St. Phila. Pa., p.93.

Today, all that is gone, as are all the many miles of track, and their stations and yards, all over the Island. If you go to the Provincial Museum at Elmira you can gain, for a moment, the most insubstantial impression of what once was by walking on a few feet of iron track, carefully preserved, as the memento of the greatest moment in the Island’s industrial communications past.

Today, Kensington, and all the other railway communities, are iron-free and green once again, but forever scarred by what once dominated and crushed their community heart.

And what of those miles and miles of railway beds, what happened to them? They are still there in the landscape, named – you must have guessed it – the Confederation Trail. Never has a word on the Island been so used to death in the development of the official Provincial fantasy.

June 4, 2003

The Thrust to the West and the Acadian Region

With the opening of roads to the west, and a generation later the building of the railroad, Prince County beyond Summerside began to become part of the rest of the Island. A few miles beyond Summerside was the much older community of Miscouche established by Acadian refugees. The road stopped there, but by the Middle of the Nineteenth Century the Great Western Road, which in the end even reached far-away Tignish, had been planned and work begun. The topography of Miscouche had to be altered to accommodate the Western Road.

The Acadians, who were determined to re-establish themselves as a people, were supported by the Catholic Church which established parishes along a large area of coastline to the south of the Western Road that had been set aside as a homeland for the refugees. A road advanced into that territory from Miscouche, which was now a major crossroads. One cannot help but speculate that this Acadian enclave, today proudly called La Région Évangéline, was perceived by many hostile anglophones much in the same way they thought about the Mi’kmaq on Lennox Island: find them a place and get them out of the way.

By the 1880s the Acadians knew exactly what they wanted and spearheaded by the strongly expressed desire that education in the French language should be available for their children, they began the process of a form of nationalisation, complete with flag, motto and anthem, which continues to accelerate successfully into these days.

Fishing was the prime activity of the Acadians and the wealth it brought helped finance the building of exceptionally beautiful and very grand churches, all with the finest decoration and furnishings. The 1899 church at Mont Carmel, silhouetted against the sea, and replacing a fine neoclassical wooden church begun in the 1820s is, from a topographical point of view, one of the most beautiful and impressive architectural statements on the Island landscape.

All along the shores of La Région Évangéline are to be found prosperous, tidy villages connected with the fishing industry. St. Chrysostome, which became a school district in 1853, was once known, even as late as Meacham’s ATLAS, as Joe League Village, named after Joseph Arsenault, famous in his time for the accuracy of his surveying techniques.

 

Abraham’s Village, named after Abraham Arsenault, existed in the 1820s and today is firmly called Abram Village. It is one of those road villages in its plan, but parallel streets are emerging that have begun to change it into an organic grid.

 

The Mi’kmaq in Malpeque Bay and the offshore Islands

Lennox Island, given that name by Samuel Holland, was a traditional home of the Mi’kmaq people, although we do not know when they first occupied that spot. It might well prove to go back to remote antiquity. By 1840 it had become an Indian reserve as part of a major project to give the Mi’kmaq a home and also to remove them from the land now being occupied by British colonists.

 

Prince Edward Island is surrounded by a great many small islands, many of them uninhabitable, but from a topographical viewpoint, providing very attractive vistas that serve as a transition from the mainland to the sea beyond. They all look as if they were placed in that position for picturesque effect, which, of course, is the basis of landscape painting.

 

 

Remnants of the Nineteenth Century Landscape

We would like to believe that everywhere on the Island there are remnants of the glorious rural landscape, with its attendant towns and villages, there to delight us as natives of this place, but to attract and delight visitors on whom so much of our economy depends.

 

The Drama of Modern Field Arrangements

Farming techniques all over the world are evolving because of new crops and farming methods that involve colossal farming equipment that needs a great deal of space.

As well the small farm that has come down to us, in some places intact, from the Nineteenth Century, cannot survive in this modern world of high production produced by incredible quantities of chemical fertilisers and foreign ownership of thousands of agricultural acres. An astonishing amount of the Island landscape is now controlled completely by foreign owners. Mindlessly, without a thought, they will utterly destroy our traditional agricultural landscape that represents the original dream of the Eighteenth Century colonial planners. Does anybody care?

Here and there in the landscape, we see shocking deviations of the grid system that we have grown up with, and which forms the basis of our emotional and rational response to Island rural topography.

For the most part these are not to be feared as many of these strange field forms are attempts to control wind and water erosion. These techniques work and keep our rich topsoil intact.

 

More Drama in the Traditional Landscape

Through the years there have been other dramatic impacts on our rural landscape, again having to do with transportation. When the age of flight took hold of the Island airports had to be constructed. What a strange sight they are with vast runways perfectly aligned so that planes can land and take off under optimal, safe conditions. During World War II the first airports appeared in the flat landscape of Portage and Summerside. After the war Summerside joined Charlottetown as a commercial airport, only to fail for lack of traffic. But the airport was saved and now people can receive advanced aeronautic training in that space.

The airports are relatively small and are a necessity against which no argument can hold. Emotionally re have recognised them, in just a few generations, as vital to our existence and modes of transport.

As part of providing touristic allure, the international sport of golfing, with its millions of fans, has found a hope on the Island where numerous golf courses, big and small, have been imposed upon the landscape. Their strange patterns, with no recognisable geometry, come as a shock when they appear before us as we travel along the countryside. In a silly sort of way, they ornament the landscape, and we can enjoy the contradiction of a very rational mathematical sport inserted into a landscape of utter fantasy. Perhaps that is part of the essence of the Scottish spirit that invented and nourished this strange game.

 

Mining on the Island

Mining on the Island is manifested in discreet ways, like the mining of sand from “unimportant” beaches to spread on the roads in winter. There are also shale quarries that open and close, usually when sections of secondary highways are being rebuilt. Very rarely open pit mining of sandstone takes place, such as the recent activities in Lot 67 to obtain fair grade sandstone to restore the second, inner wall of province House, which too is of stone. Of course open pit mining is a dreadful scar on the landscape, but it has been a constant feature in the development of human civilisation since antiquity. People all over the world live with it. Abandoned open pit mines can, in time, with vegetation and water seeping in, become quite beautiful landscape features in themselves.

At present there are activities on the land, for the most part carefully concealed, that take advantage of a number of bogs left over from the post-glacial period many thousands of years ago. The great bog at Tignish has been turned into a tourist attraction, which in turn has been completely ruined in its natural context by a forest of extremely ugly but necessary wind turbines.

Foxley River has escaped this desecration on the landscape by tightly controlling its peat operations. The fact that the bogs are concealed by endless miles of dense spruce growth mitigates the visual offense one tends to feel in a territory as tiny as this Island.

 

New Community Plans

As communities grow, they begin to experiment with new formal arrangements. Gone forever is Charles Morris’ grid plan as we see circular developments such as this one in West Royalty. The interesting thing is that this circular plan has its origins in the Twelfth Century when circular towns, called circulades, were popular in Southern France for a while. Nothing is really new, is it?

The island, from the very moment the British colony was conceived of, was tied in irrevocably with a strict grid-based geometry. We have all grown up with it so that when a right angle is replaced by a graceful curve we are thrown into a state of shock. That is too bad, but we have to live with it. The Island is very small, true, but it is big enough to sustain spatially experiments in new concepts of town planning. I would add, as a caveat, that we must avoid at all costs, interfering with the essential structure of our perfect historical urban spaces, Charlottetown being at the fore. They are precious historical artefacts of international importance.

 

Roundabouts – Traffic Circles

The latest attack on the Island landscape, perpetrated in the name of travel safety, is the introduction of the roundabout in urban and rural areas. Statistics provide the Department of Highways with alarming information on the frequency of accidents and fatalities in particular spots, some very obscure. The reasons discussed publicly concern drivers ignoring stop signs and barrelling through intersections at speed. The reason almost never discussed publicly is that many of these drivers are drunk.

Untold millions are spent constructing monstrosities in the landscape such as the Cornwall Perimeter Highway. The Government of PEI Website has this to say about the virtues of this new experiment:

The Trans-Canada Highway extension project from North River to Clyde River will create a safer drive for over 6600 vehicles per day, while also reducing traffic congestion in smaller neighborhood streets. The Trans-Canada Highway Extension in Cornwall is also growing our economy, with an anticipated 500 jobs and $40 million in GDP generated during the construction phase.

There you go, and this is the result.

Photo courtesy of Prince Edward Island Government

I find this trend in road building an ugly affront to our landscape. I hope in time that it will stop.

 

But everywhere the past remains

Fortunately, at least in what is left of my life, a great deal of Eighteenth-Century geometry and rationality remain everywhere you look. YOU KNOW that those lines of fields are aligned to the Magnetic North of 1764. Does that matter? Yes, as much as being able to say that your ancestors are Scottish, Irish, English, or French.

It is a question of identity, here the British Colonial identity, which conceived, planned, and oversaw the emergence of geometric perfection out of a wilderness without destroying the spirit of that primordial environment.

I believe this landscape is doomed. It will all be destroyed to meet new demands on the land, and new minds that are completely disconnected with the historical past will obliterate our topographical heritage in the name of progress and necessity.

 

 

 

 

 

PATRONS

Kind persons have provided support for the expenses incurred in producing this blog. I wish to express my deep gratitude to these individuals who have helped me cover the costs of archival scans, photographs, learned journals, books and professional services.

Henry Kliner
Earle Lockerby
Robert L. Scobie

 

Resources

Arsenault, Georges, “The Acadian Settlements of Pinette and Pointe Prime,” published in Keepsakes and Memories: Our Belfast Origins and Times of the People of Belfast, Prince Edward Island. Edited by Susan Hornby. Belfast, Belfast Historical Society, 2009.

Arsenault, Georges; translated by Sally Ross, Illustrated History of the Acadians of Prince Edward Island, The Acord Press, Charlottetown, 2019.

Arsenault, Georges, “The Malpeque Bay Acadians 1728-1758,” The Island Magazine, Number 66, Fall/Winter 2009, Museum & Heritage Foundation, Charlottetown.

Bakker P., “Basque Pidgin Vocabulary in European-Algonquian Trade Contacts,” Papers of the Nineteenth Algonquian Conference, ed. William Cowan, Carleton University, Ottawa, 1988.

Champlain, Samuel de, The Works of Samuel de Champlain, Volume 5, The Champlain Society, reprinted by the University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1971.

Denys, Nicolas, The Description and Natural History of the Coasts of North America (Acadia), 1672, Translated and edited with a memoir of the author, collateral documents, and a reprint of the original, by William F. Ganong Ph.D., The Champlain Society, Toronto, 1908.

Douglas, R., Place Names of Prince Edward Island with Meanings, F. C. Acland, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, Ottawa, 1925.

Ganong, W. F., Crucial Maps in the Early Cartography and Place Nomenclature of the Atlantic Coast of Canada, University of Toronto Press and the Royal Society of Canada, Toronto, 1964, reprinted 2017.

Garnett, Ron, Prince Edward Island Slide Show and Screen Saver, www.airscapes.ca

Harvey, D. C., The French Regime in Prince Edward Island, (Reprinted from the 1926 edition), Ams Press, New York, 1970.

Lennox, Jeffers, Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690-1763, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2017.

Lockerby, Earle and Sobey, Douglas, Samuel Holland: His Work and Legacy on Prince Edward Island, Island Studies Press, University of Prince Edward Island, Holland College, Charlottetown, 2015.

Loewen, Brad and Goya, Miren Egaña, “Le routier de Piarres Detcheverry, 1677. Un aperçu de la presence basque dans la baie des Chaleurs au XVIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, Volume 68, Number 1-2, Summer–Fall 2014.

Rayburn, Alan, Geographical Names of Prince Edward Island, Surveys and Mapping Branch, Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, Ottawa, 1973.

Sobey, Douglas, Early Descriptions of the Forests of Prince Edward Island – A Source Book – Part I, The French Period 1534-1758, Prince Edward Island Department of Agriculture and Forestry, Charlottetown, 2002.