Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, Canada
Nova Scotia, Latin for New Scotland, is the largest of
Canada’s Maritime Provinces in terms of prominence and population, but still
has a fairly stagnant population under one million. It’s one of those places
I’ve planned to see for a long time and am finally getting around to it. I came
to Nova Scotia on a family road trip in 1984, but we only spent about three
days in the province. Back then our family trips seemed to involve mostly
spending a lot of time in the car with only the occasional stop at a
significant site, sort of “keeping to schedule” even though we didn’t usually
have reservations to be anywhere at any particular time nor were very limited
on time since my father was a teacher with two months off for the summer. The
34 years between then and now is one of the longest time periods between visits
to the same place for me, but I doubt Nova Scotia has changed much visibly over
that time.
In our rush to get from place to place quickly, we somehow
skipped Louisbourg Fortress, one of Nova Scotia’s top sights, and that was when
my brother and I were in our teens/tweens, as age when we getting a lot of
history in school and interested in similar historic places like Williamsburg,
Mount Vernon, and Plymouth Rock, other stops on family road trips around that
time.
Louisbourg has ever since been in the back of my mind as a place to get
to because I missed it all those years ago.
Louisbourg Fortress is located on a defensible harbor near
the easternmost point of Nova Scotia and was built by the French in the early
1700s as part of their defensive network. It was their biggest fort in North
America, comparable in importance to Quebec City but rather small compared to
defensive works built around the same time in Europe. The site was of
importance during the first half of the 1700s when it saw several battles and
changed hands twice between British and French before eventually coming under
permanent British control in 1755. The French population of 2,000 in the fort
and surrounding village was deported and the site eventually mostly abandoned
as it lost its strategic significance.
Thus, the Parks Canada site you can see today is entirely a
reconstruction of approximately a quarter of what once existed around the site
after an archaeological excavation in 1960. What has been rebuilt was completed
by the early 1980s (about the time I would have visited with my family had we
stopped there) and is supposedly true to historical architectural designs for
the buildings that have been found. Nowadays, Louisbourg is one of those
historical sites with lots of people in costume doing historical reenactments
of life at the time, sort of like a Williamsburg north. Overall the site is
fairly impressive, even if you realize it’s all a reconstruction. Naturally,
the demonstration I couldn’t miss was one on rum production which included a
tasting of the product of a local distillery for a small extra charge.
With good morning weather I walked the rather short
Louisbourg Lighthouse Trail across the harbor from the historic site, one of
relatively few coastal hikes I targeted in the Maritimes that I’ve actually
been able to do so far because of the generally poor weather the last few
weeks.
2025-05-23