At the Crossroads: A History of Sackville, New Brunswick

Richard Wilbur is author of The Rise of French New Brunswick and H.H.
Stevens, 1878–1973, and co-author of Silver Harvest: The Fundy
Weirmen’s Story. His latest book is Horse-Drawn Carriages and Sleighs:
Elegant Vehicles from New England and New Bruns

The author of this handsome and lucidly designed volume is a retired
Mount Allison University professor. As he states in his preface, he
takes a broad interpretation of local history, starting with the first
of three themes: the area’s crossroads going back thousands of years
and covering the eras of the Mi’kmaq, the Acadians, and the first
arrivals of New England and British settlers and their short but
successful shipbuilding period. The second theme is “the enduring
legacy of the adjoining marshlands,” which thanks to the dyking
techniques established by the Acadians produced “the largest hayfield
in the world.” The third theme began in 1839 with the establishing of
a Methodist Academy, the forerunner to the university.

I found the first two themes the more readable and informative, not
only because of the scholarship behind them but also because I sensed
that they were also the author’s favourites. He provides a fund of
fascinating material and snapshots of colourful characters blended into
a skilfully constructed narrative of several tiny communities that
gradually became the incorporated town of Sackville.

The last section, “The Winds of Change,” sometimes seems little
more than a summary of town council minutes, but it redeems itself with
tales of how a once-bustling late-19th-century town saw its location,
formerly so useful to all forms of transportation, being made redundant
by trucking and by corporate and government decisions to move their
facilities to larger centres like Halifax and Moncton. The one exception
to these negative trends was Mount Allison University, which pursued
quality rather than size and went on to become one of Canada’s premier
undergraduate institutions.

Hamilton has produced a scholarly work that should be closely consulted
by present and future provincial historians.