Historic Antigonish: Town and County

Margaret Conrad is Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at
the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of Atlantic Canada: A
Region in the Making, and co-author of Intimate Relations: Family and
Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–

There is now a whole shelf of volumes in Nimbus Publishing’s Images of
Our Past series, which tells the stories of Maritime communities in
black-and-white images supported by text. Like its companion volume,
Historic Wolfville (2003), this one is twice as long as most of the
volumes in the series and it is certainly one of the best. Its authors
are or were—Ray MacLean died in 2004—highly respected history
professors at Saint Francis Xavier University, and their research skills
show in the narrative and selection of photographs. Not content to
chronicle only the obvious developments for which Antigonish is
famous—St. Francis Xavier University, the Antigonish Cooperative
Movement, the Highland Games, and a newspaper improbably named the
Antigonish Casket—the authors showcase the diversity of a county that
includes Mi’kmaq, Acadian, black, and Chinese citizens as well as
Scots, who by the mid-19th century were the area’s predominant
cultural group.

Largely bypassed by the wave of industrialization that swept eastern
Nova Scotia in the late 19th century, Antigonish remained essentially
rural. There are splendid scenes of the rolling countryside and an
entire chapter on women’s work with rare photographs of women doing
the “ordinary” chores of feeding chickens, hauling firewood, tending
sheep, spinning wool, and knitting. As with most books in the series, it
ends with a gallery of individuals, high and low, whose photographs, for
one reason or another, have been preserved. Here at last we see a Scot
with his bagpipes (Angus MacQuarrie), his image captured by journalist
Clara Dennis in 1930. By that time notions of “New Scotland” and its
quaint “folk” were being packaged for tourist consumption by people
like Dennis but, as the caption indicates, MacQuarrie was no rural rube.
He spent much of his early life in the United States and western Canada,
studied piping in Scotland, and judged piping contests for the
Antigonish Highland Games.

The people of Antigonish County and anyone interested in its
development are well served by this volume, which offers a sure-footed
history of one of Canada’s most “distinct” societies.