Historic Yarmouth: Town and Country

Margaret Conrad is the Nancy Rowell Jackman Chair of Women’s Studies
at Mount Saint Vincent University, editor of Intimate Relations: Family
and Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800, and co-author of The
Joy of Ginger.

Like many areas of Nova Scotia, the Yarmouth region flourished in the
early industrial age, its economy buoyed by shipbuilding, seafaring, and
manufacturing. The flavor of this “golden age” (roughly 1850 to
1945) is conveyed here through the reproduction of some 200 photographs
from the rich archival collection of the Yarmouth County Museum. Except
for a brief introduction, the books consists of photographs and detailed
captions. The images are grouped by subject matter, with chapters
devoted to streetscapes, domestic architecture, businesses, public
architecture, special events, sports and leisure, uniforms (primarily
military), shipping, and transportation. The last chapter focuses,
appropriately, on the photographers themselves and on portraits of some
of their subjects. Overall, this book provides a fine photographic
interpretation of the high points of Yarmouth’s history.

While the overwhelming majority of the photographs depict the best and
most elegant aspects of Yarmouth society—domestic architecture was,
and still is, a testimony to the wealth and (usually) good taste of the
period—cameras also caught such rarely documented phenomena as the
laying of the first water pipe, the staff of a local laundry, and
Captain Isaac Webber in string trousers and bare feet. Few
photographers, it seems, turned their gaze on the underside of Yarmouth
life or even its minority peoples, though there is an extraordinary 1936
portrait of a Mi’kmaq guide dressed in “Indian” costume of the
period. As museum director Eric Ruff notes in his introduction, the
selection process was challenging because of the excellent quality of
the period’s photography and the vastness of the collection. The
quality of the photography, however, is not always fully captured in
this modest publication, except on the cover. It is a great pity that
some of that 19th-century Yarmouth County wealth could not have been
tapped so that the publishers could do full justice to these delightful
images of yesteryear.