Historic Amherst

Anthony A. MacKenzie is an associate professor of history at St. Francis
Xavier University in Nova Scotia.

The creators of these latest books in the Images of Our Past series,
using photographs acquired from museums, archives, institutions, and
generous individuals, have put together outstanding pictorial histories
of two towns and one county in Nova Scotia. Whether portraying outdoor
scenes, buildings, individuals, festive gatherings, or watercraft, the
illustrations are sharp and clear, at least one photo on each page. The
accompanying text is tightly written and informative.

A reader unfamiliar with the places noted only two minor errors.
Sheppard’s Historic Queens County identifies a vessel being launched
as a brigantine; since it has three masts and a brigantine has only two,
this is incorrect. In Acker and Jackson’s Historic Shelburne, a steam
locomotive is referred to as a tin wheeler instead of a ten wheeler. No
matter. The book presents many surprising snippets of information. In
the section on transportation, “a group of weathered ship carpenters
and the yard horse ‘Jim’” strain at the hawser to secure the
cradle of the newly launched Enola Gay in a 1947 photo. A son of the
boat builder was one of the ground crew for the B-29 bomber that dropped
the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In the same book, we are told that the
navy of the Republic of Chile sank 30 enemy submarines in World War II.
Historic Amherst contains a picture of Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky and
his unflattering account of life in an internment camp in the town.

Pauline Furlong identified her theme as an attempt to chronicle the
expansion and decline of the border town through the years of “Busy
Amherst” and the gradual decline of its industrial base. Her book
shows how the face of the town has changed. Some fine old buildings
remain but many have fallen victim to fires and developers. Shelburne
was an even more dramatic “boom and bust” site than Amherst.
Mushrooming from nearly zero inhabitants in 1783, it contained 12,000
people three years later; only 374 remained in 1816. Queens County, too,
is haunted by “ghost towns” today, which were thriving communities
in the gold-mining days. All the books, in fact, illustrate and document
the economic and social decline of Nova Scotia over a 100-year period.
Not quite a requiem, but certainly a lament.