The we visited the Bait Verte area was the day before a hurricane that never really hit, hurricane Bil. It gave a socked in feel to the day.
by ARCHIE NADON
The day we explored the Baie Verte area, including Port Elgin, we did no planning. None. We just jumped in the car and headed for the Nova Scotia border like rum runners. We didn’t Google it, look it up in a guide, or ask anyone about it, we just went. Elaine did have her trusty New Brunswick Backroad Mapbook with her, but that was all the preparation we did. We went with no expectations which was a good thing because there wasn’t much there, other than a pickup truck with its transmission on fire.
If we had done a little research (I got most of this history from Port Elgin’s own history page) we would have discovered things of interest. For one, Port Elgin was, at one time or other, Gaspereau Town, Fort Monckton and Fort Gaspereaux. The latter was a fort that was built in 1751 just before the deportation. After the British captured the fort, which had only 19 men guarding it, they renamed it Fort Monckton, after General Monckton, the most misspelled British commander in history. The British gave up on the fort after only a few years because they couldn’t defend it against hostile Mi’kmaqs. There is a cairn with a plaque there now, as you can see in this National Historic Site (scroll down the page about a third).
What I like about the plaque is its neutrality. When I was young, despite being French Canadian growing up in Northern Ontario, I always thought of the British as the only legitimate rulers of Canada. It’s surprising how long it’s taken me to remember to ask, when I read Canadian history, “Who wrote this?’ so that I don’t automatically see things from the British perspective. Yet, there is a third perspective which gets lost more often than not and that’s the Aboriginal perspective, in this case, the Mi’kmaq. That blatant European perspective is obvious in phrases that start like , “Champlain discovered…” Fortunately, it seems that the further we go into the future, the more we learn about the past. Perhaps, someday we really will have a balanced written history of the region, one that includes the First Nations.
The other thing that surprised me was that Port Elgin was once a port. Why the name didn’t tip me off is a subject for some other kind of blog, but it is hard to imagine that this sleepy little village was once bustling with trains, trade and factories, back in the days when the world was less centralized. There was even the obligatory industrialist, this one named Fred Magee, who owned fish and produce processing plants and shipped his Mephisto brand worldwide. His home is now a seniors’ complex.
I’m not sure what all that adds up to. Does it add up to “interesting.” What does make a place “interesting?” Water slides? Wave pool? Huge reconstructed historic sites? All of that, I suppose, depending on your age, depending on why you made the trip. Is Port Elgin interesting? You won’t get much from the Web, most of it coming from the village’s Website. But I’ll know if it’s interesting when I go back and walk the streets looking for traces of Fred Magee or the the old hand-cranked train swing bridge or the Mi’qMak fishing camps or evidence of what used to be the port in Port Elgin.
