A Brief History of Old Nova Scotia Headstones
Little is known by settler historians about the ways in which the first burial sites in present-day Nova Scotia were marked, if they were marked at all. The location and nature of burial sites of Mi’kmaq people prior to the arrival of Europeans is kept as traditional knowledge among Mi’kmaq knowledge keepers. Some of these sites were also used by Acadian settlers, and later, British colonists as burial grounds, and so have been examined by archaeologists and historians.
Acadians settled the lowlands of the province in the early 1600s, and remained until they were forcibly expelled in 1755, after Britain gained control the territory of l’Acadie at the end of the ‘French and Indian War’, the North American theatre of the Seven Years War. In capturing Acadians for deportation during le Grand Dérangement, British soldiers and New England militia burned the buildings and fields of l’Acadie. No Acadian grave markers from the period survive, leading researchers to speculate that markers were wooden crosses, having been lost in the scorched-earth campaign.
In the 18th century, England and France competed for occupancy of Mi’kmaki, the traditional homeland of the Mi’kmaq people. The earliest English occupation came during a brief period preceding the expulsion of the Acadians by several decades. The oldest remaining headstone in Nova Scotia (and, indeed, Canada) is at Annapolis Royal, dated 1720, and inscribed in English.
Over the course of the century, the hands of over a dozen English language carvers transformed traditions and motifs of imported gravestone art into a uniquely Nova Scotian expression of the form.
Today, some 650 or so 18th-century gravestones remain in Nova Scotia, with roughly half in Halifax, over a hundred in various sites in Kings County and Hants County, and the remainder in about 40 different locations on the mainland, from Guysborough to Wallace to Chebogue to Barrington. Often located some distance from the centre of contemporary communities, many of these burial grounds are rarely visited, and in some cases ignored completely. Several burial grounds require maintenance to preserve this rich artisanal legacy, as well as the details of the difficult and grief-filled lives the stone inscriptions provide.
The earliest stones were mostly imported from Boston, which had been settled a century earlier by English Puritans, and was supporting a number of skilled “stonecutters” by the time of English occupancy in Nova Scotia. The first local carvers emerged in the 1770’s on the South Shore, Halifax and Kings County. At short time later, a skilled carver began working near Saint John, New Brunswick, exporting some stones to customers in Nova Scotia, often Loyalists who settled after 1783.
A significant number of 18th-century stones are unadorned with carved images. Many bear the word “Sacred” on the tympanum—the curved centre atop the stone. Others, chiefly the stones of Roman Catholics, bear a simple cross and the letters I-H-S. Some – notably many stones of Lutheran settlers at Halifax’s “Little Dutch Church” – eschew ornamentation by doctrine, and so dutifully record the pertinent facts – the business, as it were – of the death and the deceased.
