Antigonish County, Nova Scotia

Canada

The officers and men of the Nova Scotia Volunteers were given a grant of 21,600 acres around Antigonish Harbour in 1784. Their commanding officer, Col Timothy Hierlihy, tried to establish a town called Dorchester here but the soil proved more fertile upriver and the plan failed. The new village, at the junction of the Wright and West rivers, was called Antigonish by 1821.

Early settlement in Antigonish by Highland Scots was along the Northumberland coast between 1785 and 1791 with their first named settlement being at Arisaig (earlier known as Frenchman's barn). The first known Scottish settler, and who named the place, was Angus Gillies MacDonald who had come to America with John MacDonald of Glenaladale and received a soldier's grant on the disbandment of the 84th Regiment. He decide, though, to explore and chose 500 acres here but did not remain long because he thought the Mi'kmaq too hostile. His brother, with wife and son, came in 1785 to become the first permanent settlers.

The area at that time, in common with all of eastern Nova Scotia, was called Sydney County. As bits were added to the county, it was split into two, the upper district remaining Sydney and the lower becoming Gusyboro county. In the mid-1860s the name of Sydney was changed to Antigonish.

The Highland emigrants to Antigonish were mainly Roman Catholics from the Western Highlands and their first church was established near Arisaig pier. The Western Highland, and island, influence can be seen throughout the county with placenames such as Knoydart, settled in 1787, Morven, Lochaber and Eigg Mountain where islanders from Eigg cam in 1823. One of Gaeldom's great poets, John MacLean from Tiree, settled in Antigonish County in what is now called Glen Bard.

Despite this influence, and the visible remnants of it today in pipes, kilts and the Antigonish Highland Games, it would be wrong to characterise this as a purely West Highland community. Graeme Wynn writes of a 'mosaic of identities' in On the Margins of Empire (in Craig Brown's History of Canada),

'By clinging more or less tenaciously to their roots, the various groups - Acadians, Irish, German-speaking descendants of the Protestant migrants of the 1750s, those who were English, and those who were Yankees, added to the diversity of the eastern colonies. Largely a product of the settlement process which brought people at different times from particular source areas to one or another of the region's circumscribed pockets of habitable land, such distinctions lingered longest in those settlements which were most isolated.'

In Catholic country 'Down-shore, there was dancing and card-playing and a church with a cross on a steeple .... Upshore [where few Catholics were to be found] .... there were box socials and strawberry festivals and small white box-like churches.'

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