Architecture of the French/Acadian Period - Part 1

• This strange map with the world upside-down might just as well represent the way most Islanders view the French/Acadian period on PEI – with incomprehension. I have always been dismayed at how little people care or know about this fascinating chapter in our history that spans the years 1720 until 1758 when the Acadians were deported and their geography, and thus their world, was obliterated from the face of the earth by the Holland Survey in 1765. It would be over one hundred years before the remnants of the Acadians re-established themselves on the Island.
  
  Following Champlain’s experiment at colonisation in 1604, Nova Scotia, and the Bay of Fundy in particular, became the focus of many attempts to colonise this fertile area and to exploit its vast tidal flats by huge dyking projects. Soon the focus of this work became Port Royal/Annapolis Royal but it was plagued with frequent changes of ownership involving the French and English and the consequences of their European wars.
  
  In very early illustrations dating to the 1600’s we can see the patterns of these settlements built close to both the water for transportation and the dyked marshlands for the production of hay and the breeding of cattle.
  
  
  In this small detail of Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin’s 1686 manuscript map of Port Royal we can see the arrangement of one end of the village where houses are lined up near the shore, each displaying their well-ordered garden plots, some of which are set out formally as was the custom of the day. Church, cemetery, windmill, landing place on the shore and village were all intimately placed. Although this was not typical of French/Acadian settlement because it was a military, administrative and commercial town, the physical details of settlement surrounding the town as represented in this map serve to illustrate how settlement could develop.
  
  The term “Acadia” is a corruption of the name of the Greek and Roman Neverland, Arcadia. Here, poets of Antiquity wrote, rural life was easy and sweet, happy relationships flourished and remoteness from the city spelled freedom.
  
  The area became known as Acadia on the maps of the period and its inhabitants Acadians. Gradually they moved up the Bay of Fundy into Minas and Cumberland Basins and exploited the tidal flats to great advantage. Many settlements appeared, often consisting only of a group of houses belonging to one family, but larger ones developed also. One of these was Beaubassin situated on a ridge and slope that projected to the Bay just inside what is now the NB/NS border, the Missaquash River. When the English claimed the land west of the river in 1750, the village was burned to the ground on the orders of a tiresome and interfering priest, the Abbé LeLoutre. There, and in outlying areas in Nova Scotia, about 150 houses were burned, displacing a population of about 1000. At the crest of the ridge the English built a small offensive fort named after Major Charles Lawrence, their commander. The ridge, its slope and the marsh below, still remain as a massive unexploited archaeological site. Fortunately Parks Canada has obtained this vital piece of land and we are assured of preservation and probable archaeological exploration in the future.
  
  In 1731 Robert Hale of Beverly Massachussets, a Harvard-trained doctor and later military officer at the siege of Louisbourg, sailed up the coast and visited some of the Bay of Fundy settlements. He kept a diary which is exciting to read and which provides us with a dispassionate view of Acadian settlements. Having arrived at the village of Beaubassin he set about to explore it. These are his words.
  
  "Mond. 28 5 A.M. I rose & after Breakfast walk'd about to see the place and divert myself. There are but about 15 or 20 Houses in this Village, tho' it be the largest in the Bay, besides 2 Mass Houses or Churches, on one of which they hang out a Flagg Morning & Evening for Prayers, to the other the Priest goes once a day only, Habited like a Fool in Petticoats, with a Man after him with a Bell in one Hand ringing at every door, & a lighted Candle & Lanthorn in the other.
  
  And a little later,
  
  They have but one Room in their Houses besides a Clockloft, Celler, & Sometimes a Closet. Their Bedrooms are made something after the manner of a Sailor's Cabbin, but boarded all round about the bigness of the Bed, except one little hole in the Foreside, just big eno' to crawl into, before which is a Curtain drawn & as a Step to get into it, there stands a Chest. They have not above 2 or 3 chairs in a house, and those wooden ones, bottom & all.
  
  It is especially evocative to stand in the fields which once were, and still are as archaeological sites, the village of Beaubassin and to read Robert Hale’s words. Visually the landscape has not really changed in any significant way since his time.
  
  The study of Acadian architecture is still in its infancy and must remain so until more sites are excavated. There has been considerable work done in Nova Scotia and it is possible for us to imagine what ordinary houses might have been like from these published reports. In the Vol. 8, No. 3 Spring 1984 edition of The Occasional published by the Nova Scotia Museum, archaeologist David Christianson wrote a fascinating preliminary report of two Acadian houses excavated at Belleisle, a former settlement a few kilometres north of Port Royal. Both of these were dated to pre-expulsion times and had been destroyed by fire, probably in 1755.

  House No. 1 provided a great deal of information about how such a building was constructed and also its dimensions. There was a fieldstone foundation 11 by 7.5 metres on which had been built a wooden house employing post and beam construction, typical of all wood-frame construction methods imported from Europe. At one end, built inside the house was a massive stone and clay chimney which connected to a round exterior bake oven as shown in the above illustration, by artist Azor Vineau, taken from the Spring 1984 issue of The Occasional.

  
  

  Students of Acadian architecture know that there is much discussion about exactly how these houses were constructed. Some houses were certainly made of squared logs that appear to have been dovetailed at the corners and then pegged into place. Others of the braced-frame type had the spaces in between the beams filled with wattle and daub consisting of a fixed web of small branches filled up with mud and straw. Another method of filling the spaces between the beams was to pile up sections of squared log until the space was filled and then pegging everything into place. Early records about the building of a settlement on PEI indicate that yet another method was used for ordinary buildings: en piquet. This consisted of a typical palisade structure with vertical logs buried a few feet into the ground. This rotted easily and was subject to movement by the frost thus making it even more unstable. Someone has yet to assemble data on every type of construction that can be reliably dated to the Acadian period and then cataloguing the various elements according to construction techniques and geographical locations. Perhaps now that dendrochronological dating techniques have been developed for the Maritimes it might be possible to verify the age of some of these buildings.
  
  The interior probably consisted of one room which was the centre of family life. The following illustration, also by Azor Vineau and taken from The Occasional, gives us a good idea of what that might have looked like.
  

  
  

  

  
  

  This matches up pretty well with Hale’s description of a typical Beaubassin house. We see the small windows and the ladder leading to the loft where people could sleep close to the warm chimney. Hale mentions a kind of cupboard bed, called a lit clos, as being typical of those houses. These were "room-within-a-room" structures, often two bunks tall, characteristic of rural homes in Britanny. The presence of such a relatively large object, with its chest in front of the opening, must have taken up a significant portion of the small room. Such furniture, of course, has not survived.
  
  The Ile St.-Jean settlers, mostly coming from France, would have constructed houses in a manner familiar to them back home, depending of course, on whether similar materials were available. It is not yet clear to me whether regional differences in building methods existed and if they did, were they connected to locally available materials or what other settlers had adapted to. To date only one Acadian house on the Island has been excavated and that at the site of Port La Joye, across the harbour from Charlottetown. This was where the Compagnie de L'Isle Saint-Jean established the colony granted by the French crown to the Comte de Saint Pierre, a French nobleman who did not personally visit the place. By 1721 there was a small garrison of soldiers commanded by the Sieur de Gotteville, and 16 French families who had sailed from Rochefort in France and accompanied by four Acadian families from Beaubassin, notably Michel Hache who was nicknamed "Gallant" and some of his relatives. They had settled in the area now called Rocky Point and gradually began to move up the Hillsborough River.
  
  

  In 1734 this wonderful sketch was drawn as part of a larger document illustrating the actual and planned development of Port La Joye. It shows, along with the proposed fort, a panorama of the village with private and official buildings that had sprung up in the last 14 years. A favourite thing that I like to do is juxtapose that drawing with a photo of the present landscape taken from the harbour approximately where the sketch was done. As you can see almost nothing in the landscape has changed except for the disappearance of all French buildings. Now there is only the encroachment of cottages along that desirable stretch of coast.

  
  

  This black and white detail gives a clearer image of what the village next to the fort looked like.

  

  Near the middle of the sketch, just before a stream bisects the picture, there is a group of buildings, all of which belonged toMichel Haché Gallant.
  

  We can plainly see two large buildings and what appears to be a small house. The buildings are strategically located along the path that leads from the landing place up to the fort. The other settlers are all across the stream and up it on narrow lots of land. We know this from a sketch map that survives from 1730 where every lot is indicated as well as the owner’s name. Nine of the fourteen properties are owned by members of the Haché Gallant family.
  
  Michel Haché is a fascinating person who has given the name “Gallant” to many, though not all, of his descendants. Before moving to Ile St.-Jean Michel had been in the employ of the Sieur de la Vallière, an influential man from Trois Rivieres who had received a grant of what was to become the village of Beaubassin. Michel had received some education and served in some capacity of importance for de la Valliere. As a result when, at an advanced age, he moved to Port La Joye, he may have been given a post that we might describe as harbour master. If that is so that would explain the position, size and importance of his land grant and perhaps the other buildings near him because if he indeed was harbour master warehouses near the shore would be necessary. As a matter of fact, lead bale seals, pressed into the binding of packages and bearing official emblems, were found in the area of his house. His past history of being associated with and in the employ of a very important man may have also contributed to his settling on this important spot. His vast experience and know-how could have been very valuable to the founder of this new colony.
  
  In 1987 Rob Ferguson, a senior archaeologist with the Canadian Parks Service in Halifax, initiated a preliminary investigation at Port La Joye to locate the site of the French fort and also that of Michel Haché Gallant’s house. By the summer of 1988 enough information had been collected to begin serious excavation at these two places and I was hired to work with his team at the Haché Gallant site.
  
  The previous summer’s survey had come across what appeared to be a shallow cellar scraped out of the sandstone which is never more than a few inches below the soil on that headland. Our team opened up an eight metre square and, centimetre by centimetre, we worked our way down through the 19th Century plough zone and gradually exposed an arrangement of features and artefacts that fulfilled our hopes of finding an Acadian house site. That story is told by Rob Ferguson in the Spring/Summer 1990 issue of the Island Magazine and it makes for fascinating reading.
  
  The following illustration is a montage I made of several photographs that together show a cross- section of the dig. Notice how close to the surface everything is and also how shallow the root cellar was. Looking at a surficial geology map of this area shows that the whole landscape was little more than a very thin layer of soil over a shale and sandstone substrate. What an unhappy place to start a new settlement!

  
  

  

  
  

  As the excavation progressed it became clear how we should interpret the different strata. Basically it was simple. In 1745 New Englanders on the prowl burned the settlement. This sort of thing happened fairly often in those days. The house was at that time being rented by officers at the garrison because Michel Gallant had fallen through the ice and drowned in April of 1736 and his widow moved out of the house. There was a blanket of ash and burnt material that covered the entire house site. This was interpreted as the house and its contents, objects rented out by the Gallants or brought in by the French officers. Probably at that time the chimney stack protruded out of the ashes. The Gallants did not rebuild this house but abandoned the spot. In time the chimney, made of rubble and clay, would have collapsed or been pushed over and sod and later garbage would have covered the depression of the cellar.
  
  This photomontage of shots made by Rob Ferguson using separate photos taken by a camera suspended from an A-frame pipe stand called a bipod shows clearly what lay ahead to explore and interpret after the soil mixed up by constant ploughing had been removed. Clearly visible is the dark outline of the cellar and about 2 metres away from this edge the burnt outlines of the house walls which are believed to hyave been en piquet. Note that this cellar was not a basement in the modern sense but an excavation well away from the house walls so that the produce stored in it would be safe from the frost. The bottom of the pit is squared and like other such cellars, may have been lined with wooden sides. Such cellars used in that manner survived well into the 20th Century on PEI.
  
  When all this information was transferred to paper it became clear that the house was somewhat different from the Belleisle house in Nova Scotia. The dimensions were at least 9 by 10 metres and it is possible that there were two rooms. This is suggested by the placement of the chimney in the 1737 sketch of Port La Joye and, if the excavation were opened again and extended so as to reveal the area of the whole house, it might be possible to determine the exact placement of the chimney. Suffice it to say that there was a considerable amount of rubble and brick clay that had to be shifted and that suggested a very large quantity of material that could not be accounted for in other ways.
  
  A truly vast number of small nails suitable for shingles was found in the course of the excavation and these were so evenly distributed over the surface of the building site as to suggest that the roof had been shingled and not thatched. The walls were probably covered with clapboards. As well hundreds of pieces of window glass turned up and their distribution suggested that the house had several windows.
  
  

  A burned wooden house is not going to reveal much interior detail but but two finds deserve to be pointed out as hints to what might have been in the house.
  

  
  

  The first consists of a number of bricks, most probably imported and most probably used for the hearth. This assumption is made because some of the bricks, and one in particular, were ground down in such a manner as to suggest repeated traffic, presumably by the feet of those in the vicinity of the fireplace.

  
  

  The other artefact that hints at what might have been seen at least in one part of the interior is a piece of plaster with markings on the back that indicate it was applied to lath or rough board. Perhaps the overmantle area was plastered over for safety and aesthetic reasons.
  
  One may ask if there is still anything in the ground that could possibly provide us with information that we don’t know about the French regime in Prince Edward Island. Well, look at this map and ask yourself whether in a largely rural province there is anything worth digging for.

  
  

  
  

  

  
  

  In 1765 Samuel Holland, while surveying the Island into lots so that individuals the British Crown owed favours to could be impartially rewarded, listed the presence of over 300 structures, and the vast majority of these dated from the Acadian period. Even if only half a dozen of these were found and excavated how greater would be our understanding of how people lived before the Deportation of 1758.

  
  

  The historian John Caven wrote in a 1901 issue of The Prince Edward Island Magazine about the old settlement of St. Peter’s Harbour located on the South side of the Bay. He described the setting thus:
  
  The visitor at the present day still beholds the impetuous waters from the Gulf forcing their way through the huge ridges of sand that stretch out from either shore as if to forbid passage; he still sees the waters, after passing the barrier, rushing and spreading inland for miles, bordered with green fields, by many a wharf and snug farm steading; he still sees looking seaward, to right and left, far as his eye can carry, the grey wastes of sand -- here gathered into ridgy dunes, there massed into huge mounds, made solid by the rank sand grass; but he will have to search among the ever-shifting sand to find even the slightest token that a large community had its home on that green slope above, and toiled on that treacherous sea. A rusty hinge or nail that crumbles into dust with the pressure of his fingers -- fragments of glass and old-fashioned pottery rudely coloured, the blackened earth with pieces of charcoal, where probably once stood a forge, and half-filled cellars over which once blazed the family log-fire, are all the memorials he meets with, of a community that has passed away, and whose place knows them no more.
  
  He goes on to say that
  
  Two rows of cellars, each extending about a hundred yards, and separated by a wide street, still mark the spot. Other dwellings were scattered up and down athwart the declivity, while among the dunes and sand mounds the wind at times clears out some spacious foundations, where probably stores and warehouses may have stood. On the crest of the eminence, a few yards from where now stands the dwelling of Mr. Sinott, rose the church. Franquet says of it, that it was a large and solid building. … A few paces from the site of the church, a square plot of land carefully fenced in, is preserved by the reverential owner from all contact with the plough; for tradition says that there, in sacred burial, repose the bodies of many a toil-worn settler. A cluster of dark firs casts a sombre shade over the hallowed spot.
  
  Today you can visit that very spot and imagine before you the wide street following the shore line (now completely covered over by cottages) and imagine others leading up to the still-standing Sinott house. Now, aside from the cottages, all you can see is a vast cultivated field going down to the entrance of the Bay. The owners of these summer houses cannot even dig a flower bed without turning up some vestige of that Acadian past, whether it be a button, a coin, a musket ball or a piece of pottery. Mixed with these along the shore are many quartzite prehistoric artefacts that speak for another people who inhabited that site thousands of years before. It is a magical place, full of what the Romans called genius loci -- the spirit of the place and you are overwhelmed by the spirits of those who inhabit that place.
  
  Last year my friend John, while walking in that great field, came across this metal artefact. I don't know if it was a button, token or something else, but soon I made out the words, engraved around clasped hands, L’AMOUR NOUS UNIS -- LOVE UNITES US. It was more than a token. It expressed a way of life built on hope.

  
  
  

  
  

  The power of this simple talisman so affected me that I could hardly keep myself from crying. It will always be thus.
  
  When we look again at a map of the Island from the French/Acadian period (this time right-side-up!) we can see how in the brief period from 1720-1758 the French and Acadians made the Island their world, settling where they thought most useful and making the best of the world they carved from the wilderness. As we shall see in a future chapter, that Island, in order to make room for the dreams of the conquerors, had to be destroyed.

  
  

  
  

  Sources:

  
  

  For many years the topic of Acadian Architecture has interested me and I have collected everything on the subject I could find as well as keeping a large file of loose material. I have also visited as many sites as I could to study in situ remains from this period and have also had the privilege of sharing in the excavation of the only specifically identified example of an Acadian structure on the Island. Finally there has been the wonderful and lively interchange of ideas among my keen and clever friends.

  
  

  The Occasional, Vol. 8 No. 3, Spring 1984, published by the Nova Scotia Museum

  
  

  The Island Magazine, No. 27, Spring/Summer 1990, published by the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation

  
  

  The Prince Edward Island Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 8, October 1901
  
  Dawson, Joan, The Mapmaker's Eye: Nova Scotia Through Early Maps, Nimbus Publishing Ltd. and the Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax 1988

  
  Very special thanks to Rob Ferguson of Parks Canada who read the text closely and suggested a number of corrections which have been made. Rob also provided copies of the artefact photos with centimetre scales on them.
  
  
• Special thanks to Georges Arsenault who kindly made suggestions to improve the accuracy of my text.

  
  

  (more material is to be listed soon)
  
  

The Earliest Peoples and their Architecture

The area now called Prince Edward Island has been inhabited, more or less constantly, for about 10,000 years. This is supported by very credible archaeological evidence found across the Island but especially in Saint Peter’s Bay.

This first people to inhabit North America were the PALAEO INDIANS who either entered the country in glacial times when the Bering Sea was frozen over, or perhaps, as is now believed by some archaeologists, along a similar frozen corridor following the North Atlantic. Here is a point that I found in Saint Peter’s Bay that illustrates perfectly the late technology of these people.

We do not know what sort of houses or shelters these people lived in nor what the landscape looked like because ten thousand years ago it is possible that you could have walked to the Magdalene Islands because so much of the earth’s water was held in the glaciers of the last ice age.

About five to six thousand years ago the evidence for the Palaeo-Indians fades and a new technology, named after a people we call the LAURENTIDE ARCHAIC, comes into prominence in Northeast North America. We really don’t know much more about them than we de about the Palaeo-Indians but their stone technology is distinct. Instead of the concave base fluted point the hafting method now employs a stem. Here are two points that I found that reflect this new technology.

The black material for the large knife was imported from Nova Scotia while the brown point, made of local quartzite deposited by the retreating glaciers, shows an interest in using locally-available materials.

As to their dwellings, we can only speculate as no evidence has survived or been discovered.

The last two thousand years are better understood because by that time sea levels were similar to what they are today and thus we can postulate that this third group of people lived near the sea and travelled on it as well as exploiting its various life forms. We know these people today as the Micmac or Mi’kmaq and their history is relatively well documented. They lived in birch-bark structures called wigwams that were circular and which permitted a small hearth for a fire and therefore controlled warmth. Many sketches by various artists exist from the days of early European exploration but this photograph, in the collection of the PEI Museum, taken around 1860 by the surveyor Henry Cundall, gives us an excellent notion of what this building type looked like when people still lived in wigwams.

The structure is roughly circular and so typical of the shape of many kinds of houses in the history of early peoples. By the time of this photo, canvas, perhaps from shipwrecks, replaces animal hides to close the opening. There are a number of photographs in the Public Archives that show the varieties of these structures.

In August 1860 the Prince of Wales visited PEI as part of a larger visit to Canada. It was felt to be important enough, whether as an exotic element or an acknowledgement of the native presence on the Island, to display a large birch-bark wigwam proudly flying the Union Jack prominently in front of Province House. This illustration appeared in the Illustrated London News as part of the lavish coverage the Prince's travels in Canada received.

The following photograph dates from a generation or so later, and along with a Mi'kmaq woman wearing the typical bead-ornamented hat of her people, shows that the wigwam circular structure survived until the end of the 19th Century.

An important amateur Island photographer WA Mitchell (c 1900), whose visual legacy is preserved by the provincial museum, photographed the Indian Reservation of Rocky Point across the harbour from Charlottetown. As well as showing the traditional round wigwam shape he provides startling evidence of a shift in the way these structures were constructed.

For the first time the wigwam is shown as a SQUARE STRUCTURE and the implications of this are fairly obvious. It seems as if the Mi’kmaq are adapting their traditional dwelling shape to the squared structures of the European settlers. What other explanation can there be? To further support this idea of European style assimilated by the native peoples Mitchell provides us with this image of the next step in the transition.

Now the square wigwam has become a shingled shack that is as typical of this assimilation as the clothing that the Mi’kmaq are wearing. Architecturally it is a letdown not only because a perfectly beautiful sprung-from-the-soil architectural type has been lost but also because it signals the end of an ancient evolutionary process and a most environmentally effective lifestyle.

By the end of the 19th Century the frame house of the European settlers gradually replaced the wigwam as a permanent structure. When the Inspector of Schools Joseph-Octave Arsenault visited Lennox Island in 1894* he noted that the 43 families inhabiting the reservation at that time all lived in wooden houses and these he found neat and comfortable. One even had a harmonium and the people could sing things in both Latin and Mi'kmaq.


The wigwam eventually ended its days serving as a summer tent and there are still persons living who remember seeing them in various temporary camps across the Island.

Sources

In spite of a century's spasmodic archaeological exploration little is known about PEI prehistory. It is believed that many of the most important sites have been eroded by the sea while many others may lie under the waters of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, because of major changes in sea levels since the last ice age. Farming activities have also taken their toll and also the practise of digging up clam and mussel beds through the winter ice to spread on fields as fertiliser. I have personally seen two very important sites completely destroyed by unregulated house building on the edge of the sea. Although it has a weak, weasel-worded archaeological sites protection act, the Province regulates nothing.

The Island Magazine, published by the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation, has a series of articles that appeared over the past 25 years that report on current progress in archaeological exploration. These are mostly by David Keenlyside, formerly of the Museum of Civilisations in Ottawa and now the new Executive Director of the provincial museum, and are vital in gaining an understanding of where things stand in Island prehistory.

Over the years the national museum has published a number of books and booklets on Atlantic prehistory. These are by the best authorities in the subject and can be consulted in public or university libraries.

A great deal can be learned from the excellent site of the Nova Scotia Museum. Most of what it says about the region can be applied to circumstances on the Island.

(more to be added)

* Many thanks to Geroges Arsenault who sent me the quotation from the newspaper L'Impartial for 18 January 1894 in which the school inspector's article appears.

Introduction

Prince Edward Island is an amazing place and that’s just not because its my home! Its geology, natural history, geography, archaeology and history of human settlement are all fascinating and, for the most part, unique.

Geologically the Island is a sandbar ground over by glaciers and eroded by the weather. In spite of its tiny size and red sandstone base there are a surprising number of distinct environments to be found here from salt marshes, dunes, bogs floating in glacier-made excavations, forests of various combinations of wood, lowlands, highlands and the cleared land and buildings of human settlement.

Much has been written about PEI, some of it dripping with integrity and some of it sentimental crap. Not wishing to divorce myself from either category I will try to keep a middle course and pass on what I believe I know with accuracy and passion.

Although my main focus in these blogs is to explore the architectural history of the province I will from time-to-time digress and include related topics that I believe have not received the focus due to them in writings to date. Here I include what I believe to be profound effects on Island development and identity caused by Samuel Holland’s survey, some new thoughts (from an amateur) on the Island’s prehistory and an attempt to define some aspects of our past in the light of what they have contributed to our Island identity.

Look at the satellite photograph of the Island that heads this blog and ask yourself the question: why does the Island look as it does from the air? What do all the lines, dark and light areas and various coastal configurations mean?

In the months ahead I hope to suggest answers to some of those questions. I will do so from the position of an amateur, not an historian, because my ultimate goal is not to make definitive statements about Island heritage but to use my knowledge and enthusiasm to spread awareness.

Note on Sources:
My information is gleaned from personal observation, conversations with my friends and from consulting archival material and various published works that are relevant. The illustrations are all taken from my private collection which was formed over the years by my taking photos of artefacts and buildings and copying illustrations from published works, using illustrations given to me by others and photographing private collections. If I do not ascribe provenance for a picture then I took it myself, otherwise I will indicate where the original can be found if it is in a public collection. Errors will be corrected.

My email address is Andravida@xplornet.com