Meet the People in our Neighbourhood
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Nicholas Hughes, August 6th, 2020 |
Olwynn Hughes: Okay! First question, what’s your name?
Nicholas Hughes: My name is Nicholas Walter Grant Hughes. The Walter and the Grant come from my two grandfather's.
OH: All right. What year were you born?
NH: I was born in ‘64, in Bristol, England.
OH: When did you move here?
NH: I moved here 20 years ago.
OH: Why did you move here?
NH: Because, saying Vancouver wasn't big enough for me anymore. It was time to leave.
OH: All right. What drew you to Avondale?
NH:Oh... dreams and hopes.
OH: How did you hear of Avondale?
NH: I didn't, it was by accident, which seems to be the case for most people who end up here.
OH: What is your role with the Museum, or did you have a role in the museum?
NH: Not really officially, I guess it started as the boat builder/shipwright. Yeah, then as time went on, it was just help out when I can. So I'm on the board to fill up the numbers a lot of the time. You don't really need me now, but before it was a case of getting enough people involved, but now it’s 15, this year. So you don't need that, I think, but no, no I enjoy it.
OH: You were part of the boat building school weren’t you?
NH: Yeah, I was.
OH: Can you tell me a bit about that?
NH: It was a dream of Hugh McNeil and, like, semi-fashioned on boat building schools, and there was only one in Canada at the time, but there were lots in the States, obviously ones in other countries, so yeah. That was what [was planned], the Avon Spirit had sailed away, that project was done, but the space was still there, space was here. So we wanted to see both spaces utilized still, not for it just to be nothing going on, like okay, what's next, what's next?
So that was the start of the boat building school, and still a museum, and Cafe, whatever else is going on too, but the shipyard to be used. As a school, a place of learning, for whatever, but to be used, in that it's a Shipyard right? To be used for that kind of idea. Yeah, but basically for it to get used, not just to sit idle, for the community to take it up.
OH: Was moving here a big change?
NH: Uh, no, it wasn't a big change at all. It was just me and my dog, we drove across the country in a van, and I had friends here. I'd actually lived here before, but over in St. Andrews, so the other side of the Bay of Fundy. I’d been there for two and a half years. So, I mean, I’d been in the Maritimes. I’d only spent, I don’t know, maybe 48 hours in Nova Scotia, but I knew what the feeling is like and St. Andrew’s is a small town surrounded by country. So I knew, and that's where I basically lived before, the environment. So yeah, so it wasn't like moving from the country to the city, city to the country. It was kind of the same thing but different coasts, but yeah, I really liked it, the people were warm and welcome.
OH: What do you think Avondale has to offer for people that move here?
NH: Oh man, everything you want? It doesn't involve living in a big city. It's got everything you want. Yeah.
OH: What are your hopes for the future of Avondale?
NH: I'd like it to become... So whatever the population was in its heyday, whatever that population was, meant that this area could handle those numbers of people, it could sustain them, because food was local, blah blah blah. I would like to see Avondale, I’m just talking about Avondale, like you could go broader, but for just around here, for there to be as many houses and as many people as there were back in whatever year it was, Eighteen fifty, sixty, seventy, and you know, whatever the heyday was of Avondale, with ships here, blacksmith shops, bars. I'd like to see a nice village. Yeah. Yeah. So rather than, like, these old villages, all the old villages around here used to be f****** busy, bustling places, right? Very busy, but everybody moved away. Obviously the first reason cited nowadays is jobs, jobs, jobs, but that's becoming less of a possible reason, as everybody just saw recently, 2020, and everything that's been going on. Man, closer to home is obviously better. It always was, we just forgot. We thought it was more exciting, we were willing to do two hour commutes and s*** like that. But, no man, you gotta stay closer to home for a huge variety of reasons and it's not just Covid. It's the health of the planet. Yeah. These more important, bigger issues out there with expanding populations. So if we all stayed close to home right around Avondale, it’s the perfect place in my opinion, we could have our own school, a little school, while we just go back to the way things were a little bit in that respect. Everything kind of closer to home.
OH: Yeah, so going off of, like, how things used to be, would you want to tell us a bit about the history of the property you live on and, like, the trail?
NH: Yeah. Yeah, so I don't know much about the earlier history. A fellow by the name of Ralph Stillman owned it and really whatever period of time 40, 50 years ago he seemed to be the biggest land owner actually in Avondale. In that he owned what we call the Curry Field with the high point in the heart of Avondale. That was his, and he also owned basically all back to the vineyard, my place, 60 Avondale Crossroad, right beside the community hall, and then woodland in behind there. And then, yeah, he sold the Curry Field to Raymond’s dad, and then he sold the backfield that I have, the backfield there to the vineyard, and then I got my little chunk there. And so that was the remains of the Stillman homestead that I ended up with, so I know there's lots of stories like everybody in the community went to school in the community hall would know about stories about him, and I guess it was his niece,Ola.
OH: What about his niece?
NH: His niece Ola lived there, Ralph Stillman and Ola lived there in the period that Millie (McCullum) and Ralph (Lyons) and stuff were still attending school. And so I know he was a blacksmith, kind of homesteader guy, was regarded as a local blacksmith. I've heard that story. But yeah any of those people can tell you way more than I know. I’ve have never bugged them for knowledge or stories, but they used to go over to our well apparently for the Community Hall to get water for them, that’s one story about the place. And so the trail that’s on it right now, it was really just a trail that I started using, I didn’t create it, everybody else used it, including cows and animals, it was theirs, but that was my easiest way to get up to Raymond Parker's shack on the hill. So I started doing that kind of, and Raymond was kind of using that way to come down. So yeah. So it kind of just got beat in a bit and then we have Devan Archibald and Matt Smith and his people wanted a trail thing and they asked about it. But anyhow, sign a piece of paper saying that it could be part of the trail system, I said yea, no problem, of course.
OH: What do you see your role being in the community in the future?
NH: I’ve got no idea, I’ve been thinking a lot about that myself.
OH: What do you love about Avondale?
NH: I know it's cheap, it's generic, but everything.
So yeah, it's 10 minutes, I got stuff to do, you guys got stuff to do. I could tell you for hours what I like about you Avondale. Yeah.
OH: Do you think that, like, we have a movie being filmed here, we have the festivals, do you think that those bring something to the community?
NH: Yeah, absolutely. Like I said earlier, the place was bustling. Yeah, Saturday night in Avondale, hundred twenty-five years ago, yeah, holy cow. People from all over the world, waiting on tides, waiting on ships. Sailors from everywhere, bars, people, life, two or three churches fully occupied, like, yeah. So definitely, I like that there’s more people here. Yeah, and it's to be expected, if you live within an hour [of the city], I come from Vancouver, so I come from our country’s large urban center. And land prices went up and people moved further, further out, commuting, commuting, because they can’t afford the heart of the city, this kind of thing, and Avondale... There's going to be more and more people. That's the way it's going to be. So everybody in Avondale should, really, our community, everybody that lives within that distance from Halifax, because Halifax is booming right now. Nobody’s seen anything like it. Yeah, it's booming. And so anywhere within that hour, or distance, possible commute, that you're alright with an hour because you go to the city to work and have bills, 55 minutes. I did it. Well 50, I'm not a speeder. And I did it for 15 years while you guys were growing up, made the commute from Avondale, back and forth to the city, and [it’s a] super easy commute compared to a Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa commute. Right? And it's beautiful. There's tons of land. There's more than enough room for lots of people. I think Avondale’s going to keep growing and it's not as if it’s going to grow or not, it's going to grow, it’s how you'd like it to grow, what you'd like to see, what you'd like to get started like start planning, planning for the future. Just for more and more people. And I like the fact that Avondale and Nova Scotia is a sharing province. I got welcomed, man, some 36 year old and a dog shows up in a beat-up van from a little town in Vancouver, I don't know if I would have got the... or just outside of Vancouver... if I would have got that same welcome. Nope. Nova Scotia people were very welcoming and trusting from the start.
OH: Did you find any artifacts or old things when you moved onto the property?
NH: Yeah, well, I did, I found a huge c-clamp, actually there’s on in this one building. Yeah, it's funny in a way, because you always expect to find s*** in a building that's falling in on itself. Yeah. No one’s going in underneath it. It's an intact building. It's just come in on itself, and as you pull it apart, dig, dig, so it's like twelve layers of s*** on top of it. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then I come across an old rake, because this was supposed to be Ralph’s, one of the blacksmith, kinda, areas anyhow, and so I figured I'd find lots of bits of metal and that. So I found an old rake, where a piece of galvanized tubing had been welded onto the rake head, which I still use to this day, but it doesn't break, it’s got a metal handle on it. I use it for raking fires, and a huge, like the C-clamp, the big metal C-clamp for building ships. It's down here in the museum. So I’ve seen one there, and I’ve seen one a couple other places and there was one big f****** C-clamp there, maybe even bigger than the one that’s here. And so that’s the one hanging from the cedar tree, at the house by the picnic table.
And so those were the two artifacts that I found on the property. There is of course junk because every farm around here used the back of the property as the junk pile, scrap place. You could even call it a storage yard because it is, you might need parts, might need anything. So there's tons of stuff actually that, you've seen the cars in the back of the vineyard, those old cars. Yeah, that kind of thing, and the back of Raymond's place. Yeah, there's stuff back there.
OH: What was your involvement in the Avon Spirit?
NH: Very little, really. I showed up here after she had been hauled out of the shipyard. She was outside the shipyard and she was being rigged by Lynn St. Claire Patterson. Yeah, he did all the rigging on it and various other things were done. I didn't do anything on the actual Avon Spirit. I was there, I had to do stuff, hung out. And then two or three weeks later I think it was, actually Hugh [McNeil] asked me if you want to sail around on it, because I had just hung out here, I wasn't sleeping here or nothing. I was over in Kingsport with my friends, but yeah just started coming by, helping out.
I went to school for boat building. Yeah, I like boats and I showed up here. Oh, yeah. This was an artifact in that house in Kingsport. The lady that owned it, Carol Carpenter, bought the house off of the wife of the guy who built the original Spirit [the FBG]. So the original Avon Spirit is from, the FBG, is from Kingsport. So Carol Carpenter, who was Sophie's, my ex's, mother bought that house off of the G Gibson Frigates and she was a school teacher actually in Kingsport. Everybody knew her more than they knew Fred. I might be getting this wrong.
So I actually have a mast or a boom of the original Avon Spirit. The FBG that was in her barn that I tore down for her. She didn’t want it, she told me to take it, and she gave a lot of the FBG artifacts that are here. Yes. So they're from Carol Carpenter who was my mother-in-law basically, and so I was staying at her place. She had mentioned this place, and I came. So I hung out here, slept over there. And yeah, that was that mast, but that's over in St. Croix, over the thing, so that’s part of the original FBG.
OH: You still have it?
NH: Yeah, it's mine. Maybe I'll give it to the museum. Yeah. I actually want to incorporate it into whatever my next house is. I want to have it in that, except it's like a pretty big thing. Yeah, that's a cool thing.
OH: Well, I guess, do you have any other artifacts like that?
NH: That box of treasure. Yeah, no. Well, I mean I do. Everything I have, you’ve seen my barns and they are all artifacts that I stumbled upon in one form or another and dragged home thinking they were cool. I don't have any use for them or it's just cool, who knows.
OH: You have the top of the steeple of the church, right?
NH: Yeah the church steeple. So what happened was, I'm walking around Avondale all the time, basically. Yeah, when I first got here, and I stumbled upon, literally, the very top most [part of the steeple] when you look at the old pictures, not the current one. So the older pictures of the steeple. There was a ball, whatever diameter, and then it went up again, another ball then went up again, another ball, and then on top of that ball, the last ball or the last bit of piping. Anyhow, I'm getting it wrong, but you get the picture right? It's kind of transgression up,there was this, like, a ball and the pointy part made out of wood [that was turned]. So it used to be covered in lead. There wasn't any lead on it, it had to come off because it was probably, I won't say it's the last thing to go on the church, but it was the last thing to go on the Spire. So over time degradation of the materials over like a hundred and forty years or however old the church is. Maybe it's only a hundred and twenty I got no idea. It wore out, it fell off and who knows how long it had been sitting there. So I took it home with me. Why not? Obviously, no, it wasn't a big deal. It's just a chunk of wood. I could have made another in a half hour on the lathe, right? Yeah, the hard part's getting it back up there. Yeah. So, yeah, so, so that's on the kitchen table. Very top of the steeple. Yeah, that's cool. Just thinking how many years it could’ve been there, just saying everything that went on, all the people's lives. Yeah, I like that church. I really like that building.
Nicholas Hughes: My name is Nicholas Walter Grant Hughes. The Walter and the Grant come from my two grandfather's.
OH: All right. What year were you born?
NH: I was born in ‘64, in Bristol, England.
OH: When did you move here?
NH: I moved here 20 years ago.
OH: Why did you move here?
NH: Because, saying Vancouver wasn't big enough for me anymore. It was time to leave.
OH: All right. What drew you to Avondale?
NH:Oh... dreams and hopes.
OH: How did you hear of Avondale?
NH: I didn't, it was by accident, which seems to be the case for most people who end up here.
OH: What is your role with the Museum, or did you have a role in the museum?
NH: Not really officially, I guess it started as the boat builder/shipwright. Yeah, then as time went on, it was just help out when I can. So I'm on the board to fill up the numbers a lot of the time. You don't really need me now, but before it was a case of getting enough people involved, but now it’s 15, this year. So you don't need that, I think, but no, no I enjoy it.
OH: You were part of the boat building school weren’t you?
NH: Yeah, I was.
OH: Can you tell me a bit about that?
NH: It was a dream of Hugh McNeil and, like, semi-fashioned on boat building schools, and there was only one in Canada at the time, but there were lots in the States, obviously ones in other countries, so yeah. That was what [was planned], the Avon Spirit had sailed away, that project was done, but the space was still there, space was here. So we wanted to see both spaces utilized still, not for it just to be nothing going on, like okay, what's next, what's next?
So that was the start of the boat building school, and still a museum, and Cafe, whatever else is going on too, but the shipyard to be used. As a school, a place of learning, for whatever, but to be used, in that it's a Shipyard right? To be used for that kind of idea. Yeah, but basically for it to get used, not just to sit idle, for the community to take it up.
OH: Was moving here a big change?
NH: Uh, no, it wasn't a big change at all. It was just me and my dog, we drove across the country in a van, and I had friends here. I'd actually lived here before, but over in St. Andrews, so the other side of the Bay of Fundy. I’d been there for two and a half years. So, I mean, I’d been in the Maritimes. I’d only spent, I don’t know, maybe 48 hours in Nova Scotia, but I knew what the feeling is like and St. Andrew’s is a small town surrounded by country. So I knew, and that's where I basically lived before, the environment. So yeah, so it wasn't like moving from the country to the city, city to the country. It was kind of the same thing but different coasts, but yeah, I really liked it, the people were warm and welcome.
OH: What do you think Avondale has to offer for people that move here?
NH: Oh man, everything you want? It doesn't involve living in a big city. It's got everything you want. Yeah.
OH: What are your hopes for the future of Avondale?
NH: I'd like it to become... So whatever the population was in its heyday, whatever that population was, meant that this area could handle those numbers of people, it could sustain them, because food was local, blah blah blah. I would like to see Avondale, I’m just talking about Avondale, like you could go broader, but for just around here, for there to be as many houses and as many people as there were back in whatever year it was, Eighteen fifty, sixty, seventy, and you know, whatever the heyday was of Avondale, with ships here, blacksmith shops, bars. I'd like to see a nice village. Yeah. Yeah. So rather than, like, these old villages, all the old villages around here used to be f****** busy, bustling places, right? Very busy, but everybody moved away. Obviously the first reason cited nowadays is jobs, jobs, jobs, but that's becoming less of a possible reason, as everybody just saw recently, 2020, and everything that's been going on. Man, closer to home is obviously better. It always was, we just forgot. We thought it was more exciting, we were willing to do two hour commutes and s*** like that. But, no man, you gotta stay closer to home for a huge variety of reasons and it's not just Covid. It's the health of the planet. Yeah. These more important, bigger issues out there with expanding populations. So if we all stayed close to home right around Avondale, it’s the perfect place in my opinion, we could have our own school, a little school, while we just go back to the way things were a little bit in that respect. Everything kind of closer to home.
OH: Yeah, so going off of, like, how things used to be, would you want to tell us a bit about the history of the property you live on and, like, the trail?
NH: Yeah. Yeah, so I don't know much about the earlier history. A fellow by the name of Ralph Stillman owned it and really whatever period of time 40, 50 years ago he seemed to be the biggest land owner actually in Avondale. In that he owned what we call the Curry Field with the high point in the heart of Avondale. That was his, and he also owned basically all back to the vineyard, my place, 60 Avondale Crossroad, right beside the community hall, and then woodland in behind there. And then, yeah, he sold the Curry Field to Raymond’s dad, and then he sold the backfield that I have, the backfield there to the vineyard, and then I got my little chunk there. And so that was the remains of the Stillman homestead that I ended up with, so I know there's lots of stories like everybody in the community went to school in the community hall would know about stories about him, and I guess it was his niece,Ola.
OH: What about his niece?
NH: His niece Ola lived there, Ralph Stillman and Ola lived there in the period that Millie (McCullum) and Ralph (Lyons) and stuff were still attending school. And so I know he was a blacksmith, kind of homesteader guy, was regarded as a local blacksmith. I've heard that story. But yeah any of those people can tell you way more than I know. I’ve have never bugged them for knowledge or stories, but they used to go over to our well apparently for the Community Hall to get water for them, that’s one story about the place. And so the trail that’s on it right now, it was really just a trail that I started using, I didn’t create it, everybody else used it, including cows and animals, it was theirs, but that was my easiest way to get up to Raymond Parker's shack on the hill. So I started doing that kind of, and Raymond was kind of using that way to come down. So yeah. So it kind of just got beat in a bit and then we have Devan Archibald and Matt Smith and his people wanted a trail thing and they asked about it. But anyhow, sign a piece of paper saying that it could be part of the trail system, I said yea, no problem, of course.
OH: What do you see your role being in the community in the future?
NH: I’ve got no idea, I’ve been thinking a lot about that myself.
OH: What do you love about Avondale?
NH: I know it's cheap, it's generic, but everything.
So yeah, it's 10 minutes, I got stuff to do, you guys got stuff to do. I could tell you for hours what I like about you Avondale. Yeah.
OH: Do you think that, like, we have a movie being filmed here, we have the festivals, do you think that those bring something to the community?
NH: Yeah, absolutely. Like I said earlier, the place was bustling. Yeah, Saturday night in Avondale, hundred twenty-five years ago, yeah, holy cow. People from all over the world, waiting on tides, waiting on ships. Sailors from everywhere, bars, people, life, two or three churches fully occupied, like, yeah. So definitely, I like that there’s more people here. Yeah, and it's to be expected, if you live within an hour [of the city], I come from Vancouver, so I come from our country’s large urban center. And land prices went up and people moved further, further out, commuting, commuting, because they can’t afford the heart of the city, this kind of thing, and Avondale... There's going to be more and more people. That's the way it's going to be. So everybody in Avondale should, really, our community, everybody that lives within that distance from Halifax, because Halifax is booming right now. Nobody’s seen anything like it. Yeah, it's booming. And so anywhere within that hour, or distance, possible commute, that you're alright with an hour because you go to the city to work and have bills, 55 minutes. I did it. Well 50, I'm not a speeder. And I did it for 15 years while you guys were growing up, made the commute from Avondale, back and forth to the city, and [it’s a] super easy commute compared to a Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa commute. Right? And it's beautiful. There's tons of land. There's more than enough room for lots of people. I think Avondale’s going to keep growing and it's not as if it’s going to grow or not, it's going to grow, it’s how you'd like it to grow, what you'd like to see, what you'd like to get started like start planning, planning for the future. Just for more and more people. And I like the fact that Avondale and Nova Scotia is a sharing province. I got welcomed, man, some 36 year old and a dog shows up in a beat-up van from a little town in Vancouver, I don't know if I would have got the... or just outside of Vancouver... if I would have got that same welcome. Nope. Nova Scotia people were very welcoming and trusting from the start.
OH: Did you find any artifacts or old things when you moved onto the property?
NH: Yeah, well, I did, I found a huge c-clamp, actually there’s on in this one building. Yeah, it's funny in a way, because you always expect to find s*** in a building that's falling in on itself. Yeah. No one’s going in underneath it. It's an intact building. It's just come in on itself, and as you pull it apart, dig, dig, so it's like twelve layers of s*** on top of it. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then I come across an old rake, because this was supposed to be Ralph’s, one of the blacksmith, kinda, areas anyhow, and so I figured I'd find lots of bits of metal and that. So I found an old rake, where a piece of galvanized tubing had been welded onto the rake head, which I still use to this day, but it doesn't break, it’s got a metal handle on it. I use it for raking fires, and a huge, like the C-clamp, the big metal C-clamp for building ships. It's down here in the museum. So I’ve seen one there, and I’ve seen one a couple other places and there was one big f****** C-clamp there, maybe even bigger than the one that’s here. And so that’s the one hanging from the cedar tree, at the house by the picnic table.
And so those were the two artifacts that I found on the property. There is of course junk because every farm around here used the back of the property as the junk pile, scrap place. You could even call it a storage yard because it is, you might need parts, might need anything. So there's tons of stuff actually that, you've seen the cars in the back of the vineyard, those old cars. Yeah, that kind of thing, and the back of Raymond's place. Yeah, there's stuff back there.
OH: What was your involvement in the Avon Spirit?
NH: Very little, really. I showed up here after she had been hauled out of the shipyard. She was outside the shipyard and she was being rigged by Lynn St. Claire Patterson. Yeah, he did all the rigging on it and various other things were done. I didn't do anything on the actual Avon Spirit. I was there, I had to do stuff, hung out. And then two or three weeks later I think it was, actually Hugh [McNeil] asked me if you want to sail around on it, because I had just hung out here, I wasn't sleeping here or nothing. I was over in Kingsport with my friends, but yeah just started coming by, helping out.
I went to school for boat building. Yeah, I like boats and I showed up here. Oh, yeah. This was an artifact in that house in Kingsport. The lady that owned it, Carol Carpenter, bought the house off of the wife of the guy who built the original Spirit [the FBG]. So the original Avon Spirit is from, the FBG, is from Kingsport. So Carol Carpenter, who was Sophie's, my ex's, mother bought that house off of the G Gibson Frigates and she was a school teacher actually in Kingsport. Everybody knew her more than they knew Fred. I might be getting this wrong.
So I actually have a mast or a boom of the original Avon Spirit. The FBG that was in her barn that I tore down for her. She didn’t want it, she told me to take it, and she gave a lot of the FBG artifacts that are here. Yes. So they're from Carol Carpenter who was my mother-in-law basically, and so I was staying at her place. She had mentioned this place, and I came. So I hung out here, slept over there. And yeah, that was that mast, but that's over in St. Croix, over the thing, so that’s part of the original FBG.
OH: You still have it?
NH: Yeah, it's mine. Maybe I'll give it to the museum. Yeah. I actually want to incorporate it into whatever my next house is. I want to have it in that, except it's like a pretty big thing. Yeah, that's a cool thing.
OH: Well, I guess, do you have any other artifacts like that?
NH: That box of treasure. Yeah, no. Well, I mean I do. Everything I have, you’ve seen my barns and they are all artifacts that I stumbled upon in one form or another and dragged home thinking they were cool. I don't have any use for them or it's just cool, who knows.
OH: You have the top of the steeple of the church, right?
NH: Yeah the church steeple. So what happened was, I'm walking around Avondale all the time, basically. Yeah, when I first got here, and I stumbled upon, literally, the very top most [part of the steeple] when you look at the old pictures, not the current one. So the older pictures of the steeple. There was a ball, whatever diameter, and then it went up again, another ball then went up again, another ball, and then on top of that ball, the last ball or the last bit of piping. Anyhow, I'm getting it wrong, but you get the picture right? It's kind of transgression up,there was this, like, a ball and the pointy part made out of wood [that was turned]. So it used to be covered in lead. There wasn't any lead on it, it had to come off because it was probably, I won't say it's the last thing to go on the church, but it was the last thing to go on the Spire. So over time degradation of the materials over like a hundred and forty years or however old the church is. Maybe it's only a hundred and twenty I got no idea. It wore out, it fell off and who knows how long it had been sitting there. So I took it home with me. Why not? Obviously, no, it wasn't a big deal. It's just a chunk of wood. I could have made another in a half hour on the lathe, right? Yeah, the hard part's getting it back up there. Yeah. So, yeah, so, so that's on the kitchen table. Very top of the steeple. Yeah, that's cool. Just thinking how many years it could’ve been there, just saying everything that went on, all the people's lives. Yeah, I like that church. I really like that building.