Village Thibodeau (Poplar Grove)
At the Shaw farm in Poplar Grove, site of former Acadian Village Thibodeau, descendents of Acadian and Planter families who farmed the same land consecutively for well over 300 years worked together in 2013 on an archaeological dig that unearthed Acadian and Planter relics. Pierre Thibodeau arrived in this area in 1690 and, while some of some of the Thibodeau family left for Isle St. Jean (PEI) before the deportation of 1755, it is believed that others of his family farmed here until the 1755 expulsion.
While buildings in most Acadian communities were torched by the British at the time of the Expulsion to prevent Acadians from returning, in this area some buildings were spared and eventually became the first homes of a number of Planter families, including the original Shaw Planter family.
In 1760, five years after the expulsion of the Acadians, Rhode Island Planter Arnold Shaw arrived at what appears to have formerly been Village Thibodeau and seven generations of his family have farmed there since. Oral tradition is that in 1760, when the Shaws arrived, there was a structure on the land that they called the old French house. The Shaw family built a larger home around the French house rather than demolish the structure.
In 1985, Dick Thibodeau, using a 1756 map, located and identified Village Thibodeau, the land from which his direct ancestor, Alexis Thibodeau, had been deported and sent to Philadelphia. This is the site of a 2013 archaeological dig that brought two families, the Shaws and the Thibodeaus, together around a shared history that spans more than three centuries.
Other farmers in the former Newport Township area have reported, over time, unearthing a number of artifacts, including buried gold coins. The lands around the Avon River and its tributaries have an elevated potential for archaeological resources, due to the former presence of Mi’kmaq, Acadian, and Planter inhabitants. Our museum looks forward to hearing of any other historical artifacts uncovered or discovered in this area to add to our limited knowledge about the Acadians who farmed here for about 75 years.
While buildings in most Acadian communities were torched by the British at the time of the Expulsion to prevent Acadians from returning, in this area some buildings were spared and eventually became the first homes of a number of Planter families, including the original Shaw Planter family.
In 1760, five years after the expulsion of the Acadians, Rhode Island Planter Arnold Shaw arrived at what appears to have formerly been Village Thibodeau and seven generations of his family have farmed there since. Oral tradition is that in 1760, when the Shaws arrived, there was a structure on the land that they called the old French house. The Shaw family built a larger home around the French house rather than demolish the structure.
In 1985, Dick Thibodeau, using a 1756 map, located and identified Village Thibodeau, the land from which his direct ancestor, Alexis Thibodeau, had been deported and sent to Philadelphia. This is the site of a 2013 archaeological dig that brought two families, the Shaws and the Thibodeaus, together around a shared history that spans more than three centuries.
Other farmers in the former Newport Township area have reported, over time, unearthing a number of artifacts, including buried gold coins. The lands around the Avon River and its tributaries have an elevated potential for archaeological resources, due to the former presence of Mi’kmaq, Acadian, and Planter inhabitants. Our museum looks forward to hearing of any other historical artifacts uncovered or discovered in this area to add to our limited knowledge about the Acadians who farmed here for about 75 years.
Interview with Archaeologist, Sara Beanlands
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Sarah Beanlands
My name is Sarah Beanlands. I am a direct descendant of Beulah and Anthony Shaw, who were my grandparents and they, the Shaw family, were one of the original families that came in the 1760s when the Planters arrived in Newport Township; they have been here ever since. And they still live here, so it's been several centuries of Shaw family here in this area and lots and lots of stories in oral traditions that go along with that history; and in fact, many of those stories predate the Shaw family arriving. My understanding is that they were actually scouts for the original Planters so they arrived a couple of years earlier than most of the Planter settlers that came to the area. They were here somewhere around 1759, 1760. And they came to look out, sort of scout around and see what kind of properties were available and then relay that information back to New England.
Carolyn van Gurp
We understand you've been doing archaeological work on your family property, could you tell us a bit about that?
Sarah Beanlands
I grew up in Halifax. My mother grew up in Poplar Grove, and every weekend, particularly in the summertime, we would come here to visit my grandparents. So, my grandfather's Anthony Shaw, and my grandmother was Beulah Shaw, originally Beulah Allen. And we would come up here every summer and I would spend significant periods of my childhood in Poplar Grove. And we were always playing outside, always playing outside and I can remember playing in foundations and cellars and going through all the old out buildings and the barns and seeing all of this ancient- what seemed to me at the time to be ancient, history. It was everywhere, it just surrounded me when I was a child, and I didn't understand very much of it at all but I did know that my family had been here for a long time. So, as I got older, I just began to have an appreciation for history, for my own family's history, but really for the greater history of the area. I began to learn a little bit more about actually how long my family had been here and that they were very much a part of the Planter settlement of this area.
Richard Thibideau Arrives
When I was 11 a stranger came to the farm, to my uncle Allen's farm on a motorbike. And he was apparently from Maine, and he kind of, he just arrived, out of the blue. He came up and found my uncle working in the fields and they struck up a conversation and he said to him, “You know, I've been doing a lot of my own family research and genealogical studies” and that sort of thing and he said, “I'm pretty sure, based on what I've discovered, your farm is where my ancestors lived.” And my uncle said, “Okay, well I don't really know” but he said, “There are some old cellars and foundations on the property. Want to go have a look at them?” And so this stranger said, “Yeah, I'd love to.” So my uncle showed him around. Like I say, I was 11 or 12; maybe I didn't even know this had happened.
Twenty Years Later
So then maybe like 20 years later, or maybe 15 to 20 years later, we were all sitting around my uncle's kitchen table having dinner and he mentioned that this man had called him again, this time from Florida but it was the same man. And he said, yes, he was just calling to see if we'd found anything or if we had any new information. And I was like, “Who are you talking about?” And he told me this story about this stranger having arrived, and he told me his name and he said, you know, he was an Acadian. That he believed this was where his Acadian ancestors had lived; this was their village. He's pretty sure and he was just checking to see whether or not we had any additional information. I had never heard this story before. I had never heard anything about Acadians being in this area, I mean I guess I knew and we all know, in some sense, but it didn't have any- it didn't really have any significant meaning to me. And I was just floored by this information. At this time I was studying history at university and studying archaeology. And I said, “Well, did you get his address, is there a way I can contact him?” and he said yes, so he gave me his address. I wrote him, and I remember, I sat down and wrote him like a handwritten letter. And I sent it to him and it basically just said, “I've just heard this story that you believe that this may have been where your ancestors came from. This place is very special to me because it's where my ancestors come from, And would you be at all interested in working together to see if we can, you know, build this narrative that we're so connected to, but yet we're so separated from?” And he immediately wrote me back. At that time he was in his 70s. I was in my late 20s so it was an unlikely friendship. But we became the best of friends.
Acadian and Planter Descendant Collaboration Begins
He immediately wrote me back and he said, “Let's do this, let's see what we can find out. You work on the Shaw history and I'll work on my Acadian family connections to the property and let's see what we can find out.” So we began to do that. He would feed me information about what he knew about the Acadian settlement. His name was Richard Thibideau, we all lovingly called him Dick. His Thibideau family ancestry, he had it all right back to Port Royal, every single individual, and every cousin identified and that sort of thing. He'd found some historic mapping where you could see there's a bend in the St. Croix River that's still there. It’s a really big bend you can't miss it so when you're looking at historic era photos, or even historic mapping going back to the mid 18th century, when you see that bend in the river, you know where you are; it's a marker. So he had identified a number of Acadian dwellings, or at least there are indications of Acadian dwellings, around that bend in the river. And they were labeled as village Thibideau and he knew this was where his ancestors were from. And this is why he believed that what was the Shaw property, was the same place. So I started to collect oral traditions from my family, and to my great surprise, it turned out that the Shaw family had unwittingly preserved a great deal of Acadian history within their own oral traditions. And because their... that land had been passed down from father to son, to father to son, since the mid 18th century, and the land had never been sold, there was this unbroken chain of oral traditions that has been passed down to my uncles. And it's really interesting, there are all kinds of place names in particular. None of what you would ever find on a map. They only existed in the oral tradition, and had that land been sold or divided as it so often is and continues to be, those place names would have completely disappeared because they only existed in the family. But they were the name of the farm. When my grandmother was there was Willowbrook farm, and that was in recognition of the French willow trees that were on the property when the Shaws arrived in the 1760s. There was the old French road. There was French Orchard Hill, the old French mill, the old French house. There were all these place names that I had grown up with, but they didn't... you know it's funny you can hear something over and over and over again, but without the context to make it meaningful, it was just another place name. It had no meaning to me whatsoever. But once I realized that perhaps the Thibideau family had occupied and lived on this land before the Shaws had arrived, perhaps these place names were in reference to this earlier family that had lived there.
Mapping the Land
So I started to map out all of the place names that seem to refer to the Thibideau family or to the Acadian settlement. And then I started to talk to- unfortunately my grandfather had passed away, but- he passed when I was quite young, so I never got to talk to him. Very, very unfortunate. But I did start to talk to my uncles, and I've said this many times: we have a lot of really advanced technology that we use in archaeology ground-penetrating radar and electromagnetic geophysical instruments that we use, but there is nothing more accurate and more efficient, than a Nova Scotia farmer. “You guys,” I said to them, “Is there anywhere on your property that you know there are archaeological features or cellars or foundations or depressions that you know that don't belong, that aren't associated with the Shaw family?” and he said, “Absolutely, I do.” He said, “Actually I filled several of them in only recently.” Because up until the era of the modern tractor and bulldozer, most farmers in the area, if you had an old cellar on your property, you would plough around it. And then, with modern machinery, they started to fill those in and level them off. So he knew exactly where they were and he knew that they weren't associated with the Shaw Family occupation of the land.
The Old French Road
So he took me up one day, we went up to one of the areas that's called French Orchard Hill. He walked me straight up. And he said, “Just dig here.” So, I talked to Richard Thibideau and I said, “Look, we've got a really good location, I think we should do a small archaeological test excavation, not a big dig or anything but let's test this area and see if we find evidence of an Acadian, pre-deportation Acadian house or evidence of Acadian settlement or anything like that, then we can really say with a great deal of certainty, not only do we have an Acadian settlement here but this is the Thibideau family home.” And he was really excited, so excited to do that. He was still in the United States at the time so I put together a very small crew. This is up on my uncle Allen's, sorry my uncle David's farm and in fact if you take the Ferry Road and continue it to the left-hand side of the Anglican Church there's a little pathway that carries on into the fields and goes all the way down to the St. Croix River. That, in the Shaw family tradition, was always called The Old French road.
Carolyn van Gurp
Is that where there is a little sign?
Sarah Beanlands
Yes, it's exactly so, that's why we put the sign there. So that is actually the physical remains of that earlier cultural landscape that is associated with those Acadian settlements. That road that goes all the way down. And the road itself, I can remember my Uncle Fred, who was born in the Old Stone House, telling me that they used to leave their rubber boots down at the end of the Old French Road, and when the tide went down they would ford the river, leaving their boots on either side, right, and then they would walk up what we now call the LeBlanc Hill and over to Windsor. That's actually how some of the Planters in this area would get across.
The Test Dig
So we put together a little crew, and we dug and we did indeed find evidence of a pre-deportation house in that area. We had- what was really interesting is that there were no Planter period artifacts associated with that particular feature. So it was a depression in the ground that had been filled in. So we weren’t looking at a building that had been possibly used by the Acadians, and then by the Planters or anything like that. There was no plant or cultural material there at all. It was all dating to the mid-18th century, just actually prior to the deportation, and we were able to date that particular site, I believe it is 1750-ish. But we had a lot of pipe stems that we could date and ceramics that are typically found in association with Acadian settlement. So we had a really good idea that yes, this was Acadian and yes this was pre-expulsion.
The Acadian Congrès
So I immediately called my friend Richard Thibideau who was now in Florida and said, “Oh yeah, I think we have got it. Fairly certain that this is an Acadian site, based on all the research that you've done. I think we can say we likely have some remains of the village Thibideau.” And I said, “What do you want to do now?” That was in 2004. In 2005, the Acadian Congrès was being held in Grand Prè and they were having family reunions all over this area. Congrès are held once every five years, and they select a place. Sometimes it's in France, sometimes it's in Atlantic Canada or Acadia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Maine. So they have them all over the place but generally speaking, somewhere in the Maritimes. So that year in 2005 they were going to hold the Congrès at Grand Prè, and the Thibideau family reunion was going to be at Grand Prè. And we hatched this plan, that wouldn’t this be a great time to announce to all the Thibideau descendants that would be coming back for this family reunion that we think we've rediscovered where this, this sort of lost Thibideau village was? So we thought “Oh this is a great idea”. He contacted the organizers at the Thibideau family reunion. They put a spot for us in their schedule, and we were going to do a little presentation and you know it's all going to be wonderful. So I put together a PowerPoint. And I had never at that point in my career, I had never spoken publicly. You know, I'd never been in front of a crowd or anything like that. So I was already nervous, but I was feeling excited to share this information. And it wasn't until that day I arrived at Grand Prè and there were hundreds of people, hundreds of Thibideaus and then a big tent set up, and I was walking up onto the stage, and I just felt like I had been punched in the stomach. And I thought, “Oh my God, I've made a terrible mistake. I have made a terrible mistake. How can I, this Planter descendant, go up in front of all of these French Acadians, and tell them about their history. When my family is now living on the land from which they were expelled?” None of this hit me until I was walking up the stage. I've made a terrible mistake. I can't do this. This is so insensitive. They're going to hate me, but by that time I was walking up on the stage so there was nowhere to go. But so, Dick gave his little part of the presentation first and he talked about how we had met and, you know, our exchange of letters and all that sort of thing and then I got up and I did my little PowerPoint about the archaeology that we had found. I was very, very nervous, and it's well documented how nervous I was by some of the press that was there. I couldn't get the PowerPoint to work. I knocked the microphone over; it was a disaster. But at the end of it I said I’d spoken to my family before and we would really welcome any of you here today. If you would like to come and see the area, come and actually see one of these cellars. We'd love to have you come to Poplar Grove; so we can meet tomorrow morning at the Windsor Tourist Bureau and we can all drive down there together and I would really, really love to make that happen.
At Poplar Grove
So, the next day my aunt had gone and bought a few pastries, like a plate, and she bought an extra thing of lemonade, and she had it laid out on the table. And I drove up from Halifax and I got to the Windsor Tourist Bureau and it's packed. It's packed, there's like 100 cars there with four people in each car, and I was like, “Oh my goodness!” So I called my Aunt Joanne. We started to drive and I called my Aunt Joanne. I didn't think we had cell phones in 2005 but I called her and I said, “Okay, I'm coming with the Thibideaus, there's a few more than we thought. And I don't know if you have any extra lemonade.” Well, she said to me, “What are you talking about, you're coming with the Thibideaus? They're already here.” Another 75 had bypassed the Tourist Bureau and had gone directly to the site. So when we got there, I mean there were just hundreds of people, the CBC was there. What was really interesting, there was a man who had been sent from The Times Picayune in Louisiana, which is the largest newspaper in Louisiana, he'd been sent to cover the whole Congrès. Well, it turns out he was a direct descendant of the Thibideaus who had lived on the, what was now the Shaw farm. So he'd come up to cover it. There were just like... it was unbelievable. Unbelievable. So we took everybody up and walked around the site and we showed them some of the artifacts and they all sort of got to know each other and there were people who were, you know, relatives who had never met each other, who are meeting each other for the first time on the site of their ancestors' village. I mean it was, it was one of the most amazing days of my life. And they were so nice to me. I really thought everybody was gonna be mad at me. But they spent the whole day there, and in fact, over the next few weeks, people would come from all over. And ever since that day in 2005 we have had Thibideaus come from Europe, all over North America, Atlantic Canada, the United States, come every summer to come and visit the site, and they will. My aunt Joanne has kept a guestbook of every single Thibideau that has come with all their names and the date and that sort of thing. And there are 1000s of them in the book.
Family Stories
Carolyn van Gurp
So, we’ve got to get them scanned.
Sarah Beanlands
We do, no, we really do, we really do. So, that was 2005. One of my favorite stories from 2005, was when my mom was a little girl. She used to hear her father, my grandfather Anthony, talk about the Tippy Toes. And in her mind, she was just a child, she and my aunt Marilyn thought the Tippy Toes were these little gnomes that lived under the bed, and they were nice; they weren't malevolent or anything but they were little creatures that lived under the bed. And she had forgotten about them, you know, they're just things they talked about when they were children. She had forgotten all about them until that day in 2005, and she came over to me and there were Acadians everywhere and she came over and when she said, “Sarah, the Tippy Toes don't live under the bed.” She said, “The Tippy Toes are here.” He was saying Thibideau. And it really struck me, because obviously my grandfather knew the name of the Acadian family on whose land the Shaws had arrived. Obviously through the oral tradition they knew where all of these places were; they still refer to it as the old French Road, French Orchard Hill, the old French house, the old French mill. There was so much history and oral tradition and knowledge that had been retained simply through that connection to the land. But in one generation, when he was speaking about those Acadian settlers had distorted to become little gnomes that lived under the bed. To me, I never even heard about either of them. I'd never heard about the Thibideaus or the Tippy Toes. I didn't know anything about it. So had we not done all of that in 2004-2005 when we did, I think we were at the very end of the survival of that oral history because it had, like I said, it had just distorted from real historical human beings to fantasy gnomes, to being not there at all.
Planning the Big Dig
It was 2015 when we had another Thibideau reunion and we did the Big Dig. We made up T-shirts that just said the Tippy Toe Diggers. We did all of that and then I didn't do a great deal because I was going to school and I sort of started my career and that sort of thing. And then it was in 2013, well, just before that, just after all of the… a year or so after we had the big reunion, Dick Thibideau and his wife Doris came back to Poplar Grove and they brought their trailer, like their camper van. And he took his trailer up to the top of the hill, French Orchard Hill where we had done the first little dig, and he placed his camper right there. They stayed overnight for several days. I have pictures of them- they're sitting out there with their wine glasses, and they camped right on top of the cellar that we had dug. And he was the first Acadian since the mid-18th century to watch the sunrise from that spot so that was really, also a really amazing, an amazing experience.
So I wasn't doing a whole lot, we were still compiling information and that sort of thing and I was getting historic photographs and stuff and there was, I had heard this story from my uncle about the old French house. And it wasn't there anymore, but we knew where the foundation was. If you remember, I said Dick Thibideau had identified five dots along the St. Croix River that he thought were indicating five structures, and we knew we found one. So we were looking for the other ones, and I figured, well, if this foundation is referred to as the old French house, it’s probably the place to start to find the next one! But then I found- my father went through his old slides, and in the 1960s he had taken photographs of the farm, and some of the different old buildings that were standing there, and he had a picture of what everyone was referring to as the old French house. And I thought all this is great, but it doesn't look Acadian really. It looked very Planter, like you can see the Planter homes in the area. They're very distinctive because they're very symmetrical, and that kind of architecture in the Planter period having symmetry was really important. So you have two windows on either side of a door that's centrally located and it's a very, that's a very New England style of architecture, very different from the Acadian style of architecture. And we don't have very many examples. We only really have photographs left of what some of these pre-deportation structures look like, but it didn't look-- it looked Planter to me. So I thought, okay well we can still maybe dig and see.
The Old House
But the more I looked at the photograph, the more I started to see something really, really weird in it. So, there was, you know, sometimes if you have a building a structure that's built, against, right up adjacent to another structure and you tear one of those buildings down, you'll get a shadow of that original structure. So I started to see a shadow in the photographs, and then the more I looked at it, the more you could actually see, there's a house inside of a house. And I wondered, did the Shaw family, when they arrived-- because we know from the historic documentation that when the Planters arrived in the Poplar Grove area, they didn't-- well, when the Acadians left, they didn't burn the buildings the way they did at Grand Prè and other places. They seemed to have left a lot of the infrastructure intact in this area for whatever reason. And I started to wonder, is this, is there an Acadian house inside this greater Planter house? And the only way we would know would be to dig, right, because the building was gone. In fact with the photographs that we had, the building had been moved by teams of oxen in the late-19th century, up the hill from the original foundation. It was actually intact when I was a little girl, I think it came down in the 1980s, but they pulled up the structure, which says a lot about the integrity of that structure, they pulled it up with teams of oxen, closer to the Shaw family house that they eventually built. And they used it as an outbuilding, basically, for hay and for chickens and various other things. But they knew where that foundation was-- the original foundation was, and I could remember as a child playing there; a little garden used to grow around the foundation. Every summer you look out into the field and there would be this garden that was, there's nothing else in the field but this garden would appear out of nowhere; it's actually delineating the foundation of what they call the Old French house.
The Big Dig
So in 2013, we decided to do another small test excavation to see what we could find. And I wasn't sure, I was hoping it would be like 2004, we would put shovels in the ground, turn over the sod, boom, there'd be a pre-deportation house and, you know, that's number two. But it didn't turn out that way at all. We started to excavate and we were getting tons and tons of artifacts and cultural material, but it was all Planter. And I thought well, it is very likely that up until then all of the oral traditions that had tested had demonstrated their validity, they were very, very accurate. Here's the first time that I've come across something. This is supposed to be the foundation of the old French House, but I'm finding Planter artifacts. And maybe that oral tradition, maybe like the details about it had migrated, you know, I mean the old French house was actually over here, but I wasn't really sure. But I also thought, you know if I'm right and there's an Acadian house inside that Planter house that maybe if I dig, the more I can get through that Planter occupation, that I might be able to find an Acadian occupation underneath it. So at that point, I figured, well, this is going to be a pretty substantial dig.
Okay, that this would be a pretty substantial dig; if we were going to do it, it was going to be a major effort to do it. And so I thought, well, I think it's really, really important that we invite the Thibideau family, those people that we met who had come in 2005 and had been coming every year since, to invite them to do this with us, because really, this is their culture, this is their history. I didn't want to do it without them, to be honest, so I got in touch with Dick Thibideau again and we kind of put a call out to all these Thibideaus that we have met from all over North America and said, “We're going to dig, we're going to dig the old French house, and if so, if any of you would like to come and dig with me, just get in touch with me and we'll make it happen.” And I did the same thing I did in 2004. I thought I might get five people. And didn't I get like 75 people from all over North America “We want to come and dig”. So at that point, we really had to put some framework around what we were going to do because I didn't have enough resources, I didn't have enough gear, I didn't have enough supervisors. So, we managed to pull together. I think just about every archaeologist in Nova Scotia came for two weeks to help supervise, because these were people who had never done archaeology before, they had no experience. We didn't want to do anything that would harm the archaeology. I mean, the archaeology, we had to do it right. So we needed a lot of supervision. We like to say it was-- we didn't have any funding for the project, but it was funded on enthusiasm. We actually reached out to the Avon River Museum and asked if we could use the big building up there to have a barbecue like a homecoming barbecue, and we went over to see the winery, who donated wine. We had a big barbecue right here, in this museum, where all the Thibideaus came, and then we dug for two weeks up at the site of the old French house. We had everyone from four year olds, from the community to 81 year olds who were Acadian descendants. We had many, many Thibideaus from Arkansas and Texas and Florida and Maine and anywhere you can imagine, Louisiana, of course, who had all come to dig with us. And they dug beside the Shaw family. So we went through the Shaw family material culture first and then we started to go through what ended up being an Acadian occupation underneath it.
Family Connections
We never finished the dig. I always wanted to go back and finish it but it just, yeah, it takes a lot, it takes a lot of resources to pull something like that off, but we were able, at the very least, to identify that, yes there was an Acadian occupation underneath this Planter settlement. Clearly, it became clear to me as well and actually looking through the historic mapping that the Shaw family-- so, now we're talking about the early 1800s, so not the first Shaws that are on it, but likely their grandsons-- it seems as though that building that was the old French house was still standing when the Shaw family arrived. That the Shaw family likely moved into it, as they were building their own homestead. They moved into that Acadian house and lived there for a period of time. They built their main house, which is no longer there, but they built the main Planter house just up on the hill a little bit, and then their sons extended the old French house into another Planter house that we can actually see on some of the mapping, it's right where it is. But it was again this amazing connection between two families whose backgrounds and experiences were completely different. In many ways, you know, we had Acadians, who had come and been expelled and New England Planters who had come migrated up and taken over that land. How many times did they meet? Maybe a couple of times in those early days but they would have had this shared experience on the landscape, without ever really knowing each other. And yet, here we were in 2015, digging. Descendents of the Acadian family, the Thibideaus, and the descendants of the Shaw family, and truly we were just one big family. And we've been one big family ever since 2005. And, you know, you'll often see, not so much anymore-- my uncle's getting older-- but they would always fly an Acadian flag on their home, so you know if you drove by you would actually think it was an Acadian home but, the experience of digging with those descended communities, the two of them together, learning. So it, all of us, we all had to go through the Planter occupation first and you'd have some of the Thibideaus they would run up to you and say “Oh my God, look what I found!” And it would be Planter artifacts, but they would be like, “What could this be for?”, like “This is so cool. This is amazing!” And then the same thing happening when Shaw family was finding pieces of [??] and other Acadian ceramics, they're like, “Oh my God!” So there was this opportunity to reconcile, not just these two families, but these histories that are really very painful in many ways. The archaeology was so powerful to bring people together to reconcile, to have these sort of contested histories on a contested piece of land, come together and share that experience, share those histories, respect each other's histories and learn about each other's histories, particularly through that cultural material was amazing. It changed my entire perspective on how archaeology should be done, and how powerful it is and how it can bring people together, like I say from completely opposite cultural spaces to really unite them.
A Powerful Experience!
And it's been just a remarkable, remarkable experience for everyone and we still, you know, I've been to Louisiana to go visit them. They come here like I said, usually typically every year. They come from all over just because when you think about it, often, you go, “Well, for me, if I was going to look for where some of the Shaws came from and I was in New England, say, probably the closest I could get would be a community. I could probably pinpoint what town was, but the possibility of actually finding the very cellar, or foundation or structure that my ancestors lived in would be highly, highly unlikely.” And I think that's the case for most people.
So for somebody to be able to come back to a landscape that is very similar, I expect, to what it would have been in the mid-18th century, to be able to come back and actually stand on the very spot and touch the very things that your ancestor left and in fact, you are the first person to touch those objects, since they were there, they were dropped by your ancestor, that kind of connection, that tangible connection to history, is incredibly powerful. And in fact we had people again who met. There was a woman from Arkansas, who had come, she heard about the day she spent two weeks digging with us, and a man from Meteghan in Nova Scotia, they were digging together and they started to talk and they realized they were cousins. And they were meeting for the first time on this archeological dig, in sort of this Planter context, and it was really, really, really special. I wish we could do more and I would really like to do more up there. If I could, in the future. But even just to have that opportunity once was absolutely amazing.
So that's sort of my connection to the Acadian history, it's not that I set out to discover it or, but it was that it just seemed to be... It's there. And really all you have to do is scratch the surface. And it changed, I think my whole family's perspective on ownership as well. This had been their land for over 200 years, but all of a sudden I think they felt like stewards of the land, as opposed to owners, and I'm so grateful that they were so gracious and having all of these people come back.
Village LeBlanc Across the River
We did another small dig, just across the St. Croix River, so if you're standing on my Uncle David’s property on the site where we did- French Orchard Hill, where we did the first dig, and you look across the St. Croix River, there’s a big hill. And my understanding is that there was likely a blockhouse on the top of that hill, that they used to signal from Fort Edward and there was a, there's a whole series of these blockhouses through which to communicate.
I can't remember the name, there was- but there was also a large Planter settlement there as well. But we're looking at the historic mapping once we've identified where Village Thibideau and we could anchor that village on the map, then we could get a much better understanding geospatially of where these other communities might be located. And there was one on the top of that hill, that was called Village LeBlanc. So we went over there and did a little bit of testing as well. And what was really interesting there, was in 2005 we noticed that there were all kinds of LeBlancs at the Thibideau family reunion. And it turns out that from the very early days of Acadia, the LeBlanc family and the Thibideau family, there was a lot of intermarriage. There were many, many LeBlancs that were intermarried into the Thibideau family and they were all sort of part of this larger extended family. And I mentioned to them all, “Pretty sure over on that hill, that's the LeBlanc village”. And all of a sudden, again we had this sort of epiphany. While we're standing on Thibideau village, we can see LeBlanc village. We have all these LeBlanc and Thibideaus and you know if you're standing on the top of that hill, you can yell and you can hear from where we're standing, you know, in the Thibideau area. You can communicate very easily between the hills, and maybe this is one of the reasons that those two families are so connected and have been so connected over time. So there were just so many amazing- so much amazing information that I think it's subtle and it's nuanced and it gets lost in the list and the historic documents. And you know, all of these subtle connections to the landscape that are lost when the historian tries to pull the narrative out of documents, that you can actually rediscover when you bring people back onto the land and share these stories. And, you know, it's really, it's very, very powerful.
I'd love for us to do more of it in this area because this area now is sacred to many, many Acadians. Where before we started, and even me, I had no appreciation of the Acadian history of this area. None whatsoever. This was all Planter, right? And again that speaks to what are we missing about the Mi’kmaq presence on the landscape, which we know was extensive. And if we've been here for, you know 300 years, they've been here for 13,000 years. And how do we bring everybody back to have these experiences. We do believe we did find some Mi'kmaq artifacts in those layers that we were digging on site, which is in no way surprising, it is to be expected. So, yeah it's a really, I think it’s a really powerful way to connect with history and anybody can participate in that and so sure there's more but...
Next Steps
Carolyn van Gurp
So Sarah, as you know, there were 25 stories in what you just said. I know how privileged James and I are to hear this and now this will be transcribed so your story is recorded and will be shared. But what's going through my mind, same question as you have, is how can we extend this amazing learning further? One of the things we've been talking about around here is arranging a dyke walk. A curated walk either with interpretive panels or with guides. My other thought is that the next Acadian Congrè is in 2023 or 2024. Just wondering if you have any ideas, thoughts of what can happen here to keep that connection going?
Sarah Beanlands
Well, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have another family reunion, and they will come, They will come, they come anyway, they will come and if we could have something more formal? It's amazing, that day the museum was so gracious. They just sort of opened it up and it was amazing. So this museum is very much a part of their experiences and coming back to the land, I'm sure we could do something like that and maybe even reach out to some of these other families where we don't yet necessarily have- We haven't pinpointed the location of their settlements because in many cases, you know, these are operating farms. We have new families that have come in and that oral tradition is broken, and we'd actually have to go in and do it the hard way, not just go to my uncle and say, “Where should we dig?” So there are definitely other Acadian families who have shared in the making of this landscape in Acadia, that would, wouldn’t it be wonderful? And to see that experience again, people meeting each other and collective [?]. I'm sure there's, I'm sure there is.
I would love to do even, maybe on a smaller scale, because once I realized that we were going to have like 100 people come and dig, I needed porta potties and I needed buckets! And so maybe not on such a large-scale but even to have more regular public archaeology programs, a little bit smaller-scale, but where we can have the systemic communities come back, and participate in recovery in their own past. But also have community members, local community members. I loved that the farmers would drive by; we had all these tents set up on the hill that you can see from the road and the local farmers would drive by and they would stop and they would talk and they’d go, “Allen, why do you have circus tents up there on your field?” Right? But to also engage community members because I think that's really important. Engage them in that archaeology, in that history.
Mi’kmaw Artifacts?
When you do archaeology, you become part of the history of that site, you actually are an active participant in that site’s history and that experience is amazing. So the opportunity even on a small scale to make that available to people, and obviously to the Mi’kmaq because we're doing a dig right now in Kings County, where we have a really big Mi’kmaq crew, and I think if you think that it was powerful for the Acadians to come back, we have to say that now that we're working, that's 5000 years old, and that is life changing.
Carolyn van Gurp
You mentioned that you did collectively find some Mi’kmaq artifacts. We know they were there but this has to be documented, we have to have the artifacts.
Sarah Beanlands
Absolutely. Oh absolutely, so they're all registered. There weren't that many. But again, that's not a reflection- that in no way is a reflection of the Mi’kmaq presence on the landscape at all, but we didn't get, you know, we didn’t get to the bottom. But yes, and you know, I bet if we spoke to some of the farmers in the area I would not be surprised at all to find that people have shoe boxes under their beds of stuff as well. The archaeological context in that case is gone. So their scientific value is diminished, their cultural value remains significant. But also if we could talk to people and find out where even the general vicinity of where these things were found, that would give us a great place to start piecing that back together. There's no question that were we to look, we would find significant Mi'kmaq sites, all along these rivers. We know, even on the St. Croix, there is a huge site. There is a very, very significant Mi’kmaq site that goes right back to five to 8000 years ago. So, they're definitely there.
My name is Sarah Beanlands. I am a direct descendant of Beulah and Anthony Shaw, who were my grandparents and they, the Shaw family, were one of the original families that came in the 1760s when the Planters arrived in Newport Township; they have been here ever since. And they still live here, so it's been several centuries of Shaw family here in this area and lots and lots of stories in oral traditions that go along with that history; and in fact, many of those stories predate the Shaw family arriving. My understanding is that they were actually scouts for the original Planters so they arrived a couple of years earlier than most of the Planter settlers that came to the area. They were here somewhere around 1759, 1760. And they came to look out, sort of scout around and see what kind of properties were available and then relay that information back to New England.
Carolyn van Gurp
We understand you've been doing archaeological work on your family property, could you tell us a bit about that?
Sarah Beanlands
I grew up in Halifax. My mother grew up in Poplar Grove, and every weekend, particularly in the summertime, we would come here to visit my grandparents. So, my grandfather's Anthony Shaw, and my grandmother was Beulah Shaw, originally Beulah Allen. And we would come up here every summer and I would spend significant periods of my childhood in Poplar Grove. And we were always playing outside, always playing outside and I can remember playing in foundations and cellars and going through all the old out buildings and the barns and seeing all of this ancient- what seemed to me at the time to be ancient, history. It was everywhere, it just surrounded me when I was a child, and I didn't understand very much of it at all but I did know that my family had been here for a long time. So, as I got older, I just began to have an appreciation for history, for my own family's history, but really for the greater history of the area. I began to learn a little bit more about actually how long my family had been here and that they were very much a part of the Planter settlement of this area.
Richard Thibideau Arrives
When I was 11 a stranger came to the farm, to my uncle Allen's farm on a motorbike. And he was apparently from Maine, and he kind of, he just arrived, out of the blue. He came up and found my uncle working in the fields and they struck up a conversation and he said to him, “You know, I've been doing a lot of my own family research and genealogical studies” and that sort of thing and he said, “I'm pretty sure, based on what I've discovered, your farm is where my ancestors lived.” And my uncle said, “Okay, well I don't really know” but he said, “There are some old cellars and foundations on the property. Want to go have a look at them?” And so this stranger said, “Yeah, I'd love to.” So my uncle showed him around. Like I say, I was 11 or 12; maybe I didn't even know this had happened.
Twenty Years Later
So then maybe like 20 years later, or maybe 15 to 20 years later, we were all sitting around my uncle's kitchen table having dinner and he mentioned that this man had called him again, this time from Florida but it was the same man. And he said, yes, he was just calling to see if we'd found anything or if we had any new information. And I was like, “Who are you talking about?” And he told me this story about this stranger having arrived, and he told me his name and he said, you know, he was an Acadian. That he believed this was where his Acadian ancestors had lived; this was their village. He's pretty sure and he was just checking to see whether or not we had any additional information. I had never heard this story before. I had never heard anything about Acadians being in this area, I mean I guess I knew and we all know, in some sense, but it didn't have any- it didn't really have any significant meaning to me. And I was just floored by this information. At this time I was studying history at university and studying archaeology. And I said, “Well, did you get his address, is there a way I can contact him?” and he said yes, so he gave me his address. I wrote him, and I remember, I sat down and wrote him like a handwritten letter. And I sent it to him and it basically just said, “I've just heard this story that you believe that this may have been where your ancestors came from. This place is very special to me because it's where my ancestors come from, And would you be at all interested in working together to see if we can, you know, build this narrative that we're so connected to, but yet we're so separated from?” And he immediately wrote me back. At that time he was in his 70s. I was in my late 20s so it was an unlikely friendship. But we became the best of friends.
Acadian and Planter Descendant Collaboration Begins
He immediately wrote me back and he said, “Let's do this, let's see what we can find out. You work on the Shaw history and I'll work on my Acadian family connections to the property and let's see what we can find out.” So we began to do that. He would feed me information about what he knew about the Acadian settlement. His name was Richard Thibideau, we all lovingly called him Dick. His Thibideau family ancestry, he had it all right back to Port Royal, every single individual, and every cousin identified and that sort of thing. He'd found some historic mapping where you could see there's a bend in the St. Croix River that's still there. It’s a really big bend you can't miss it so when you're looking at historic era photos, or even historic mapping going back to the mid 18th century, when you see that bend in the river, you know where you are; it's a marker. So he had identified a number of Acadian dwellings, or at least there are indications of Acadian dwellings, around that bend in the river. And they were labeled as village Thibideau and he knew this was where his ancestors were from. And this is why he believed that what was the Shaw property, was the same place. So I started to collect oral traditions from my family, and to my great surprise, it turned out that the Shaw family had unwittingly preserved a great deal of Acadian history within their own oral traditions. And because their... that land had been passed down from father to son, to father to son, since the mid 18th century, and the land had never been sold, there was this unbroken chain of oral traditions that has been passed down to my uncles. And it's really interesting, there are all kinds of place names in particular. None of what you would ever find on a map. They only existed in the oral tradition, and had that land been sold or divided as it so often is and continues to be, those place names would have completely disappeared because they only existed in the family. But they were the name of the farm. When my grandmother was there was Willowbrook farm, and that was in recognition of the French willow trees that were on the property when the Shaws arrived in the 1760s. There was the old French road. There was French Orchard Hill, the old French mill, the old French house. There were all these place names that I had grown up with, but they didn't... you know it's funny you can hear something over and over and over again, but without the context to make it meaningful, it was just another place name. It had no meaning to me whatsoever. But once I realized that perhaps the Thibideau family had occupied and lived on this land before the Shaws had arrived, perhaps these place names were in reference to this earlier family that had lived there.
Mapping the Land
So I started to map out all of the place names that seem to refer to the Thibideau family or to the Acadian settlement. And then I started to talk to- unfortunately my grandfather had passed away, but- he passed when I was quite young, so I never got to talk to him. Very, very unfortunate. But I did start to talk to my uncles, and I've said this many times: we have a lot of really advanced technology that we use in archaeology ground-penetrating radar and electromagnetic geophysical instruments that we use, but there is nothing more accurate and more efficient, than a Nova Scotia farmer. “You guys,” I said to them, “Is there anywhere on your property that you know there are archaeological features or cellars or foundations or depressions that you know that don't belong, that aren't associated with the Shaw family?” and he said, “Absolutely, I do.” He said, “Actually I filled several of them in only recently.” Because up until the era of the modern tractor and bulldozer, most farmers in the area, if you had an old cellar on your property, you would plough around it. And then, with modern machinery, they started to fill those in and level them off. So he knew exactly where they were and he knew that they weren't associated with the Shaw Family occupation of the land.
The Old French Road
So he took me up one day, we went up to one of the areas that's called French Orchard Hill. He walked me straight up. And he said, “Just dig here.” So, I talked to Richard Thibideau and I said, “Look, we've got a really good location, I think we should do a small archaeological test excavation, not a big dig or anything but let's test this area and see if we find evidence of an Acadian, pre-deportation Acadian house or evidence of Acadian settlement or anything like that, then we can really say with a great deal of certainty, not only do we have an Acadian settlement here but this is the Thibideau family home.” And he was really excited, so excited to do that. He was still in the United States at the time so I put together a very small crew. This is up on my uncle Allen's, sorry my uncle David's farm and in fact if you take the Ferry Road and continue it to the left-hand side of the Anglican Church there's a little pathway that carries on into the fields and goes all the way down to the St. Croix River. That, in the Shaw family tradition, was always called The Old French road.
Carolyn van Gurp
Is that where there is a little sign?
Sarah Beanlands
Yes, it's exactly so, that's why we put the sign there. So that is actually the physical remains of that earlier cultural landscape that is associated with those Acadian settlements. That road that goes all the way down. And the road itself, I can remember my Uncle Fred, who was born in the Old Stone House, telling me that they used to leave their rubber boots down at the end of the Old French Road, and when the tide went down they would ford the river, leaving their boots on either side, right, and then they would walk up what we now call the LeBlanc Hill and over to Windsor. That's actually how some of the Planters in this area would get across.
The Test Dig
So we put together a little crew, and we dug and we did indeed find evidence of a pre-deportation house in that area. We had- what was really interesting is that there were no Planter period artifacts associated with that particular feature. So it was a depression in the ground that had been filled in. So we weren’t looking at a building that had been possibly used by the Acadians, and then by the Planters or anything like that. There was no plant or cultural material there at all. It was all dating to the mid-18th century, just actually prior to the deportation, and we were able to date that particular site, I believe it is 1750-ish. But we had a lot of pipe stems that we could date and ceramics that are typically found in association with Acadian settlement. So we had a really good idea that yes, this was Acadian and yes this was pre-expulsion.
The Acadian Congrès
So I immediately called my friend Richard Thibideau who was now in Florida and said, “Oh yeah, I think we have got it. Fairly certain that this is an Acadian site, based on all the research that you've done. I think we can say we likely have some remains of the village Thibideau.” And I said, “What do you want to do now?” That was in 2004. In 2005, the Acadian Congrès was being held in Grand Prè and they were having family reunions all over this area. Congrès are held once every five years, and they select a place. Sometimes it's in France, sometimes it's in Atlantic Canada or Acadia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Maine. So they have them all over the place but generally speaking, somewhere in the Maritimes. So that year in 2005 they were going to hold the Congrès at Grand Prè, and the Thibideau family reunion was going to be at Grand Prè. And we hatched this plan, that wouldn’t this be a great time to announce to all the Thibideau descendants that would be coming back for this family reunion that we think we've rediscovered where this, this sort of lost Thibideau village was? So we thought “Oh this is a great idea”. He contacted the organizers at the Thibideau family reunion. They put a spot for us in their schedule, and we were going to do a little presentation and you know it's all going to be wonderful. So I put together a PowerPoint. And I had never at that point in my career, I had never spoken publicly. You know, I'd never been in front of a crowd or anything like that. So I was already nervous, but I was feeling excited to share this information. And it wasn't until that day I arrived at Grand Prè and there were hundreds of people, hundreds of Thibideaus and then a big tent set up, and I was walking up onto the stage, and I just felt like I had been punched in the stomach. And I thought, “Oh my God, I've made a terrible mistake. I have made a terrible mistake. How can I, this Planter descendant, go up in front of all of these French Acadians, and tell them about their history. When my family is now living on the land from which they were expelled?” None of this hit me until I was walking up the stage. I've made a terrible mistake. I can't do this. This is so insensitive. They're going to hate me, but by that time I was walking up on the stage so there was nowhere to go. But so, Dick gave his little part of the presentation first and he talked about how we had met and, you know, our exchange of letters and all that sort of thing and then I got up and I did my little PowerPoint about the archaeology that we had found. I was very, very nervous, and it's well documented how nervous I was by some of the press that was there. I couldn't get the PowerPoint to work. I knocked the microphone over; it was a disaster. But at the end of it I said I’d spoken to my family before and we would really welcome any of you here today. If you would like to come and see the area, come and actually see one of these cellars. We'd love to have you come to Poplar Grove; so we can meet tomorrow morning at the Windsor Tourist Bureau and we can all drive down there together and I would really, really love to make that happen.
At Poplar Grove
So, the next day my aunt had gone and bought a few pastries, like a plate, and she bought an extra thing of lemonade, and she had it laid out on the table. And I drove up from Halifax and I got to the Windsor Tourist Bureau and it's packed. It's packed, there's like 100 cars there with four people in each car, and I was like, “Oh my goodness!” So I called my Aunt Joanne. We started to drive and I called my Aunt Joanne. I didn't think we had cell phones in 2005 but I called her and I said, “Okay, I'm coming with the Thibideaus, there's a few more than we thought. And I don't know if you have any extra lemonade.” Well, she said to me, “What are you talking about, you're coming with the Thibideaus? They're already here.” Another 75 had bypassed the Tourist Bureau and had gone directly to the site. So when we got there, I mean there were just hundreds of people, the CBC was there. What was really interesting, there was a man who had been sent from The Times Picayune in Louisiana, which is the largest newspaper in Louisiana, he'd been sent to cover the whole Congrès. Well, it turns out he was a direct descendant of the Thibideaus who had lived on the, what was now the Shaw farm. So he'd come up to cover it. There were just like... it was unbelievable. Unbelievable. So we took everybody up and walked around the site and we showed them some of the artifacts and they all sort of got to know each other and there were people who were, you know, relatives who had never met each other, who are meeting each other for the first time on the site of their ancestors' village. I mean it was, it was one of the most amazing days of my life. And they were so nice to me. I really thought everybody was gonna be mad at me. But they spent the whole day there, and in fact, over the next few weeks, people would come from all over. And ever since that day in 2005 we have had Thibideaus come from Europe, all over North America, Atlantic Canada, the United States, come every summer to come and visit the site, and they will. My aunt Joanne has kept a guestbook of every single Thibideau that has come with all their names and the date and that sort of thing. And there are 1000s of them in the book.
Family Stories
Carolyn van Gurp
So, we’ve got to get them scanned.
Sarah Beanlands
We do, no, we really do, we really do. So, that was 2005. One of my favorite stories from 2005, was when my mom was a little girl. She used to hear her father, my grandfather Anthony, talk about the Tippy Toes. And in her mind, she was just a child, she and my aunt Marilyn thought the Tippy Toes were these little gnomes that lived under the bed, and they were nice; they weren't malevolent or anything but they were little creatures that lived under the bed. And she had forgotten about them, you know, they're just things they talked about when they were children. She had forgotten all about them until that day in 2005, and she came over to me and there were Acadians everywhere and she came over and when she said, “Sarah, the Tippy Toes don't live under the bed.” She said, “The Tippy Toes are here.” He was saying Thibideau. And it really struck me, because obviously my grandfather knew the name of the Acadian family on whose land the Shaws had arrived. Obviously through the oral tradition they knew where all of these places were; they still refer to it as the old French Road, French Orchard Hill, the old French house, the old French mill. There was so much history and oral tradition and knowledge that had been retained simply through that connection to the land. But in one generation, when he was speaking about those Acadian settlers had distorted to become little gnomes that lived under the bed. To me, I never even heard about either of them. I'd never heard about the Thibideaus or the Tippy Toes. I didn't know anything about it. So had we not done all of that in 2004-2005 when we did, I think we were at the very end of the survival of that oral history because it had, like I said, it had just distorted from real historical human beings to fantasy gnomes, to being not there at all.
Planning the Big Dig
It was 2015 when we had another Thibideau reunion and we did the Big Dig. We made up T-shirts that just said the Tippy Toe Diggers. We did all of that and then I didn't do a great deal because I was going to school and I sort of started my career and that sort of thing. And then it was in 2013, well, just before that, just after all of the… a year or so after we had the big reunion, Dick Thibideau and his wife Doris came back to Poplar Grove and they brought their trailer, like their camper van. And he took his trailer up to the top of the hill, French Orchard Hill where we had done the first little dig, and he placed his camper right there. They stayed overnight for several days. I have pictures of them- they're sitting out there with their wine glasses, and they camped right on top of the cellar that we had dug. And he was the first Acadian since the mid-18th century to watch the sunrise from that spot so that was really, also a really amazing, an amazing experience.
So I wasn't doing a whole lot, we were still compiling information and that sort of thing and I was getting historic photographs and stuff and there was, I had heard this story from my uncle about the old French house. And it wasn't there anymore, but we knew where the foundation was. If you remember, I said Dick Thibideau had identified five dots along the St. Croix River that he thought were indicating five structures, and we knew we found one. So we were looking for the other ones, and I figured, well, if this foundation is referred to as the old French house, it’s probably the place to start to find the next one! But then I found- my father went through his old slides, and in the 1960s he had taken photographs of the farm, and some of the different old buildings that were standing there, and he had a picture of what everyone was referring to as the old French house. And I thought all this is great, but it doesn't look Acadian really. It looked very Planter, like you can see the Planter homes in the area. They're very distinctive because they're very symmetrical, and that kind of architecture in the Planter period having symmetry was really important. So you have two windows on either side of a door that's centrally located and it's a very, that's a very New England style of architecture, very different from the Acadian style of architecture. And we don't have very many examples. We only really have photographs left of what some of these pre-deportation structures look like, but it didn't look-- it looked Planter to me. So I thought, okay well we can still maybe dig and see.
The Old House
But the more I looked at the photograph, the more I started to see something really, really weird in it. So, there was, you know, sometimes if you have a building a structure that's built, against, right up adjacent to another structure and you tear one of those buildings down, you'll get a shadow of that original structure. So I started to see a shadow in the photographs, and then the more I looked at it, the more you could actually see, there's a house inside of a house. And I wondered, did the Shaw family, when they arrived-- because we know from the historic documentation that when the Planters arrived in the Poplar Grove area, they didn't-- well, when the Acadians left, they didn't burn the buildings the way they did at Grand Prè and other places. They seemed to have left a lot of the infrastructure intact in this area for whatever reason. And I started to wonder, is this, is there an Acadian house inside this greater Planter house? And the only way we would know would be to dig, right, because the building was gone. In fact with the photographs that we had, the building had been moved by teams of oxen in the late-19th century, up the hill from the original foundation. It was actually intact when I was a little girl, I think it came down in the 1980s, but they pulled up the structure, which says a lot about the integrity of that structure, they pulled it up with teams of oxen, closer to the Shaw family house that they eventually built. And they used it as an outbuilding, basically, for hay and for chickens and various other things. But they knew where that foundation was-- the original foundation was, and I could remember as a child playing there; a little garden used to grow around the foundation. Every summer you look out into the field and there would be this garden that was, there's nothing else in the field but this garden would appear out of nowhere; it's actually delineating the foundation of what they call the Old French house.
The Big Dig
So in 2013, we decided to do another small test excavation to see what we could find. And I wasn't sure, I was hoping it would be like 2004, we would put shovels in the ground, turn over the sod, boom, there'd be a pre-deportation house and, you know, that's number two. But it didn't turn out that way at all. We started to excavate and we were getting tons and tons of artifacts and cultural material, but it was all Planter. And I thought well, it is very likely that up until then all of the oral traditions that had tested had demonstrated their validity, they were very, very accurate. Here's the first time that I've come across something. This is supposed to be the foundation of the old French House, but I'm finding Planter artifacts. And maybe that oral tradition, maybe like the details about it had migrated, you know, I mean the old French house was actually over here, but I wasn't really sure. But I also thought, you know if I'm right and there's an Acadian house inside that Planter house that maybe if I dig, the more I can get through that Planter occupation, that I might be able to find an Acadian occupation underneath it. So at that point, I figured, well, this is going to be a pretty substantial dig.
Okay, that this would be a pretty substantial dig; if we were going to do it, it was going to be a major effort to do it. And so I thought, well, I think it's really, really important that we invite the Thibideau family, those people that we met who had come in 2005 and had been coming every year since, to invite them to do this with us, because really, this is their culture, this is their history. I didn't want to do it without them, to be honest, so I got in touch with Dick Thibideau again and we kind of put a call out to all these Thibideaus that we have met from all over North America and said, “We're going to dig, we're going to dig the old French house, and if so, if any of you would like to come and dig with me, just get in touch with me and we'll make it happen.” And I did the same thing I did in 2004. I thought I might get five people. And didn't I get like 75 people from all over North America “We want to come and dig”. So at that point, we really had to put some framework around what we were going to do because I didn't have enough resources, I didn't have enough gear, I didn't have enough supervisors. So, we managed to pull together. I think just about every archaeologist in Nova Scotia came for two weeks to help supervise, because these were people who had never done archaeology before, they had no experience. We didn't want to do anything that would harm the archaeology. I mean, the archaeology, we had to do it right. So we needed a lot of supervision. We like to say it was-- we didn't have any funding for the project, but it was funded on enthusiasm. We actually reached out to the Avon River Museum and asked if we could use the big building up there to have a barbecue like a homecoming barbecue, and we went over to see the winery, who donated wine. We had a big barbecue right here, in this museum, where all the Thibideaus came, and then we dug for two weeks up at the site of the old French house. We had everyone from four year olds, from the community to 81 year olds who were Acadian descendants. We had many, many Thibideaus from Arkansas and Texas and Florida and Maine and anywhere you can imagine, Louisiana, of course, who had all come to dig with us. And they dug beside the Shaw family. So we went through the Shaw family material culture first and then we started to go through what ended up being an Acadian occupation underneath it.
Family Connections
We never finished the dig. I always wanted to go back and finish it but it just, yeah, it takes a lot, it takes a lot of resources to pull something like that off, but we were able, at the very least, to identify that, yes there was an Acadian occupation underneath this Planter settlement. Clearly, it became clear to me as well and actually looking through the historic mapping that the Shaw family-- so, now we're talking about the early 1800s, so not the first Shaws that are on it, but likely their grandsons-- it seems as though that building that was the old French house was still standing when the Shaw family arrived. That the Shaw family likely moved into it, as they were building their own homestead. They moved into that Acadian house and lived there for a period of time. They built their main house, which is no longer there, but they built the main Planter house just up on the hill a little bit, and then their sons extended the old French house into another Planter house that we can actually see on some of the mapping, it's right where it is. But it was again this amazing connection between two families whose backgrounds and experiences were completely different. In many ways, you know, we had Acadians, who had come and been expelled and New England Planters who had come migrated up and taken over that land. How many times did they meet? Maybe a couple of times in those early days but they would have had this shared experience on the landscape, without ever really knowing each other. And yet, here we were in 2015, digging. Descendents of the Acadian family, the Thibideaus, and the descendants of the Shaw family, and truly we were just one big family. And we've been one big family ever since 2005. And, you know, you'll often see, not so much anymore-- my uncle's getting older-- but they would always fly an Acadian flag on their home, so you know if you drove by you would actually think it was an Acadian home but, the experience of digging with those descended communities, the two of them together, learning. So it, all of us, we all had to go through the Planter occupation first and you'd have some of the Thibideaus they would run up to you and say “Oh my God, look what I found!” And it would be Planter artifacts, but they would be like, “What could this be for?”, like “This is so cool. This is amazing!” And then the same thing happening when Shaw family was finding pieces of [??] and other Acadian ceramics, they're like, “Oh my God!” So there was this opportunity to reconcile, not just these two families, but these histories that are really very painful in many ways. The archaeology was so powerful to bring people together to reconcile, to have these sort of contested histories on a contested piece of land, come together and share that experience, share those histories, respect each other's histories and learn about each other's histories, particularly through that cultural material was amazing. It changed my entire perspective on how archaeology should be done, and how powerful it is and how it can bring people together, like I say from completely opposite cultural spaces to really unite them.
A Powerful Experience!
And it's been just a remarkable, remarkable experience for everyone and we still, you know, I've been to Louisiana to go visit them. They come here like I said, usually typically every year. They come from all over just because when you think about it, often, you go, “Well, for me, if I was going to look for where some of the Shaws came from and I was in New England, say, probably the closest I could get would be a community. I could probably pinpoint what town was, but the possibility of actually finding the very cellar, or foundation or structure that my ancestors lived in would be highly, highly unlikely.” And I think that's the case for most people.
So for somebody to be able to come back to a landscape that is very similar, I expect, to what it would have been in the mid-18th century, to be able to come back and actually stand on the very spot and touch the very things that your ancestor left and in fact, you are the first person to touch those objects, since they were there, they were dropped by your ancestor, that kind of connection, that tangible connection to history, is incredibly powerful. And in fact we had people again who met. There was a woman from Arkansas, who had come, she heard about the day she spent two weeks digging with us, and a man from Meteghan in Nova Scotia, they were digging together and they started to talk and they realized they were cousins. And they were meeting for the first time on this archeological dig, in sort of this Planter context, and it was really, really, really special. I wish we could do more and I would really like to do more up there. If I could, in the future. But even just to have that opportunity once was absolutely amazing.
So that's sort of my connection to the Acadian history, it's not that I set out to discover it or, but it was that it just seemed to be... It's there. And really all you have to do is scratch the surface. And it changed, I think my whole family's perspective on ownership as well. This had been their land for over 200 years, but all of a sudden I think they felt like stewards of the land, as opposed to owners, and I'm so grateful that they were so gracious and having all of these people come back.
Village LeBlanc Across the River
We did another small dig, just across the St. Croix River, so if you're standing on my Uncle David’s property on the site where we did- French Orchard Hill, where we did the first dig, and you look across the St. Croix River, there’s a big hill. And my understanding is that there was likely a blockhouse on the top of that hill, that they used to signal from Fort Edward and there was a, there's a whole series of these blockhouses through which to communicate.
I can't remember the name, there was- but there was also a large Planter settlement there as well. But we're looking at the historic mapping once we've identified where Village Thibideau and we could anchor that village on the map, then we could get a much better understanding geospatially of where these other communities might be located. And there was one on the top of that hill, that was called Village LeBlanc. So we went over there and did a little bit of testing as well. And what was really interesting there, was in 2005 we noticed that there were all kinds of LeBlancs at the Thibideau family reunion. And it turns out that from the very early days of Acadia, the LeBlanc family and the Thibideau family, there was a lot of intermarriage. There were many, many LeBlancs that were intermarried into the Thibideau family and they were all sort of part of this larger extended family. And I mentioned to them all, “Pretty sure over on that hill, that's the LeBlanc village”. And all of a sudden, again we had this sort of epiphany. While we're standing on Thibideau village, we can see LeBlanc village. We have all these LeBlanc and Thibideaus and you know if you're standing on the top of that hill, you can yell and you can hear from where we're standing, you know, in the Thibideau area. You can communicate very easily between the hills, and maybe this is one of the reasons that those two families are so connected and have been so connected over time. So there were just so many amazing- so much amazing information that I think it's subtle and it's nuanced and it gets lost in the list and the historic documents. And you know, all of these subtle connections to the landscape that are lost when the historian tries to pull the narrative out of documents, that you can actually rediscover when you bring people back onto the land and share these stories. And, you know, it's really, it's very, very powerful.
I'd love for us to do more of it in this area because this area now is sacred to many, many Acadians. Where before we started, and even me, I had no appreciation of the Acadian history of this area. None whatsoever. This was all Planter, right? And again that speaks to what are we missing about the Mi’kmaq presence on the landscape, which we know was extensive. And if we've been here for, you know 300 years, they've been here for 13,000 years. And how do we bring everybody back to have these experiences. We do believe we did find some Mi'kmaq artifacts in those layers that we were digging on site, which is in no way surprising, it is to be expected. So, yeah it's a really, I think it’s a really powerful way to connect with history and anybody can participate in that and so sure there's more but...
Next Steps
Carolyn van Gurp
So Sarah, as you know, there were 25 stories in what you just said. I know how privileged James and I are to hear this and now this will be transcribed so your story is recorded and will be shared. But what's going through my mind, same question as you have, is how can we extend this amazing learning further? One of the things we've been talking about around here is arranging a dyke walk. A curated walk either with interpretive panels or with guides. My other thought is that the next Acadian Congrè is in 2023 or 2024. Just wondering if you have any ideas, thoughts of what can happen here to keep that connection going?
Sarah Beanlands
Well, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have another family reunion, and they will come, They will come, they come anyway, they will come and if we could have something more formal? It's amazing, that day the museum was so gracious. They just sort of opened it up and it was amazing. So this museum is very much a part of their experiences and coming back to the land, I'm sure we could do something like that and maybe even reach out to some of these other families where we don't yet necessarily have- We haven't pinpointed the location of their settlements because in many cases, you know, these are operating farms. We have new families that have come in and that oral tradition is broken, and we'd actually have to go in and do it the hard way, not just go to my uncle and say, “Where should we dig?” So there are definitely other Acadian families who have shared in the making of this landscape in Acadia, that would, wouldn’t it be wonderful? And to see that experience again, people meeting each other and collective [?]. I'm sure there's, I'm sure there is.
I would love to do even, maybe on a smaller scale, because once I realized that we were going to have like 100 people come and dig, I needed porta potties and I needed buckets! And so maybe not on such a large-scale but even to have more regular public archaeology programs, a little bit smaller-scale, but where we can have the systemic communities come back, and participate in recovery in their own past. But also have community members, local community members. I loved that the farmers would drive by; we had all these tents set up on the hill that you can see from the road and the local farmers would drive by and they would stop and they would talk and they’d go, “Allen, why do you have circus tents up there on your field?” Right? But to also engage community members because I think that's really important. Engage them in that archaeology, in that history.
Mi’kmaw Artifacts?
When you do archaeology, you become part of the history of that site, you actually are an active participant in that site’s history and that experience is amazing. So the opportunity even on a small scale to make that available to people, and obviously to the Mi’kmaq because we're doing a dig right now in Kings County, where we have a really big Mi’kmaq crew, and I think if you think that it was powerful for the Acadians to come back, we have to say that now that we're working, that's 5000 years old, and that is life changing.
Carolyn van Gurp
You mentioned that you did collectively find some Mi’kmaq artifacts. We know they were there but this has to be documented, we have to have the artifacts.
Sarah Beanlands
Absolutely. Oh absolutely, so they're all registered. There weren't that many. But again, that's not a reflection- that in no way is a reflection of the Mi’kmaq presence on the landscape at all, but we didn't get, you know, we didn’t get to the bottom. But yes, and you know, I bet if we spoke to some of the farmers in the area I would not be surprised at all to find that people have shoe boxes under their beds of stuff as well. The archaeological context in that case is gone. So their scientific value is diminished, their cultural value remains significant. But also if we could talk to people and find out where even the general vicinity of where these things were found, that would give us a great place to start piecing that back together. There's no question that were we to look, we would find significant Mi'kmaq sites, all along these rivers. We know, even on the St. Croix, there is a huge site. There is a very, very significant Mi’kmaq site that goes right back to five to 8000 years ago. So, they're definitely there.