Historic Antigonish Town & County
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$29.95Antigonish County is a rural community steeped in a unique heritage. Mi’kmaq have lived here for hundreds of years; they were joined in the eighteenth century by Acadians, Loyalists—including Black Loyalists—and settlers from New England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Historic Antigonish: Town and County bears witness, in photographs and detailed captions, to this cultural diversity and its many benefits. This is a book not about landscape or politics–although both have naturally affected life here–but about the countless individuals whose everyday lives shaped the area’s evolution, people like John Boyd, founder of the Casket; Lottie Melanson, champion sheepshearer; Alex MacDonald, the “Klondike King”; and Katie MacEachern, a gifted midwife. From the raising of St. Joseph’s Church to the fiery destruction and resurrection of Mount St. Bernard, local events, businesses, and, above all, people are captured and honoured in this wide-ranging tribute to Antigonish town and county.
Tokens of Grace
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Beginning in the 17th-century Scotland, when Covenanters met in open defiance of religious repression, open-air communions –the Sàcramaid – evolved to become the social and spiritual highlight of the year. Primarily a mixture of prayer and religious and kinship feasting, open-air communions were an expression of core communal values and basic kin and religious loyalties.
Particularly between 1840 and 1890, but well into the 20th century as well, the sacramental season and its open-air communions was a dominant symbol in the lives of Cape Breton’s Scots Presbyterians. Whole communities, numbering in the thousands, converged for this great religious occasion, taking part in as many as five days of exhaustive preparatory self-examination.
