Historic Annapolis Valley
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95The allure of the Valley is its diversity- seacoast and agricultural land; ocean basins and fresh water lakes; tidal rivers and mountain streams; marshlands and meadows, fishing ports and farming hamlets, urban towns and country villages. Historically, the Valley’s heritage is as rich as its soil, with roots reaching back four hundred years. Historic Annapolis Valley is first and foremost about a region, not individual communities, although many are included as part of the overall story. The book covers the Annapolis Valley from Digby to Windsor, with an emphasis on the mid-valley, from Bridgetown to Berwick, beginning with the French in the 1600s and discussing topics relevant to the present day.
Nebooktook In the Woods
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95In Nebooktook, Mike Parker once again pays homage to our wilderness heritage and those who, in days gone by, revelled in a life in the woods. In today’s world, primitive wilderness places are more “visionary” than “actual. ” The call of the loon is being drowned out by the industrial roar of “men who dig up and tear down and destroy.” Newspaper headlines bemoan a myriad of environmental concerns and issues almost daily as beleaguered politicians and bureaucrats, entrusted to responsibly manage natural resources and safeguard the environment, are taken to task.
In order to keep us grounded in the environmental riches we once possessed and where we should be heading, Parker reminds us of the beauty and power of the wilderness. He goes beyond mere documentation and offers a heartfelt call to see the wild places of Nova Scotia as more than a source for pillage and profit. Nebooktook, which in the Mi’kmaw language means “in the woods,” is an eclectic mix of history, heritage, ideology, nostalgia, philosophy, poetry, and prose. Set in Nova Scotia, the more than three hundred early-twentieth-century images appearing here could just as easily have been taken in any number of wilderness areas stretching from the Adirondacks to the Rockies. The book’s message is equally timeless and universal, spanning centuries and drawing upon scores of voices from a variety of disciplines and professions. Nebooktook is reflective, introspective, meditative, and thought-provoking. While it decries the practices and doctrines that wantonly destroy and pollute, more importantly the book celebrates the traditions, natural beauty, and intrinsic values of our woods and waters.
Frontier Town: Bear River, Nova Scotia A Snapshot in Time
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$26.95Bear River photographer Ralph Nelson Harris captured the village’s waning days of sail and lumber through his camera lens in the early 1900s. Drawing upon hundreds of recently discovered Ralph Harris images, historian and author Mike Parker puts a newfound face to Bear River’s past while utilizing painstakingly researched excerpts from The Telephone, Bear River’s newspaper of the day, to add an informative and entertaining voice to the story. Includes 470 images.
Gold Rush Ghost Towns of Nova Scotia
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95Gold Rush Ghost Towns of Nova Scotia tells the fascinating stories of abandoned communities, not haunted buildings and paranormal encounters, although the occasional resident spirit does make an appearance. Ghost towns generally begin as industry-based communities of convenience for mining but when resources were depleted, marks slumped or demand outstripped production, their reason for being ended.
The story of mining in Nova Scotia is one of Canada’s oldest, yet is perhaps the province’s best kept heritage secret. More gold was mined worldwide in the 1800s than during the previous five thousand years. Since Canada was one of the worlds largest gold producers, auriferous tales and legends abound from that era of motherlodes found and fortunes lost. Nova Scotia heralded the first of its three gold rushes 37 years before men braved Yukon’s Chilkoot Pass heading to the Klondike. Adventurers from the world over were drawn to Nova Scotia’s burgeoning nineteenth-century gold districts as was “a motley crew of day labourers, farmers, fishermen, ruined mechanics, drunkards and gamblers.”
An air of mysticism shrouding ghost towns holds a fascination for historians, social scientists, treasure and relic hunters, geocachers and nostalgia buffs. Mike Parker tells the story of characters and con men, industry and labour, prosperity and recession. Although abandoned gold mining settlements are the book’s central theme, ghost towns built upon coal, iron ore and copper are featured as well. Scores of exhaustively researched images, supported by informative, entertaining text, tell the sad story of a great heritage that has been nearly erased from our history books.
Historic Digby
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95An exceptional collection of over 160 historical images from Digby and area reflecting the era from the late 19th century up to the Second World War.
Historic Lunenburg
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$17.95Historic Lunenburg brings together a host of images celebrating Lunenburg’s proud sailing heritage and its history as a centre of fishing and marine culture, as well as its people, business, rich architectural traditions, and celebrated events.
From Lunenburg’s beginnings as a British settlement for “Foreign Protestants” to its days as an international fish exporter, and as a home to traditionally crafted schooners, this book brings to life the spirited past of one of Nova Scotia’s most picturesque communities.
Historic Dartmouth
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95Historic Dartmouth is a fascinating glimpse of this charming city’s social, economic, and cultural life over the last two centuries. From its beginning as a settlement of British immigrants on an Aboriginal campsite in 1750, Dartmouth’s growth was uncertain and sporadic. In 1759, it was used as a temporary billet for Wolfe’s troops before his attack on Quebec; in 1785 it was, briefly, the home of the influential Nantucket Whaling Company; and in 1826 the building of the Shubenacadie Canal gave it new life until the coming of the railway in 1870.
Finally incorporated as a town in 1873, Dartmouth’s location on the east side of Chebucto Harbour, and its thousands of inland lakes and rivers, made it an ideal place for thriving communities, and a destination for leisure and pleasure seekers. Its “golden era” at the turn of the nineteenth century is the focus of this book.
End of the Line The Dominion Atlantic Railway – A Trip Back in Time
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$25.95There was a time when railways criss-crossed Nova Scotia, carrying passengers and delivering mail, moving freight and produce, hauling timber, coal, gypsum, and iron ore. But those days have passed thanks in large measure to the advent of the automobile, improved highways, long-haul trucking, and the vagaries of market demands and resource extraction. The number of railways operating today in the province can be tallied on one hand, with fingers left over.
Vestiges of Nova Scotia’s railway heritage are disappearing. Tracks are now Rails to Trails; trestle bridges have deteriorated to decrepitude; and train stations, once the arterial pulse for so many communities, have, for the most part, disappeared. Most poignant, perhaps, is the silencing of that magical, haunting train whistle.
Mike Parker’s latest book End of the Line follows a similar track as three of his earlier best-selling books about ghost towns and deserted island settlements. Presented in Mike’s popular storytelling style, and drawing upon more than 430 images, many of them in colour, End of the Line opens another window to the past, taking the reader for a nostalgic trip back in time on the abandoned Dominion Atlantic Railway along the once-famous Land of Evangeline route from Yarmouth to Halifax through the heart of the Annapolis Valley.
Twenty-five years have passed since the demise of the Dominion Atlantic Railway (1894-1994), which closed just one month and five days short of its one hundredth birthday. There have been many railways but none more storied than the D.A.R., considered to be “one of the more important pages out of Nova Scotia history.”
Into the Deep Unknown
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95Unspoiled woods and waters, abundant game and legendary guides were the cornerstones upon which early tourism was built in Nova Scotia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many entertaining and informative accounts were written by visiting sportsmen of that era; the most widely read and enduring is The Tent Dwellers, penned in 1908 by Albert Bigelow Paine in which the American humorist light-heartedly recounted a camping and fishing expedition through what today constitutes the “Toby” and “Keji.” A more recent work of wide popular appeal was published in 1990 by Mike Parker, whospent four years conducting extensive, groundbreaking research interviewing the last of the old-time woodsmenwhose reminiscences and tales formed the basis for Guides of the North Woods, a compilation of oral and writtenhistory documenting Nova Scotia’s guiding tradition.Into The Deep Unknown is both a stand-alone book and a companion to The Tent Dwellers and Guides of theNorth Woods. It continues Mike Parker’s ongoing quest to preserve our historical past and heritage. A richlyillustrated sporting journal, it interweaves the first-person account of a 1910 canoe “pilgrimage” through the Landof the Tent Dwellers with more than 424 vintage photographs and text.
Ghost Islands of Nova Scotia
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95There is an aura that cloaks islands in mystique and stirs the imagination. Nova Scotia would be an island if not for a narrow isthmus linking Canada’s second smallest province to New Brunswick. The ocean waters surrounding Nova Scotia have proportionally more islands than anywhere else in the Atlantic. In fact, there are more than 3,800 islands that lie “scattered like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle” along nearly 5,000 miles of coastline. For Ghost Islands of Nova Scotia, Mike Parker has selected a treasure trove of 330 images and maps to produce a series of pictorial vignettes accompanied by a wealth of descriptive text. Legendary islands such as Sable, Seal, St. Paul, and Scatarie come to life, as do a score of others including Sambro, McNabs, Georges, Lawlor, Devils, Melville, Little Hope, McNutts, Oak, Isle Haute, Bon Portage, Liscomb, the Tuskets, the Canso Islands, and LaHave Islands.Featured are tales of abandoned settlements and homesteads, lighthouses and keepers, storms and shipwrecks, contagious diseases and mass burials. There are stories of lost cemeteries and ghostly apparitions, pirates and buried treasure, smugglers, spies and murderers, forts, prisons and secret passageways, even picnics, carnivals and merry-go-rounds. Ghost Islands of Nova Scotia is a virtual encyclopedia of our coastal past – a look back at a rugged, adventurous, dangerous, often lonely and sometimes tragic way of life.
Buried in the Woods
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95Born and raised in Bear River, Nova Scotia, Mike Parker has been called Nova Scotia’s Storyteller, a reference to the diversity of themes covered in his many books of popular history. The best-selling author has been researching and writing about his native province for more than twenty years. This is his thirteenth book. Mike is affiliated with the Gorsebrook Research Institute for Atlantic Canada Studies at Saint Mary’s University as a research associate. He is a graduate of Acadia University and a long-time resident of Dartmouth.
Woodchips and Beans (new edition) Life in the Early Lumber Woods of Nova Scotia
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$29.95Lumbering in Nova Scotia has a long and storied history, dating back nearly for centuries. A rich resource and lose to world markets, lumbering has played an important role in the development of the province, employing thousands of men and woman over the years.This oral history, covering a 30-year period from the 1920s to the 1940s, captures the personal experiences of those choppers, scalers, swayers, yarders, mill hands and cooks who were part of this rugged experience.
Guides of the North Woods
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$29.95Hunting, fishing and woodsmanship are inscribed in North American culture. Once the survival skills of the Mi’kmaq people, they became recreational pastimes for British officers arriving in Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century. The native people became wilderness guides for these ‘sports’, passing on their guiding skills to others. In this book, using their own words, Mike Parker resurrects how native and white men shared the call of the wilderness, traveling miles on foot or by canoe, hunting moose and deer or fishing trout and salmon. The hair-raising incidents of danger, the funny anecdotes, the skills necessary to succeed, and the personality of these men are collected here with respect and admiration.
