Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the world's most popular poet in his time, a respected scholar, and a man of great social consciousness. This rare combination of talent, intellect, and character produced several works of conscience: a volume of antislavery poems 20 years before the US Civil War; the epic poem Hiawatha, which pleads for humanizing Native Americans, who were then thought of as "savages;" the immortal "Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie," a preservation of Acadian culture and history. This great poem begins just here, in Grand-Pre. The power of Evangeline is so great that Longfellow's heroine has become a central symbol for the Acadian culture.

Layne Longfellow will read from Evangeline, tell the moving story of its creation and of its creator, and dedicate the poem and the day to the Acadians, whom Longfellow both idealized and immortalized.