GRAND-PRÉ,
August 7, 2008 —
Acadians were deported from several places in Nova Scotia, including
Annapolis Royal, Windsor, Truro, and the Amherst area, but Grand-Pré
has become the symbol of the Deportation. We owe this fact to several
individuals.
Ironically, we
first have to pay tribute to Lieutenant-Colonel John Winslow, the
officer from Massachusetts who was in charge of the operations at
Grand-Pré in the fall of 1755. Winslow kept a detailed journal that
was published in the 1880s. Although lesser known, Jeremiah Bancroft,
one of Winslow’s officers, also kept a daily journal describing the
deportation at Grand-Pré. There are no documents of this kind for any
other Acadian area.
We then have to
pay tribute to
the politician and writer, Thomas
Chandler Haliburton,
who relied heavily on Winslow’s journal for his chapter on the
dispersal of the Acadians in his well-known History of Nova Scotia,
published in 1827.
We then of
course have to thank Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for writing the poem
Evangeline which became an instant best seller in 1847 and
bestowed on Grand-Pré an extraordinary emotional legacy. Longfellow
borrowed a copy of Haliburton’s History of Nova Scotia from the
library at Harvard University in March 1841. So it is not by chance
that he chose to set Evangeline in Grand-Pré, as opposed to any
of the other Acadian villages where deportations took place.
While Winslow,
Haliburton and Longfellow contributed to the notoriety of Grand-Pré,
it was John Frederic Herbin who actually preserved the land where the
original Acadian church once stood. Without his foresight and his
concrete actions, there would probably be no Grand-Pré National
Historic Site today.
John Frederic
Herbin (1860-1923) was the son of Marie-Marguerite Robichaud from
Meteghan and Jean Herbin, a French Huguenot born in Cambrai, France.
Both father and son worked as watchmakers in Halifax and Windsor. John
Frederic Herbin eventually moved to Wolfville where in 1885 he
established Herbin Jewellers which still exists today. Herbin
graduated from Acadia in 1890 and later served as town councillor and
major of Wolfville. Influenced by Longfellow and convinced that his
mother’s people had been wronged, he began doing research on the
history of the Acadians. He published several books on local history
including a detailed History of Grand-Pré.
In 1907, John
Frederic Herbin bought 14 acres of land in Grand-Pré and began his
efforts to establish a memorial park to honour the Acadians,
Longfellow and Evangeline. He proposed a variety of projects that
included rebuilding the original Acadian church and restoring the “old
burying ground.” In June 1906, Herbin wrote a letter to Sir Wilfrid
Laurier, Prime Minister of Canada, inviting him to become a patron of
the proposed memorial park. Ironically, Laurier was advised by Sir
Frederick William Borden, the Liberal M.P. for Kings County, to
withhold his patronage until he could determine to what extent
Herbin’s venture was merely directed at attracting American tourists!
Herbin also
attempted unsuccessfully to obtain support from the Acadians. In 1909
he erected a stone cross (now called the Herbin Cross) to mark the
location of the old Acadian cemetery. Unable to raise the necessary
funds for a memorial park and concerned about the potential
desecration of the site, Herbin sold the land to the Dominion Atlantic
Railway in 1917. However, one of the stipulations of the sale was that
part of the property be deeded to the Acadians for the construction of
a memorial to their past.
On August 16,
1922, the Memorial Church was officially opened. The Dominion Atlantic
Railway had arranged for a special train to bring Acadians to the site
for the blessing of the cornerstone. The church had been built by
Acadian stone masons with funds raised in Acadian parishes in Canada
and the United States. Before he died, John Frederic Herbin was thus
able to see one of his dreams come true.
The Acadians
honoured Herbin in 1925 with a bronze plaque on the stone cross he had
erected to mark Saint-Charles-des-Mines cemetery.
