Day: March 12, 2010

Rector David Curry delivered this address to the West Hants Historical Society on 4 March 2010.

Flora MacDonald’s Winter in Windsor

Sorrow and loss, pride and gain are part and parcel of the Scottish Legacy in the land which we call Nova Scotia, New Scotland.

I have been told on good authority – it appears on bumper-stickers – that “God made the Scots a wee bit better,” a sentiment with which some might agree, whether with or without té Breag, a wee dram of the creature, while others might take exception. But we cannot overlook the role of the Scots/Irish in our Maritime and local history.

We meet in the town of Windsor, acknowledged as “The Home of Sam Slick,” if we are to believe the bill-boards on our highways, and we meet, of course, in the gateway to the Valley also celebrated on the bill-boards and in the tourist literature as “The Land of Evangeline.”

With respect to the first, “The Home of Sam Slick,” we have to say, no, not so, either fictionally or in reality. The literary creation of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who rightly may claim Windsor as his home, Sam Slick is the fictional “Yankee peddler”, who provides an amusingly satiric and not always complimentary view of the pioneer realities of early nineteenth century Maritime society and culture with all of its pretentions and follies, prejudices and biases. A source of amusement, especially to the literate and chattering classes of England, Sam Slick is certainly not of Windsor born.

Just as fictitious, but with a greater degree of romantic interest, is the heroine of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Evangeline, a poem which has caught the imagination and continues to exercise a power upon all who imagine themselves as displaced and disenfranchised by the ubiquitous and imperious decree of whatever “powers-that-be.” But it is altogether a fiction, pleasing and heart-rending as it may be.

Both are the creations of the nineteenth literary imagination, the one local and earlier in the century, the other mid-century and out of New England; both embued with a sense for the power of a story and the ability to tell it well and poetically with all of the license of a poet and a novelist. But the reality?

To some extent, the reality lies in the fiction and the power of fiction, the power of a well-told story, the power of sympathetic character and the power of wit and humour. But over and against such fictional identities, important as such things are, stands another story, a real story about a real heroine, and one whose name has somehow managed to escape our notice almost entirely. Certainly, it adorns no bill-board; a forlorn plaque alone speaks to its poignant reality; the odd notice and passing remark appear in some of the historical literature. There is, too, a paucity of historical evidence and yet what we have is sure. Flora was here!

Windsor is, quite literally, the winter stopping-place of Flora MacDonald (1722-1790). Now it would be a bit of a romantic stretch or a satiric comment, more akin to Longfellow’s Evangeline and Haliburton’s Sam Slick, to call Windsor, the winter-castle of Flora MacDonald! And, yet, what a story it is! A story that illumines so much of the story of the Scots, and their contribution to our Maritime and Canadian identity.

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