Pierre Melanson and the Acadians who joined him in Grand-Pré built dykes there to hold back the tides along the Minas Basin.

Grand-Pré became the bread basket of Acadia, soon outgrew Port-Royal, and by the mid-18th century was the largest of the numerous Acadian communities around the Bay of Fundy and the coastline of Nova Scotia (Latin for "New Scotland").

During Queen Anne's War, the Raid on Grand Pré (1704) happened and Major Benjamin Church burned the entire village.

Some were motivated not to sign for fear of losing their religion, some were afraid of repercussions from their native allies, some did not want to take up arms against the French and others were anti-British (see Military history of the Acadians).

As a result of British attempts to secure their control over the Bay of Fundy region, they were defeated by some local Acadians, Mi'kmaq and Canadiens in the Battle of Grand Pre.

During the Bay of Fundy Campaign (1755), Lieutenant Colonel John Winslow arrived in Grand-Pré with troops on August 19, 1755 and took up headquarters in the church.

When the poem, Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was published in the United States in 1847, the story of the Deportation and le Grand Dérangement, the great uprooting, was told to the English-speaking world.

[5] In 1907, John Frederic Herbin, poet, historian, and jeweller, and whose mother was Acadian, purchased the land believed to be the site of the church of Saint-Charles so that it might be protected.

Acadian history had already become a staple for tourism traffic on the Dominion Atlantic and the Grand Pre site was located beside the railway's mainline.

In 1920 the Dominion Atlantic erected a statue of Evangeline conceived by Canadian sculptor Louis-Philippe Hébert and, after his death, finished by his son Henri.

As railway tourism declined in the face of subsidized highway construction, the Dominion Atlantic sold the park to the Canadian federal government in 1957.

[8] The 1,300 hectares (3,200 acres) of polderised marshland and archaeological sites in the Grand-Pré area were recognized as an "exceptional example of the adaptation of the first European settlers to the conditions of the North American Atlantic coast" and as "a memorial to Acadian way of life and deportation".