Most notably, Joseph Howe, a journalist and later Premier of Nova Scotia, was put on trial on a charge of criminal libel on March 2, 1835, at Province House.

[1] Led by the efforts of Joseph Howe, the Anti-Confederation Party won a resounding majority in the first election held after Nova Scotia joined the Confederation of Canada on July 1, 1867.

On October 2, 1758, the Nova Scotia House of Assembly met for the first time in a modest wooden building at the corner of Argyle and Buckingham streets in Halifax.

(A month later Nova Scotian and Prime Minister of Canada Robert Borden – whose wife Laura Bond was former president of the LCWH – used his majority to pass women's suffrage for the whole country.)

The first important trial in the court was against Richard John Uniacke Jr. for killing William Bowie in the last lethal duel in Nova Scotia (1819).

[1] On March 2, 1835, newspaper editor Joseph Howe defended himself at trial in the present-day library for seditious libel by civic politicians in Nova Scotia.

(MacCarthy also made the South African War Monument in the Halifax Public Gardens and the statue to Harold Lothrop Borden.)

To the south of Province House is a statue to the Honourable Joseph Howe, created by famed Quebec sculptor Louis-Philippe Hébert.

There are also portraits of former prime ministers John Sparrow David Thompson by Thomas Forrestall and Sir Robert Borden by Walter H. Cox.