Scotch Village is an unincorporated community on the Kennetcook River in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, located in the Municipality of West Hants.
Mi’kmaq and their ancestors have been in the Bay of Fundy area for over 10,000 years, long before Egyptians built pyramids or European agriculture began.
The treaties recognized Mi’kmaq title and established rules for an ongoing relationship between nations; they did not surrender or cede lands.
A census of 1763 by Isaac Deschamps stated that the following Mi’kmaq men plus 19 unnamed women and 41 children hunted along the Kennetcook River: Joseph Nocoot— Captain, Charles Nocoot, Barth.
The treaties recognized Mi’kmaq title and established rules for an ongoing relationship between nations; they did not surrender or cede lands.
A later census listed none, although Mi’kmaq had a summer encampment along Station Road around a hundred years ago, where they made and sold baskets.
[8] In October 1755 during the Expulsion or Grand Dérangement, about one thousand Acadians from this area were deported from Pisiquid (Windsor) on four ships under devastating conditions, arriving destitute with no belongings.
[9] The Acadians were permitted to re-establish in seven relatively isolated regions of the province after the Deportation and consequent Migration years ended and The Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763.
After the expulsion of Acadians created a farming crisis, Governor Charles Lawrence offered “free” land, often still occupied by Mi’kmaq, to Protestants willing to move to Nova Scotia.
[12] Its lacked sufficient land to support its growing population and many farming families took up Governor Lawrence's offer, with the understanding that they could maintain religious freedom and elected representation.
[14] The shipbuilding and related trade in the Avon River and Scotch Village areas was connected to the slave-based economy of North America and the Caribbean.
Nova Scotia vessels brought dried fish and timber to Caribbean slave-based plantations and traded these for sugar, rum, and molasses, which ultimately were used to purchase more slaves in the trans-Atlantic slave-trade.
This is a part of Nova Scotia's history that is seldom shared yet warrants greater awareness, especially as we strive to learn about and overcome today's legacy of slavery and the slave trade.
In the 1780s, White Loyalists brought 1,500 enslaved Africans to Nova Scotia, including to Newport, Falmouth, Summerville, Windsor, Rawdon, and Douglas (Kennetcook and Stanley) to work on farms, orchards, in construction, in domestic servitude, etc.
[16][17] Before slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834, African-Nova Scotians contributed skills, knowledge, and labour under dreadful conditions that enriched “owners” and communities.
Despite centuries of discrimination and hardship, people of African descent from Hants County have contributed immensely to the economy and culture of Nova Scotia.
Today this rural community of farm and woodland, pasture and reclaimed marshland is populated primarily by descendants of the Planters and more recent arrivals.