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3-30 FARNHAM GATE RD |
Nova Scotia Tourism Region : Halifax Metro
Description From Owner:
- French Landing: This is believed to have been the landing place and encampment of the men who were with the ill-fated, disease-stricken Duc D'Anville's fleet that arrived at Halifax in 1746.
- Fairview Cove and Birch Cove: Seven or eight thousand men were put ashore along the western side of the Basin. Camp was made along the shore of the Bedford Basin from Fairview Cove to Birch Cove.
- The land was covered with trees then, down to the water’s edge so the encampment had to be made on the beach.
- An encampment was set up at French Landing (located at the bottom of Bay View Drive on the Bedford Highway)and that is where a tent hospital was put up to shelter the sick men.
- The large tents were made of old sails. The Acadians, living high in the hills from Fairview Cove to Birch Cove in Rockingham, tried to help them by bringing previsions but many Acadian caught the fever and died.
- More than eleven hundred men died here, bringing the death total to more than three thousand since the great Armada sailed.
- At French Landing the soldiers and sailors made a road back to the hills where they buried some of their dead, (spot unknown) some skeletons,
- thought to be those of d’Anville’s men, were found when Gateway Road and Bayview Drive were constructed, many others were buried along the shore.
- Very old fragments of adult bones doubtless either belonging to the Acadian French settlers of the district before 1749 or of Duc d’Anville’s fever-stricken men of 1746, were found in 1887 by Simon D. MacDonald and Mr. M. McLearn.
- The area where they were found was on Robert Allen’s property to the southeast of Mt. St. Vincent College, between Rockingham and Fairview, close to the southwest shore of Bedford Basin.
- The foundations of old French houses could once be detected behind Allen’s place, near the abandoned road on the side of the hill.
- Grave mounds were also discovered in back of Birch Cove in shallow graves.
- Tradition says that when settlers were clearing away brush at the cove known as French Landing, they found a number of skeletons among the trees supposed to have been the remains of soldiers of the Du d’Anville ill-fated expedition.
- With permission from 'Nova Scotia Place Names' David E. Scott 2015 also from: fairviewhistoricalsociety.ca/duc-d-anvilles-french-armada/
Address of this page: http://ns.ruralroutes.com/Bridgeview