Doreen and Laura's Excellent Adventure: Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia - part 12

(sightseeing)

August 9, 2018 - August 11, 2018

As I said in the last post, we drove from Dingwall to Baddeck where we had lunch with our friends Bill and Alice. They came from Sydney after getting off the ferry from Newfoundland. After sharing some pictures and some stories they headed northeast to see the historic port of Louisbourg and we continued southwest to Merigomish to position ourselves close to Stellarton where the Nova Scotia Museum of Industry is located. As we made the turn at Antigonish for the Northumberton Coast we passed several gas stations but, for one reason or another, didn't pull in. Suddenly we were on a country road with no gas in sight but fervently hoping a station would suddenly appear before us. We were running on fumes when we finally saw a station just ahead of the turn to our campground. What a relief!

The next morning we drove to Stellarton to see the Museum. It pays tribute to the hard working and adaptable Nova Scotians by detailing how jobs have come and gone, as well as changed over the years.

Note the nod to Ross Farm which is where we learned about coopering in depth.

Love this picture of oxen pulling a large wagon load of barrels.
Notice that there is a second pair of oxen pulling another load of barrels right behind this one.

From a genealogical perspective the word laborer is sometimes used on census records as an occupation
but in my experience people who were working on farms usually recorded their occupation as "farming"
whether they owned, rented or were hired hands. On the other hand, Laura's notes that the word laborer
is frequently used on Dutch census records and could mean working in any number of areas as hired help.

I'm not sure exactly what it is that these 'laborers' are doing but it looks hard, dirty and hot!

Most women were recorded on census forms as housewife or more precisely as 'keeping house.'
If they hired someone to help they usually were recorded as 'servants.'
It isn't mentioned in the write-up but it was also the woman's job to 'put up' vegetables, fruit, etc. for the
family to eat during the winter, take care of the barnyard animals, take care of the family garden,
wash the family's clothes, etc. It was hard, hard work.

The ship building trade employed many people back when 2-5 masted ships where the norm.
Many towns along the Atlantic coast had their own ship builders but as wind turned to steam and gasoline power those businesses went by the wayside.

A couple of caulkers at work.

The blacksmith was an important person in every town. He handmade everything from nails to hinges to candle holders to horseshoes and much more. With the industrial revolution and the increase in automobiles, this job slowly dwindled to almost nothing.

It's clear that many jobs have come and gone as innovation has changed the way we live. I'm reminded of Trump promising to bring coal mining jobs back but it's a dying industry just like like coopering, blacksmithing, caulking before it.

The addition of power supplied by water made many jobs much easier.

The museum had some really fantastic hands-on samples showing how water is used to turn wheels.
For jobs like milling grain, sawing logs, tanning leather, forging iron and making wool into cloth, waterwheels
were the key to making the job easier and speeding up the process.

Another example of how things change with new technology and is where coal mining became an important job.

Example of a shop using belts and pulleys to run numerous machines on the shop floor.

This brings to mind the famous I Love Lucy episode with Lucy and Ethyl working on the chocolate assembly line.
It still makes me laugh but I doubt these women found working on the line amusing.

Probably doesn't look like anything we are familiar with today but I bet our grandparents and great-grandparents would relate to this.

This would probably be a short list of all the items made by Nova Scotians.

Not the largest tire made today but it dwarfs Laura.
The tires used on equipment in open-pit mines would make this look small.

Electricity changed everything, especially in factories.

I'm glad someone can make sense of this and knows how to build and repair it.

Electricity to rural areas took much longer but had a major affect the lives of the people living in the country.

Here's another example of how technological advancement changes the types of jobs available.
It's been going on forever!

This should take you back. OMG - these appliances look positively quaint by today's standards.

The 1930 U.S. census actually asked if families owned a radio or not. I looked up why that question was asked and found the following information on archives.gov:

"As historian Roland Marchand has argued, in the early decades of the twentieth century, American business and political leaders viewed radio as a source of cultural "uplift" for the population as well as a valuable medium for advertisement of mass-produced goods. The inclusion of a question on radio ownership reflected this new interest in the possibilities of consumer items and methods of mass communication."

I guess this was when 'consumer economy' really took off.