Street View, Truro (Image: McLeod, Markland or Nova Scotia)
Before I leave my grandmother Velma’s high school years behind as she enters Dalhousie University in the fall of 1915, I’ll share a few details about the town of Truro, where the high school she attended, Colchester County Academy, was located. My source for these details is Markland Or Nova Scotia: Its History, Natural Resources, and Native Beauties, by Robert Randall McLeod. Published in 1903, Markland Or Nova Scotia is the work of another of those obscure nineteenth-century historians in whose prose I take such delight.
Truro was about thirty-four miles from the Moore farm in Economy Point, so it was necessary for Velma to stay with her father’s sister, Addie Moore, when school was in session, returning to the farm in the summer.
When Velma entered high school in 1910, living in town would have been quite different from living on the farm. As McLeod’s history tells us:
Streets, dwellings, and stores are lighted by electricity. There are eleven churches and two superior hotels.1
. . . .
Quite a number of manufactories are in successful operation. There is the Truro Foundry Company, the Truro Knitting Mills Company, the Truro Condensed Milk and Creamery Company.
This town is also a railway center of considerable importance, being on the Intercolonial Line, also the point of departure for Pictou and all points in Cape Breton. Recently, the Hants Central Railway has been opened to Truro, and it will doubtless add not a little to the business importance of the place.2
As for Colchester County Academy itself, “[it] is a credit to the town, and its equipments are of a high order. . . . The academy has a good laboratory and is well-equipped with apparatus for scientific work.”3 Velma was well-served by the academy’s laboratory and faculty, as they provided her with the foundation needed to later pursue a university degree in biology. Opportunities for cultural experiences would also have been available to her in Truro: “A Conservatory of Music is among the later institutions of the town, and is reported to be in a flourishing condition.”4
Architect’s Rendering of Colchester County Academy, 1902 (Image: Annual Report of the Superintendent of Education of the Public Schools of Nova Scotia, 1902)
Another of Truro’s attractions was Victoria Park, with which McLeod was obviously very taken:
I have before me an elaborate description wherein the writer can hardly keep his feet for the tendency to take flight. Here too at my hand are half-tone views of rustic summer loveliness as they were caught by the camera, and they fill me with “longings for spring.” Here are driveways following cycloidal sweeps of a curve system that has delved under the sheltering hillside, where it frets the roots of ancient trees, and gets itself tented under their friendly branches.
It is very evident that the spell of the place is on me also, and to stop while I can is prudent.5
Image: McLeod, Markland or Nova Scotia
Image: McLeod, Markland or Nova Scotia
Before I return McLeod’s virtual dusty tome to its proper place in the Google Books stacks, I must give him credit for the following digression on his way to discussing the founding fathers of the town–which echoes the genealogist’s lament:
Alas that the mothers are so often overlooked in the records of people, and often in the written lives of illustrious sons. John Stuart Mill wrote his life and never once mentioned his mother, who was a worthy woman, and did more for him than his father, whom he never tires of admiring.6
Image: McLeod, Markland or Nova Scotia
1Robert Randall McLeod, Markland or Nova Scotia: Its History, Natural Resources and Native Beauties (Toronto: Markland Publishing Company, 1903), 326.
2McLeod, Markland or Nova, 327.
3McLeod, Markland or Nova, 327.
4McLeod, Markland or Nova, 326.
5McLeod, Markland or Nova, 326.
6McLeod, Markland or Nova, 327.
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