Looking back at the year – Part 1

At the stroke of midnight, folks at the gathering behaved in a somewhat unseemly fashion, the wife and the oldest girl no less than the others. There was shouting and hugging and the oldest girl plus the Eaton girls, who have grown into lovely young women, threw their arms around people with abandon. Then, to my astonishment, everyone pulled off their shoes and boots and ran around the outside of the house in their bare feet, though the snow was to the knees. Not wishing to appear old-fashioned, I hobbled along, screeching at the cold.

We arrived home in the small hours, after the horse struggled through the drifts. In the morning, the wife was late getting to the cows, and while it wasn't as warm after she got up, I permitted myself extra time in bed to think about the whole year, and how it had progressed. I do recall, with the aid of my journal, that at the beginning of the year they had to rebuild the tail race bridge by the upper pulp mill on the Mersey, over which the Liverpool and Milton railway train crosses, as it was determined to be unsafe. For a time, the train only ran as far as the new paper mill.

I don't know if you remember the great Saxby Gale of about forty years ago, when, in 1869, an October hurricane hit Maine, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. It destroyed dykes and train tracks and caused devastation along the South Shore. On the first Saturday of February, we had the worst storm since then. There were gale force winds, driving snow, drenching rain, and hailstones like gravel. In Sandy Cove, Shelburne County, Captain Thorburne's schooner Etta Vaughn went ashore. It was loaded with general cargo, with no insurance.

The mail steamer Grampian, due to leave Halifax for Liverpool at the height of the storm, put by and didn't arrive here until later that week. The weather was pretty hard on Michael Davis, of White Point, who bought a pig in Liverpool the day of the storm. He headed for home into the teeth of the inclemency and somehow lost the pig, but it turned out well, as Robert West discovered a bag on the ground with something moving in it, and it was the lost pig.

People were pretty excited about the automobile this year. There were none in Queens County as yet, but a garage has been opened in Halifax. Towns larger than Liverpool already have two or three automobiles, and legislation has been passed to ensure the safety of people travelling on foot or driving teams. The House of Assembly plans to make it possible for towns, cities and villages to pass laws prohibiting the use of motor vehicles on certain days of the week.

In March, A.W. Hendry and Sons' new tern schooner Rossignol made a passage from Liverpool to Trinidad in a record thirteen days. While in Trinidad, she loaded 700,000 coconuts for Philadelphia and made the run back there in twelve days. Buyers said that had never happened before and were delighted with the condition of the coconuts.

The next month, another of the Hendry schooners was not so lucky. The Mersey arrived in Yarmouth with 389 tons of hard coal, but she was in poor condition. Due to rough weather, her jib boom, spanker boom and fore topmast were broken off. Poor weather began upon her leaving Philadelphia and continued for most of the trip, leaving officers and crew exhausted.

The first fatal railway accident in Caledonia occurred in May, when young Henry Taylor, 21, was killed while uncoupling the engine from the train, which had two flat cars, two box cars and a passenger coach. Taylor, from Mount Uniacke, fell under the wheels of the first flat car. The whole town was shocked and the conductor, engineer, fireman and baggage master of the line were heartbroken over the loss of the popular Taylor, whose body was taken to Byron Kempton's hotel.

A new little church was opened in May in Bang's Falls, a gift of Mr. John Y. Payzant, of Halifax.

The first half of the year ended in June, with the Liverpool Town Council adopting an odd resolution banning the slaughter of cattle within the limits of the town, within twenty-five yards of a privy. Finally, in June, word came from Ottawa that only twelve of the eighteen counties in Nova Scotia were enforcing the Canada Temperance Act. I will tell you about the rest of the year next week.

Thomas W. L. Sheppard, Esq., can be contacted at the old Benjamin Annis place, Hibernia.