Digging into the past

This has led to Historic Bridgewater, part of Nimbus Publishing’s Images of our Past series. The book release was held Oct. 2 at R & C Sagors Bookstore in Bridgewater.

Sheppard, who has written a weekly column for The Queens County Advance since 1977, says he started writing community histories at the request of Nimbus Publishing. The result was Historic Queens County and Historic Wolfville, Grand Pre and Countryside. The former teacher and principal at North Queens Schools also co-authored Keji: A Guide.

Sheppard says he finds the research process enjoyable because he uses photographs as a “springboard” to tell a good story. “I like tracing a story back to its beginnings to see how and why it happened. When I taught Canadian history I always thought that the best way to do it was to take a situation occurring in the present and figure out what happened in the past to create the situation today. That’s the great thing about history – when you understand it, you can understand why the world is like it is.”

In fact, he enjoys the process in general, including “digging” through old newspapers, books and diaries and talking with people about their personal histories.

He adds, “The photographs are really fascinating. It is fun to do detective work on old pictures, to identify the people in them, to determine when they were taken, to see what parts of a story they can provide.”

His efforts also take him to museums, the Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management in Halifax, to area photographic collections and snapshot albums as well as university archives.

He says the Bridgewater book, about three years in the making, was fun to do “because there is so much more to the town than meets the eye. Once you scratch the surface you find interesting historical characters and lovely old homes. It’s no secret why Bridgewater has become a commercially successful town, as there was an amazing entrepreneurial spirit in the town from the very beginning.”

He also showed many examples of connections between Queens Co. and the Town of Bridgewater. This includes the Davison lumber empire, – E.D. Davison started in Mill Village – a hockey rivalry between Liverpool and Bridgewater, and North Queens’ orientation towards Bridgewater, helped greatly by the former railway connection between Caledonia and Bridgewater.

Sheppard grew up in Wolfville, graduated from Acadia University, Carleton University and University of Toronto, majoring in political science and international studies. He worked at the Chronicle Herald, and taught at Acadia before heading into the public school system. He is married to Sheila. They have two children, Anne-Marie and Jonathan. They moved to North Queens in 1972 after visiting the area. He is now involved with a large number of community groups.