ANNAPOLIS ROYAL, N.S. – A search for the birthplace of grain farming in
Canada would not lead to a patch of fertile ground on the Prairies or
even to Quebec, where Louis Hébert is celebrated as Canada’s first
farmer.
Instead, the trail would lead here, to this historic coastline on the
northern edge of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley.
In 1604, a small group of Frenchmen arrived to create a settlement on
the coast of Nova Scotia. They planted wheat and possibly corn to feed
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themselves.
By 1607, they had enough production to build what is considered North
America’s first water-powered gristmill.
Samuel de Champlain, a geographer on the expedition and later the
founder of New France, described visiting grain fields near the colony.
“This visit was productive of great pleasure to them as the growth of
the grain since the period of being sown pointed to a future, not far
distant, when they may be relieved from the necessity of seeking their
food supplies from the motherland,” he wrote.
Historian W.A. Calmek wrote in 1897 that it was the birth of an
industry that later would be a mainstay in Canada and the Prairies.
“This was the initial step made in farming in North America.”
At Acadia University in the heart of the Annapolis Valley, historian
Barry Moody is cautious about the claim of “the first.”
The head of the university’s history and classics department said there
is no solid evidence about whether the Spanish in Florida or
aboriginals who populated Canada before the Europeans arrived grew
wheat. There was an attempt to grow grain on St. Croix Island at the
present-day New Brunswick-Maine border a year before Port Royal was
founded.
“I wouldn’t want to make too sweeping a statement about being first in
grain growing in North America, but it is clear that the colony had
extensive production because they built the gristmill, which is widely
considered the first water-powered mill in North America,” Moody said.
“They found hand grinding wheat too difficult and time consuming.”
In modern-day Annapolis Royal, an affluent and trendy tourist location
a two-hour drive west of Halifax, the main evidence of this early foray
into grain growing is a plaque on the original site of the gristmill
and a larger-than-life replica of the mill down the road.
But a leader in Nova Scotia’s small grain industry said it can trace
its roots to that first small colony struggling to survive almost 400
years ago.
“I think that history is not promoted here, but it is recognized and
mention is made in agricultural schools,” said Findlay McCrea, chief
executive officer of grain buyer and broker East Coast Commodities of
Kentville, N.S.
“The roots of this industry go far back and I think it is fair to say
the roots of the entire Canadian grain industry are right here.”
It is ironic, because Nova Scotia now qualifies as one of Canada’s
smallest grain-producing provinces, growing no more than 45,000 or
50,000 tonnes of grain a year.
McCrea said most production is hard winter wheat.
“Right now, the grain industry is nothing to really get excited about
here, but it does have history.”
Most of the wheat purchased by Dover Mills in Halifax, the last major
mill in Atlantic Canada, is imported from outside Nova Scotia.
“In many places here, grain is just not the most appropriate crop.”
More than 395 years ago, it was the difference between survival and
starvation in the first European settlement in Nova Scotia. Corn, then
a generic term for grain, was to be celebrated and in January 1607, it
formed the basis for the first agricultural picnic in northern North
America.
“Weather was so fine we sported ourselves with singing and music on the
river and in the same month, we went to see the corn and did dine
merrily in the sunshine,” a colonist wrote in his diary.
