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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
In the early nineteenth century thousands of Scots emigrated to Nova Scotia, Canada, settling there principally in Pictou and Antigonish Counties. This article considers the transformation of the domestic architecture of emigrants from the Scottish Highlands, from earth and random-rubble-walled ‘black houses’ to Classically ornamented and proportioned timber-framed houses. It demonstrates that, in contrast to the transferable traditions of Lowland Scottish settlers, virtually no element of the Scottish Highland vernacular building tradition was established in Nova Scotia, and that Scottish Highland emigrants adopted a new architecture with near total uniformity. These changes in architectural practice are described here in some detail, and then interpreted as indicators of changed social practice within the immigrant Highland community.
1 The mountainous, northern region of Scotland, known as the Highlands, is the historic home of Scotland’s Gaelic population. Scottish Gaels, or Highlanders, spoke Gaelic, and still do so in the Islands, and are closely related, both ethnically and culturally, to the Gaels in Ireland. Historically, Scottish Gaels were quite distinct from Lowland Scots in their political and economic systems, language, history, literature, music, dance and dress: tartan and the kilt are the best known, if not entirely authentic, Highlandisms.
2 Maudlin, Daniel, ‘Tradition and Change in the Age of Improvement: A Study of Argyll Tacksmen’s Houses in Morvern’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 133 (2003), pp. 359–75.Google Scholar
3 ‘Improvement’ was ‘infamous’ from the perspective of the Scottish Highlands and Scottish Gaels, but for the Lowland Scots and the English alike, it was a triumph of modernity and civilization over feudalism and perceived barbarity.
4 Devine, Tom M., ‘Landlordism and Highland Emigration’, in Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society, ed. Devine, Tom M. (Edinburgh, 1992), pp. 84–103 (p. 84).Google Scholar
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8 Clearances continued through the nineteenth century, but later emigrants from across Scotland (and indeed Britain in general) set sail for Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, rather than for Canada.
9 A tacksman was the principal tenant of a clan chief, a figure of a certain wealth, status and authority within the clan system. Within the traditional social structure of the Highland clan, which survived into the mid- or late eighteenth century, the position also involved a military role, roughly equivalent to that of a middle-ranking officer.
10 Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory: Nova Scotia and Scotland, c.1700–1900, ed. Marjory Harper and Michael E. Vance (Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1999), pp. 1–33 (p. 20).
11 Population statistics taken from Kornwolf, James D. and Kornwolf, Georgiana W., Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America (Baltimore, 2002), pp. 13–33.Google Scholar
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13 In the Scottish Highlands a glen is a narrow valley, a strath is a flat fertile area of land at the head of a loch or glen floor, a loch is a long narrow lake, and a sea loch is similar to a Norwegian fjord.
14 Settlement in the Pictou area was divided into regular land grants initially laid out by the Philadelphia Grant Company, or by the British government in the case of military veterans. These land grants, each of about 200 acres, were later subdivided by speculative grantees into lots of varying sizes.
15 National Monuments Record Service of Scotland / NG37SE.
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18 Photographic fieldwork surveys of both counties were conducted, 2002–05, using a modified form of Ronald Brunskill’s extensive recording system; see Brunskill, Ronald, Vernacular Architecture: An Illustrated Handbook, 4th edn (London, 2000)Google Scholar. This extensive recording system establishes the dominant architectural character within a survey group, through the collation and analysis of comparative survey data of identifiable attributes such as form, materials and construction. Designed to highlight regional variations in building groups, the system is also remarkably effective for demonstrating uniformity. The survey group for Pictou and Antigonish Counties was restricted to those extant buildings built between 1800 and 1850. The buildings’ dates were established by using a combination of historical published sources, such as the Illustrated Atlas of Pictou County (Philadelphia, 1879) and the County Registry of Deeds, together with oral history. Histories of farm ownership are closely tied to the building of farmhouses. It was possible to establish the probable ethnicity of farm owners: at an individual level by name origins, and sometimes by explicit reference, through the Registry of Deeds and oral histories; and at a regional level, through analysis of census records. The whole project was greatly assisted by research into ‘heritage houses’ and family histories carried out by volunteers at the Antigonish Museum and Pictou Heritage Centre in 1985 as part of a wider initiative undertaken by the Nova Scotia department of Culture, Fitness and Recreation. The identification and characterization of buildings within the survey group cannot be completely without error as many buildings have been destroyed and many more heavily altered or entirely rebuilt even within the historic period of the survey (1800–50).
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21 Pers. comm, Mary Fraser, Rosemary Maclean and Frances Dunn, Antigonish Historical Society.
22 Pictou Heritage Centre (hereafter PHC): Registry of Deeds; Jenson, Wood and Stone, pp. 17–18.
23 PHC: Registry of Deeds; Jenson, Wood and Stone, pp. 7–8; supplementary information provided by St Clair Prest, Director, Pictou Heritage Centre.
24 Information provided by David Jones, University of St Andrews.
25 Information provided by Wayde Brown, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia.
26 Mackay, Karen E., 1838 Census of Pictou County (Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1995), pp. 176–79 Google Scholar (transcribed from PANS/RG1/vol. 449/166a-166f).
27 PHC: Registry of Deeds; Jenson, Wood and Stone, pp. 13–14.
28 PANS/MFM/4693: Colonial Patriot, 18 June 1831, p. 5; Tratt, Elizabeth, ‘A Survey and Listing of Nova Scotia Newspapers, 1752–1957’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Dalhousie University, 1979), pp. 2–3.Google Scholar
29 Lowland Scottish masons were both highly trained, serving seven years of apprenticeship, and highly mobile; economic migrants worked throughout Britain — Robert Mylne and Thomas Telford being two well-known examples — and the colonies. Migrant Lowland masons were largely responsible for the many hundreds of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ‘improved’ Classical farmhouses that pepper the Scottish countryside from the Borders to the northern Highlands.
30 Mackay, , 1838 Census of Pictou County, pp. 176–79 Google Scholar; Mackey, Karen E., 1838 Census of Shelburne and Yarmouth Counties (Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2002), pp. 170–83.Google Scholar
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33 Gowan, Alan, ‘New England Architecture in Nova Scotia’, Art Quarterly, 25 (Spring 1962), pp. 24–36 (p. 30).Google Scholar
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35 Information supplied by the Chester Municipal Heritage Society.
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37 The low number of extant pattern books may suggest that the printed sources were less influential in the dissemination of architecture than were migration and the passing on of knowledge through the apprentice system (pers. comm., Jeffrey Cohen, Brynmawr College).
38 Cummings, Abbot Lowell, ‘The Availability of Architectural Books in Eighteenth-Century New England’, in American Architects and Their Books to 1848, ed. Hafertepe, Kenneth and O’Gorman, James F. (Amherst, 2001), pp. 1–16 (p. 1).Google Scholar
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41 PANS/MEM/8158: Halifax Gazette, 9 June 1753, p. 5.
42 PANS/MEM/8158: Halifax Gazette, 18 April 1752, p. 6.
43 Clive, John and Bailyn, Bernard, ‘England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 11.2 (1954), pp. 200–13 (p. 207).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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46 The history of the British Atlantic has emerged as a distinct subject with recent works devoted to a British Atlantic perspective on diverse topics from colonial legislation, chartered enterprises and cultural property to slavery, the fisheries and landscape painting, although, surprisingly perhaps, none on architecture. See Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America, ed. Robert Olwell and Alan Tully (Baltimore, 2006); The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore, 2005); The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael Braddick (New York, 2002).
47 Strangers within the Realm, pp. 1–33 (p. 1).
48 Lemon, James T., ‘Spatial Order: Households in Local Communities and Regions’, in Colonial British America, pp. 86–123 (p. 86).Google Scholar
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55 To those not familiar with the culture of traditional Highland society and the history of the suppressed Jacobite Rebellion, the Gaels’ subsequent monarchism and support of the British government in the late eighteenth century was, and still is, baffling. The Gaels were zealous monarchists. It was the House of Hanover to whom they objected, and against whom they rebelled, in support of the House of Stewart, the true line of kingship. By the late eighteenth century, when the Hanoverian ascendancy was clearly a permanent fixture, most Highlanders transferred their monarchist loyalties to the House of Hanover. This cleared the path for the successful careers of Highlands Scots throughout the British Empire in the nineteenth century (notably as pioneer farmers and trained professionals, such as soldiers, doctors, lawyers, teachers and ministers).
56 See Small, Nora Pat, Beauty and Convenience: Architecture and Order in the New Republic (Knoxville, Tennessee, 2003).Google Scholar
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61 In the 1870s, the Scots-owned firm of Dewar Bros, ran a large sawmill and furniture factory on Barney’s River, Pictou. See Mackay, 1838 Census of Pictou County (transcribed from: PANS/RG1/vol. 449/166a-166f). ‘Dewar Bros. Builders & Manufacturers, Barneys River, Pictou Co. N.S.’, illustrated in Sir John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, Illustrated Historical Atlas of Pictou County, Nova Scotia (Philadelphia, 1879).
