Aulac, New Brunswick - History

History

Aulac became strategically important for French military forces during the 18th century after ceding what is now peninsular Nova Scotia to Britain in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht; the words describing the boundary of Acadia (then including all of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Cape Breton Island, Prince Edward Island, the Gaspé Peninsula, Anticosti Island and part of eastern Maine) were sufficiently vague as to permit France to establish the Missaguash River as the boundary between Britain's new colony and New France. During Father Le Loutre's War, British military forces constructed a log stockade on the Fort Lawrence Ridge, 3 km to the south of Aulac, naming their facility Fort Lawrence, which was promptly answered by the French construction of Fort Beauséjour at the western end of the Aulac Ridge, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

After falling to Britain during the Seven Years' War, the Aulac area became part of the Tantramar farming district in the township of Sackville. The Intercolonial Railway constructed its mainline connecting Moncton, New Brunswick with Truro, Nova Scotia in 1872, with the railway line curving around the ridge below the fort.

In the 20th century, roads across the marshes passed up and over the Aulac Ridge, as did a road running the length of the ridge toward Port Elgin. These roads were upgraded in the 1960s as part of the Trans-Canada Highway project, with the Moncton-Amherst, Nova Scotia section being numbered Highway 2 and the Aulac-Port Elgin (and thence Cape Tormentine) section being numbered Highway 16.

Read more about this topic:  Aulac, New Brunswick

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    If you look at history you’ll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.
    Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)

    Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?
    Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)