This column is a repeat from one on the paper's website, but I want to see why the HTML link failed there. Trying it again here.
When I started at the Courier in 1994, one of the first things I did was discover where I could find old copies of the newspaper. The Courier has been published since the mid-1870s, but it is the last five or six decades that I was interested in especially.
The Through the Pages column has told me a great deal about the community—its people and events—that I couldn’t have found as readily elsewhere.
For example, the fire that destroyed Weymouth Industries Ltd. and the efforts to encourage it rebirth are a story that is coming to life again.
The other day, Ben Prince stopped me in Tim Horton’s to say people were ribbing him about the dry cleaning business he was newly involved with 50 years ago. If he looks this week, he’ll see his name as a goal scorer in a game against Clementsport a few years back as well.
Through the Pages as much as possible is a names column, and I try to include all I can, knowing that many people from 35, 50 or 60 years are still living here in town, and others will be remembered.
There’s a lot of news that seems familiar, too. Old problems get that way by hanging around. This week’s column, which I’ll post very soon, mentions that people at Joggin Bridge and Smith’s Cove wanted a safer turnoff from Hwy. 101, and there was even a suggestion of an overpass. That was 35 years ago—and the overpass has got the over part completed, even if the turnoff element is still lacking.
One thing that caught my eye was the decision by local communities 50 years ago to sell the power generating station on the Sissiboo. The dam and the generating equipment was the property of the municipally owned Digby County Power Board. The quarter-million dollar sale to Nova Scotia Power Commission spelled the end of a locally owned power board, but that was inevitable because the demand for electricity was growing beyond the capacity of the local board, which had been buying extra power from NSP.
We forget just how little electricity was needed before 1958; even television was still new for most people in the area, and clothes hung on lines to take advantage of solar and wind power.
Karla Kelly sent me this photo from the Sissiboo dam earlier today. The facility still generates power, but it also produces a vantage point for some great images of winter. It’s nice, too, to have a little back story on the dam and the old copies of the Courier, available at the library on microfiche, are a great source of local history.
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