Twentieth-Century Memory of Settlement

In 1604-5, there were two significant efforts to establish French settlements in what would become Acadie. Under the command of Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons, a settlement was established on Île Ste-Croix, on today's border between New Brunswick and Maine, and when that colony failed after a single winter, it was transported to Port-Royal, near today's Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. During the twentieth century, there were various efforts to mark the anniversaries of Dugua's settlements.

List of Media

  1. Sites of French Settlement
    This map indicates where the Dugua expedition of 1604-5 established settlements whose anniversaries were marked regularly during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
  2. Annapolis Royal 1904
    1904 marked the tercentenary of the arrival of the Dugua expedition that resulted in the establishment of the settlement on Île Ste-Croix. Even though Port-Royal was not established until 1605, commemorative events were staged by the English-speakers at Annapolis Royal (near that site of memory).
  3. Saint John 1904
    In 1904, there were events staged in both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to mark the tercentenary of the Dugua expedition of 1604 that resulted in the settlement on Île Ste-Croix. The expedition passed by the site where Saint John would be established, and Champlain named the St John River, after John the Baptist on his feast day. To mark that event, there was an elaborate re-enactment of the landing in 1904 that was in the spirit of such lavish events of the time.
  4. Île Ste-Croix
    While the Dugua expedition spent the winter of 1604-5 on Île Ste-Croix, after it departed the island largely remained uninhabited and forgotten. One of the only markers to indicate that a settlement was here is a plaque on a boulder that was installed in 1904 during the celebration of the tercentenary of Dugua's colony.
  5. Port-Royal National Historic Site
    In the late 1930s, the federal began to reconstruct the habitation from the Port-Royal settlement of 1605. While Île Ste-Croix was largely forgotten, the Port-Royal habitation became a site of memory connected with the Dugua expedition of 1604-5