Also view subpages:
– About Kerr Canning
– About Conrad Byers
– About David Patriquin
and the first post: Welcome to Parrsboro Shore Days
About this website
It’s about days gone by on the Parrsboro shore, with a focus on the industrial technologies of those days. The website includes descriptive materials based on my experiences growing up in the Parrsboro area in the 1940s and ’50s in a family involved with seafaring, ship building, lumbering; and historic research material gathered since the early 1970s from private collections, archival holdings, interviews with older residents living on the East Coast of Canada, and from visits to Europe’s historic water and wind powered mills. As well, in more recent years I have conducted my own observations on the occurrence of remnant materials associated building of dykes and water- and wind-powered mills in the coastal lands in days gone by.
There are many materials I hope to post here, and it will take some time to make a significant dent in them. Some have been accumulated for various purposes on David P’s versicolor.ca webspace at versicolor.ca/kerr; most of those will eventually find their way onto this website but in the meantime, I may cite some of those materials.
The website is dedicated to my life long friend who passed too early, Conrad Byers.
David Patriquin has helped me compile materials on the web, and most recently, to create this website. As well we share common interests in saltmarshes and dykelands and forests and forestry, and now also, the Parrsboro Shore.
– Kerr Canning
We Are in Mi’kma’ki
This website is about settler days on the Parrsboro shore. We are very aware and fully acknowledge that the Parrsboro shore is located in the traditional land of the Mi’kmaw Nation; further that this land is covered by the “Treaties of Peace and Friendship” which Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik peoples first signed with the British Crown in 1725; and that the treaties did not deal with surrender of lands and resources but in fact, recognized Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik title and established the rules for what was to be an ongoing relationship.
Like so many of our generation in the settler lineage, we grew up in a society that was largely ignorant of or chose not to recognize these facts and of the impacts of settler colonization on the indigenous peoples.
We are still in the process of educating ourselves about the Mi’kmaq peoples and lands, past and present, and we want to actively participate in the process of reconciliation between settlers and indigenous peoples in Canada.
– Kerr Canning & David Patriquin
Hosting & Archiving of the website
This website is hosted by Montreal-based funio.com under versicolor.ca, a domain and webspace managed by David Patriquin since 2003. The address is parrsboroshoredays.ca (domain name taken out on Mar 21, 2021). The website is archived periodically on the Internet Archive.