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| 2369 Landscape of Grand Pré - Statue of Longfellow's Evangeline and memorial church |
Situated in the southern Minas Basin of Nova Scotia, the Grand-Pré marshland and archaeological sites constitute a cultural landscape bearing testimony to the development of agricultural farmland using dykes and the aboiteau wooden sluice system, started by the Acadians in the 17th century and further developed and maintained by the Planters and present-day inhabitants. The landscape is an exceptional example of the adaptation of the first European settlers to the conditions of the North American Atlantic coast.
The cultural landscape encompasses a large expanse of polder farmland and archaeological elements of the towns of Grand Pré and Hortonville, which were built by the Acadians and their successors. The site - marked by one of the most extreme tidal ranges in the world, averaging 11.6 m - is also inscribed as a memorial to Acadian way of life and deportation, known as the Grand Dérangement, which occurred between 1755 and 1764, during the French and Indian War, as part of the British military campaign against New France.
The Acadians were the French colonists who settled in Acadia, a colony of New France in northeastern North America that included parts of eastern Quebec, the Maritime provinces (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island), and modern-day Maine to the Kennebec River. Although today most of the Acadians and Québécois are French-speaking Canadians, Acadia was a distinctly separate colony. As a result, the Acadians and Québécois developed two distinct histories and cultures. They also developed a slightly different French language.
Grand-Pré (French for great meadow) is an area of tidal marshland, first settled about 1680 by Pierre Melanson dit La Verdure, his wife Marguerite Mius d'Entremont and their five young children who came from nearby Port-Royal, the first capital of Acadia. When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published the poem Evangeline in 1847, the story of the Deportation was told to the English-speaking world, and Grand-Pré, forgotten for almost a century, became popular for American who wanted to visit the birthplace of the poem's heroine.
About the stamps
The first stamp is part of the series Canadian Locomotives (1836-1860), issued in 1983.
The second stamp is part of the series UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Canada, designed by Lara Minja and issued on May 15, 2014:
• The Old Town Lunenburg
• The Grand Pré landscape - It's on t he postcard 2369
• The Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump
• The site of SGang Gwaay
• The Rideau Canal
The third stamp is part of the large series Heritage Artifacts, issued on April 8, 1983. The last stamps are part of the series Beneficial Insects, about which I wrote here.
References
Grand-Pré National Historic Site - Wikipedia
Landscape of Grand Pré - UNESCO official website
Sender: Jason Thomson (direct swap)
Sent from Ottawa (Ontario / Canada), on 07.08.2015
Photo: Peter McMahon
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