Proud and practical, generations of Lunenburgers have preserved the traditions and architecture of this Nova Scotian Port
By Harry Thurston
INSIDE THE FOUNDRY IT IS ALWAYS NIGHTTIME. All light is swallowed by layers of soot that coat the windows and walls, which look unwashed since the Lunenburg Foundry opened in 1891. But the gloomy innards glow with a fierce dawn light when workers lift the crucible of molten metal from the furnace's inferno. The vessel tips and a golden stream of liquid manganese flows into a mould for a propeller bushing. "It's a mixture of Dickens and Dante," says foundry president Edward Kinley, looking proudly around the well-worn but productive precincts in Lunenburg, N.S.
We venture up a dark, creaky wooden staircase and emerge in the pattern room, where skilled craftsmen turn out wooden patterns for a host of objects to be cast in metal. "We're incredible pack rats," says Kinley, looking around at layer after layer of wooden patterns, their elegant curves suggesting all manner of nautical uses. "Every pattern that was on the Bluenose is in here. I think its a treasure."
The same might be said of Lunenburg itself. More than any other place in my home province, it is a repository of our marine history. The town symbolizes the extraordinary success that Nova Scotians have had in their affairs of the sea. But Lunenburg is now grappling with an issue that threatens to reshape its very character. The question is whether this civic icon of hard work and resilience can resist the economic forces that may recast it into a genteel resort for "summer people."
Throughout their history, Lunenburgers have displayed what Mayor Laurence Mawhinllcy calls the "ingenuity of coastal people." The original settlers were farming stock from the German palatinate, the Montbéliard region of France, and Switzerland. They were brought by the British, under George II, to expand the empires influence into territory formerly held by its New World rival, France. Lunenburg became the first British colonial settlement in Nova Scotia outside Halifax. Set ashore on the rock-strewn coast in 1753, these "foreign Protestants" quickly set about transforming the unpromising drumlins of Lunenburg County into cabbage fields and -- with legerdemain, salt and water -- the cabbage into justly famous sauerkraut.
When, a half-century later, they turned to the sea, they performed another kind of innovative magic, by constructing the first Grand Banks schooner fleet. By the early 20th century, the harbour had berthed 150 blackhulled schooners which, to many modern-day sailors, are still the pinnacle of sailing genius. Among the vessels eventually launched down Lunenburg's slips was Canada's most famous tall ship, Bluenose, which never lost a series to the best of its New England rivals in the International Fishermen's races. And from the fortunes of this elegant fleet rose one of the world's largest fishing companies, National Sea Products.
ASHORE, the shipwright-carpenters of Lunenburg helped erect an imposing townscape that still impresses and charms visitors. "Old Town" Lunenburg is a giddy concentration of Victorian gingerbread and classic Georgian elegance, gothic churches and schools, with more than a dollop of local architectural flavour. There is so much heritage architecture packed, cheek by jowl, into such a small space, that the 400 buildings and narrow streets of Old Town were declared a National Historic District in 1991 by Heritage Canada. It remains today, as one historian called it, "a living lesson in history."
But "living" implies change. On a recent trip to Lunenburg I discovered yet another sea change in this town of 3,014 souls on Nova Scotia's rocky South Shore. In summer, the waterfront streets and alleys are transformed into a promenade for brightly clad visitors. Less ephemeral is the tide of seasonal residents from the United States, Europe and across Canada who have been bidding up the price of Lunenburg Country's pristine coastal properties, so much so that many are too expensive for the children of founding families. With the collapse of the groundfish stocks, even the ocean itself, which has always sustained Lunenburgers, seems to have turned on this coastal people.
"Its become a postcard town," mourns fisherman Tom Pittman, the grandson of Thomas Joseph Pittman, a legendary Newfoundlander who pioneered fish dragging for National Sea Products. "There are a few token boats for the camera people, but it's losing its edge as a vibrant working town. It s going to become another four-or-five-months-of-the-year operation, if it keeps going the way it is. And to me that's not good." Pitman may be correct in the long term, but the spirit of tenacity is still alive.
A striking example of Lunenburg's ability to adapt and endure is the recent history of National Sea Products. Near where the first settlers landed, at Battery Point, stands the continent's largest fish processing plant. Moored alongside was Atlantic Canada's largest and most formidable flotilla of offshore trawlers, until the recent groundfish crisis forced NSP to sell many vessels.
Compared to other fishing centres, Lunenburg has had a relatively safe passage through the recent troubled times -- but don't tell that to the many fishermen and plant workers who have been laid off. One reason is the leadership of home-town boy Henry Demone. The son of a former NSP captain of the fleet, he rose rapidly through corporate ranks to assume the position of president in 1989, at age 35. He inherited a $240-million debt, but came armed with "a work ethic handed down from generation to generation," he says, and an outward-looking philosophy.
Displaying typical Lunenburg frugality, he relocated the company's head offices from high-priced towers in downtown Halifax to more modest digs in the fish plant itself. Although the fleet now catches only five percent of the plant's processing capacity, NSP still employs nearly 1,000 people in Lunenburg relying on the scallop harvest, fish caught by Russian and Norwegian trawlers and a value-added product line. The Lunenburg plant produces all NSP's battered-fish products for Canada.
For generations, of course, what Lunenburg has been all about is fishing. The scallop fleet still berths on the waterfront at the foot of the town, and its 10 day shuttles between port and Georges Bank lend Lunenburg the metred pace of life dependent on the commerce of the sea. These rhythms still evoke deep emotions in native Lunenburgers like Jill Smith, a sailmaker: "Hearing the boat-horns and watching the ships come in makes me cry, so I'm tied into the schedules of the sea." However, true to Pittman's words, much of the hustle-and-bustle of the waterfront today has to do with the pulse of tourism.
Every summer day, the waterfront parking lot is full to overflowing with vehicles from across the continent. Most visitors to Lunenburg pass through the doors of the adjacent bright red chandlery, home of the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic. Initiated in 1967 by the community as its centennial project, it now hosts 90,000 visitors annually. They come to see the live fish in the aquarium and the displays on the fishers' life, to go aboard the last salt bank schooner, the Theresa F. Connor, and to walk the deck of the Bluenose II. Even with her mooring lines secure and her sails furled, one can sense her impatient energy underfoot, her almost animal will to ride the seas like her famous namesake.
As much an attraction as the waterfront is Old Town, which is being considered for World Heritage Site designation by UNESCO. Laid out on the 18th-century model of a British town, its gridiron of streets and blocks surrounds a central public space, like a geometrically regular quilt pattern. Two-thirds of the 400 buildings in Old Town date from the 19th century. "The richer you were, the taller the house and the more decoration," observes Deborah Croft, a full-time tourist guide.
This is a place built to endure, in part because many of the builders were also shipwrights accustomed to building against the sea's ferocity. Croft points out the many examples of the shipwrights craft in the house-building techniques. Structurally, "knees," such as one finds in a ship's hull, are often substituted for the traditional mortise and tenon joint. Externally, houses are sheathed in clapboard -- clinker-built like shiplap. The decorative elements are distinctly nautical: knees become fancy brackets; the wave-like scrollwork that embellished ships' nameboards finds its shore-bound expression in Victorian gingerbread. Atop some homes is an exclusive maritime element, the widow's walk, a cupola where a captain's wife kept anxious watch on the comings and goings of her husband's schooner.
"Little Dutch toys," one writer called these brightly coloured, whimsically decorated dwellings. The most fanciful and distinctive feature is the "Lunenburg bump," oversized dormers that project from the second storeys of many houses, creating the appearance of a prosperous, pot-bellied burgher. Sometimes the bumps are topped with the confection of a multi-tiered, bell-shaped roof; some extend to street level as ornate entrances. They resemble the Oriel windows of late Gothic and Tudor architecture and, some claim, have a mediaeval quality about them.
In almost every Nova Scotia town, I have seen fine examples of heritage homes, and on occasion a whole street or block of them. But in Lunenburg the illusion endures, block after block. The seamless concentration of houses casts an unbroken spell on many who wander the streets of Old Town. Preserved without restrictive building codes -- a deep-seated German frugality and practicality making bylaws unnecessary -- development happened on the outskirts, in "New Town."
"In that conservatism there's a reason why the architecture didn't change," says historian Richard Field. Even the proliferation of bumps reflects a conservative tradition of imitation rather than innovation, Field maintains.
Field lives in one of Lunenburg's most venerable homes, the Benjamin Knaut House, built in 1793. It is in some ways an object lesson in understanding Lunenburg society: English on the outside, German on the inside. From the street, it has the classic lines of a Georgian home. But inside, Field directed my attention to the matchstickreeded pattern on the hallway arches -- a distinctively Germanic flourish. Other such Germanic decorative motifs as compass stars, whorls, hearts and diamonds can be found throughout Lunenburg County on everything from 18th-century mantel pieces to contemporary barn doors.
Field is himself of "Pennsylvanian Dutch" -- that is, Deutsch or German -- origin, and therefore feels a special affinity for the "Lunenburg Dutch," as they have long been known in Nova Scotia. Lunenburg is now his spiritual home, even though to native Lunenburgers he will always be an outsider. He likes the fact that there are five sauerkraut factories within an eight-kilometre radius of the town. As a Lutheran, he appreciates living in a community that boasts the oldest Lutheran congregation in Canada. Above all, Field admires his neighbours independence and self-respect.
"This is a real community. There's a lot of pride in their traditions. The pride in their heritage is reflected directly in how the architecture of the town, the history of the fishery, and the history of the county itself have been maintained. These people know where they came from. You have this fragment of German-European culture in this incredibly pervasive English environment," Field says. "They survived by drawing into their religion, their food-ways, their clothing and their language."
Some Lunenburgers spoke German until the 1930s, and Germanic influences still flourished in the decorative arts until the outbreak of World War II. At that point, many Lunenburgers deliberately subverted their German traditions, for fear their neighbours might misinterpret their loyalties. German bibles and prayer books were burned, as were items such as hooked rugs bearing the swastika, an ancient symbol appropriated by the Nazis. Today, the Germanic influence is couched in the many Anglicized German names: Corkum, Gaetz, Risser, Whynot, Slauenwhite and Zwicker. And, in talking with older Lunenburgers, one can hear, if not always decipher, the South Shore accent, a kind of conversational music both clipped and lilting that planes off the endings of words and sometimes leaves the ear bereft of consonants. And the "Germanness" of the place can be savoured in the local cuisine, featuring spicy Lunenburg sausage and pungent sauerkraut.
The strong bonds, originally born of ethnic isolation, have been nurtured through generations and still hold the community together today. "One of the strengths of Lunenburg is that people compete with each other, but they also work with each other at the same time," Kinley had told me, as we walked under the imposing hull of an 800-tonne trawler that Lunenburg Foundry was repairing on the marine railway that serves several shipbuilding firms. On a big job, each will take a piece of die action for which it is best suited. "In Lunenburg everybody likes to work together to keep it going," says Kinley.
Family and business do seem to go together in Lunenburg. Thomas Walters & Son, marine and general blacksmiths, is run by 70-year-old Vernon Walters. His father forged the fittings for the original Bluenose and Walter himself hand-fashioned the ironwork for the Bluenose II and the replica of the H.M.C.S. Bounty. Like his father before him, Arthur Dauphinee, of A. Dauphinee & Sons, turns out gleaming wooden blocks for yachters up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Similarly, marine industries like Snyder's Shipyard and the Lunenburg Foundry are second and third-generation operations respectively. And, in the fishing industry, people speak of "the old guard" in Lunenburg. The torch is now being passed to a new generation like Demone. As well, descendants of the founders of Lunenburg's two scallop companies, Adams & Knickles and Scotia Trawler, have taken the rudder of command.
Still, there is no denying that the face of Lunenburg is changing. Increasingly people are coming simply to live by the sea where they can enjoy the unsullied coastal environment and small-town lifestyle. Some commute an hour to Halifax, but many are offshore buyers who live in the area seasonally. Among them are French, Germans, Swiss and Austrians -- a veritable second wave of European immigrants, but this time they are rich and mobile.
This concerns locals like Garry Corkum, whose family has been in Faltzen South -- a hamlet near Lunenburg -- for 150 years. He worries that his own children will never be able to return to the county because of escalating real estate prices. "Foreign people are coming in here to buy property. The Germans that are coming to this area have plenty of money, so they employ carpenters and contractors, which is good. But the thing wrong with it, if one of my kids wants to buy a piece of property to build a house, they can't afford it."
Corkum, who speaks in a broad Lunenburg accent, is proud of his Lunenburg County heritage and takes pains to point out the county's part in making Lunenburg what it is today. "Not just the town of Lunenburg, the surroundings of Lunenburg made and created the tourist industry. For instance, Feitzen South, Black Rock, Stonehurst, Blue Rocks, Rose Bay is where you tourists go, and then they go back and tell their friends, 'I was in Lunenburg.' It's the surrounding district that helped the tourist industry get to where it is today, because the people living in the small communities are very friendly, talkative, and the tourist enjoys getting out and talking to the old fishermen instead of the clerk in Lunenburg." Corkum's own affability gave weight to his view.
Corkum went to work at National Sea Products at age 16, when his father was lost at sea while lobster fishing. He worked there for 33 years, rising to the position of supervisor of shipping and freezing. Then, seven years ago, when groundfish quotas began their precipitous decline, he was unceremoniously handed a pink slip. Now he does a little lobster fishing from a seven-metre open boat, and picks up some part-time work at a nearby fish plant in Riverport to qualify for unemployment insurance.
"Lot of my friends, the same thing happened to them," Corkum told me. "They just plain got laid off. We're not living the way we were used to living. We were used to making a comfortable living. And now it's been cut back, and I'm thankful that my kids are grown up and I don't have to worry about feeding them, because what I make in a year just couldn't do it."
Directly across Lunenburg Bay from Feltzen South lies the fishing hamlet of Blue Rocks. Its appeal is enduring, with its tiny white houses clinging like barnacles to the winding coastal road, and its weathered stages precariously perched on the mussel-blue rocks that give the place its name.
Such an elemental seascape attracts artists like marine painter Graham "Buz" Baker, who moved from nearby Mahone Bay to Lunenburg six years ago. "I came down here for a particular reason," he says. "The thing I liked about Lunenburg was that it was a real live working town, whereas Mahone Bay or Chester are retirement or tourist towns." Baker believes Lunenburg can resist the slide into becoming a recreational community. He argues that the Lunenburg foundry, the shipyards, even the museum, maintain a vital connection to the sea. If that historical relationship were severed, Baker maintains, his neighbours would rise to the occasion.
"History may repeat itself," he says. "When they left Germany they were all farmers, and they came here and they couldn't farm. They turned to the sea, they built a fleet, and out of this fleet, they built a work of art. The Bluenose was actually a work of art...a utilitarian thing that is beautiful in all respects. Now if the sea has collapsed, they'll find other ways because they're creative people."
Lunenburg preserves things not merely because they are beautiful but because they continue to be functional. In the pattern room of the Lunenburg Foundry, Edward Kinley flips a switch to turn on the power. An overhead array of ancient belts and pulleys creaks into motion, stirring smells of sawdust and coal. The technology is generations away from the computers in the foundry office. "Do you modernize it?" Kinley says, as if testing his own resolve. "I couldn't in my heart ever tear this stuff apart. I'd be doing a disservice to my community."
