Barton

I will start this blog with the promised photo of the coat room with the finished, blingy, coat rack and a matching painted wooden crate. Except for flooring and trim - one room done!

I thought today I would write about my new town. That being said, it was hard to find any real details! Barton is very small and not included in Census Canada (although it is recorded as part of a dissemination area which I will talk about later.) I cannot find any unique human interest stories, or historical facts, or persons of interest pertaining to Barton, Nova Scotia. But what I could discover is: in the Province of Nova Scotia, in the Tri-Counties, in Annapolis Valley,  in the District of Clare, in Digby County you will find a tiny town named Barton that has a Baptist Church and a Post Office. We are overlooking St. Mary's Bay and can see Digby Neck beyond the Bay. On the other side of Digby Neck is the Bay of Fundy. We experience some of the highest tides in the world so at times, our neighbours backyards are water and at times we can see mudflats for miles!

Blue Dot is Me!!

As I mentioned earlier, Barton is included in a dissemination area as defined by Statistics Canada as an area with 200-400 households. In this area, Statistics Canada has combined Barton, Brighton, Marshalltown, Acaciaville and Jordantown. Our dissemination area has a population of 462 which falls in 203 households. 58% of the houses were built before 1960 with only 1% of all the houses being built after 2011. 96% of my neighbours are english. This would change 30 minutes down the road into Comeauville, Saulnierville and Meteghan which are over 70% french speaking.

I do hope to eventually have a food garden so the soil is important to me. Throughout Annapolis Valley there are a number of wineries and breweries. That sounded a lot like Niagara Peninsula, so I was expecting similar soil types. I have read that it is a good area for mixed farming as it is "fair crop land". The soil is reportedly sandy loam. The only catch to this good growing soil is its "gravelly stoniness"! So while my vegetables may grow well, I may have to spend a season raking out all the stones before I can plant!

Barton was named for a Loyalist Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Barton who commanded the 1st  Battalion of the New Jersey Volunteers and received grants of land here after the war. So the story goes that Joseph Barton was in a a bar in 1788 boasting that he could fell a tree all by himself and better than anyone with experience, even though he had never done it before. The next morning he went to prove this point and felled a birch tree on his property. Unfortunately the tree fell on him and mortally wounded him! As I sit here with a bleeding finger, a blistered palm, a blackened finger nail, and a bruised leg, I wonder if following in this gentleman's footsteps, settling on his lands, boasting that I can do this myself, was actually the wisest decision? Maybe I should have researched this beforehand and taken warning from his story!