Speaking of Nova Scotia

[Neighbor]

Speaking  of Nova Scotia, what of the lengthy border between the USA and all it's neighbors to the north? Just who are those many  peoples to the north? What are the  interests  fears joys and passions today? Just how diverse are these many peoples to the north of the USA? What is the State of Christianity there today? Might it be much like it is at post Christianity USA?

 

[Willa]

I am unfamiliar with Nova. Scotia.  I am more familiar with British Columbia where Washington State has so much in common with BC both historically and today.   Both were founded by the Hudson Bay Company long before explorers arrived.  It existed for fur trappers.  When vacationing in BC we still find much in common with the area.  They raise the same crops and celebrate the same holidays.  It was more like being in another state than another country.  Where faith is concerned I am not sure.  It is probably very individual as is always.  God has no grandkids.  Only children are born again.  

[farouk]

In some parts of Washington State, it's easier to drive - whether to a supermarket or to church service, for that matter - into BC than to the main, contiguous part of the state.

(I'm not remotely equating supermarkets with 'worship in spirit and in truth' (John 4), but more to the peculiar consequences in places of how the international boundary has been created along the 49th Parallel.)

[D. Adrien]

Atlantic Canada was the largest trade partner of New England prior to the fall of Montreal and Quebec to the English in 1759. (I may be off on the year). 

The French on the Atlantic coast were deported to New Orleans,(today the descendants are the French Creole), area which still was a French possession prior to Napoleon selling it off to fund his various campaigns. The British then insisted that New England colonies stop trading with Atlantic Canada probably due to a loss of tax revenue for the Crown.

...Or something like this anyway.

Edit:  Is known as the Acadian deportation. Napoleon sold the Louisiana purchase in 1803.

Edited January 23 by D. Adrien

[Neighbor]

Say what eh?! LOL

I am of New England stock via Nova Scotia, family was in the lumber industry, also the shoe industry some as tanners, some as timber men providing material for ship building, but also  as owners of lumber mills and the first automated shoe box factory. Most all of the males had association with  the Masonic Lodge regardless of their occupation or community standing.

Church Association was either with the then Methodists, or the Congregationalists, though I do have a French line that were with the "Indians" at Nova Scotia serving as nuns of the Roman Catholic Church at their orphanages.  They themselves having been orphans and likely  raised there the family line on that side  gets vague in a hurry. 

BUT just who are the USA's neighbors today? I sense from the very little news I receive that they are not  Christians except by heritage. That there is little belief or faith among the people today, much as it is at post Christian USA. So who does the USA share so much border with to the North?

I really do not know. Seems they may be very much anti Christian, and so I ask  the question What of Nova Scotia? and all of Canada?

 

[D. Adrien]

Isn't most of the population of Canada located within 100 miles of the U.S. border?

I remember my grandfather, probably born approx. 1903, telling me many workers crossed back and forth across the N.H. border to work in sweat shops known as mill towns. he himself did this a number of times, but I don't know the years he was referring to. My family are/were French Canadian and I was born in Montreal, raised in Vt.( My dad was born in Vt. but raised in Canada).

[D. Adrien]

To elaborate on my above post:

Passports only became a thing during the first world war. Likely an effort to control spies and saboteurs from free movement across national borders. It was  such an effective control that after the war the requirement for passports was never rescinded.

[Neighbor]

20 minutes ago, D. Adrien said:

shops known as mill towns

Yes, many those sweat shops today are trendy brick malls. I am very familiar with one shoe factory and the workers, the jobs they did, and the company housing of that era.

My father while at college stoked the furnaces all night long that provided the steam to run the massive series of power take off shafts, pulleys, and leather belts, that drove all the machines to each work station on each floor.

The factory smelled heavily of horse glue and leathers. I would walk the stations with my grandfather at night as he clocked in at station after station as the night watchman. I still remember going up and down the hand operated freighter elevators ( Just like the broken one one in the scene of the movie "Driving Miss Daisy". By day he was in charge of the machines maintenance crew which was my family too.

About forty years plus ago I considered trying  to buy that old then abandoned factory and making it into a condo, But my father said *%#** ! to that idea. He wanted to have nothing to do with those memories, nor the town at that point. Eventually it was just flattened. The town today is a haven for the wandering lost  meth addicts, and those old timers waiting for a government hand out. It is a pretty sad state of affairs.

[Neighbor]

As the New Hampshire shoe mills failed the industry flourished at Massachusetts. I have found that many of my ancestors lived in company housing there where there were as many as 500 factory owned housing units( Row Houses) with families of up to 17 individuals in each individual unit.

Fact my own were evidently pretty prolific having no less than 9 children under roof and as many as 17. Hard to imagine how terrible a life that was for the women!!! But it explains the appeal of  The Shaker movement at Canterbury NH to them! 

[D. Adrien]

You could be describing a number of wasted towns in Northern new England. Berlin, N.H. comes to mind.

I remember a mom of a friend earning money by stitching leather moccasin pieces together to assemble the moccasins, thereby earning a set amount for each assembled moccasin. This transpired in the Northeast Kingdom of Vt.

Edited for spelling and readability.

Edited January 24 by D. Adrien