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Missing: one harbour
By Shaina Luck | Dec 8, 2010Readers often contact us with questions about Halifax. We don’t always know the answer, so we send reporter Shaina Luck out to get the dirt. Something puzzling you? Send your questions to tadams@metroguide.ca.
Q: Where is Cole Harbour? I mean, the actual harbour?
I live there, and I’m not sure.
When settlement started at Cole Harbour in the 18th century, the life of the farming community was centered around the harbour. As you can tell from the question, that’s no longer true. Terry Eyland, curator of the Cole Harbour Heritage Museum, describes the community as “shrinking.” Modern developments have moved away from the water, leaving the area largely green space.
Keep going on Cole Harbour Road and you’ll get there. “Cole Harbour dyke actually starts to the rear of Rainbow Haven beach,” says Janice Kirkbright of the Cole Harbour Rural Heritage Society. “It’s a marshland, that protects a [big] inland inlet there.”
Unlike nearby Eastern Passage, Cole Harbour was always a farming community. The large, marshy bay was too shallow for larger fishing boats. Attempts were made to dyke the harbour to gain more land, but Kirkbright agrees that the difficulty of building on marshland might be one reason settlement left the water’s edge.
There are several suggestions as to how Cole Harbour got its name, but Eyland says no one knows the answer for sure. One theory says the British Navy named an unmarked harbour “Cold” when it contained a source of fresh, potable water. Another theory is that in the 1750s the land was under the control of Mik’maq district chief Jean-Baptiste Cope, leading to “Cope’s Harbour.”
Eyland’s favourite theory is that “cole” is an old Yorkshire slang term for a type of seaweed that the farmers harvested from the marsh to fertilize their gardens and fields.
Incidentally, Halifax council has proposed changes to the district boundaries that would take most of the land at the harbour’s edge from the “Cole Harbour” district and add it to the “Eastern Passage” district. Janice Kirkbright says that she’d rather that not happen—if only for the name’s sake.
There is another Cole Harbour up the Eastern Shore near Chedabucto Bay. This Cole Harbour is on our Authentic Seacoast 101 and is the end point for the “Preachers Trail” also known as the Queensport Road trail. The Preachers Trail goes from Queensport on Chedabucto Bay over the Bonnet Lakes Wilderness Area to Cole Harbour and received its name as it was the route taken by the local preacher for the Queensport and Cole Harbour communities. There is also a new historical development as the area was home to a World War II radar station.
I recall visiting QC and seeing a story on TV about Cole Harbour. The visual was a map of NS with an arrow pointed at Cole Harbour and the coverage started with, “Racial tensions continue to disrupt the relative peace and quiet of this coastal fishing community.” The visual changed to fishing boats docking in what the story referred to as “Cole Harbour”. I couldn’t help but laugh, despite the seriousness of the story.