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Historical Context: Pictou County

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Pictou County, Nova Scotia, is a special place. Once inhabited entirely by the Mi'kmaq - "Pictou" is derived from a Mi'kmaq term meaning "an explosion of gas," resulting from the outcrops of coal - it became home to immigrant Scots in the second half of the eighteenth century. The British colony of Nova Scotia received its first immigrants directly from Scotland in September 1773 with the arrival of the Hector in Pictou harbour. Although fewer than half of the 178 people who disembarked remained in the settlement a year later, other immigrants took their place. By 1840, when migration from Scotland slowed to a trickle, Scots had become the largest ethnic group in Nova Scotia, dominating the eastern end of the peninsula and Cape Breton Island.

Scots were a diverse lot - Protestant and Roman Catholic, Highlanders and Lowlanders, literate and illiterate. In mainland Nova Scotia they tended to form communities that cohered around religious identity. As a result, Pictou County attracted Presbyterian Protestant settlers while nearby Antigonish County was peopled primarily by Roman Catholics. Presbyterian Scots put a high premium on education, not only because it lead the way to salvation through reading the Bible and other religious literature but also because it helped to improve one's lot in this world. In 1816 the Reverend Thomas McCulloch founded Pictou Academy, an institution that quickly earned a reputation for educational excellence. Bright young men such as J.William Dawson, who later became a world-renowned geologist and the president of McGill University, cut their educational teeth at Pictou Academy.

By the time that Daniel McQueen and Catherine Olding married in 1849, the immigration frontier had moved westward and Pictou County was on the verge of an industrial boom. Entrepreneurs in the area were promoting railways and encouraging industrial development that would take advantage of the county's vast coal reserves. In 1827, the British-based General Mining Association had begun producing coal at Albion Mines (now Stellarton). The company introduced steam engines, built the province's first steamship and opened a short railway in 1839 to take their coal from Albion Mines to waiting ships at Abercrombie. In 1833, the Royal William made the first all steam crossing of the Atlantic with coal from Albion Mines.

When the General Mining Company's monopoly over the Nova Scotia coal fields was revoked in 1857, new entrepreneurs appeared on the scene. Coal production in Pictou County skyrocketed, stimulated by the free trade agreement with the United States that prevailed from 1854 to 1866 and the escalating demand resulting from the American Civil War (1861-1865). Although the markets in the United States closed abruptly in 1866, the completion of the Intercolonial Railway in 1876 opened Central Canadian markets for coal and local demand was greatly expanded by the emergence of a highly successful iron and steel industry. Two local tradesmen, Graham Fraser and George Forrest MacKay, grew their metal working operations into one of Canada's major industries, incorporated as the Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company in 1901. With coal mining booming and manufacturing on the rise, industrial towns such as Westville, Stellarton (the former Albion Mines) and New Glasgow began to rival and then surpass the shire town of Pictou in size and wealth. Farm families such as the McQueens could count on a steady market for their produce.

Notwithstanding the spectacular transition from a ship-building and trading centre to one of Canada's industrial success stories, Pictou County failed to industrialize at a sufficient rate to hold its burgeoning population. Out-migration began to take its toll in the 1880s as young people increasingly pursued opportunities elsewhere.