Louisbourg rebuilt again

 ... This time it's in Lego.

Two hundred thousand pieces of Lego, two years labour, and the fortress city rises again, this time in scale to the iconic Lego figurine.  And I want to go to there.

"Me and my brother went to the fortress for the 250th anniversary of the second siege of the fortress [2008]," said Bédard. "It was just magical with all of the British and French soldiers and the fortress itself and the fog." [....]

 Bédard said he began the replica project in January 2020, and soon after a team was assembled.

The five people behind the project have all chipped in to cover its cost, estimated at around $20,000.

No word on whether there are teenyl ittle Lego historians behind the scenes of this reconstruction, but it's got a good review from one who could be there, John Johnston, the dean of lifesize Louisbourg specialists: 

A.J.B. Johnston, a historian who worked at the Fortress of Louisbourg for 23 years, said he's impressed by the Lego creation's accuracy and detail.

 "It's an endless pit, or an endless treasure trove," he said. "Louisbourg can fascinate you in countless ways."

Update, July 22: Mark Reynolds comments:

Sometimes you don't know what your dream is....until you see a full scale Lego replica of Louisbourg, and realize that you've wasted your life. To think I've been raising children, when I could have been doing that instead - if they ever make Canadian history Lego kits, I will be *bankrupting* this family, I swear.

 

History of blowin' up real good

When I saw the little item on CBC about the army blowing up eighteenth-century ordnance from Louisbourg in Nova Scotia, I had several thoughts.

First, no one ever told me unexploded 18th century ordnance was stashed away in a shed somewhere! Also, seems to me that if they are hollow and filled with black powder, they would be mortar shells, not cannonballs (and the bit about steel cannonballs mystifies me too). But maybe this is expecting too much from the CBC.

Happily, Saltwire knows the difference between a shell and a cannonball and explains it pretty nicely.

One might also think -- well, I thought -- they could just flush out the ancient powder with water or something and save the artifacts, as heritage institutions exist to do, but no doubt the army leans towards blowing things up if at all possible. On the other hand, Saltwire talked with the historic site's collections and conservation technical adviser, who was deeply involved with all this and would have considered that first, I'm pretty sure.

When I was helping to train the fortress's re-enactor troops (only slightly after this ordnance was in active use), we used to march them around the fortress site and fire off reproduction musket balls, until one of the archaeologists pointed out this was not best practice on an archaeological site. If they have some anomalous musket balls in the collection, that might have been us. Pretty sure they were not steel, though. Prenez-garde à vous! (which I recall as pretty much the Compagnies franches de la Marine equivalent of "Ten-HUT!")

Image from Saltwire.  Thanks for Chris Raible for getting me started on this post.

Museum Exhibit: Louisbourg is The Most Suitable Place

AMLJ and a gallery curator with part of their exhibit

[This one's for you, Charlevoix.]

The best museum exhibition I have seen lately, up there with Champlain's baptismal certificate at the Museum of Civilization, is "The Most Suitable Place," an exhibition now open at Cape Breton University in Sydney, NS.  Curated by historian Anne Marie Lane Jonah, it is on the foundation of Louisbourg 300 years ago. Many of its exhibits left Louisbourg for France in the summer of 1758 (in a hurry, let us say) and have not been back since

The centrepiece of the exhibit is documents on loan from the archives in La Rochelle.

“They thought that the 300th anniversary of Louisbourg was really a time to express the links between La Rochelle and Louisbourg,” explained Lane Jonah. “They’re planning an exhibit over there, they’re making a film and they wanted to bring some of the documents that left Louisbourg in 1758 and have been in their care ever since, they wanted to bring some back to sort of share with us the story that they’ve been safeguarding in document form.”

I did primary research for years at and on Louisbourg without ever seeing a document that was not on microfilm, and came to accept that as normal. The document as thing itself... it has power, even beyond the information in it, and an art gallery setting brings that out.

Image and quotation from the Cape Breton Post. Good to see a local newspaper that still covers local cultural events.

Update, June 15: Thought I had mentioned this earlier.  Lane Jonah's 2012 book  French Taste in Atlantic Canada/ Le gout francais au Canada atlantique 1604-1758 was a prize winner at the Atlantic Book Awards a couple of weeks ago.

There's a Treaty of Utrecht Day? And I missed it?

"In 1713, by the Treaty of Utrecht..."

When I was a little baby historian at Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site, it seemed every public statement, every research report, every article, every piece of writing of every kind that came out of our shop began that way, leading into a potted explanation of how it was as a consequence of that treaty that the French government founded the fortified city of Louisbourg, and history began, as far as we were professionally concerned.  It gave me a little seminar in narrative openings: search my works, and you will not find that opening in any of them, until today.

But permit me to note the 300th anniversary of the signing of that treaty of peace between His Most Christian Majesty (France) and His Most Britannic Majesty (Britain), duly signed in the Dutch city of Utrecht, April 11, 1713. Charlevoix has the details. And Active History  Also, Louisbourg will be rocking it this summer. Still, I'm not entirely surprised that today is not a major public holiday,

Utrechtiana: there is a story by Alice Munro, published in her first book of stories Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), called "The Peace of Utrecht."  It is not set in Utrecht; indeed, it is the first of the semi-autobiographical stories rooted in the southwestern Ontario home she called "Jubilee," and henceforth "this was the only kind of story I wrote." So the story is historic in its own right. One of its characters had been studying European alliances at university before returning to Jubilee to negotiate peace with her family and ... well, if you have read a little Munro, you get the picture. Suffice it to say this is not a historical novella about the foundation of Louisbourg.