Celebrating 250 Years of Community Life

During the summer of 1761, seventeen families from Sandwich, Cape Cod, arrived to settle a long, crooked harbour located on the far southwestern tip of Nova Scotia. Now, in the summer of 2011, we are celebrating the 250^th anniversary of that settlement — today's Town of Yarmouth, a busy community of over 7000 people and the regional centre for a population ten times larger.

What better way to celebrate an anniversary like this than to create a photo album with pictures from the past? This is exactly what we’ve done, in a partnership with the Yarmouth County Museum and Archives. From their collection of over 25,000 historical photographs, YCMA staff have contributed 42 representative images, from the 1870s to the 1960s, for online presentation. Each one tells a different story of the town and its people.

From our library we've digitized a booklet which nicely complements the historical photographs provided by the YCMA. The Souvenir of the 150^th Anniversary of the Settlement of Yarmouth Nova Scotia contains a brief community history and a selection of contemporary photographs. It was published exactly one hundred years ago, for celebrations held in Yarmouth in the summer of 1911. The Programme for those celebrations can be found in the middle of the booklet, at page 16. Can anyone tell us what, exactly, was the 'Procession of Callithumpians, Polymorphians, Ancients and Horribles' advertised for Wednesday morning at 6 a.m.!?

For those of you interested in additional historical photographs of Yarmouth... type 'Yarmouth' in the Search Virtual Archives box up in the top right of this page, and you'll get over 300 returns from other areas of our Website to open and explore.