Chapter Two 23

CHAPTER TWO

3mm Settlement to Small Town 1830-1899

1.7m the sixty-odd years, from Circa 1830 to its centennial in 1899, the settlement of Tignish was gradually transformed into a typical nineteenth-century small town. At the beginning of this period, it consisted of two areas of scattered homesteads strung out near the shore, loosely connected by a primitive road running northwest across the portage from the church to the Irish settlement. There was also a road of the same kind to the settlements farther east and south of the original landing- place, of which Little Tignish was the first. Most travel was by sea. Apart from a few visits by rent collectors, the twice-yearly arrival of a missionary and the trickle of new settlers (often just one family per year) no one came.

Government road-building in the 18305 and 405 gradually broke the isolation of the Tignish area, with both good and bad consequences for its inhabitants. In order to open more land for settlement, the colonial government had extended its road and bridge building to ”the far west," as it was sometimes called. Not only were existing roads improved, but a “Great Western Road” - now known as Route 2 - was run diagonally through the centre of West Prince County. This road did not touch the settlement of Tignish, by—passing it to