Lawrencetown

Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia

Subdivision Kentville, Mile 37.1

• Next Station East: Brickton
• Next Station West: Paradise

Facilities & Features

• Lawrencetown Station
• 1069 foot passing track

Commerce & Industry

Lawrencetown was an importance apple shipping point during the peak years of the apple industry. Five apple warehouses and an apple evaporator were located in Lawrencetown. The evaporator was run by the M.W. Graves company but burned in 1938. The Beaver Fruit Co-operative, run by local apple farmers operated two of the warehouses and ran a general store, a flour and feed warehouse and a bulk feed operation in addition to shipping apples. At various times saw mills, a grist mill, a woolen mill, tanneries, a boot factory, a furniture factory, a butter and cheese factory, and a box factory operated in Lawrencetown.

Description & History

Settled about 1760, Lawrencetown was first named Richardson's Landing and Lunn's Mill but in 1827 received the name Lawrencetown, after Charles Lawrence, the governor of Nova Scotia from 1753 to 1760. The village the location of several early saw and woolen mills and various agricultural industries. The Windsor and Annapolis Railway began construction through Lawrencetown on July 20,1867 when the first sod was turned at the Leonard Road crossing by the wife of Avard Longley, Commissioner of Railways in the provincial government. Lawrencetown builder John MacLeod player a major role in constructing the roadbed through and around Lawrencetown. A early centre of commerce, Lawrencetown grew with the arrival of the railway and rivaled Middleton until the 1890s when the Nova Scotia Central, later the Halifax and Southwestern made Middleton their junction in hopes of development from the iron mines at Torbrook Mines. An annual agricultural fair started in 1927 grew to be the Lawrencetown Exhibition, one of the largest agricultural fairs in Nova Scotia. A school for surveyors founded in Lawrencetown 1948 became the Nova Scotia Land Survey Institute in 1958 and today operates as the Centre of Geographic Sciences, part of the community college system in Nova Scotia. Rail traffic dwindled in the 1960s with the growth of paved highways and services and the decline of the apple industry.

Gallery

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  Lawrencetown Station and one of its early apple warehouses, c. 1890.

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  Photo of No. 502 arriving at Lawrencetown Station with extended apple warehouse in background, c. 1924-26.

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  VIA Rail sign and the retired 1928 Lawrencetown Station, 1986.

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  VIA Rail sign, 1986.

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  Three generations of Lawrencetown Stations in 1989: VIA Rail sign, the retired 1887 station in farmyard and the retired 1928 station on far right.

References & Footnotes

• Alexander MacNab, Windsor and Annapolis Railway, Report of Alexander MacNab Nov 1, 1873
• 1969 Memorandum of General Information, "LAwrencetown", page 12
• History of Lawrencetown, Lawrencetown Consolidated School (1977)
• Bruce Ferguson, Lawrencetown, Annapolis Country", Places and Place Names of Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Archives, pages 348-349