The Ghost Town of "Electric City" | Nova Scotia's Vanished Dream

[00:00:03]Most ghost towns leave something behind.

[00:00:06]A cracking street, a crumbling building, something obvious. And yet, one of the most important ghost towns of Nova Scotia hardly leaves a trace. If you didn't know exactly where this place was, you could walk through these woods and never realize that a town was ever here at all. This was where a French immigrant family forged into the wilderness with ambitious plans. These green horns built a sawmill, a railroad, and a settlement electrified long before much of the rest of the country. Hydro electricity, homemade locomotives, and a profitable family enterprise. A modern town in the unsettled forest of western Nova Scotia. It was comfortable, lavish, and lively. Down this way, you're going to have the wine celler, but you'll also see Herz's tea house.

[00:00:59]>> This here is the well of temptation. But that's all gone now. Burned, dismantled, collapsed, or simply swallowed by the trees. But the tale is still here if you know where to look. This is the story of New France, Nova Scotia's electric city on Part-Time Explorer.

[00:01:38]Electric City is the nickname given to a settlement called New France out in the woods of western Nova Scotia among the thick timber and where the last of the local moose roam freely.

[00:01:51]It was an experimental society, ambitious, short-lived, and in some ways far ahead of its time, boasting hydro electricity powering its street lights and houses. Pretty impressive for a small town when even the big metropolitan cities were only starting out on that. Today, it's said that there's nothing left out there. What did remain has slowly been erased by weather, neglect, and fire. But I'm convinced that there are still some stories left to be uncovered. Before we begin our expedition deep into the rural woods of Nova Scotia, we're stopping here at the Electric City Interpretive Center in Weimoth. We being the closest neighboring town to New France. It's housed in a beautiful old church contemporary to the ghost town that we're looking for.

[00:02:41]Hal Tyio is one of the driving forces behind the electric city Lenuv France society and one of the people most responsible for keeping this story alive. I was taken back on a fishing trip when I was a young teenager about 14 years old. The father in the family took me back on a fishing trip and introduced me to the story and I fell in love with it then and the site. Hal along with the society's co-founder Stacy Ducet will be our guides to the past today, taking us back to the ruins and sharing what is known.

[00:03:15]Looking around the museum, it becomes apparent that the story of Electric City is about an industriously brilliant group of people as much as it's about a town settlement. New France didn't come from one single visionary, but a close-knit family. Photographs of that family hang on nearly every wall. The Stalins were not newcomers to industry nor to responsibility. Their patriarch Emil Stalin had lived through the FrancoRussian War, an experience that left him deeply uneasy about Europe's future. They believed progress could be built deliberately through education, infrastructure, and stability. And they were searching for a place where that kind of future was still possible.

[00:03:58]somewhere they could put down roots without the constant threat of political or social collapse. And that permanent something was short-lived. I'm told to expect little back at the town site.

[00:04:11]Even here in the center, you can feel how things are missing. It's sadly a bit sparse. Hal and Stacy had collected countless artifacts, photographs, and historical documents about New France when this initiative started, but sadly they fell victim to arson.

[00:04:28]Hal and Stacy have hopes that their society will be able to take stewardship of the town site to be able to clean up the land, install historical interpretive panels, and even host guided tours. And we seek to uh open an interpretive center that will share the story and the marvelous story of an immigrant family who arrived here in the 1800s to establish a new life for the family. It's an ambitious plan, but they are well on their way towards success.

[00:04:57]Hopefully spreading awareness of the electric city story will help them. A handmade model gives us an overview of the sites. Okay, this is the replica of the electric city. When we go back into the woods, there is actually two ways you can get in, but this is the one. Uh we're going to be coming in through here. All these buildings are not here anymore. They're completely disintegrated. What happened was um they were all built on wooden floors and stuff. They didn't have a foundation to them, so it was just wood on the ground and went back to the earth again.

[00:05:33]>> This diarama and a book will help us significantly while we explore. The book was written by Paul Stalin, grandson of Emile, the patriarch of New France. His book and handdrawn map provide us with an excellent sense of what this old settlement once was.

[00:05:54]From downtown Weaimoth, it's an hour-ong drive.

[00:05:57]>> It's 31 km the way I'm taking you now, and it takes us an hour by car to get there. But if you uh think about back in the day when they did horse and buggy, and they went by the way the crow flies, um it'd take you about 10 minutes to get there uh by horse and buggy. It's not as far as you really believe it is. The roads are fine until you leave the Weimoth area. Then they become seasonal logging roads. Rough in the winter, but they'd have been better in the summer.

[00:06:28]It's the dead winter right now, a cold and bleak time to visit the town site, but we chose to do this because with the leaves and undergrowth gone, we'll be able to see more. Not to mention, winter here does have its beauty.

[00:06:44]After following the logging road for a few miles, we turned off onto an abandoned road, the road to the old ruins. In recent years, this hasn't been maintained.

[00:06:59]The road out to Electric City is not forgiving. It's long, indirect, and increasingly uncertain the farther you go. Even today, it feels like a place that you have to commit yourself to reaching.

[00:07:13]The Stalins didn't arrive in Nova Scotia all at once. Before the family made the decision to leave Europe, one of the sons went ahead alone. His name was Jeanjhacqu. Jeanjhac arrived not as a settler, but as a scout. He came to see whether the promises of the new world matched reality, whether opportunity here was tangible or just another distant idea. He learned the terrain. He learned the people. He learned what worked and what didn't. He was French and this was Aadia, a very French part of Canada, one of the original French settlements. But when Jeanjac got here, he didn't understand a word of their French. It took adapting, but he didn't give up. As we make our way toward the town site, following roads that feel increasingly detached from the modern world, Jeanjhac was doing much the same, navigating unfamiliar systems, languages, and expectations, trying to determine whether this landscape could become home.

[00:08:15]Jacqu wrote back to his family in France, "This could work." They now had friends and opportunities here. There was land to be bought and worked and slowly the impossible began to come together. In 1894 he was joined in Nova Scotia by three of his brothers, Emil Jean, Roger and Paul. The four brothers spent the winter of 1894 into 1895 at a cabin that they built in these trees logging, experimenting with milling, and testing whether these European aristocratic young men had the fortitude to establish an entire settlement out here. Around this time, Jeanjac married an Acadian woman named Katie Tibido. The two set up housekeeping in the small cabin on the site, making it the first true home at New France. When Jean wrote home with the news, his father was not pleased. The marriage had not been arranged or approved, and Katie was not from the same social background that the family had expected. In May of 1895, their father and mother, Emil and Marita Ree, crossed the Atlantic to see the land for themselves.

[00:09:28]Emile didn't arrive to congratulate them. He arrived to decide whether this venture could support an entire family and whether it was worth the risk.

[00:09:38]During the parents visit, they actually grew fond of Katie Jeanjacqu's wife, eventually approving of their marriage.

[00:09:46]After surveying the site that summer, he agreed to move forward. Emil and Marie Terresa returned to France briefly to settle their affairs and only then sent for the rest of the family committing to Nova Scotia permanently. Now I visited New France for the first time in the winter as you see here. But I did return again the following summer to see the beauty of this place in bloom. I'm using footage from both visits which explains why you're going to see us here in both the white of winter and the green of summer. a sharp contrast that I wanted to explain real quick. Along the road into the town site, we stopped for a second. It's not historically significant, but it is a bit of a reminder. Now, this all used to be all cleared, right? Everything and they'd have two, three, four school buses in here at >> this is where the school buses would park when field trips would come to visit the ghost town back in the 1980s and 1990s. field trips, family picnics, and even campers would regularly come back here in the notsodistant past to learn about the history of this town.

[00:10:56]What was then can be again if the society's work pays off. But it's interesting that extra layer of abandonment means this isn't simply a ghost town. It's a ghost of a ghost town.

[00:11:28]When you first arrive at Electric City, there's no obvious spectacle to greet you. No standard walls, no towering ruins, no single dramatic structure announcing what this place once was. It looks at first glance like any other patch of the Nova Scotian forest. A few barbecues, an aged road, not much else.

[00:11:51]Almost everything that made up this place is gone. To understand it, you have to start combing through the area.

[00:12:00]So, that would have been a building uh right over by those trees over there.

[00:12:05]See the log going across? So, that would be the framing of one building right here. And then this would be the framing of another one which would be here.

[00:12:15]And there's another one right here. Uh anything where you see a 6x6 timber uh would be the the foundation of where buildings were.

[00:12:26]>> It's fitting because when a meal Stalin arrived in this forest, there was no city waiting for him either. All they had were dreams, money, and each other.

[00:12:37]And I'm visiting here alongside two people with dreams of their own. This was where the town square would eventually be. But this wasn't quite where the settlement was born. We had to walk down the main road about a quarter of a mile farther until we reached the Silver River.

[00:12:54]>> All right. Where to?

[00:12:55]>> Okay. We're just heading down this trail here. And this is just give you a better outlook of where the mill used to be.

[00:13:02]>> We were essentially nestled on an istmas between two lakes. Little Tusket Lake and Langford Lake. After the winter of 1894 into 95, the brothers had already confirmed that the timber here could be worked. But what remained uncertain was whether they could mill it right here on the site. This stream was the perfect place to begin work on a dam and a sawmill to kick off their lumber operations.

[00:13:28]>> Right in this area used to be where the mill was. Um this was the danded area and then the mill all sat in this area in here. There is no remnants of the mill. Um we have found stuff in the water underneath uh like an old bearing or something of the sort that was from there.

[00:13:53]>> This is where the operation took shape.

[00:13:55]A small cabin was built on the site for Jean as the mill went up. By building this sawmill, they were able to mill lumber for themselves and make the construction of subsequent buildings all the more easy. By the time Emil arrived in the summer of 1895, this work had already begun. The sites had been selected and construction was underway.

[00:14:17]They had two dams. So the the lagoon that they actually used to draw the water from for the power for the mill was much larger than the size of what you see now. And they had two separate dams. So they they flowed into the uh to the mill and the water powered the the mill obviously the saws >> the water from the stream would power the mill itself and structures were being put in place to control its flow and apply it to the mill. Emil got the idea that if they had these dams in place, why not install a water turbine to generate electricity for the town?

[00:14:51]Cities around the world like New York, London, Paris, and more recently Halifax had been installing electric lights in homes and on the streets. Well, why couldn't they? They purchased a water turbine from the Canadian General Electric Company. The Stalins had an engineer working on their operations, a man named Justin Blinn, whom they referred to as Boss Blind. He was illiterate and self-taught, but a genius when it came to implementing their visions.

[00:15:24]He was overseeing the construction of many of the buildings around New France, and he spent a day with the turbine manufacturers to learn the ins and outs of the machine before supervising the installation at the mill. The design of the mill from the start was done by boss and his mainly Aadian workforce starting out and they had figured out how the belts would work to power the various saws. They had various saws that would produce various kinds of lumber. They designed it and built it all from scratch. So it was amazing really for as I say an illiterate group what they could actually design and figure out and have work successfully. So this was the mill that housed the generator that made it electric city. The dams fed water through a slleway to turbines below the mill floor. But as the water was coming through, they also powered the gang saw, the hall up, and the other machinery needed to turn logs into finished lumber. The mill would soon be able to process 15,000 board feet of lumber in a single 9-hour shift. Following Emil's approval, work continued at the site. The damning was extended and the mill developed into a functioning part of the operation. It provided the means to process timber taken from the surrounding land and it supplied the material needed to construct the rest of the settlement.

[00:16:48]The town's foundation had been laid, the anchor had been dropped. Emil and Marie Terresa returned to France to settle their affairs and gather the rest of the family, committing to Nova Scotia permanently.

[00:17:03]While the patriarch was back in Europe, the seed that was planted began to germinate. Jeanjac and his brothers Emil Jean, Roger, and Paul remained on the site, expanding what they had already begun. The mill operation had pushed forward. Timber production increased and the groundwork was laid for something larger than a temporary logging camp.

[00:17:28]Jean was acting as the driving force at the site, but he wasn't working alone.

[00:17:32]To carry out the work, experienced men were brought in to take charge of different parts of the operation. One of them was a man known as Boss Blind, whom we met earlier, a carpenter and an engineer who oversaw the construction of the mill and many of the buildings.

[00:17:48]Another was Frick Tibido, the now brother-in-law of Jean Jacques and now was responsible for managing the wider operation, including the logging work around Little Tusket Lake and the coordination of the crews in the fields.

[00:18:03]At first, the workforce was made up largely of Aadian men from along St. Mary's Bay. Then they started branching out and hiring everybody.

[00:18:12]>> They would accept anyone as a worker. It didn't matter what background or who they were. So for example, uh they had people from all of the various cultures and races. They had the French Acadians.

[00:18:24]They had the English-sp speakaking descendants of United Empire loyalists, the African Canadian descendants of United Empire loyalists. Migma uh in and out working sometimes and there to help.

[00:18:35]As was custom, bosses were hired first, and they in turn hired the men best suited to the work. That brings our explorations back to the town center where we first arrived. A century ago, this would not have felt like wilderness. Much of what is now densely overgrown had been opened up into a compact little settlement arranged around a central square.

[00:19:00]Even uh today you can get an understanding of how uh concentrated the the little village was with the kind of a square in the middle very much in the European style and a lot of the the socialization took place uh outside as I said even in the in the winter let alone of course in the summer. The trees were cut back, the lake was visible. The river powered the mill below and the road into town carried workers, visitors, supplies, and eventually the Stalin family themselves. There was like three or four buildings all in a line right along this area. So this was the main center of town, I guess you would call it, and then the house is up in that area.

[00:19:44]This was to be the heart of New France, >> the cook house, which was built um really one of the first buildings that was built and it was built to house the crews. Of course, >> that was the first priority, the basic essentials of food and shelter. Meals here were prepared by Fbranny McLaclin, the camp's master cook, who ran the kitchen, assisted by her daughter, Marie.

[00:20:06]>> Um you'll see off to one side there was a the kitchen area, which is an L. A lot of these buildings had little elves connected to them and that kitchen area housed the cook and her husband and their little daughter who were with the Stalins almost throughout the entire settlement. So this is what remains of the cook house.

[00:20:28]Before there was a village, there had to be shelter for the laborers. The 2 and 1/2tory cook house was built to house the crews who were clearing land, cutting timber, and getting the operation off the ground. Upstairs was dormatoryst style sleeping accommodation. Downstairs was the common eating area. It was rough, practical, and built for work. Originally, it housed 45 men staying in a dormatory style upstairs and a a cafeteria style refactory downstairs where they would eat. The various cultures and and uh religions and and languages were in fact living and working together.

[00:21:09]>> We haven't proven it yet.

[00:21:11]But there's two pipes that come out of the ground. And we did land penetration, checking out the ground and stuff and see where those pipes go. And we're kind of thinking that they would originally come from the big house cuz they had their own water supply in the big house and that would be the only water here into the cook house.

[00:21:36]And just across the square stood another practical necessity, the barn.

[00:21:42]>> You can see the general outline in the rocks. Snow was covering most of the rocks. It was 50 by 50 by 50, 50 ft high, 50 long, 50 wide, and it held, of course, the animals, but it also held the uh their buggies and and and all of the various things they used to get around. Oxen handled the heavy hauling while horses increasingly took over the faster trips to Weaimoth for mail, supplies, and errands. And very often on a night of a day very much like this, there are stories in the book that will tell you about how local people would come visiting and come over the hill and see the light shining. And they always were welcome no matter what time they arrived. And it was routinely in the evening. And the family would open the wide doors of the bar and build a bonfire. And the family all were trained as musicians. they studied when they were young in Europe and they would play their instruments and people would would dance and and have their their social outside in the in the beautiful winter air and and so on. And that was all done in front of from the barn in front of those large doors. So there's the 50x50 part of the barn. But coming off of it, past this wall of the foundation is another rock wall. And this was an extension put on which likely housed the stables.

[00:22:59]Up to this point, everything that had been built served the work. The mill, the cookhouse, the barn, all of it was just practical. It supported labor, movement, and production. But the next structure was different.

[00:23:12]>> Where to now?

[00:23:13]>> We'll go to the big house. The house that was built um the summer before the family came over. It was built for the family.

[00:23:22]>> This house was built in anticipation of the arrival of the Stalin family. By the time Emil had inspected the site and returned to France, the decision had been made. The whole family was committed to this endeavor, which meant that this place had to change. The wilderness couldn't simply be a work site. It had to become civilized. It had to become a home. If Emil was going to bring his wife and his daughters, a larger, more permanent residence was required, one that would accommodate the family and the household that came with them. So, it held uh 12 people in the family plus half a dozen or so regular maids and cooks. The house along with the other two previous buildings at the town center were constructed under the supervision of Boss Blind whose work defined the layout and structure of the settlement.

[00:24:15]It was built to house the entire family along with staff in a way that reflected how they had lived before coming here.

[00:24:23]Even in the middle of the forest, their wellto-do French household standard was being carried over.

[00:24:29]>> There was a gentleman that used to work in the big house. His job strictly was to take water from the well to the big house, bring it up three floors up into the top level of the house, put it in a big sifter, and then it ran through the house and gave them running water. That was his full-time job. The boys were building a house for their mother whom they loved dearly. It was a home for their sisters. They wanted it to be special. We don't have any detailed account of the construction process of this home, but we do know that the boys had initially built a smaller house here on this site in the early days. And now they were expanding it to fit the large family of 12 rather than building the structure from scratch. A formal saloon sat at one end while Emil and Marie Terresa's bedroom and dressing room occupied the other.

[00:25:26]There were three doors along the front.

[00:25:29]Um, two on the on the extended sides of of the main building that led into uh into one of the one would we call the living room. One was actually the bedroom for the parents and then the big front door which led to the staircase and so on. It had two large rooms. One of which we again we would call a parlor or a living room where most of the the everyday activities took place. Uh and that was for example it was composed actually once they had electricity of u duo chairs two chairs with a little table in the middle of them with a lamp for reading purposes. They did the musical evenings on particularly on Sunday evenings in that particular room.

[00:26:12]The original smaller house was incorporated into the structure itself, becoming the dining room, while a new kitchen extended off the back. Above it all, the upper floors were reserved for the rest of the family and the household staff. They doubled up. Most of the bedrooms were housed two and the and a couple of them housed three of the children. But it was a large building uh by any standard in the area, but especially by in the middle of the forest. But if you look over there, uh it's actual where the fireplace was and the chimney and everything was over in this area and it fell this way in. Was it stone, brick?

[00:26:50]>> It was stone. It was all uh stone.

[00:26:53]>> Stone and cement.

[00:26:54]>> Stone and cement. Yeah.

[00:26:56]>> While there are almost no ruins left in Electric City, we are able to enter the cellar of the big house, as they call it. This cellar would mainly have been for food storage. above it on the first floor of the house was the kitchen and the dining room. So, a cook or several cooks as they had would have simply walked out one of the doors, come around to the cellar entrance that we came in and just grabbed ingredients or meats or whatever they were had stored here.

[00:27:26]There was an ice house in that general direction. nothing left of it, but that's where they would have stored cold foods such as meats or anything else that needed to be kept cold and preserved. Power lines ran up from the mill to the town center, bringing electrical lighting to the big house, cookhouse, and barn, letting them burn cleanly and brightly at all times of night. There were also a handful of street lights burning around the town's center. All in all, there were 300 electrical outlets installed in the town, though they only ever allowed themselves to run 200 at once.

[00:28:12]Many of the big cities in the west had been electrified by this point. But for a small town like this with such a small population to not only be electrified but to have been electrified simply by the ingenuity of the town's folk was remarkable.

[00:28:28]New France was an oasis of light in the dark forest and quickly took on the nickname of the electric city in newspapers across western Nova Scotia.

[00:28:39]Even though New France was little more than a small settlement, hardly a city.

[00:28:57]On February 24th, 1896, the family left France aboard the SS Labana. Their group on that crossing consisted of Emil and his wife Marie Theres, then six of their children, Terres, Louise, Jaime, Maurice, Simone, and Bernard. Their other son, Charles, remained behind temporarily to finish his army service and followed later that year.

[00:29:25]When they arrived, New France was well underway, the mill in operation, and their home was ready to be moved into.

[00:29:33]The family ended up furnishing their new home mostly with new items and furniture bought from Halifax and Weimoth rather than shipping their old stuff all the way across the Atlantic. They did however bring with them a few sentimental family heirlooms, an oak desk, some beds, and a family piano.

[00:29:53]They brought a lot of music with them as well from France. Uh and uh the piano itself is still in terrific shape.

[00:30:00]that's in storage at University Saintan.

[00:30:03]>> They also brought with them a seemingly endless supply of wine and champagne. Of course, enough to maintain the customs of their life that they were leaving behind. They imported 40 gallon casks of wine and brandy from France and bottled it on site and it was brought out at every celebration. Every worker would be given a bottle of wine.

[00:30:24]>> Marie, a devout Catholic, brought with her a statue of St. broke and she brought something else too. Seeds, flowers from France planted around the house in gardens.

[00:30:37]>> This here would have been a garden.

[00:30:42]>> The mother Mary Teresce really wanted to have some French flowers. She was devoted to flowers and they she planted the flowers around the uh the foundation of the big house. And if you go to the big house in the early spring, you'll see the flowers are still there while they come up. So this is here all would have been garden. Uh this these plants would not just grow wild here way back here in the woods. This would be their actual flower garden type say uh because this right over here is our big house.

[00:31:12]So >> apple trees that would take root in the clearing. Some of them still grow here today. Actually they brought the apple seeds along with flower seeds with them from France. Yeah. This apple tree was actually planted by the people from New France. Apple trees obviously weren't back here in the middle of nowhere. I was back here with a friend of mine.

[00:31:35]She's an expert on the flora and fauna of the area and has learned a lot from the indigenous people and she harvested some of the apples and took them home and made us some very good apple pie.

[00:31:45]So, they're still edible.

[00:31:48]>> At Civil War battlefields, we have a thing called witness trees. These were trees that are known to have been there because of the age and you can see them in some photographs. So in a way these are witness trees to New France. Some of these trees are large enough, thick enough and old enough that we can safely assume they were here at the time. They probably chose not to log these in order to keep it for the aesthetic value in the town, provide some shade, just make the place feel more homely.

[00:32:29]With the family now in place, the Stalins were ready to commit their full undivided attention and resources to the expansion of their new family enterprise. Timber was cut in the areas around Little Tusket Lake, where crews worked under the direction of Frick Tippido. The trees were felled, stripped, and prepared in the woods before being hauled back toward the mill. This was slow physical work dependent on terrain, weather, and manpower. Oxmen were used to pull the heavy loads, dragging timber across rough ground toward the river. Horses handled the faster trips, moving between the settlement and Weimoth with supplies, equipment, and communication.

[00:33:12]Just as before at the mill, that flow of timber was turned into lumber, cut, processed, and prepared for use. Some of it stayed here, feeding the continued growth of the settlement itself, but much of it did not. Lumber was the town's primary industry, and the community only kept what they needed.

[00:33:33]Lumber coming out of New France was loaded onto wagons and pulled by horses and oxmen back out to Weimoth, the town where our adventure started. We straddles the Sicu River and was one of the larger small ports of the area at the time. There were plenty of lumber ships in the area ready to export this wood. Now, the Stalins did not own their own ships and instead worked out deals with other local shipping companies or at times with any ship that happened to be in town looking for a cargo to pick up. We became the connection point between New France and the rest of the world. The Stalins had built a private wararf for their enterprise there. The spot that I'm standing in right now is the waterfront in downtown Weimoth. And this exact point right here was the wararf owned by the Stalins.

[00:34:29]At the time in Weaimoth, there were several wararves along the Sisbu River right here. And the Stalins was only one of many here. In fact, there were also at least five different shipyards building ships along this river. And some of them were even farther up the river inland from here. Right now, it doesn't look like this river would be navigable by larger vessels like the ones that were built here. But back then, they stayed on top of dredging it.

[00:34:59]And larger vessels like lumber sailing ships were able to come up here to Weimoth and beyond. From Weimoth, the lumber didn't just supply the region. It entered a global trade network. Ships arriving from across the world took on cargo here, carrying New France's timber to the United States, the West Indies, South America, and Europe. The Stalins had a more direct road connecting New France to Weimoth, a quicker road than the one that we took back into the ghost town, but it was still a massive undertaking every time that they hauled a shipment from the town to the docks.

[00:35:38]>> Certain times of the year, horses were impossible. The road would muddy up in the spring and so on. Oxen was the usual method of transportation, but oxen are are glorious to watch, but plottingly slow. It was Emil who put forward the solution, a railway built to connect the operation directly to Weimoth.

[00:35:59]It was going to be a costly undertaking with Emil being the sole financial backer. The line was to be about 27 kilometers long or roughly 16 mi. They secured the rights of way and surveyed the line planning to bring it right up to the Stal and Wararf in Weimoth. It was a very big challenge plus the challenge the other type of challenge of securing rights of way from all the various uh land owners between here and there which is 27 or so kilometers. So a great deal of logistics involved before the railway could could see fruition.

[00:36:35]And of course the topography was very very challenging from the middle of the province out to the the coast to St. Mary's Bay. Uh lots of hills, lots of bogs. As Emil was to be the sole financial backer, they opted to make the project as affordable as possible, even going so far as to make the tracks themselves out of wood rather than the typical steel rails on normal train lines.

[00:37:00]>> Wooden rails, they were um rounded on three sides, left flat on the bottom where they sat on the earth.

[00:37:08]>> This wheel set was found in the woods near New France and is now on display at the interpretive center. It shows the unique design of wheels that the Stalins used to adapt to the wooden rail construction. The wheels were concave so that they sat comfortably on top of the log rails. With the tracks being laid starting from New France and working outward, the Stalins got to work building their rolling stock. The plan was to build the train inhouse at New France using their own parts. A very makeshift project. Boss Blind was once more called on to supervise this job.

[00:37:46]>> And when Emil explained to to Boss Blind what his idea was, then Boss Blind would sketch out ideas and from the sketch be able to assign his his crews to be able to build what they needed. The first locomotive produced was called Mush AU or Firefly in English. It was a success.

[00:38:06]And after a brief trial run on the short stretch of track already laid, they built a series of flat cars and then a small passenger coach that fit a party of only four or five people, enough to transport a small labor force with each load of lumber or to bring the Stalins in and out of town. As the lumber and railroad operation expanded, so did the family. In 1895, Emil Jean, the oldest son, married an English woman named Anne Baldwin. Soon after they started having children that led to need a need of getting them out of the big house where everyone else was and put them in their own space. So that house was built across the river with a gorgeous view of the entire settlement. It was a twostory home with a kitchen and living space below and three bedrooms on the top.

[00:38:56]Today, like every other structure at New France, it is simply a cellar, overgrown and fading into the slowly shifting landscape.

[00:39:06]And unfortunately, this has never been cleaned.

[00:39:11]So, she's trying she's starting to deteriorate quite a bit.

[00:39:17]Now, at the time, this looked over the river.

[00:39:22]Believe it or not, >> the story of how Emil Jean met his wife is an interesting one.

[00:39:29]>> Many years before when two of uh this the young girls in the Stalin family were at a convent school in in Paris studying, there was a young English girl named Anne Baldwin who was there as well. She had been sent to Paris by her mother in in London in order to learn the French language and she became close friends with Shiman and Simone and he remembered her really well. So when he was here in Nova Scotia in the middle of these woods, he uh was at the point in his life he thought it would time to find a wife and he remembered Anne and in a very short length of time he wanted her to come to Canada and and marry him.

[00:40:06]Anne's mother in England thought that probably was not a very good idea because she thought she'd lose her daughter for sure and never see her again. And so she semi-refused. So Anne threatened if she did in fact refuse her permission to get married, she would uh enroll in a convent in France. And so the mother gave her permission. So accompanied by a maiden aunt as a chaperone, she came over. He met her in Halifax and the wedding was held there so that the companion the the chapron could jump back on the ship the same day and sail back to England. And this was a fairsiz house too also like cuz this is the one wall and that's the other wall way over there. So, it's somewhere nearby on De Mo Jean's side of the river that a well is said to be. It was the town's primary drinking water source and it was known as the well of temptation. It's an odd name that implies some sort of backstory. It was called the well of temptation because in the evenings all the workers would get together. They'd come down to the well down to the casino um and meet up with the women and Yeah. Yeah.

[00:41:26]Whatever happened happened.

[00:41:29]>> The Stalin book mentions the well, joking about it as a place where things could happen rather than a place where things actually did happen. The rumor says that the well of temptation was always up here on top of the hill here where the big rock is. Um I kind of disagreed with it cuz a few years back I ended up going through this way and came across an actual rock built by man uh area which I believe is the well of temptation. So show me both if you don't mind.

[00:42:04]>> Okay, I'll show you this one up here first.

[00:42:08]And why I don't believe it's a well is cuz it just looks like a dirt hole. I believe it was right here. Old maps of the place indicate the well to be right here.

[00:42:22]Everything's falling in now. So, but this would have been the Well of Temptation area.

[00:42:30]>> Possibility one.

[00:42:31]>> Possibility one. Uh the area I'm looking at um there's actual rocks around and it looks man-made.

[00:42:40]>> Are we able to get to that?

[00:42:41]>> Yeah, but that's back down the hill.

[00:42:44]>> Probably 4 years since the last time I've been back here, but it might be a nice little hike. Stacy and Hal have gotten good at investigating this site, questioning what was taken for granted of its history. It's possible that the actual well of temptation is buried in these trees rather than the obvious site that's been marked for decades.

[00:43:05]Now, there's a lot of tales stating that the well of temptation was always beside the road. Um, I always felt that wasn't correct. Um, I'm believing this here is the well of temptation. I kind of come across it one day walking through the woods and it's a man-made structure like in the summertime when I was here. Um, you could almost see timbers on it. So like there was almost like a cover on it or a nut building on it or of some sort.

[00:43:40]>> So maybe it was a spring house.

[00:43:42]>> It it could have been. But I believe this was what they called the well of temptation because you're off the road far enough where people know that you know you're coming back to meet a woman or whatever. So, you're kind of out of the way a little bit because if you notice, the rocks are out here and it came around here and I almost think that was kind of just a wall type thing, but the well was actually here where this tree is growing up in just cuz of the shape of the way the rocks are. This seems to be more like it with this place appearing more as a typical well of the time. Giving further evidence that this really is the well is the map drawn by Paul Stalin. He drew the well as a fairly sizable stone structure, not a simple hole in the ground. Emile's sons had adapted well to Nova Scotia, falling in love with the wilderness and industry that they were developing.

[00:44:39]Jaime, one of the younger daughters, was also adapting well to the new life, accompanying her brothers on hunting trips and taking part in many of the projects around town. But not all of the Stalin daughters adapted to life in New France in the same way. There was one really interesting character in the family, the oldest girl. Her name was Teres and she was a bit obstinate. She was 23 by the time they moved here. She was a bit resentful of being picked up from the uh the culture, the relative culture of France and moving to what she felt was the the backwaters of of the new world. And she was claimed to have said that how if I can't find a husband in France, how am I ever going to find one in the woods of Nova Scotia, which proved to be true. They just couldn't find a way to help her fit in. And she never learned English uh as an accomplished speaker. But she took on various jobs. They tried her as a teacher to the homeschooling children.

[00:45:35]Uh that didn't quite work out. Uh children wouldn't learn for her. They even gave her the task of looking after the the chickens at one time, but they stopped laying for her. And so she was she was taken off that task as well. So the poor lady had had a good deal of trouble.

[00:45:50]She couldn't get along with a lot of people in the the village. Her parents decided to build her spot away from everybody. So, she was up here by herself.

[00:46:02]>> Down toward the lake, away from the center of the settlement, the landscape opens up. She didn't actually live here altogether. She stayed in the big house with the rest of the family at the town square. This, however, was something of a private retreat. Unfortunately, the house is completely gone. Uh, the area is grown over. There's nothing at all there anymore. You can kind of still see it.

[00:46:29]Right along here was a trail that went up through the woods, up around the corner, and then looked over Langford Lake. Um, that was where her tea house was up at the very peak. It was alone, far from the rest of the settlements, isolated, and that was the point. At the base of the hill beneath the sight of Theresa's house was the old wine cellar where the Stalins stored the many cases and casks that they brought over from France when they first immigrated. Now this was still standing to up to maybe 2 years ago. But then the trees started caving in, the rocks started caving in.

[00:47:10]Now, this is the entrance to the wine celler, but it it originally had a roof on it, and it stood right till just the past little while. Like, we're talking within 10 years anyway.

[00:47:24]That would have been the last section of the roof.

[00:47:28]Wow.

[00:47:30]Any wine left?

[00:47:31]>> Nope.

[00:47:33]It would have tastes good if it was.

[00:47:37]>> Things are starting to cave in. The actual wall is starting to fall in now.

[00:47:41]And >> yeah, this this tree >> Yeah.

[00:47:43]>> stump. You can see it's grown and pushed this wall down.

[00:47:47]>> And this is our goal is to try to get the trees away from the settlement just so we can preserve what's still here and hopefully keep it. Bottles were gifted to the company workers each Christmas and the supply of wine was enjoyed regularly in the cook house and in the big house where Emil and his family lived. That was the center point of the town where gatherings were held and the town socialized.

[00:48:14]Now across from the social center of the town was the spiritual center.

[00:48:20]The chapel was dedicated to our lady of the forest. Though modest in size, it was a truly beautiful structure, home of the finest woodwork in town, painted white, blue, and gold. It had two large windows in the front, a large fireplace and statues throughout of Jesus and St. Teresa. The Stalins were friends with several of the clergy at the nearby college Staint Anne in Church Point. So some of those priests made regular journeys to New France to offer mass for the local population. The chapel, for example, the HP Pew was built by u the Acadian workforce. And in fact, we still have one of those that we're going to have as part of our display at our center.

[00:49:05]>> The Stalins were Catholic. The Acadians were Catholic. The Migmall were Catholic. The local native tribe that was now becoming involved in Electric City. This chapel was central for nearly everyone living in New France. A place to offer thanks for all of the town's success so far. It was built mainly for family. And when they could not get one of the local priests from the Acadian area, the Clair Shore, to come for a service, they conducted these services by themselves.

[00:49:41]By 1897, the railroad had been completed out to Southville Corner about halfway between New France and Weimoth. This is where the roads branching out from Weimoth became better. So even with the railroad incomplete, the Stalins began shipping lumber out to Southville Corner and hauling it on ox carts from there while the rest of the line was worked on. The proof of concept was finished with the tracks being laid fast out of town at a cost of about $3,000 a mile or $120,000 per mile in today's dollar. So this was the track itself. This is where the track came in. uh the Irvings when they had the land as they made the park here, they they cleared a lot of this land, but the track actually came in through here and went over to the other side uh right to the to the river in back of the buildings cuz the grading doesn't look very good for a train track.

[00:50:36]>> Well, I mean, everything's changed so much over the years, but uh you know, it may have you know, it may have altered, but this is basically where it came in.

[00:50:45]>> Okay.

[00:50:45]>> So, we you know, that's the only record that we have. So, this is where it is.

[00:50:49]And if if one looks at the sketches and so on and this is indeed where it came through. So, >> and where did it continue down to?

[00:50:56]>> It it went around the the community. You could go to the edge of the the water where the millard was and where they stored the lumber so it could load lumber. It could also went around the community and around the the other side on this side um where there was um a shed they could drive through and leave the engine in the shed where it could be repaired or any kind of work that had to be done on it. The first locomotive and passenger car were successful in proving that the railway could function, but they were limited in capacity.

[00:51:25]>> The engine didn't quite have the power to make some of the the gentle grades that had to be built to to uh overcome the topography from here to there. With the railroad expanding, the Stalins kind of realized their homemade engine wasn't going to get them very far and decided to commission a second generation of equipment. A new locomotive arrived, having been built by Rob Engineering in Amherst, Nova Scotia. This locomotive, professionally built rather than the first homemade one, was christened the Maria Teresa, the anglicized version of Mrs. Stalin's name. It arrived by rail to Weimoth and also arriving within a month of that was a shipment of trucks for new flat cars as well as a brand new passenger coach for the new France line, a car called the Caribou. The Caribou was 20 ft long and painted an eggshell blue with maroon trim. It had four windows on either side and an observation platform at the back. There were two interior compartments, a small one for the workers and a larger one at the rear for the Stalin family or special guests. With the milestone of Southville having been reached, the momentum of the railroad began to stall.

[00:52:43]The Nova Scotian government had promised that if Emil built the railroad, they would build a government road running alongside the track, easing maintenance and locking New France into the province's infrastructure.

[00:52:57]But the province backed out of this agreement and Emil felt like he had been swindled.

[00:53:03]Still, the track laying inched along towards its final stop. For a time, it seemed as though everything was working.

[00:53:11]The mill produced lumber. The railroad carried it out of Southville. Ships took it from Weimoth. And the whole thing turned a profit. Life was happy in New France with the luxuries of old France carrying through to the new world. 5 years passed as the town flourished.

[00:53:32]In the summer of 1900, a visitor came to Electric City. This was Captain Neas K of the nearby town of Bear River. He spent some time in town becoming closely acquainted with the Stalins, especially Jaime, one of the daughters who was adapting so well to her new life. She had a strong sense of adventure, and he was a sea captain. Well, it didn't take long for them to fall in love, and with Emil's permission, the two were engaged.

[00:54:02]So many guests were invited to the wedding that the celebration couldn't take place in New France. The ceremony itself was conducted here at St. Bernard Church and officiated by Father Sullivan.

[00:54:19]From there, Mr. and Mrs. Kay led a horsedrawn carriage procession back to Weimoth, crossing the bridge over the Sibu River, ornately decorated for the occasion, and came here to the Goodwin Hotel. The Goodwin Hotel was a frequent stop for the Stalins whenever they came to Weaimoth. and now it would host the wedding reception. It was then that the group posed outside for this photograph.

[00:54:46]The newlyweds, already in their travel clothing, then boarded the train for Yarmouth, then jumped on a ship to New York and began a 2-year honeymoon sailing on Captain K's ship around the world.

[00:55:01]With Jaman gone, life in New France became a little quieter. The construction of the railroad had stalled shortly after Southville corner and the Stalins began to lose sight of the goal of bringing it to Weimoth. Emil and Marie Reay were aging and the bold optimism felt 5 years ago was beginning to become exhausted. Money was running low and the family was scattering. This was the beginning of the decline for the electric city. But in 1902, their optimism would be tested once more. In September of that year, while sailing in the Caribbean, Captain Kay's ship, the Florence B. Edgeit, was overcome by a fierce storm. Jaime was on board. The ship was battered, swamped, and torn apart. The crew, Captain Jaime, and the ship's cat managed to get into a boat and escape, but spent 10 days a drift at sea before safely making landfall. It was a disaster that could have turned out a whole lot worse, but news of the shipwreck reached New France before the details emerged. Jaime's parents were anxiously distressed, even to the point of compromising their health.

[00:56:21]Things did settle down after this near loss. There was still hope to continue on the business, the mill steadily turning out lumber. There was hope that if the railroad could ever reach Weaimoth, things would turn around. But the final nail in the coffin came in 1907.

[00:56:40]That summer was a particularly dry one.

[00:56:43]The engineer of the Maria Teresa, the Stalin's locomotive, took it out for a drunken joy ride, speeding down the wooden tracks faster than the train was ever meant to go. The wheels created friction. The sparks were thrown into the dry brush along the tracks. A fire began rapidly spreading along the line, following the tracks for long stretches through the woods. There was a fire crew put together from this end, the Southville end of local men and and and women to help and vice versa from the other side, a group or rather another group put together from the New France side. By the time the crews got the fire under control, much of the track had been destroyed. That was it for Emil.

[00:57:27]The railroad was the biggest investment he had made in the New France project, and it was his final hope for the colony. But with it destroyed, his passion and optimism were gone.

[00:57:39]>> So much of the track had been destroyed.

[00:57:41]The father was so despondent because his vision was gone of this this um business saving railway that he ordered everything completely scuttled. He ordered it scuttled and and they did literally take things apart except for the wheels and they threw them uh in no no organized way at all in the woods so that nothing could be done to to refurbish them in any way whatsoever. We can still find remnants of it in in in places if one goes scouting deep in the woods in the area. Milling work continued, but they were back to hauling it out by ox cart. In the years that followed, New France did not collapse all at once. It just faded. The work slowed. What had been built with such energy and ambition began piece by piece to fall quiet. Maria Theresa's health had been declining for some time, and in 1910, she passed away. With her passing, something at the center of New France was lost. The big house, once the heart of the settlement grew quiet. The family began to drift as the life that they had built here slowly, began to come apart.

[00:58:52]Emil Stalin left the site and moved to Weaimoth with his two unmarried daughters, while some of his sons remained behind for a time, continuing what operations they could. But the life that had once thrived there was no longer present. New France continued, but only in fragments.

[00:59:11]And then the outside world intervened.

[00:59:14]Now the Stalins had come to Nova Scotia in part to build something separate from the tensions of Europe to carve out a life removed from all the many wars that had shaped the old world. But in 1914, war came anyway. The First World War reached across the Atlantic, and the sons who had grown up in the forests of New France were drawn into it. The very thing that the family had tried to leave behind had found them again.

[00:59:54]New Franc's Mill fell quiet. The Stalin men were off fighting the war. as were many of the laborers.

[01:00:06]Emile lingered in Wemouth, staying up to date on the conflict with his daily newspaper. Six of his sons had gone off to war. He would march from this side of the river where he had purchased a house all the way down across the bridge to the local uh Western Union office for the the update of the latest casualty list looking for his sons. And this picture why it it is so emotive to me because you can see the stoop you can see the weight of the world on his shoulders as he waits for word war being the that what they had tried so hard to escape and now his sons embroiled in it in Europe. Um so it it's so evocative and and I find it an extremely emotional picture of Emil's talent. Each day when he opened up that paper, he worried that he'd see one of his son's names listed in the killed in action column.

[01:00:59]The project at New France did not survive those years. The buildings fell into disuse. The tracks were gone and the forest began to reclaim what had been cleared. The war ended and the Stalin men survived. But New France was never revisited as a business operation.

[01:01:17]It returned to the wilderness. The decades passed. Campers stayed in the ruined buildings. Hikers passed through knowing little of what dreams unfolded here. But it it's a bit of an eerie feeling because one does not see wildlife and you don't hear anything.

[01:01:36]It's really quite s silent. And it occurred to me as I was working and being working creating a a kind of a a written story that it's almost as if a ghost of the electric city have taken possession of this particular area and the wildlife has gone outside outside the community. So it it's a haunting kind of place in in several different ways. Not in a negative way but in an odd unusual way. When the buildings were still here, there have been many stories passed down to the to the people in the area. As people were camping in the buildings, they could hear the train approaching and it went closer and closer, the sound of the engine, and then it would abruptly stop or as soon as they got to the door to open the door, the sound would go away. Uh, other people when they were camping in the big house would hear footsteps upstairs.

[01:02:24]They would light a fire on the floor and to cook their suppers as they were back here hunting and fishing. They might light a fire, be sitting around the fire and they hear that barrels rolling around upstairs. There are many stories.

[01:02:35]People who were camping back here talks about the fiery horsemen. The original story and I talked with the grandchild of one of the two people who were back here on a fishing expedition. They were camping at night and as they were sitting and just at the edge of the tent, they could hear the sound of a galloping horse approaching down the uh the roadway that runs through the center of the community. And it got closer and closer and suddenly this figure went by them of a horse with a a rider all dressed in black. And the eyes of the horse and the eyes of the rider were all ablaze as if they were on fire. And they got to almost this point where the uh the chapel was. The horse stopped. The rider got off and went into the chapel and the two people who were camping could hear a vicious sword fight going on inside the chapel and they were getting more scared of course all the time. Eventually the rider came out, jumped on the horse and disappeared as he was riding out of the community. So they they came over to investigate and they came in the chapel and they could smell like a burning, some kind of burning embers, but no sign of anything.

[01:03:49]Uh they were so scared they packed up and left and walked out in the dark all the way back out to civilization. And that story has been passed down. It's in the book about the electric city. And other people have claimed to have seen the the fiery horsemen as well.

[01:04:03]>> When did that story take place?

[01:04:05]>> That would have been probably around 1930 or so.

[01:04:12]Artifacts left behind by the Stalins were taken and eventually the ruins were torn down. And today all that is left is what we see here. There is nothing left of any of the organic wooden structures.

[01:04:26]Sellers and foundations partially survive. The only remnants to indicate to us what was once here.

[01:04:36]Should mention how cool this bridge is.

[01:04:40]And the new bridge is clearly built right on top of the collapsed ruins of the old bridge.

[01:04:47]We walked an overgrown clearing in the forest, which was once a bustling street with homes, a barn, and a church. Today, nothing. Memories linger. They're not our memories, but in a way, they are now after we've gone through this story so intimately.

[01:05:06]>> Yeah. When the first son to come over in Jeanjac, he quickly realized that he couldn't get around and survey the land or find out anything about it without a horse. So, he bought a horse which uh became actually the main horse of the family. The father took it over when he moved. It was called General. And uh one of the great stories of the the electric city is that it was with a male scale and the father throughout their entire tenure here on the site. And when he moved out to uh Wemouth, he bought a place in Weouth that had a barn and a paddic so he could take dear old general who was getting quite old by then with him. Um the horse outlasted Emil died.

[01:05:44]And one of the sons who was still in the area would visit every day to look after General and feed him and so on, make sure he was warm in the winter time. And uh during early one hunting season, he in the morning he went to the barn at uh at the the father's house to look after General and General wasn't there. The door was still locked, but General was gone. And he got a search party in in Wemouth. They searched all through Wemouth in the area. No sign of him at all. But several days later, the son came back with a couple of his friends to the New France site in order to do some hunting. And when they got to the the door of the barn here in front of us, uh, they found General in front of the the barn door. So >> So right here, >> right here, the theory was that he had somehow found his way back to New France after all those years.

[01:06:34]The day was over and it was time to head back to Weimoth. Emile died in 1918, having rarely, if ever, returned to New France. He along with his wife Marie Teres are buried in St. Joseph Cemetery just south of Weimoth. Several of their children are buried there with them.

[01:06:54]Terra who once had her tea house outside of town and even Jaime buried with them rather than her husband. Emil Jean and his wife Anne married at the start of our story and even Paul Stalin who authored the book about this settlement.

[01:07:12]So proud of his work was he that it's mentioned on his gravestone.

[01:07:16]Their third daughter, Simone, lived for many years in her own house not too far from the New France Interpretive Center, one of the few structures connected to the Stalins that still stands in the area. It's abandoned, collapsing more and more with each passing year.

[01:07:36]Be careful.

[01:07:37]>> Yeah.

[01:07:38]>> Try to step way over that.

[01:07:42]Simone was an avid gardener in her later years and her neighbor owned rabbits, >> had flowers. She loved flowers. She had extensive flower gardens, right?

[01:07:51]>> And what sent her back to France is that she had a dispute with the neighbor and I don't know which side it was on. We've never heard that. But the neighbor had rabbits and the rabbits came over and ate all of our flowers and uh including the second planting and she was so upset she said that was it and she packed up and she moved back to to France.

[01:08:10]>> How how long has this been abandoned? I have no idea, but I've never seen anyone living here in my memory. I'm not sure.

[01:08:20]>> The electric city may be gone, but its legacy has continued here at the New France Interpretive Center in Weimoth.

[01:08:28]They've recently succeeded in acquiring several grants to support their efforts, allowing them to move forward with plans for interactive exhibits and trained interpreters. And so we've been spending the last two two and a half years reclaiming the building and saving it for the next hundred years. So we have reshled the roof. We've drilled a well.

[01:08:47]It never had potable water before. We have uh saved all of the 26 stained glass windows and reccocked them.

[01:08:55]Still, as one looks around the center, you can't help but feel the lack of artifacts. Their massive collection of Electric City artifacts, research, and photographs were destroyed in a fire only a few years ago. We lost absolutely everything in the fire. We were told it was arson and it started at the building beside us and it took into ours. Um, we had artifacts from birth certificates to passports to army uh certificates going into the army, coming out of the army. Uh, artifacts as in pots, pans, whatever, dishes, uh, clothing, you name it, we pretty much had it. What could we have learned if those museum items hadn't been burned? Although so many artifacts are gone, Hal and Stacy believe that the true value of their work is in preserving the facts and the story of the people. A story which cannot be lost to a fire.

[01:09:58]>> Families will take their children back and talk to them about the the history, the heritage connected to it. As the society moves forward with a major grant from both provincial and federal governments and one from us at HFX Studios, they are asking that if anyone has items in their homes from the site, consider donating them to the society.

[01:10:21]They don't care how they were initially acquired, no questions asked. They just want to protect the history. And so if you're in the western end of Nova Scotia traveling around the province or arriving on either the Digby or the Yarmouth feries, it's only a short detour to visit this center here in Wayamoth and well worth your time. Come in, get a coffee, and learn about the innovative effort that built a community out of nothing, burned vibrantly in the darkness, and has since been retaken by the woods.

[01:10:56]Heat. Heat.

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