My mother knew him as Daddy; we knew him as Papa. Many others knew him as P. MacE. Nicholson, Patrick or Paddy. At one point or another in his life of 84 years, he was a husband, poet, short story writer, editor, painter, labor organizer, labor newspaper reporter, janitor, and devout Catholic father of 8 children. This is not a complete list, but it's a good start for now.
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| P. MacE. Nicholson |
He spent his first 20 years farming the land that his grandfather, Alexander Nicholson, claimed and cleared when he emigrated from the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland in 1836. This land is located in what is known as Rear Beaver Cove, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Patrick was born on that land in 1887 at a time when there was a thriving community of fellow Scottish immigrant families with names like MacMullin, Gillis, MacSween and MacNeil, to name a few. It's called
Rear Beaver Cove because Beaver Cove borders the Bras D'or Lake; Rear Beaver Cove is up a "mountain" from the lake. The prime lakefront property was claimed by the earliest settlers from Scotland. Many of the later settlers received tracts of 200 acres per family in the rear lands; Alexander Nicholson was awarded 280 acres. Patrick described this process of obtaining land in Cape Breton in one of his short stories, "The Hill They Blessed":
When the Scottish Islanders settled along the shores of Cape Breton, they were land thirsty. Living on small narrow crofts, bound and chatteled by laws and limits all their lives, when they came to a new land, enormous in its vast size, free to their possession they took such large proportions that later emigrants had to take less favorable grounds or move inland to the "Rears". Big Alexander, while only a few years behind the first settlers in Cape Breton, had to possess for himself and family of "rear land."
He goes on to describe the beauty and bounty of the settled Rear land this way:
He settled in the Big Glen with many of his former Barra-men and it was a happy choice as the Big Glen proved to be a fertile, fruitful valley, beautiful beyond description in its wild rugged scenery. ... Lakes and rivers teeming with salmon and trout, countless streams and springs babbling constantly over crags and waterfalls; forests of spruce and pine, of birch and maple, studded with dogwood and wild cherry, spanning as far as the eye could see...this was indeed a paradise to the true Scot.
I just had to see this land for myself! My chance took form several months ago as I was preparing for a trip to Cape Breton. Through the DNA service 23&Me, I found a distant cousin who had grown up in Cape Breton and knew Roddy Nicholson, a first cousin of Patrick's in Beaver Cove. (More about the blacksmith, Roddy, in another post). He tipped me off to a website,
www.boisdale.org, where walking tours of Rear Beaver Cove can be arranged. The administrator of that website put me in touch with another Nicholson cousin, George MacLean. Alexander Nicholson was also George's 2nd great grandfather, so that makes us third cousins:
George and two of his brothers have been exploring Rear Beaver Cove for over 30 years. They were excited to take me and Mark up into the area and point out some of the landmarks. Patrick Nicholson's family left Rear Beaver Cove for the industrial part of Cape Breton, specifically Glace Bay, in 1907. This was a time when many of the descendants of the original pioneers were unable to sustain their large and growing families by farming the land. By 1920, all of the inhabitants of Rear Beaver Cove had left the countryside for "greener pastures". So this land has been uninhabited for about 100 years. Here's one copy of an early map that they are working from:
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| Early government map of Rear Beaver Cove showing Nicholson tract (circled) |
In the lower right corner of the map above, you notice Loon Lake. This is a fairly large lake not far from the Nicholson land. My grandfather mentions this lake in several of his stories. Here is a photo that we took along the shore of Loon Lake, with George and his brother Joe MacLean.
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| George, Judy and Joe on the shore of Loon Lake |
To get to this area, we followed a logging road, shown by the red line in the following Google Satellite Map (upper), passing along the north shore of Loon Lake and traveling west to the turnoff. We parked here and hiked the crude trail into the heavily wooded area to get to the former Nicholson property.
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Google Satellite map with route of travel marked in red.
Scale similar to that of the government map shown above. |
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Zoom out of area with Loon Lake shown in center, Beaver Cove at shore of Bras D'Or lake.
Rear Beaver Cove in the interior. |
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| Joe MacLean on the trail to Nicholson's property in Rear Beaver Cove |
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| Joe and George MacLean |
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| Natural spring on old Nicholson property |
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| Deserted for about 100 years, nature has taken back the land |
The MacLean brothers are searching for the homestead sites. Alexander Nicholson and his wife Catherine (nee MacMullin) had a family of eight, including 6 boys. There were perhaps three homesites on this land, portioned out to several of the sons including my great grandfather, John Òg (young John). John Òg married Margaret MacEachern from East Bay and they had five children, my grandfather Patrick being the third oldest (notice that the initials of his mother's maiden name became his middle name in his writing - P. MacE. Nicholson!).
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The squared-off stones in this photo are an indication of the site of an original foundation or hearth.
However, this example is not on the Nicholson property but rather an adjacent tract. |
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