Birchtown Archaeology - Material Cultural History of Nova Scotia's Black Loyalist Settlers

Stone Walls at Birchtown

The many stone walls at Birchtown are a significant feature of the cultural landscape. While some of them undoubtedly mark property boundaries and others functioned as part of a past agricultural system, still, there are others that remain unexplained. Certainly, their presence, and the investment of time and energy in their construction, denote a sense of permanence. The Black Loyalist settlers were making their homesteads here. But when the promise of better farmland and less racial tension presented itself, the settlers abandoned their eight years of effort to settle Birchtown and started over again on the other side of the Atlantic, settling Freetown, Sierra Leone.
The delineation of one's property had to have been an important statement for Africans and African descendents at Birchtown, many having left conditions of enslavement and oppression. Perhaps this helps us to understand, in part, the importance of expression exhibited in these wall systems. An effort is currently underway to integrate these graphical representations of the stone walls into the GIS for Birchtown, using a GPS and image processing software. We hope to use these tools to get a synoptic view of land use and spatial organization at Birchtown, as defined by the Black Loyalist settlers. This will hopefully bring us closer to an understanding of the community structure of Birchtown over the landscape and enable the spaces and interconnections of the historic community to be defined as a larger site. Walls at AkDi-25
Walls around AkDi-22

Walls at AkDi-11 Walls
Walls around AkDi-26, 27, 28 & 29

Walls around AkDi-5 and AkDi-25 AkDi-30
Walls at AkDi-30

Surveying wall at AkDi-21
Wall along Old Post Road (AkDi-28)

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The many stone walls at Birchtown are a significant feature of the cultural landscape. While some of them undoubtedly mark property boundaries and others functioned as part of a past agricultural system, still, there are others that remain unexplained. Certainly, their presence, and the investment of time and energy in their construction, denote a sense of permanence. The Black Loyalist settlers were making their homesteads here. But when the promise of better farmland and less racial tension presented itself, the settlers abandoned their eight years of effort to settle Birchtown and started over again on the other side of the Atlantic, settling Freetown, Sierra Leone. The delineation of one's property had to have been an important statement for Africans and African descendents at Birchtown, many having left conditions of enslavement and oppression. Perhaps this helps us to understand, in part, the importance of expression exhibited in these wall systems. An effort is currently underway to integrate these graphical representations of the stone walls into the GIS for Birchtown, using a GPS and image processing software. We hope to use these tools to get a synoptic view of land use and spatial organization at Birchtown, as defined by the Black Loyalist settlers. This will hopefully bring us closer to an understanding of the community structure of Birchtown over the landscape and enable the spaces and interconnections of the historic community to be defined as a larger site.	Walls around AkDi-22
Walls at AkDi-11	Walls around AkDi-26, 27, 28 & 29
Walls around AkDi-5 and AkDi-25	Walls at AkDi-30
Surveying wall at AkDi-21	Wall along Old Post Road (AkDi-28)