René Le Blanc, mentioned above as figuring in history, came to notice at this time in the following manner. Winslow, evidently touched by the man’s age and gentleness of character, made a special request to headquarters that Le Blanc be permitted to return to his home in Marshfield, but the old man was sent to New York with his wife and two children, out of the twenty of his family. His grandchildren numbered over a hundred. Later he found three more of his children in Philadelphia, where René died.
The Acadians were scattered throughout the British colonies. A few who escaped, wandered over the country to be later apprehended and deported. A number more found their way unharmed into the wilderness of New Brunswick, but by 1763 there were less than 1,500 who had escaped the removal.
There is a tradition based upon traces of dwellings found in the woods south of New Minas, that a few escaped Acadians lived there through the following winter. These few either were captured or later joined those retreating into New Brunswick.
After the expulsion of the French settlers, Great Britain, to induce settlers to come to the country of Horton and Cornwallis from the older English colonies, sent out an invitation with a description of the country:—
“One hundred thousand acres, of which the country has produced wheat, rye, barley, oats, hemp, flax, etc., without failure for the last century; and another hundred thousand acres are cleared and stocked with English grass, planted orchards and embellished with gardens, the whole so intermixed that every individual farmer might have a proportionate quantity of plowed land, grassland, and woodland.”
This appeared in 1759. In June, the next year, after the country was viewed by agents from New England, the people came to occupy the vacated lands. With the assistance of the Acadian prisoners remaining at Fort Edward, the dykes were repaired, and the country began to thrive with new life upon the grave of the old.
The last written trace of the Acadians in a body, appears in an order issued from Halifax in 1762, causing one hundred and thirty of them to be sent from Hants and King’s counties, where they were working for English inhabitants.
For the English settlers, the farm lands were divided into hundred-acre lots. New roads were laid out, and the old Acadian landmarks are now gradually disappearing. A single farm to-day perhaps occupies the site of a whole village of Acadian times. Willows still mark roads or the buried foundations of their homes. Their apple trees yet bear fruit, sometimes found among the wild, recent growth, or in pastures. Roads and dykes may be traced, and numerous cellars in out-of-the-way places where they have not been disturbed.
In the history of the English colonies during the next twenty years following upon the re-settlement of the Acadian country of Grand-Pré, affairs went topsy-turvy. French Canada was lost to France through the operations and strength of the colonies under English rule. New England strengthened Nova Scotia for England by removing the Acadians, and then bringing her people to the deserted farmlands.