The Alaska Daily Empire

Longfellow Memorial for Evangeline Park at Grand Pre

If the visitor to the beautiful Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia is blessed with a true romantic spirit, he may be able to conjure up the graceful quiet figure of Evangeline, and, with Longfellow to help carry out the illusion, fancy sees her back in the early days before the Acadians were driven sorrowfully from their little homes in 1755. The Annapolis-Cornwallis district, where apple trees in their blossoming time make the Valley a veritable paradise, is peculiarly romantic. The pathetic figure of Evangeline lives through the quaint streets of Grand Pre and she walks at ground enclosing the large, stone cross which marks the burial place of her forebears has been made into a memorial park and named after her. The gates are always open, and thousands of lovers of history and literature crowd there every year. A bronze statue of Evangeline, designed by an Acadian sculptor and fairly breathing the pathos of her story, now stands in the park. Nearby, admirers of Longfellow throughout Canada and the United States are planning to erect a memorial to the poet. Not far from Grand Pre is Annapolis Royal, founded in 1604 and chiefly because of historic old Fort Anne, now a Canadian National Park. Few indeed are the actual descendants of the Acadians, but their ways and customs may be judged by the relics in the Acadian room in Fort Anne, furnished to represent exactly what their homes were in the past, and carefully looked after by L. M. Fortier, superintendent of the park. Another pleasant spot for the visitor is Kentville, where the Cornwallis Inn attends to the material wants of its guests and abounds with suggestions for fishing, canoeing and hiking excursions. Still more entrancing perhaps, is Digby, a town charmingly situated on the Annapolis Basin, where there is not only trout fishing but deep-sea fishing in the Bay of Fundy, and where visitors make The Pines a temporary home from which to take motor and boat trips to the beauty spots of Nova Scotia.