National Gazette

A gentleman who was lately in Shelburne, Nova-Scotia, informs, that there are upwards of three hundred very elegant built houses in that place unoccupied. Those houses were chiefly built by the loyalists, who left New-York in consequence of the impolitic measures adopted by that state in the year 1783, when so much money was carried away by those persons, under the harsh denomination of refugees, and who would have gladly remained to expend their money in New-York, had they not been alarmed, and, in fact, forced away. The reason alledged for so many houses being empty at Shelburne, is, that the climate and soil of Nova-Scotia is deemed altogether hostile to the constitutions of human beings, who were certainly never intended, agreeably to the scale of nature, to inhabit unfruitful rocks and barren earth.