The Ghosts of Roxbury
The Mayor of Roxbury rolls down his window as we drive along the main street of the small settlement outside of Paradise, Annapolis Valley.
He’s come across a couple of unfamiliar faces and stops to chat.
“Did you see the Rosengreen House?” he asks them before we part.
“No! Where is it?” they ask.
“Right there,” Whitman says, pointing to a dense thicket of trees and plants.
The ladies look on, unconvinced. Whitman instructs them to push through an opening in the woods and after a few steps, they’ll come across the home. The graveyard is further in.
The window goes up to keep out the scourge of mosquitoes and we leave the hikers to their explorations.
Roxbury is a ghost town, but even the ghosts are dying now.
“Roxbury started off as Mi’kmaq, then French Acadian, then the Loyalists,” Whitman tells me as he navigates his four-wheel drive truck over a lumpy rock while trees whip the windows on a hot summer day. Stone walls and foundations mark Roxbury’s vanished properties and a few holes ringed with rock are all that’s left of the wells.
The graveyard is holding its clearing, for now. Many of the tombs mark fallen mothers and, often, their babies. It used to offer a fine view of the brook, but the trees have surrounded it. Whitman pushes back the forest, but a second graveyard has already been consumed.
“All this vegetation will settle down and new will grow and it’ll just cover up what’s there,” the retired teacher says as we pull up to Rosengreen House. It looks like an old snake skin, collapsed in a wrinkly pile on the ground. Built in the early 1800s, it stood until the 1980s, making it one of the first houses built in Roxbury and the last to go down.
Whitman, a local historian and chainsaw carver who runs a small publishing company with his wife, is the final keeper of Roxbury’s secrets.
The ghosts whisper old tales: the Mi’kmaq hunted and fished here for centuries, maybe millennia. The Acadians came next, holing up in the woods to escape the Expulsion. According to a story retold in the Halifax Herald in 1889, their allies, the Mi’kmaq, raced on canoe from Grand Pre to warn them what was coming in 1755. They took to the woods. Local lore says none survived the winter, but Whitman thinks differently.
“My theory is that they came back here and befriended the Mi’kmaq, cleared more land and stayed there. In 1820 the first Loyalist, Thomas Durland, came back here. There had to have been a road.”
Rumours persist that the fleeing Acadians left stashes of gold under Mile Rock on Roxbury Road, but Whitman doubts it’s true. I had a little dig anyway.
After the Acadians, the Loyalists moved in. Roxbury, as they called it, started with great promise. The Acadians had expanded the Mi’kmaq toe-path into a lane, and the Loyalists made it a road off what’s now Route 201. By the mid-1800s, it had a population of about 70, with a school, a church and homes. A mill exported lumber to the railway station in Paradise.
But like so many of its citizens, Roxbury died in infancy. Roxbury Road, a few miles into deep woods, never went anywhere else, meaning Roxbury wasn’t on the way to anything else. People trickled away. A fire in 1903 broke the settlement’s spirit.
“They just walked away from their homes,” marvels Whitman. He went back into the woods for picnics as a boy and the fascination with his ghostly neighbours has lasted a lifetime. He’s literally written the book on it: Lost in the Woods, available at Davidwhitman.ca. He’s taken hundreds of trips back in time, ferrying curious visitors to his phantom kingdom. Judging by the signatures in the guest book that greets hikers at the Welcome to Roxbury sign, it’s a well-travelled trail.
Roxbury was abandoned up to the 1920s, when two families homesteaded in the area. When they left, the sleepy forest yawned and reclaimed the land.
Like nearby New France, the “Electric City” that burned bright before burning out, the disappearing ruins of Roxbury are spectral reminder that everything ends up buried.
First published in the Chronicle-Herald July 12 2009