Lost deep in the woods of Nova Scotia on a maze of logging roads, I came across a faded sign saying “The Electric City – La Nouvelle France.” Intrigued, I followed it, and found the abandoned ruins of what had once been an egalitarian utopian society. It had been among the first places in the Maritimes to have electricity and running water, and even boasted a train which ran on wooden rails.
At the time I wasn’t even vaguely sure where I was at all – I had attempted to take a short cut and ended up on a long and headache-inducing bumpy drive over some very much washed out and overgrown dirt roads, which eventually led to a clearing.
Walking around the clearing in the forest, I didn’t immediately see anything like a city, or for that matter much of anything at all.
Upon looking closely though, I noticed that there were some stones in the shape of the foundations to a building. It was a building at some point but that was so long ago that a tree was growing in the middle of it. Not a mere sapling either, but a full-sized tree.
As I wandered through the overgrown forest, I began to make out more shapes of what was once human activity: a few large rectangles of rotting, moss covered wood. There were more misshapen walls of rocks in the vague outline of what had once been buildings.
The area was totally quiet, even the animals were eerily silent. Whatever human activity had taken place here once had long moved on. There was no sign of anything to identify what had once been here.
I suddenly heard voices in the woods. Two old men approached, wearing long wispy white beards, and speaking French.
They told me this place was once known as “The Electric City.”
In 1892 the wealthy Stehelin family departed France with their eleven children. Their home had once been Alsace, a region of France that was occupied and later annexed by the Prussians (Germans) during the disastrous and humiliating Franco-Prussian War.
Fleeing European wars, they ended up in the Acadian part of Nova Scotia, in a small village called Nouvelle France, which means New France.
According to The Electric City by Paul Stehelin; “they founded a prosperous lumbering business on the Silver River in Digby County. The family’s achievements were legendary–they built their own railway, and installed their own electricity to the incredulity of all around.”
There was a saw mill in the river which was able to power nearby buildings with electricity,
which was very rare at the time. Cables reached all of the main buildings in the village providing them with power, some decades before much of the Maritimes had electricity.
Stehelin wrote: “The dazzling sight of the hamlet at night, lit up in all its brilliance, inspired the Blacks and the Acadians to rechristen New France; The Electric City, a name still heard among their descendents.”
Many even had running water, which was also a surprising luxury for a small village at the time.
In fact the majority of rural Maritime homes did not get running water until after the Second World War, which is nearly three quarters of a century from the time of The Electric City.
The Stehelin family, escaping from European wars, held utopian ideals and wanted to build a peaceful world where all were welcome.
The village they built attracted open and progressive minded residents, and in Nouvelle France the Acadians, immigrants from France, Black Loyalists, Mi’kmaq, as well as people from numerous religions lived together without regard to race, religious, linguistic, and class divisions.
There was an emphasis on equality and respect in The Electric City.
The Stehelin family clearly trusted the workers from the village. So when a group of Acadien workers –most of who could not read– came up with the idea for a train that ran on wooden tracks out to the coast.
Stehelin wrote: “the rails were made of logs twenty to thirty feet long. They were squared on three sides and laid with the remaining rounded side up … on which fitted the concave wheels of the rolling stock.”
The train itself, named “Mouche a feu,” was built right there in The Electric City itself, by the same Acadians.
Although it was built as a peaceful refuge to get away from far away wars in Europe, war eventually brought about the end of The Electric City.
Only two and half decades after the Stehelin family fled France and its wars to faraway Canada, France found itself engulfed in a far bigger war than anything the family had fled: The First World War.
France, suffering badly in the conflict, implemented mandatory conscription for all adult males of age who were French citizens. Unlike other countries such as Germany or Russia, where one could get deferred from serving in the army due to educational or family commitments, there
were no deferments, and virtually every male from France between the ages of 20 to 45 were conscripted.
“Alas,” wrote Paul Stehelin, “they soon were told by the Consul that they remained French citizens. France did not recognize their [Canadian] status and should they fail to answer the call, they would be considered deserters, subject to severe punishment, even execution, should they ever set foot on French soil again, even as Canadian soldiers.”
Many of the people living in The Electric City were French citizens, and so they, along with several of the Stehelin sons, were conscripted into the faraway European war.
Meanwhile, the economics of timber in a fast-modernizing world of iron weren’t as profitable anymore. The Electric City, now bereft of most of its people, declined rapidly during and after the war, and was later abandoned completely.
And so The Electric City was left to become overgrown by the same forest that was once it’s raison d’être, and its fascinating legacy as a progressive attempt at a more egalitarian society was largely forgotten.
