Fortress of Louisbourg

Despite the complete lack of existing 18th-century built works remaining intact on Cape Breton’s shores, the beautiful Louisbourg fortress and townsite did indeed come to rise again.

The reconstruction was a Herculean task. The colonial town had long-since been completely destroyed; only building foundations remained. But from that barely visible beginning, the multi-disciplinary teams began their studies of the landscape, bent on recreating at least a quarter of the site.

The researchers began well, locating the original town-site plans for Louisbourg in France. The city, in 18th -century fashion, was laid-out on a perfectly rectangular grid. The Fortress, too, could be recreated with confidence, since precise drawings existed for similar works, with protective bastions and batteries. Over decades, researchers discovered more than 500 maps, thousands of photographs and hundreds of thousands of document pages. Working together, the architects, landscape architects, archaeologists, historians, and conservators assembled a massive collection of more than 5.5 million artifacts and a massive GIS database.

With evolving teams of experts from dozens of fields, they recreated the thriving Louisbourg of 1744 before the British sieges began to destroy the town. Today, Louisbourg once again boasts greenery in dozens of yards and gardens, busy streets full of carts and music, elegant homes, a King’s Bakery and scores of detailed works that bring the centuries-old, colonial capital authentically to life.

“The city of Louisbourg was graced by a large number of gardens, formal and elegant for high officials, simple and functional for commoners,” wrote Ron Williams, in Landscape Architecture in Canada. There had been, he noted, “more than a hundred gardens within the city, most of them bounded by picket fences and laid out in square or rectangular planting beds bordered with shrubs or flowers.”

Given the constant shortage of foodstuffs, most were essentially practical (fruit gardens, kitchen gardens). But since no detailed plan has ever been found of a particular garden site, the garden reconstruction teams at Louisbourg created representative gardens, using plants and techniques harvested from a variety of sources: cookbooks, gardening books, letters, documents, seeds and pollen. The archaeological record provided clues as well.

“Included among the plants identified, from Native sources as well as the mother country, were cabbages, beans, onions, carrots, and squashes, usually placed in the middle of planting beds; anise-seed (caraway), hyssop, lavender, and spearmint at various locations; and blue iris along with carnations, bellflowers, and pansies as borders.

“Vertical planks were used to raise the level of beds, and wood was used for staking and supporting plants according to several traditional techniques.” — Excerpted from Landscape Architecture in Canada, with the kind permission of author Ronald A. Williams

Reclaiming the past is an ongoing job, reaching across centuries into the present. At Louisbourg, three-quarters of the site is resting still, hidden beneath turf and forest, pasture and knoll.  

New discoveries proliferate as teams of specialists unravel the landscape’s history and the lived experiences of those who once occupied this town.  Every year, scores of story-tellers and planners, interpreters and volunteers, blacksmiths and bakers, authentically bring the town’s stories to life.  

For some 70,000 visitors a year, the fortress experience is an incredible opportunity to connect with Louisbourg’s unusual history. For the vast community of those who work on the heritage sites, Louisbourg embodies generations of learning. 

Almost a half century ago, the project became a case study in exploring how and when reconstruction should be managed in places of historic significance. While many of the steps taken at the site in the 1960s would not be considered best practice today, even the missteps, carefully recorded, informed current methods of preservation and re-creation. Louisbourg’s massive knowledge base is a key resource for professionals, both inside Canada and abroad.

Still, there is work to be done. Every artifact, every landscape, needs constant care. Landscapes do not remain static.    In our century, climate change is bringing sea level rise, coastal erosion and increased storm activity. Original 18th-century shore protections are no longer sufficient. Landscape architects, together with other scientists, are searching for answers. Similarly, built heritage teams are devising ways to make the site more accessible to all visitors, pioneering new designs and methods that are sympathetic to the town’s historic character. 

Louisbourg is destined to remain a work in progress that is of intense interest to visitors and specialists alike.