Town of Kentville covers controversial Cornwallis name on signage

The Town of Kentville has covered the name Cornwallisonsignage portraying a new bridgeafter officials learned of a petitionto change the name.

Isobel Hamilton, who moved to Kings County four years ago from Scotland, started the petition calling for the new bridge to be named in recognition of Mi'kmaq heritage rather than Cornwallis.

"I was quite angry actually just because it seemed such an insensitive thing to do," she says.

Construction on the new bridge is about to begin. It will straddletheCornwallisRiver, and will eventually replace the existing bridge, which is called theCornwallisBridge.

Bloody history

Governor Edward Cornwallis was a British military officer who founded Halifax in 1749 and issued a bounty on the scalps of Mi'kmaq people.

Hamilton says she was aware of recent protests to have Cornwallis's name removed from several landmarks, but points out Cornwallis also has history in her home country.

"In Scotland, he was a pretty unpleasant man as well," she said.

"He was part of the suppression of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 just before he came here, and after the battle he suppressed the Scottish highland people by boarding families up in their houses and setting fire to them and burning them alive."

Internal working name

As her petition pickedup hundreds of signatures, Hamilton got a call from the Town of Kentville's chief administrative officer, Mark Phillips, who informed her the town had no intention of naming the new bridge after the controversial figure, but rather after Wendell Phinney, Kentville's longest-serving mayor.

The name Cornwallis, which was supposed to be an internal working name for the project, was promptly covered up.

"It was a slight oversight on our side to use an internal name," saidadministrative assistant Jennifer West.

New petition for Cornwallis River

Hamilton says she's pleased to see the name covered, but she would still like to find a way to recognize Mi'kmaq heritage.

"There's no way to fix the wrongs that happened in the past, but to adopt some place names that were theirs, it's a good way of acknowledging their presence here and remind everyone that they were here first and this is their land," she says.

She's now started a new petition to rename the Cornwallis River.

The province has already removed signs bearing the river's name, and the Annapolis Valley First Nation has been working to get the river renamed Jijuktu'kwejk, which means narrow river. No one from the First Nation was available for comment on Hamilton's petition.