LOUISBOURG, N.S. — The roads were barren and empty at the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site in Louisbourg, N.S., on Thursday.
It's how life must have felt on a daily basis during the long, harsh winters in the 18th century town.
"According to who you ask, in the 18th century, winter could last seven to eight months,” said Dan Pitcher, an acting historian at Fortress of Louisbourg.
From October to May, there was little respite from the cold and the howling wind off the ocean.
"A lot of these buildings were drafty. Snow would come in through the cracks in the doors,”Pitcher said.
Keeping places as warm as you could was only part of the battle. Then, there was whether you had squirreled away enough food to keep starvation at bay.
"There would be times when you would run out of food or not have enough food to get through the winter,” Pitcher said. “So, access to food is a big advantage we have today compared to the 18th century."
What little evidence there is suggests it was colder back then. The period from the year 1300 to about 1850 in the North Atlantic was known as the Little Ice Age.
"We never had anybody in Louisbourg with a thermometer to record what the temperature was like, so we can't really know 100 per cent that way,” Pitcher said. “But we do know from other parts of the world, from looking at tree rings and how they were smaller - closer together during this time period, it was definitely colder than it is today."
More than 250 years later, the winter of 2022 at Louisbourg is a difficult one because of the latest wave of COVID-19. While the fortress is once again open to the public, there were no visitors Thursday morning. While those who lived in the fortified town weren't dealing with a global pandemic back in the 1700’s, settlers in Louisbourg were no strangers to outbreaks of disease.
"One winter, we did have a smallpox epidemic in the 1730s,” Pitcher said.
Stories of how people came together to stave off the harsh winter conditions and blow off steam were found in an engineer's journal dated 1758.
“He does talk quite a bit about going to different parties between Jan. 1 and Lent,” Pitcher said, adding that Louisbourg was known for its steady imports and exports of rum. “So he's talking about who he's with, what they're eating, what the music might be, what games they would have played."
