History & Heritage

New Brunswick is a province with a diverse and fascinating cultural heritage. Micmacs, Maliseets, Loyalists, Acadians, Irish, Scots, Danes and Germans all played a role in creating the New Brunswick we know today.
The French mariner Jacques Cartier visited the east coast of the region constituting present-day New Brunswick in 1534. When Samuel de Champlain and other Europeans began to visit New Brunswick in the early 1600s, they were met by Maliseets and Micmacs. The early French farmers settled at the head of the Bay of Fundy and up the St. John River Valley as far as present-day Fredericton and called the land Acadia.
Warfare between the French and British flared intermittently between 1689 and 1763. Great Britain obtained possession of mainland Acadia in 1713 under the terms of the Peace of Utrecht, the agreement ending the War of the Spanish Succession, but the French insisted that New Brunswick was not included. In 1755 the British defeated French forces at Fort Beauséjour and extended effective British rule to New Brunswick. In the same year, when the British expelled the Acadians from Nova Scotia, some 500 of the deportees settled in New Brunswick, substantially augmenting its population.

In 1762 the first British settlement in New Brunswick was established at Saint John. Many British Loyalists fled there from the American colonies during and after the American Revolution, and in 1784 New Brunswick, which had been administered as a part of Nova Scotia, became a separate colony. After the Napoleonic Wars many British immigrants came to New Brunswick, and the colony entered a period of prosperity based on fishing, shipbuilding, and lumbering.
Fall-out from English and French wars in Europe forced more than 5,000 Acadians into exile in 1755. Some of them escaped to what was then a remote and uninhabited coastline along the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Chaleur Bay. Today we call it the Acadian Peninsula. Others returned to France or fled to the United States, many settling in Louisiana.

July 1, 1867 New Brunswick entered the Canadian Confederation, as one of the four original provinces. Railroad building followed confederation. The Intercolonial Railway (now the Canadian National Railway), linking New Brunswick and Nova Scotia with Montreal, was completed in 1876. The Canadian Pacific Railway line from Montreal to Moncton, by way of northern Maine, was finished before the close of the century.
Scots and Irish, pushed out of their homes by political pressure and potato famines, arrived in the early 1800s, and in the 1870s a few hundred Danes settled in Victoria County where their distinctive community survives to this day. But by the late 19th century, major immigration floods were replaced by a trickle of settlers from all over the world. Today, although Native, French, English, Scottish and Irish roots run deep, New Brunswick enjoys a vivid, multi-cultural and spiritual heritage.