Poking around the Bradley property

I'm on my way to Australia now - slipping along the rim of the night over the Pacific ocean. I'm looking forward to the visit but I'm really thinking about the Bradley house. On Tuesday I scarcely had time to take it all in. Now I have a chance to reflect on the pictures I took.

The Bradley property is beautiful today as it was in 1860. The land faces south toward a small cove - it's know locally as Bradley's Cove but on the nautical charts it has no name. On the other side of the cove are two islands - Hen and Hog island. These are classic Nova Scotia island names, as years ago, farmers often kept livestock such as chickens, pigs, sheep and cows, on nearby islands -it saved building a fence. There are dozens of islands with such names in Nova Scotia. Both Hen and Hog island are owned by the Nova Scotia government so they will never be developed.

The islands shelter the Bradley property from the full force of the Atlantic ocean. The shelter, plus the southern exposure and the deep anchorage made this a prime piece of land when it was first granted.


Traditionally, the people of the Eastern Shore had to juggle several jobs in order to scratch out a living. Typically the man worked in the in-shore fishery in the summer and worked in the forest in the winter. His wife ran the house, raised the children and managed the garden or small farm. Arable land was poor or non-existent along the Eastern Shore. The area has never been prosperous. Even the village of Tangier, the site of Canada's first gold rush, never became wealthy. As explained in Bill Bradley's book; a handful of investors, charlatans - or worse, developed the small mine claims with the benefit of local labour and slipped away with the gold.

The Bradley property was better than many for the Eastern Shore life style. The deep anchorage was a huge asset for a fisherman. Today there is a wharf with a road leading to it that has been there for generations. The hill the house sits on is a glacial moraine with good soil, albeit rocky, and good drainage. Drinking water has never been a problem on this property. The remains of an old stone-lined well can be found a ways down the slope from the house. Frank Grandy, the previous owner, told me they used the old well in the mid-eighties.

At one time the upper floor of the house was used for bedrooms, accessed from the kitchen by a steep set of narrow stairs. Today, the up-stairs is a rough attic. The lathe and plaster has all been stripped away. Large 4" x 6" rafters can be seen in the oldest part of the house, the 16' x 20' west side. On the east extension the rafters are hand-hewn. One clue that the two part of the house were built at different times is the disastrous intersection of the ridge lines - it was poorly designed with insufficient support and, as a result, sags terribly. There were lots of poor builders a hundred years ago just as there are today.