Anslow’s Historic Windsor a good, easy read

“For a long time the farmers and owners of cattle and sheep had begged Judge Thomas Chandler Haliburton to try and persuade the Government to build a bridge over the river Avon at Windsor,” writes Florence Anslow in her book, Historic Windsor.

As Anslow tells it, the government refused to fund a bridge and Haliburton “persuaded four friends to help finance the project.”

Anslow doesn’t give the date the bridge opened but another Windsor historian, L. S. Loomer, writes that it was built between 1834 and 1838.

This was a toll bridge, and Anslow informs us that the fare for “foot passengers” was two cents, with a 25cent charge for carriages and teams.

This aside about toll charges is typical of what Anslow included in her Windsor history and what makes it readable and interesting.

Read in conjunction with works by L. S. Loomer and Gwendolyn Shand, it rounds out the history of Windsor.

The book is not a formal history of Windsor, however. This is explained by the subtitle “jottings from my scrapbook.”

Arthur Wentworth Hamilton Eaton, in the History of Kings County, would never include humorous tombstone inscriptions, for example, but Anslow does. And Eaton would never have given any thought to including Judge Haliburton’s explanation on the origin of bluenoses as applied to Nova Scotians. Anslow does all this and it’s exactly what makes her book worthwhile reading.

We learn that the “blue laws” of the Puritans may explain the real origin of bluenoses. From Anslow, we also learn that the robust lifestyle of one Windsor gentleman led to his tombstone reading, “He fell among thieves and died among robbers.”

In the book is the genealogy of Windsor’s famous Haliburton family, ancient Pessaquith is mentioned, and the origin of one of the oldest agricultural exhibitions in Canada.

Mentioned as well is Windsor’s connection with the Col. Noble massacre at Grand Pre, and Windsor’s old burying ground is noted as the resting place of most of the town’s pioneering builders.

Published in 1960 and now out of print, Anslow’s book can be found in the Annapolis Valley Reginal Library. She also wrote a history of the Haliburton House Museum, where she was the curator.

Loomer’s Windsor history has four “mentions” of Anslow, which was all the biographical information I could find on her life.