Grand-Pré Rural Historic District

, English , The villages of Grand-Pré and Hortonville, and the fertile farmlands which surround them, comprise one of the oldest settlement and land use patterns of European origin in Canada. Acadians began settling near Grand-Pré in the 1680s, attracted by the vast stretches of tidal marshes. Employing ingenious dyke-building techniques developed at Port-Royal, Acadian farmers enclosed over one thousand acres of marshlands which, when desalinated, created superior cropland. The houses of Grand-Pré village, scattered amidst the orchards and woodlots of the upper fringe, stood along the southern boundary of the principal marsh. Following the Acadian deportation in 1755, a British township survey was superimposed on the area for the settlement of New England Planters, who adopted the existing marshland agricultural technology. The Planters’ main settlement, which survives as the present villages of Grand-Pré and Hortonville, developed on the site of its Acadian predecessor. The combined agricultural traditions of the Acadians and the Planters have evolved to create a distinctive rural landscape of today’s Grand-Pré., French ,