00:00:00.000Well today the East Coast tour continues and I'm lucky enough to have Amos Shelley from the
00:00:11.440McCullough House artist and filmmaker so thanks for taking the time I really appreciate it we
00:00:19.360were coming in so I always tell the story how we find our way to different places so we're coming
00:00:24.120in today and jim lang i don't know jim lang's a famous uh sports commentator he hosts he come in
00:00:30.760he hosts a bunch of shows with us on tpl media and he called me so where are you going i said
00:00:36.520well i'm going to picto he said oh my goodness he said i love it because jim is from nova scotia
00:00:42.200okay and he was uh just going off about the number of beautiful things to see in the city and the
00:00:48.440town and and i thought oh that's great and as we rolled in you know the rolling hills yeah yeah so
00:00:54.760you're originally an ontario guy i am yeah who transplanted here yes yeah and i can see why
00:01:01.160yeah yeah one way one way ticket yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah you're never going back i i don't
00:01:08.360i don't think there's a good reason to go back sir no okay i don't think so all right so tell
00:01:13.240me about where we're sitting today because i read a little bit you know last night to get ready for
00:01:17.160the show i i uh the mccullough house i thought it was really interesting from an educational
00:01:22.120perspective very much so so kind of you know if you don't mind set the frame of you know what was
00:01:28.360happening here when thomas came and how his life was because i can only imagine what his life was
00:01:34.760at that time yeah so mccullough is a very interesting player i i would argue maybe one
00:01:40.440of the most undersung canadian icons i think not very many people know a lot about him
00:01:45.800um unfortunately because he's a very pivotal person in our history so picto you know the
00:01:51.980landing of the hector in 1773 uh was a very small uh port town timbers timber spot right and that
00:02:00.540and that was the vessel the ship that came right so it wasn't the first but it really the area
00:02:05.340hadn't really been settled and that's there's a long history there with grants and land grants and
00:02:09.200obviously the mcmungi were here for thousands of years uh but the hector arrives with kind of the
00:02:14.660first wave of scottish settlers um and it's hard living right yeah well then they spent from what
00:02:21.900i read the last night they were like 11 months to get here or sorry 11 weeks yeah 11 weeks on the
00:02:29.180on the ocean yeah to get over here several of them died yes mostly children no bathrooms not
00:02:35.660really no sir no they were just like you know of course in those days right they just you know
00:02:40.340they're pretty hard living yeah so without you know a long history it's really hard to talk about
00:02:46.640nova scotian history and settlement without understanding scottish kind of history and
00:02:51.180settlement and displacement right so after the the jacobite rebellions and the battle of clodden
00:02:55.360and kind of the the land reclaiming in kind of the highlands uh with the lords and lairds and
00:03:01.500english coming up there's tension between the lowlanders and the highlanders in scotland
00:03:05.540and so the Hector people were kind of the first fruits canary in the coal mine to leave
00:03:11.040kind of Scotland seeing what was happening in Scotland they left on their own volition on
00:03:16.240their own eventually it would happen that no Scots were rounded up and kind of forced to leave
00:03:20.880in the clearances that would come later on so there's a lot of political tension economic
00:03:27.500tension in the actual prehistory of Pictou and so that the people that landed they cross on this
00:03:35.020ship the Hector that never should have crossed the ocean they hit a hurricane is a horrible
00:03:40.420terrible journey uh dysentery and you know starvation children died it was awful and0.97
00:03:49.120they landed up far later in the season than they're supposed to okay and so the Mi'kma'ki0.93
00:03:53.760really helped them survive that first winter but half them stayed here half them went to Truro0.92
00:03:59.680and Pictou over the next some years Pictou is just kind of almost like an idea than it was
00:04:07.160really a settlement and it took some time before the first timber framed house was established and
00:04:13.500the land was cleared sufficiently actually one of my favorite facts about Pictou is before there
00:04:19.700was a timber frame home the Copeland brothers came and built a boat so they were building ships here
00:04:26.480before they were building houses which is crazy wow um so it's kind of in the bones of the town
00:04:31.600in the dna of the town to be industrious and hard-working and so kind of late 1700s 1790-ish
00:04:39.720somewhere in there uh edward mortimer comes from keith scotland banff scotland the mauritia area
00:04:46.240and he was a merchant and he's very savvy very smart very hard-working and he brought a lot of
00:04:53.060industry to town mainly through timber timber trading back to england and so on back to back
00:04:58.560to scotland and they're also kind of this this northwest company for trading kind of voyagers
00:05:04.840there's all this kind of mixing of just settling you know or trying to settle the land in a way
00:05:12.520and it's kind of a tangly history obviously with acadians and mcmagi but the people that landed
00:05:19.460than Pictou were mostly poor Scots and displaced Scots themselves. It's displaced Highlanders.
00:05:26.980And so early 1800s, 1803, Thomas McCullough was on a ship bound for Prince Edward Island. He was a
00:05:33.420Presbyterian minister and he was taking a call. He had a young family. He was a young man. He was
00:05:38.180taking a call to go to PEI and bad weather blew him into port here. And the legend goes people
00:05:46.240saw that he had a globe in his hand and so some people convinced him to stay because they knew
00:05:51.140he's educated and he was a lowland scot so he wasn't a highlander and so whoever was on the
00:05:56.600dock that day saw that he was educated and wanted him to stay here in town so he's never actually
00:06:03.440supposed to be here um and he did he stayed and a fierce sharp clever intelligent very impassioned
00:06:13.600progressive man and so by 1806 they built sherbrooke cottage for him which is the house
00:06:19.860we're in now and that that was his home wow uh recently we just had a kind of a historical
00:06:24.660archaeologist kind of come through and explain kind of the details of the home that actually
00:06:30.860for the time it was quite large so this it's really kind of scaled up it is for a small
00:06:36.240scottish cottage it's quite elaborate quite large um the scale is much larger the hallways are wider
00:06:43.200the rooms are bigger than they normally would be and i think it's because they probably really
00:06:47.600wanted thomas to stay so i think it was that that kind of you know for a presbyterian minister
00:06:52.300uh it's quite a grand house for his station but he was a very just a very sharp point of the spear
00:07:02.900and he valued education and he valued non-sectarian education so he valued
00:07:09.060basically everybody could be educated he didn't care your affiliation your uh your denominational
00:07:16.340affiliation where you went to church or how where you were baptized he wanted to educate you with a
00:07:21.180strong liberal arts education and no one was really doing that at the time and so he took
00:07:26.460people into this home and at one time there's 27 people living here and eventually built like a
00:07:32.020back room off the back to house students um i think up to nine or twelve at a time he had no
00:07:38.640servants it was just him his family his wife i believe his mother and they ran home and eventually
00:07:44.320they built a barn school in the back of the property to house the students uh and because
00:07:50.840he had this progressive lens of education he was kind of a lightning rod and some local people
00:07:56.140didn't agree with what he was doing and they burned that school to the ground oh it didn't
00:08:00.300stop him right and so he kept pushing and made friends with edward mortimer who was now a very
00:08:07.280wealthy merchant and between the two of them uh and some others obviously but mostly them with
00:08:13.220mortimer's financial backing and mccullough's kind of brilliance they founded picto academy in 1816
00:08:18.560or 18 yeah 1816 which i would argue was kind of canada's first modern high school
00:08:25.320oh wow so without mccullough i'm not sure education would look the way that it does today
00:08:32.040so he fought really really really hard and had a lot of adversity coming his way to make that
00:08:38.960happen so the first real let's call it public school where anyone could go yeah yeah yeah i
00:08:44.960mean yeah with limitations yeah you know as early as 1840 he started educating women as well so
00:08:50.320we're talking like a really kind of a progressive edge so it's not perfect so it would be
00:08:54.780wrong to categorize it as like he had this egalitarian view of education he didn't
00:08:59.080But in terms of the time, well advanced to where education was in the rest of the empire.
00:09:06.940And so he fought the bishop and the crown and he fought tooth and nail with local magistrates to really push for this non-sectarian education.
00:09:17.700And so, yeah, I think you could argue that in terms of a modern lens of being welcoming as the first front that everyone has an opportunity to be educated.
00:09:26.660Yes, I think you would be right to say.
00:09:28.580right he kind of set the mold for that and the settlers coming were plenty at that time through
00:09:32.860picto right many many many many many so by different places like any ship that arrived
00:09:37.780was coming from usually just somewhere else right a lot of scots a lot of scots so mostly scots some
00:09:44.780english some english mostly scots so um our town picto has been branded the birthplace of new
00:09:50.480scotland yes um some people take objection to that but this like very much so like this was the
00:09:57.920gateway to the Cape Breton Highlands all around this area, kind of the North Shore, very, very,
00:10:04.280very Scottish. I've heard it said it's more Scottish than Scotland. So a lot of Scots and
00:10:10.720particularly a lot of Highlanders. So poor, displaced. So by the time McCullough starts
00:10:15.820Pictou Academy, it's mostly at that point displaced Scots, poor Scots. Like you could1.00
00:10:23.680almost argue predatory immigration in a way like they're they're being forced out of scotland and
00:10:29.680they're being put on ships and they're landing here to start a new life and i'm not sure they
00:10:33.760have a lot of choice in that in their journey yeah i told it's interesting i told you the story of
00:10:39.440sort of my grandmother uh and and my grandfather who died uh very early once arriving in canada
00:10:46.480it was the same thing right a little quite a bit later but quite frankly you know because of famine
00:10:52.160and just what was going on in scotland uh they left and and arrived here and their family uh
00:10:59.040started here and actually made their way to ontario okay yeah yeah and then her husband died
00:11:04.240yes and she actually uh three husbands died okay yeah so along the way so she kept uh they kept
00:11:11.200getting different diseases and had heart attacks and you know unfortunately just had yeah so hard
00:11:17.680yeah yeah well she she actually and you know i used to joke with her because as i mentioned growing
00:11:22.240up um i spent a lot of time with her i used to grocery shop with her i used to go see her i
00:11:26.560spend time she really brought us up when my mom was busy and uh quite frankly she ended up having1.00
00:11:33.600five husbands in her lifetime before she passed and but you know she couldn't did nothing she0.91
00:11:40.000could do about it those were the times right oh hard times yeah very much yeah and she farmed0.71
00:11:44.800you know she she did everything when she came in she cleaned houses she farmed um she ended up
00:11:50.560living in the city in toronto uh again as a cleaner worked in a sock factory wow yeah so you know
00:11:56.880whatever she could do to make ends meet but she she didn't she lived a good life in the end like0.98
00:12:00.960she you know amassed uh some money and took care of herself and took care of her kids she had five
00:12:06.960kids wow yeah wow yeah it's amazing but uh and she was scottish she was scottish not surprised
00:12:14.800stalwart hard-working people yeah they are they are so so you know uh maccala sets the tone yeah
00:12:22.260people are coming from scotland yeah um what are they doing so when they're getting here i'm curious
00:12:27.320so this is where you know i was trying to figure out last item they arrive uh first of all where
00:12:33.480would they have been living they'd be building their own they'd be building their own homes
00:12:37.220right they as a community they'd be almost first nations group do that now yeah i find it's
00:12:42.760interesting because you know as as first nations are starting to amass some wealth they're building
00:12:46.740their own communities over time yeah um they probably they were doing the same thing right
00:12:51.140they were actually coming here and starting to settle they were all communally through church
00:12:57.120and through groups yeah helping each other build out yeah a little a little bit of everything
00:13:02.480actually a lot didn't stay it was a springboard right this is a landing spot and like your
00:13:07.640grandmother they just kept going yes um so the genealogy center that we have here like i've met
00:13:12.500people from all around north america california we've met people from new zealand uh manitoba bc
00:13:19.940because they're tracing back the roots to here okay because they're they're great great great
00:13:24.340great grandparents landed here um and then they left so a lot stayed a lot left kept migrating
00:13:32.340um timber farming uh fishing wasn't so much commercial back then but lots of shipbuilding
00:13:39.780So if you were a shipbuilder, like working with your hands, there's plenty of employment here for you in the mid-1800s.
00:13:47.280So at one point, the legend goes, you could walk across the harbor and not get wet feet because there's so many tall ships in the harbor.
00:14:33.060So we have, you know, in that time, you have, you know, just kind of right after around the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Napoleonic Wars in Europe.
00:14:43.560So there's lots of need for ships and shipbuilding and then immigration.
00:14:47.420So lots of port trading back and forth, like the very, very, very busy harbors all along kind of the Nova Scotian coast and St. Lawrence Inlet.
00:14:55.640so lots of need for ships and picked it just there was just so there's probably a dozen or
00:15:02.500more warps on the heart on the on the harbor front just shipbuilding well it's all kinds so
00:15:09.300you know large small uh early 1800s the harriet was built here by william loudon it was the
00:15:15.660largest ship in nova scotia at the time it was a beautiful yeah free mass ship so it's just all
00:15:20.540kinds of ships built here so they employed a lot of people right and and then you have just a whole
00:15:27.040another side you know prospecting coal mining uh eventually the railway it's like just any kind of
00:15:33.500industrious as as the rest of the world went so did kind of picto so a little bit everything and
00:15:40.820where they stayed where they lived there's downtown warps you know waterfronts uh houses um inns uh
00:15:49.320The waterfront has changed dramatically over the decades.
00:15:52.880Well, I was going to ask you, right now, because I'm new to Pictou,
00:15:56.640what am I seeing now compared to what is happening in the city?
00:16:02.060Unfortunately, I think you're seeing a small little bit of leftover of what it was.
00:16:08.360So if you go to Halifax and you kind of walk up that,
00:16:12.500I think it's like three-kilometer boardwalk along the harbor.
00:16:15.120yeah we just did so we were we were there uh doing the explosion of the harbor yes you know
00:16:21.480the great explosion we did uh with uh zimmel who wrote the book yeah he was a great guy and uh yeah
00:16:28.440so that that harbor kind of jets in and out because of all these wharfs that they've kind
00:16:33.020of retrofit along the boardwalk right and so it's kind of it's like jagged kind of jenga almost
00:16:38.260looking a structure picture would have resembled that so there would have been birthing docks
00:16:43.280you know probably two dozen berthing docks along the harbor okay with all these kind of inlets and
00:16:49.640like houses built on the warps like fishing huts on the warps right so it looks very different now
00:16:55.120than it would have um back in mccullough's time and then even into the mid 1800s because eventually
00:17:00.700just kind of filled that in and i love our downtown waterfront i think it's it's choice
00:17:06.060but it's not what it was and the part of me wishes it were because i think it would have
00:17:10.320been really really interesting to see kind of all those different it just it would have been so
00:17:16.020unique to see yeah what it was like back then but there's still like so you go to the old stone house
00:17:21.620downtown picto uh a tablet's leather shop is there that it's early 1800s that building would have
00:17:29.060been built our maps would show it was almost on the water so like just below it that grade would
00:17:36.620have been water and the wharf so her building would be very close to where the water would have
00:17:41.920come yeah and now we've filled it all in but it would have looked very different back then
00:17:46.080yeah so who you mentioned sort of new scotland right so is it still heavily scottish like when
00:17:54.560you when you meet people when you go around today or is it is it changing is that depends where you
00:17:58.700are in nova scotia yeah yeah yeah well here in oh yes very much very much so in like the north shore
00:18:05.020is very very very scottish so and the scottish arts and culture is very prominent i am scottish
00:18:10.680so it is feeling it's like a returning home for me um and so like my my daughter highland dances
00:18:17.340my kids are learning gaelic uh my son is a highland drummer um so and it's that's just kind
00:18:24.260of normal here so it's just a normal way of life here so it's very you know a tartan festival we
00:18:31.060just had uh kaylee's which are like scottish parties they happen all the time um it's very
00:18:37.240scottish on the north shore the rest of nova scotia there's different obviously different
00:18:40.940pockets but but here yes very much well you know it's interesting because uh last so we were doing
00:18:47.200multiple tours on the east coast so this is our second one we're probably going to do three this
00:18:51.740summer okay when we go back and forth and do you know we do between 12 and 14 podcasts each trip
00:18:57.020um and you know we hit halifax last time and we were we were absolutely
00:19:03.160envious let's call it how happy people were yeah i do see it you know when i hit halifax i do see
00:19:12.340you know a happier kind of a different way of life yes right and i think they've they've
00:19:19.740cultivated it by um figuring out you know their cultural base and that's important
00:19:26.740you know yeah and so tell me what you're doing here because you tell me because you know you're
00:19:31.020the mccullough house is a project right i think when i walked in right away i'm you know one of
00:19:36.100my businesses is a development business so when i walk in somewhere you know i say okay wow you know
00:19:40.700they're they're they're recreating this uh and you can see it right as you come in like your
00:19:47.720your your art and your uh filmmaking is telling a story of what that did happen so what do you
00:19:54.880you know what's your project now here so yeah we just finished an escape room on us on a story
00:20:01.520from picto from mccullough's time actually mccullough would have known the the protagonist of
00:20:06.160this kind of the main character of this escape room which is really fun uncovering this kind of
00:20:10.800mystery uh to picto uh for 220 years and putting it into like this interactive gaming experience
00:20:18.800that's been really satisfying to do um and i'm also working on the second chapter of a stop
00:20:23.520animation on the history of picto so i have done the first one it was released uh coming out about
00:20:29.360a year ago now um early history of picto and i'm working on the second chapter 1832 confederation
00:20:36.960uh with paper in a light box um just just trying to tell the story that's invitational to
00:20:44.960uh non-historians i guess like people that aren't necessarily keen for history but it would kind of
00:20:50.960of the art style kind of the whimsy of it would invite people in to know their story locally but
00:20:57.840the story of picto as we've discussed is i think international um i think the this is the picto
00:21:06.080punches way above its weight in terms of what it has done historically what it offers today
00:21:11.840as a town it just it's it's you know it's reach uh reverberations uh our decades and all around
00:21:20.880our country and and pick those fingerprints are all over i would argue our democracy our charters
00:21:27.920um which is just a testament to the people that were here and that that kind of as a scott i'm
00:21:35.100not ashamed to say that stalwart hard-working endlessly persevering kind of attitude that
00:21:41.440really valued education valued equality and they and they have been kind of fighting for a long
00:21:47.440time to preserve their way of life and it's just kind of in the bones of who they are and it's
00:21:53.300still in the bones of our town today so i feel like i'm just one now of many that is doing the
00:21:59.760exact same thing of preserving um a way of life and and it's and it's really beautiful so that
00:22:06.360movie is supposed to just kind of just encourage folks to be really proud of their history so yeah
00:22:11.660and you say up to confederation yes so and coming up to confederation picto was just helped me out
00:22:18.380because i'm trying to in my mind trying to gauge coming to confederation basically
00:22:24.020it was it was changing into picto was like as i understand it as i would say it's it's a town of
00:22:32.700kind of tension and waves like massive waves of growth and influence and kind of lulls as any
00:22:40.560place but never a death so it never has petered out it's always had this really strong resurgence
00:22:47.660of meaning and so in the early 1800s it was you know major timber shipping spot and then it lulls
00:22:54.580a little bit and then it becomes a major shipbuilding spot and post confederation it's
00:22:58.260still an immigration hub but it may be laws a little bit but then the great wars you know
00:23:02.920put it back on the map in terms of ship building again it's the amount of ships that that our tiny
00:23:08.540harbor built was incredible for the size of town that we were and so the great wars one and two
00:23:13.880picked out a big influence and then it kind of you know laws a little again uh and i think it's
00:23:20.020now back up on kind of a renaissance of sorts so yeah present day so well that's amazing and you
00:23:25.980know we have a we mentioned we're going to see uh the ship sorry the Hector yeah we're going to see
00:23:31.000the Hector and then uh we actually also have another great podcast coming up too awesome so
00:23:37.140we're excited about it and um part of that is actually understanding kind of uh the tools
00:23:42.740people used and you know being a builder uh you know just going over and taking a look at you
00:23:49.140know what they were driving yeah what they were using to build those ships so that's kind of
00:23:54.040unbelievable yeah yeah it's unbelievable so that so you're at the right time because they're doing
00:23:58.040it right probably right now today they are they are retrofitting the hector again uh to set sail
00:24:03.720again and they're they're using historical methods as much as possible yeah and it is unbelievable
00:24:09.080what people used to do and what they used to build with what they had it's unbelievable yeah
00:24:14.840well now with all our milwaukee tools and everything i mean it's hard to imagine though
00:24:49.840come to visit you quite frankly like careful yeah because you might not go back so that's
00:24:57.080i i i i be a little it can be a little cheeky because i i love ontario i miss the great lakes
00:25:04.520yeah um i do it's beautiful i have about six beaches without 20 minutes in my house that i
00:25:11.880can choose from and they're all different and they're mostly unpopulated no one's on them right
00:25:16.920So if you like ocean and you like beaches and fresh air and happy people and good food and good culture and live music and crafting everything from loggers to knitwear to bread and you like history, then come to Nova Scotia.