Backyard History

Giant squid attacked Newfoundland fishing boats in 1873. This was all the more shocking because at the time people didn't believe giant squid were even real. Soon, the entire world's attention would …

Camp B-70, near Fredericton,  held captured German Nazis and Fascist Italians during the Second World War. The prisoners and guards played an elaborate game of cat and mouse, with constant attempts a…

When a bank robber gets stuck in a chimney on April Fools Day, nobody believes a 12 year old boy trying to save him..

On the cold and moonless night in the winter of 1848, the only ever attempted r…

“While I am writing to you the shells are screaming and the bullets are hitting but why should I care? I have just had a good meal!” wrote Emile Goguen, an Acadian lumberjack from New Brunswick who h…

Prince Edward Island was the first place in Canada to have a car ... and the only province to ban them!

https://backyardhistory.ca/f/when-pei-banned-cars

A beloved Canadian radio host and author had a radical past.

In the 1960s a Maritimer achieved Canada wide fame for his talent in gardening. Known as Mr Green Thumbs, this kindly old man put out no…

Elizabeth Beard fought in the American Revolution ... against the Americans.

One New Brunswick woman became something of a worldwide sensation for her remarkable feats fighting in the American Revo…

Saint John's genteel Rockwood Park was once turned into a modern electric circus.

For several years Saint John’s iconic Rockwood Park –the largest urban park in Canada at the time– was turned into a …

Like the Alamo, but in Fredericton.

Fredericton’s first European settlement was a French fort, which was attacked and besieged by a fleet from New England.

The story of the battle is kind of like t…

In 1815 Nova Scotia was overrun by mice.

Dr. George Patterson later interviewed people who lived through what was called Year of the Mice.

The horrors of that year left a mark on those who had expe…

A fleet of Fascist Italian airplanes stop in a little seaside resort town in the Maritimes … with a dark political agenda.

On July 13th 1933 a reporter for the Moncton Daily Times was rushing towar…

*Top Episode of 2023!

In the 1920s two hermit brothers on Grand Manan became internationally famous as the mysterious “Dark Harbour Hermits.”

Hundreds of tourists from the United States and even fara…

The Maritimes were briefly the Dutch colony of Nova Hollandia..

We’re always taught in school that ever since European colonists arrived in what is now Canada, that it was always a colony of either…

An unlikely trio is celebrated by a US President for their heroic rescue of sailors stranded for days on a rock in a storm.

https://backyardhistory.ca/f/wreck-and-rescue-of-the-velma

“They will not allow me to go home,” begins the haunting diary that Mary Huestis Pengilly wrote while locked up in the Saint John Lunatic Asylum, Canada’s first ever mental health institution.

She wr…

The Maritimes were home to the only German bombing in North America in World War One. Fortunately the Agent wasn't very good, and was more than willing to tell everything to an intrepid reporter...

Nothing was quite what it seemed...

In the Summer of 1906 The Maritimes were captivated by a strange mystery when two young children disappeared in broad daylight from right in front of their house…

A baseball star becomes one of the few Black Canadians to fight in the First World War.

https://backyardhistory.ca/f/fighting-for-the-right-to-fight

A simple question leads to a lost colony in Cape Breton..

What does “Fundy” mean? Where does the unusual name for the large bay between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia boasting the highest tides in t…