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In 1962, Oland and Son Limited commissioned a replica of the famous schooner "Bluenose." The company's marketing and promotion activities were strictly regulated by the Nova Scotia Liquor Commission and it was eager to find acceptable ways to promote Oland products. The Oland Family were also strong promoters of economic development and maritime heritage in Nova Scotia, so the company commissioned the Bluenose II to promote its Schooner beer and to serve as a floating ambassador for the province.

Bluenose II was built by the Smith and Rhuland Shipyard of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, the same shipyard that build the original Bluenose. Smith and Rhuland consulted with Angus Walters, the captain of the Bluenose and based the design of the Bluenose II on the W.J. Roue's designs for the Bluenose. The ship's design was modified to accommodate its role as a public relations asset for the company.

The Bluenose II was launched from the ways at the Smith and Rhuland shipyard on July 24, 1963. The schooner was chartered on trips and tours around the Maritimes during the summer months and spent some winters doing charters in the Carribbean. Oland and Son frequently hosted business and industry executives, government officials, and other guests on the Bluenose II. The schooner participated in the annual Lunenburg Fisheries Exhibition and in 1967, the Bluenose II acted as the official Expo '67 host vessel for Nova Scotia.

The schooner was a resounding success as a public relations tool and a provincial ambassador, but maintenance of the ship became too costly for the company to keep up with. In 1971, the "Bluenose II" was sold to the Province of Nova Scotia by the Oland Family for one dollar. The schooner still serves as an ambassador for the province and is now operated by the Lunenburg Maritime Museum Society.

The Reverend D.B. Blair was born in Strachur on Loch Fyne, Argyleshire, Scotland, to John Blair and Catherine MacGregor. His father was employed as manager of a large sheep farm. Blair received his education at Edinburgh University and was licensed to preach in 1844. Two years later he left Scotland for Barney's River, Pictou County, where he was ordained on 29 October 1846. From 1850-1890 he preached at the Free Church congregation established in Barney's River, which derived from the Garden of Eden, Blue Mountain and Barney's River, and was named "Blair Presbyterian Church" in his honour.

In 1851 he married Mary Sibella of Brolas, Mull, Argyleshire. She died in 1882. They had six children: Anna Margaret, Thomas Chalmers, Laughlan MacLean, John Knox, Ewan Alexander and David Welsh. Blair was considered, in his day, to be the best Gaelic scholar in North America. He died in 1893 and is buried at Laggan, Pictou County.

John M. Blaikie was a merchant and shipbuilder in Great Village, Nova Scotia. He was born in Upper Stewiacke in 1837 to Harris and Maria Blaikie and moved to Great Village from Maitland ca. 1850. In 1863 he went into partnership with his brother-in-law, A.W. McLellan, with whom he would be associated for many years in merchandising and shipbuilding.

Blaikie, first in partnership and later on his own, commissioned the building of many ships during the period 1863 to 1891, including the John M. Blaikie, a 2000-tonne, four-masted barque, which was launched in October 1885 from Great Village. A model of this ship was among the exhibits at the Great London Exhibition in 1886 as well as the World's Fair in Paris.

He had at least one son by his first wife, and by 1898 he was widowed and married to Malinda Gould. Blaikie passed away in 1929.

Anne Charlotte Bishop is an activist, author, educator, food security advocate, labour organizer and community development worker. Since the 1980s she has advocated for LGBTQ rights, union organization, equity and anti-racist policies in the province of Nova Scotia.

In the 1970s she attended the University of Toronto's Centre for Christian Studies, where she was introduced to social analysis and collective approaches to education. In 1979 she worked on the People's Food Commission, a participatory research project that held hearings across Canada on issues of food security. In the 1980s she helped to organize a union of predominantly female workers at a Pictou County fish plant. In the summer of 1987, she joined Dalhousie University's Henson College as the coordinator of the Community Development and Outreach Unit. From 1987-1992 Bishop played a central role in Lesbian and Gay Rights Nova Scotia (LGRNS), which successfully lobbied the provincial government for the inclusion of sexual orientation in the Nova Scotia Human Rights Act. As an adult educator, she helped to develop a course on grassroots leadership development and wrote two influential books on consciousness-raising, anti-oppression organizational change and allyship. With Brenda Beagan, she founded a women's chorus, The Secret Furies. Bishop is currently an organic farmer in rural Nova Scotia with her partner Jan.

William R. Bird was born in East Mapleton, N.S. on May 11, 1891. Born into poverty, he moved to the Canadian Prairies to help harvest crops as a teenager. In 1914, he enlisted in the Canadian Army and served in the trenches with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces (42nd Battalion, Black Watch of Canada) in France and Belgium until 1918. Upon demobilization in 1919, he returned to Cumberland County, N.S, where he married Ethel Sutton with whom he had two children, Stephen and Betty. After a failed general store venture in Southampton, he moved to Amherst with his family and worked at the Post Office. Winning a story-writing contest in the early 1920s and a love of writing prompted him by 1928 to try making his living by writing. Bird's stories were widely accepted by magazines such as Saturday Evening Post, Maritime Advocate, Toronto Star Weekly, Family Herald and Weekly Star and his first monograph, A Century at Chignecto, was published in 1928. During the 1930s, Bird lectured widely across Canada, and in 1933 he joined the staff of the recently established Nova Scotia Tourist Bureau. For the next thirty-three years, he worked in various capacities for the Nova Scotia government. In 1938, he and his family moved to Halifax where he served as Chairman of the Historic Sites and Monuments Advisory Council until his retirement in 1966. Bird died on January 28, 1984.

In 1949 he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Mount Allison University. He published roughly 25 books and 600 short stories, for which he garnered acclaim for his historical fiction and war stories. Although Bird wrote on many subjects, he was continually fascinated by the early settlers of Nova Scotia and wrote many stories and novels on the topic. His experience during the First World War also became inspiration for much of his work. He twice won the Ryerson All Canada Award for Fiction and served as president of the Canadian Author's Association.

Marian Binkley is a professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. She served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences from 1999-2010.

She received her BA (1973), MA (1975), and PhD in Anthropology (1981) from the University of Toronto.

Binkley conducted extensive research in maritime communities. Her first two books, Voices from offshore (1994) and Risks, dangers and rewards in the Nova Scotia offshore fishery (1995), focus on working conditions in the Nova Scotia deep sea fishing fleet. Set adrift: Fishing families (2002), compares the households of coastal and deep sea fishermen and how they adapted to the pressures of the Atlantic fisheries crisis. Changing tides: Gender, globalization and world fisheries (2005), co-edited with Barbara Neis, Sirj Gerard and Christina Manezy, explores the relationship between globalization and gender against the backdrop of the world fisheries crisis. Later research explores sustainable livelihoods in Atlantic Canadian coastal communities, with a particular focus on the impact of the Atlantic fisheries crisis. Her interest in fishermen's health and safety stems from an early research study in Fogo Island, where she noticed the fishermen appeared older than their chronological age.

Binkley was involved in CIDA-supported development projects in the West Indies, Indonesia and the Philippines, focusing on resource management and other environmental concerns, and also in the Cache Creek, British Columbia, burial site analysis.

John Robert Bigelow, the son of Halle Bigelow and Hannah Ann (Blenkhorn) Bigelow, was born 16 September 1906 in New Salem, Nova Scotia. He was raised and educated in Canning, Nova Scotia, with his four sisters, Anna, Laurabel, Mabel and Lydia. He studied engineering at Acadia University for two years before transferring to the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, from where he graduated in 1933 with a Bachelor of Science in Forestry.

He began his career marketing forestry products for the government of Nova Scotia. During World War II he moved to Ottawa to work on federal lumber export policies and controls. IN 1946 he returned to Nova Scotia and became the manager of the Maritime Lumber Bureau, later taking employment as a provincial civil servant and ending his career as Deputy Minister for the Department of Trade & Industry.

John Bigelow married Muriel Olga Smith in 1938, with whom he had two children, John Robert, Jr. (1942-1994) and Mary Emery (1946-). He died in 1997.

The Bigelow family was involved in shipbuilding in the Kings County region of Nova Scotia for five generations. Amasa Bigelow (1755-1799) arrived in Cornwallis c. 1762 with his New England Planter father and became a ship’s carpenter, later operating a sawmill on Deep Hollows Mountain. He married Roxana Cone in 1775. The eldest of their eleven children, Ebenezer (1776-1860), established a shipyard at Oak Point, Kingsport, where he designed, built and sailed a variety of small vessels. He was married in 1804 to Nancy Rand, with whom he had six children.

Ebenezer Jr. (1815-1899) followed in his father’s footsteps and in 1838 established his own shipyard in Canning, Nova Scotia. Over the next fifty years he was the master builder on 67 ships, from 12-tonne sloops to the 1164-tonne Arbela, designed by his son Gideon.

Ebenezer, Jr. married Waity Sanford in 1834 and had 10 children, three of whom (John, Gideon and Samuel) joined him in the Bigelow Shipyard, eventually taking it over after his death in 1889. They in turn were joined by Ebenezer, Jr.’s grandsons, Scott and Halle, whose vessels included 4 tern schooners and one steamship, the Brunswick (1909). The last ship built in the Bigelow Shipyard was the Cape Blomidon, which was launched in 1919.