Horton Landing

Horton Landing, Nova Scotia

Mile 45.93 from Windsor Junction on the Halifax Subdivision (Mile 61.15 from Halifax)

• Next Station East: Avonport
• Next Station West: Grand Pre

Facilities & Features

• Horton Landing Station
• Apple Warehouse, 10,000 barrels, the Grand Pre Fruit Company
• 1472 feet long Passing track in 1969
• Gaspereaux River Bridge

Description & History

Horton Landing was an important ford across the Gaspereaux River and a shipping point where schooners could tied up at the river bank to land freight and passengers from the Acadian era onwards. It was a a major site for the Acadian deportation in 1755. A large town plot was laid out next to the landing for the settlement of the New England Planters in 1760, but merchants preferred to set up beside the more sheltered harbour at Wolfville for shipping, so Horton Landing remained a farming community. The landing was an important site for unloading equipment and rolling stock during the construction of the Windsor & Annapolis Railway and the site of a large construction camp to build the difficult Gaspereaux River Bridge which proved to be the last link to complete the line in December 1869. The railway brought a small station and later an large apple warehouse run by the Grand Pre Fruit Company. A memorial cross marking the believed location of the loading point for the Acadian Expulsion was installed beside the tracks on a plot of land given by the DAR to Acadian representatives in August 1924. Passenger trains ceased stopping in June 1980. The cross was moved in 2005 from its track-side location closer to the river and the actual site of the deportation.

Gallery

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  Locomotive No. 24 with an westbound passenger train crossing the Gaspereaux River Bridge in Horton Landing, Aug 24, 1902.

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  Horton tracks and snow canyon during the famous winter of 1905.

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  C.P.R. track profile drawing showing Horton Landing, Mar. 18, 1918.

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  Map by the Dominion Atlantic Railway showing Wolfville, Grand Pre, Horton Landing and Avonport with DAR stations and associated Acadian historical sites, 1920.

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  Gaspereaux River Bridge with the Horton Landing approach tracks looking eastward on July 31, 1958.

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  Horton Landing Station,looking east with the Horton Landing apple warehouse in distance, 1958 or 1959.

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  Topographic map from Kentville to Hortons Landing circa 1956.

References & Footnotes

• Alexander MacNab, Windsor and Annapolis Railway, Report of Alexander MacNab Nov 1, 1873
• 1969 Memorandum of General Information