5755 Highway 201: The Elias Morse House

Architecture Style: New England Town House

Built: 1838-1849

Villages are really clusters of family enclaves; this is certainly true of the Morse houses that flank the lost mills on the Paradise Brook. When Samuel Morse (1769-1843) built his gristmill, he carried with him the hopes of his parents, Samuel and Lydia [Church] who came from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia to make a new life. Perhaps there were traces of a mill when the Morses took their grant, the former Acadian village of the Bastarache family; perhaps it was just obvious that this would be a fine spot for a gristmill in the new community. The business did prosper, and Samuel ensured that his sons would carry it on by dividing his land among them in his will. Elias built his classically simple home near the imposing mill, which burned at the turn of the century.

The New Englanders who came to Nova Scotia in 1760 soon found themselves in a multi-cultural milieu. They had come from a single-stranded Anglo culture, shaped by their Mayflower and Puritan ancestors, and it was this group that first moved up to Paradise in the 1770s, from Granville. But before long, they settled in with Mik’Maq, German, Acadian, Dutch, Scottish, and Irish neighbours. In the 1830s in Paradise, two Morse brothers married two Boehner sisters. Samuel married Charlotte, and Elias married Lucy, whose grandparents, like his, had been Planters- only with a difference. They did not come the short distance from New England with livestock and goods; they arrived with little but courage and strength, on the ship Gale from Ansbach, Germany, in 1752.

After Elias’ death at age 61, his brother Major ran the gristmill. But Pickles and Mills, with their Roxbury lumber interests, bought this property, and a sawmill and shingle mill was established, which  Joseph Worthylake operated for a time. But it was remembered as “Wilson’s mill.” George Wilson married Nellie Jackson of the Pickles and Mills Jacksons. This was their home, and the mill their livelihood until it closed in 1954.

After that, people lived here for other reasons:  the pleasant vistas, the watersheds, and the quiet enjoyment of a well-built heritage home.