Acadian Cellar: The Bastarache Farm

Pictured about 1928

There were other homes once in Paradise. Before the New England Planters came, the farms and orchards of “Paradis Terrestre” were Acadian. It was they who gave our village its name.

In 1684  Sieur Lalanne, a clerk in the Department of the Marine, was sent to Acadie to look for timber sources for the King’s Ships. On Lalanne’s map, “Paradis Terrestre” is marked on the south side of the River, where a family named Bastarache lived. William Inglis Morse is pictured above beside an excavated cellar or storehouse on the Bastarache/Morse property.  “Paradis” also included the north side of the river, as indicated on maps by George Mitchell in 1733, and Placide Gaudet, Acadian authority of the nineteenth century, who annotated the map.

In Gargas’ 1687/88 census, Paradise is also identified as “Au Bout du Monde”.  So “Paradise” not only meant “the most beautiful place on earth;” it also meant  “the end of the world”; that is, we were the easternmost settlement on the Annapolis River. So, we are in our third century of “Paradise puns”.

W.I. Morse wrote: “The tide stops east of Paradise bridge, near Mutton Island, a mile and a quarter above Paradise Lane…The tradition of the ‘dead tide’, and the fear of settling near such a place, does not seem to have been observed in this instance.  French cellars in Paradise indicate that there were a number of inhabitants in this vicinity, and early in the history of Acadie. The lower reaches of the river in Paradise, near the outlet of the Paradise Brook, sometimes show a tide of ten feet, which rapidly dwindles away two miles to the eastward…” “W.I.” remembers hearing tales of “ heroic days, spacious forest land, and loitering fantasies”. His nostalgia for the lost peoples of Paradise and the dark Wilmot forests is poignant.

Jean Bastarache escaped the deportation and died in Quebec in 1757. Neither he nor “W.I.” could ever have imagined that the tides would rise no more in Paradise.