In later years, Thomas Caudle had a barn on the property and, from time to time, logged the land. The part of the property nearest the Cobequid Road became the Caudle Park Subdivision in the late 1960s.

First Lake was used for fishing and casual recreation, and several families had camps on the shores of the lake. Ice was cut on the lake in winter for refrigeration purposes later in the year, and Baxter’s Nursery in the 1950s piped water from it to its business on the Windsor Highway (now Sackville Drive). This watershed would be heavily developed in the 1970s under the provincial government’s land assembly project, which created a satellite community for the Halifax and Dartmouth area. The result of this rapid development was a serious degradation of the water quality of the First Lake watershed. Beyond the eastern shore of First Lake and over the ridge lay the largely undisturbed Second Lake and its watershed.

Second Lake, referred to on some early maps as “Middle Lake” or “Double Lake,” was even
more isolated than First Lake in the early years after 1749. From the Windsor Junction side of

25 the lake, to the north, this body of water was often referred to as “Kehoe’s Lake,” after a family by that name who held property in the area. This lake of many names was protected by geography and the positioning of roads and settlement patterns from the rapid development of the 1970s and 1980s, which impacted so greatly on its neighbour, First Lake, just over the ridge. Even now, many Sackville residents have not taken the trek over the ridge and have therefore not seen Second Lake.

Ironically, Second Lake contributed unwittingly to the neighbouring First Lake development by being the source of water for early central services in Sackville and Bedford. A pumping station was located at the western end of the lake and capacity was believed to be sufficient to support a community of more than twenty thousand people. Plans included a daily output of up to just over two million imperial gallons. This was never required as the area came to be served by the Halifax Pockwock system by the end of the 1970s.

The watershed of Second Lake was originally encompassed in five grants of land. The first and southernmost area, nearest the Cobequid Road, was located in the large grant of approximately 2,226 hectares (5,500 acres) made to Colonel Joseph Scott in 1765. Scott had been a Cornwallis settler in 1749 and would become Sackville’s first entrepreneur and proprietor of the Sackville Estate. Before his death in 1800, he would build the first saw and grist mills on the Sackville River, and also his residence, the Scott Manor House, which still stands today.

The Sackville grants, north of the Scott grant, which came after the settlement of the Seven
Years War in 1763, were long narrow five-hundred-acre grants of land that extended several
miles inland from the grant line that was the old road to Windsor, now the Old Sackville Road. The first four of these grants, with the Scott grant, comprised most of the Second Lake
watershed. In all, there would be thirty-two grants, known as the “farm lots,” running to what
became the Hants County line. Lots one to four, which were north of the Scott property, were those of Andrew Bower, Daniel Miller, John Triter, and Johann (John) Fultz. The latter grant was made in 1773 and was located in the area included in the watershed just north of the lake. These lands were at the extreme ends of the long lots, far from the grant line road on which most people lived in the early years. They were also quite far back from the “new road” (Sackville Drive) constructed through the floor of the valley of the Little Sackville River in the mid 1820s.

In this “hinterland,” early and latecomers hunted and fished, and at times logged, but, for the
most part, the area was left undisturbed. The north side of the Second Lake watershed was eventually affected by development, the most significant being the construction of what became the Dominion Atlantic Railway line and the Beaver Bank-Windsor Junction Cross Road. On the south side, an early map indicates that at least one homestead was located, at least in part, in the Second Lake watershed in the mid 1860s, near the crest of the ridge which separates the watersheds of First and Second Lakes. The Ambrose F. Church map for Halifax County, with information current to about 1865, shows a “J. Robinson” located in this area. Today, in the woods, one can still pick out the remains of stone walls and fields, apple trees, a well, and an old rock foundation. The census of 1871 identifies a “Robertson” family in this general area near the Cobequid Road. It consisted of John, a farmer, 26 born in Nova Scotia but claiming Scottish ancestry and age forty-five, as well as his wife, Margaret, age fifty, with three teenage children: Elizabeth, age nineteen; John, age seventeen; and Agnes, fourteen. Further research may well reconcile the two names as being one and the same family. A further clue that the name may be Robinson comes from the fact that an early reference point for property descriptions in the general area of the lakes is referred to as the ‘old Robinson line.’ In much later times, just after 1920, we know from first-hand family accounts that a West family lived in the same location. However, children of this family recall that the old rock foundation and walls were already there eighty years ago and were the remains of an earlier homestead, most likely that of the “Robinsons.”

Garland West, who died in 1965 at age seventy-six, and his wife Amelia Jane (1892-1968) lived in this somewhat remote location, for a time, after the Great War of 1914-1918 in which Garland had served in the 1st Newfoundland Regiment as a private. Later they would move their house on rollers to a site on McIntyre Lane closer to Cobequid Road. Their daughter, Mary (West) Kemp, still recalls the pleasant natural surroundings in the watershed of Second Lake near her home.

She recalls particularly how Mi’kmaq people would camp near the Windsor Junction Station and come to collect ash saplings in the homestead area with which to make baskets, axe handles and other items characteristic of their culture. As well, a prominent natural feature was an old white pine tree, thought to be 200 years old, which is still standing now near the original homestead site. Hazelnuts could be found growing along the stone wall in the area of the pasture where the West family kept a cow.
In all, the Wests would make three land purchases in the area between 1921 and 1935. The first was property including the old homestead acquired from John and Alice Smith. The second, in 1923, was the lot near the United Baptist Church on Cobequid Road, from John Smith, to which the Wests moved their house. The third lot was a 20 hectare (50 acre) parcel of woodland between First and Second Lakes, purchased in 1935, which had at one time been the property of George Smith. The Church Map (1865) shows a “Mrs. George Smith” and a “J. Smith” in this general watershed area. The property descriptions in the West’s deeds included references to the “old wood road” running through the watersheds of First and Second Lakes. In addition, there was a reference to a road locally called a “stagecoach road” running between the two lakes from Cobequid Road, past the West property, to Beaver Bank. Certainly residents of Sackville as early as the 1860s petitioned for a road link through to Beaver Bank in this area. It is unclear if such a public road was ever built or if the roadway, parts of which may still be seen in the First and Second Lake watersheds, served that local purpose as well as a logging road.

The settlement that did occur from the south side of Second Lake pushed in from the Cobequid Road. Here, during the War of 1812, were settled a number of African American families who were escaped slaves and therefore refugees from the United States. Most of these people, who came from the states located near Chesapeake Bay, were resettled in Preston and Hammonds Plains, but several smaller settlements were developed including the one on the Cobequid Road.

The census of 1871 reveals that several families of “African” origin were living in this area between the First and Second lakes and Cobequid Road. They had family names that included: Williams, Butler, Clarke and Smith. The oldest, in 1871, was “Aimy Smith,” who was born 27 eighty-eight years before in the United States, almost certainly as a slave. The Lieutenant Governor in 1817, Lord Dalhousie, visited the refugee settlements and reported that he found that “almost every man had one or more acres cleared and ready for seed and working with an industry which astonished me.” Dalhousie, who took a great interest in these settlements, provided seed potatoes along with cabbage and turnip seeds. However, hard work would not be enough in many cases as the refugees had been settled on marginal land and their arrival coincided with two natural disasters, the ‘year of no summer’ in 1816, and the ‘year of the mice’ in 1817.
The most prominent natural feature on this section of the Cobequid Road was and is the ‘Great Beech Hill’ which rises nearly three hundred feet and affords spectacular views of the surrounding watersheds, including those of First and Second lakes. Although many travellers and residents alike have passed by along the “road to Truro,” and in the nineteenth century used a stagecoach diversion to the north of the hill to avoid the steep grade, few penetrated very far into the watershed of Second Lake. Thus, cultural intrusions were minimized into what is still a largely pristine natural area, hidden away from, but now close to tens of thousands of people.