If you have travelled along the Bay Road (Route 205) just outside Baddeck, you likely have noticed a log home shrouded in trees, nestled between the roadway and the bay.
There is something unusual about the building that is not quite easy to define. It is an old log home, and it seems slightly out of place, yet perfectly suited in its surroundings.
I always knew it as McCurdy’s place – that’s how my in-laws referred to it – the home of JAD McCurdy – the pilot of Canada’s first aircraft the Silver Dart and Nova Scotia’s Lieutenant Governor (1947-1952). The house overlooks the spot on the lake where the Dart first lifted into the air, launching Baddeck as Canada’s birthplace of aviation and McCurdy as the first pilot.
But a conversation with Ed Grosvenor, who recently purchased the property, has revealed a new, previously forgotten history of the house. Grosvenor is a long-time summer resident of Baddeck and a descendent of Alexander Graham Bell.
Grosvenor discovered that before McCurdy purchased the property in the 1920s, it was owned by George Kennan (1845 –1924) and was likely designed and built by Kennan in the early 1890’s after he had spent years trekking 6000 miles into Russia. The house has retained elements, typical of an 1890’s dacha – a Russian-styled cabin of that era, including its exterior log design, banks of narrow windows and a huge floor-to ceiling stone fireplace that dominates the living room.
Kennan was an associate of Alexander Graham Bell; the pair likely met in Washington D.C. in the 1880s. Kennan was one of the founding members of the National Geographic Society in 1888, with Gardiner Greene Hubbard, AG Bell’s father-in-law. Kennan’s wife Emeline (Weld) was a friend of Mabel Bell, often attending and delivering programs to young women in Mabel’s Young Ladies Club in Baddeck. Alexander Graham Bell noted in his experiment notebooks that both Mr. & Mrs. Kennan were witnesses to the flight of the Cygnet in December 1907, an early kite experiment over Baddeck Bay.
As editor-in-chief of the online history magazine American Heritage, Grosvenor was aware of Kennan’s travels in Russia, as well as his connection to Baddeck, where Kennan had a summer home (now the Broadwater Inn). But the Kennan link to the house Grosvenor has been restoring was new information.
Grosvenor thinks the log home may be where Kennan penned many of his articles, books and lectures and was a place where Kennan sought and found peace.
Who was George Kennan?
An explorer with a writer’s eye and a journalistic view of events, Kennan went to Russia to explore the prison system, believing the method of isolating criminals - sending them to far-off Siberia, to have merit. What he experienced however, changed him forever.
“What I heard and learned in Siberia stirred me to the very depths of my soul,” he later wrote.
The Czarist Russian government believing Kennan would write positively of the system, exiled him and banned him from ever entering the county again when he wrote the unblemished truth – that it was a brutal system. The people sent to Siberia were not hardened criminals, but everyday citizens – teachers, professors, journalists, who spoke out against the Czarist regime.
Kennan became a strong advocate for human rights and spoke, wherever and whenever he could about the horrors of the system that he had witnessed. In a recent 2023 biography of Kennan’s time in Russia, author Gregory Wallance estimates that once Kennan returned, he spoke about the exile system to an estimated 1 million people over a ten-year period between 1889 and 1898 – delivering at least one lecture a day for one eight-month stretch. Often dressing as the Russian prisoners, complete with leg chains.
He spoke to thousands in concert halls in New York City, in Chicago and in Boston and in small towns in Illinois and Kentucky.
And in tiny Baddeck, N.S.
In the summer of 1891, Kennan and local businessman Albert Hart discussed the importance of a free, public library for the town. Until then, most libraries were found in cities, at universities or in homes of the wealthy. The notion of a library, with knowledge available to anyone who may be interested, was uncommon. Free public libraries were just beginning to appear in large US cities. Philadelphia opened its first in 1891; New York in 1895. The only other public library in the province in 1891 was in Halifax, the provincial capital.
Kennan volunteered to present a lecture, with all proceeds going towards the purchase of books. There was yet no library to house them and nary a committee to run it.
Kennan's lecture at the Baddeck Courthouse on September 22, 1891, raised $47. Immediately following his presentation, a committee was formed. It instructed Kennan to purchase books when he returned to D.C. that fall. Six weeks later, 142 volumes of 'standard literature' arrived. That same day, the library committee met and drafted a constitution. Three months later as the the winter winds blew, Sheriff James Dunlop pushed his desk aside to allow more room for the temporary library. For the next four years library patrons and those requiring the sheriffs' services shared the space. (Excerpt from Historic Baddeck)
George Kennan may be forgotten by many. But the first public library on Cape Breton Island and the second in the province exists today because of his early commitment and his willingness to share details of his Siberian Experience, a topic he could contemplate in the comfort of his log home on the bay.
· Historic Baddeck, Jocelyn Bethune
· Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Kennan’s papers can be found at the Library of Congress. The vast majority are not yet online. There are, however, numerous examples of photographs taken by him in Russia as well as his notebooks from the trek to Siberia.
· New York Public Library, New York City
There are more Kennan papers at the New York Public Library – a library that did not yet exist when he delivered his lecture at the Baddeck Courthouse. None of these items have been digitized. Here is more information on the History of the New York Public Library:
· Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, Gregory Wallance has written about Kennan’s final trip. Here is a link to an essay he wrote for American Heritage https://www.americanheritage.com/george-kennan-exposes-russian-cruelty-siberia
· Here is Kennan’s Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Kennan_(explorer) and more discussion on his Russia experience from the US Wilson Center https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/op277_george_kennan_russian_empire_Hundley_2000.pdf
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