Siege of Louisbourg

Siege of Louisbourg may refer to:

See also

Louisbourg

Louisbourg is an unincorporated community and former town located in Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Regional Municipality.

History

The town's name was given by French military forces who founded the Fortress of Louisbourg in 1713 and its fortified seaport on the southwest part of the harbour, in honour of Louis XIV. The harbour had previously been known and used by European mariners since at least the 1590s, when it was known as English Port and Havre à l'Anglois. The French settlement that dated from 1713 was much altered after its final capture in 1758. Its fortifications were demolished in 1760 and the town-site abandoned by British forces in 1768. A small civilian population continued to live there after the military left.

Subsequent English settlers built a small fishing village across the harbour from the abandoned site of the fortress. The village grew slowly with additional Loyalists settlers in the 1780s. The harbour grew more accessible with the construction of the second Louisbourg Lighthouse in 1842 on the site of the original French lighthouse destroyed in 1758. A railway first reached Louisbourg in 1877, but it was poorly built and abandoned after a forest fire. However the arrival of Sydney and Louisburg Railway in 1894 brought heavy volumes of winter coal exports to Louisbourg Harbour's ice-free waters as a winter coal port. The harbour was used by the Canadian government ship Montmagny in 1912 to land bodies from the sinking of the RMS Titanic.