Georges Island

Our blog today will entail a little bit of a history lesson as it is a historical place that we went to visit.

Georges Island is an island in the middle of the Halifax harbour and is part of the city's defense system. I was telling my mom about this little excursion we took on our anniversary weekend. Halifax has a lot of history and one of the key attractions of the city is Citadel Hill which is the main point of defense for the city. As it's name suggests, the Citadel is situated on top of a hill that provides a view of the whole city and harbour thus making Halifax a very well defended city. It is a point of interest that the none of the cannons in Halifax have ever been fired in combat. Back in the day, Halifax harbour was defended by 5 separate forts that formed various triangles making it virtually impenetrable. And if you happen to get by all the forts and dozens of artillery cannons, then you had an entire armada of warships greeting you in the bay. Needless to say, no attack was ever even attempted. However, in 1917, the Halifax Explosion leveled about 1/3 of the city when two ships collided in the harbour, one loaded to the gills will sensitive explosives and gasoline, killing about 2000 people. If you're not familiar with the story, it's staggering. There is an excellent movie (if you're able to find it) called Shattered City about the event.

Georges Island is a very steep island also making it great for seeing ships as they come into the harbour and they would have to get past Georges Island before they could even think about getting near the city. But that little island was so well defended itself, an enemy ship would have a hard time getting past all the artillery.

Here are some pictures from our visit:

There is a steep ditch between where this picture was taken and the walls themselves.


In the ditch between the interior walls.


One of the underground ammunition and defense tunnels. The windows are peep holes into the huge ditches for riflemen so even if the steep banks and thick outer walls were breached, they'd be met with close range gun fire from all sides while trying to scale the 30 feet wall into the fort's interior.


Inside one of the cannon rooms. This is part of the lower battery cannons.These monsters lobbed a 400 lb shot over 2 miles, and could accurately hit a target of only 16 sq. feet, making any ship an easy target. There are 8 of these large cannons and 8 smaller ones. In case you happen to get past the first 16 guns, the back of the island had 8 more smaller cannons and a Martello tower facing the city side.


The previous picture shows the size of the cannon with relation to people. This one shows a bit of the track they needed to help move it into firing position. There were usually 17 men stationed at each of the cannon rooms.


The massive door leading into the cannon room.


As with any maritime fortress, a lighthouse was necessary. The last lighthouse keeper and his family lived here up until the 1970's when they switched to an automated system.


Looking over to the Halifax side of the harbour. The green, grassy hill area you can see in the background behind that ugly tall building is Citadel Hill.


One of several historical reinactors. The bridge pictured behind him is one of 2 bridges joining Halifax to Dartmouth.

They usually only open the island to visitors once a year as much of it is crumbling. Many of the tunnels we weren't able to go into as they just are not safe. There were also other buildings (like the jail) we couldn't go into due the growth of some very dangerous fungi and spores. I had read in the paper later in the week that due to the great success of that weekend's turnout, they had decided to open George's Island more frequently and maybe restore some it too.