Interactive timeline · 11,000 BCE to 2026
Kjipuktuk, the great harbour: 13,000 years of Mi'kma'ki and a port city in 41 moments.
41 moments6 eras58 sourcesAbout ↓
11,000 BCE – 1748
The ancestors of the Mi'kmaq lived in the region for some 13,000 years and used the harbour in their seasonal rounds.
Human settlement of what is now Nova Scotia dates to the end of the last Ice Age, about 13,000 years ago, when hunter-gatherers moved in to hunt caribou. Mi'kmaw oral tradition identifies these first people as ancestors of the Mi'kmaq, whose homeland, Mi'kma'ki, stretches from the Gaspé Peninsula to Cape Breton.
The Mi'kmaq moved in seasonal rounds, fishing and hunting on the coast in summer and hunting moose, caribou and other game inland in winter. They called the harbour Kjipuktuk (also written Jipugtug), meaning "great" or "biggest harbour", which the English later rendered as Chebucto. Mi'kmaw families also lived for generations at Turtle Grove on the Dartmouth shore.
1749 – 1762
Britain built a fortified town, fought the Mi'kmaq, deported the Acadians and signed Peace and Friendship Treaties.
Colonel Edward Cornwallis, the new governor of Nova Scotia, arrived off Chebucto on June 21, 1749, aboard the sloop Sphinx, followed by about 2,500 mostly poor English settlers (the Dictionary of Canadian Biography counts 2,576). The British-sponsored town was meant to counter the French fortress at Louisbourg and secure the fishery. It was named for George Dunk, Earl of Halifax, who oversaw the plan.
The Mi'kmaq rejected British authority over land they had not ceded; a Mi'kmaw message to Cornwallis in September 1749 said the place he was fortifying belonged to them. After attacks on settlers, Cornwallis issued a proclamation in October 1749 offering ten guineas for every Mi'kmaw person "taken or killed", payable on producing a scalp, raised to 50 guineas in June 1750. The bounty applied to adults and children, and reports describe attacks on Mi'kmaw villages to collect it.
⚖️ Established fact
Established factThe proclamation and its terms are documented in the colonial record and by the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. How many people were killed is not known. Mi'kmaw historian Daniel Paul has described the policy as genocidal; Halifax Regional Council voted in January 2018 to remove Cornwallis's statue.
The Mi'kmaq declared war on the British in 1749, the first phase of a conflict that lasted until 1760, with weapons and money supplied by the French at Louisbourg. Mi'kmaw fighters attacked British settlements and carried out a successful raid on Dartmouth in 1751.
Fighting paused when Jean-Baptiste Cope, chief of the Shubenacadie (Sipekne'katik) Mi'kmaq, and Governor Peregrine Hopson signed a treaty at Halifax on November 22, 1752. In 1985 the Supreme Court of Canada, in Simon v. The Queen, upheld the treaty's protection of Mi'kmaw hunting rights, the first time a court affirmed it.
💡 Fun fact
Did you know? The Halifax Gazette, first printed in 1752, was Canada's first newspaper.
At meetings in Halifax in July 1755, Lieutenant-Governor Charles Lawrence pressed Acadian delegates to take an unqualified oath of allegiance; when they refused, he imprisoned them, and on July 28 the colonial council decided to deport the Acadian people. About 10,000 Acadians were deported between 1755 and 1763, and thousands died of disease, shipwreck or starvation.
⚖️ Officially acknowledged
Officially acknowledgedA Royal Proclamation dated December 10, 2003, acknowledged that the Crown decided on July 28, 1755, to deport the Acadian people, and the trials and suffering that followed, and designated July 28 a Day of Commemoration of the Great Upheaval. It states that it does not recognize legal or financial responsibility.
Nova Scotia's House of Assembly, the first elected assembly in what is now Canada, met in Halifax in 1758. The Royal Navy's dockyard was built in the North Suburbs in 1759, anchoring the city's role as a naval base.
With France defeated, Mi'kmaw, Wolastoqiyik and Passamaquoddy communities made peace with Britain in a series of treaties in 1760 and 1761. On June 25, 1761, Mi'kmaw chiefs from Miramichi, Shediac, Pokemouche and Cape Breton signed in a "Burying the Hatchet" ceremony in Halifax. The treaties guaranteed the right to hunt, fish and earn a living without British interference and did not cede land.
1763 – 1866
Loyalists, Black settlers and the Royal Navy shaped a colonial capital that won responsible government.
About 3,000 Black Loyalists sailed from New York to Nova Scotia between April and November 1783, after fighting for or fleeing to the British. They received land late or not at all and faced segregation and violence. In 1792 about 1,200 Black Loyalists sailed from Halifax to found Freetown in Sierra Leone.
Between 550 and 600 Maroon men, women and children, exiled after a war with Jamaica's colonial government, landed in Halifax on July 21–22, 1796, and were settled at Preston. Prince Edward employed the men on the refortification of Citadel Hill, and they also worked on roads and, in 1800, dug the foundation of the new Government House. After petitioning to leave, 551 sailed for Sierra Leone on August 7, 1800.
Province House, the Georgian home of the Nova Scotia legislature, dates from 1818, joining St. Paul's Anglican Church (1750) and Government House (1800) near the Grand Parade. Dalhousie College was founded the same year without religious affiliation.
The present Halifax Citadel is the fourth fort on the hill, after works of 1749–50, 1776–81 and 1795–1800. Construction began in September 1828 and was finished in 1855–56 at a cost of £242,122, but rifled artillery soon made it obsolete. The British garrison left in 1906.
Privateering, shipping and trade, especially with the Caribbean, brought wealth to Halifax in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars, a period remembered as a golden age that peaked in the mid-1800s. Enos Collins founded the Halifax Banking Company, and Samuel Cunard made his early fortune in the city.
On January 1, 1835, Howe's newspaper the Novascotian published a letter accusing Halifax magistrates and police of taking £30,000 from citizens over three decades. Charged with seditious libel, Howe defended himself and was acquitted, declaring "the press of Nova Scotia is Free". Several officials resigned.
Halifax, previously run by appointed magistrates, was incorporated in 1841 with an elected mayor and council. In January 1848, Nova Scotia became the first colony in British North America to win responsible government, after a campaign led by Howe.
Black families, including formerly enslaved people, Maroons and Black refugees from the War of 1812, lived on the Bedford Basin north of the city. In 1848 William Arnold and William Brown bought land there, and in 1849 Seaview African United Baptist Church opened for about 80 residents. The city taxed Africville but provided no paved roads, water or sewers, and in 1854 a railway was cut through the village.
1867 – 1945
Halifax joined Canada, recovered Titanic victims, survived the 1917 Explosion and sent convoys and soldiers overseas.
Halifax opened Canada's first public library in 1864, and the Public Gardens were formally laid out in 1867. When Nova Scotia joined Confederation that year, Halifax was Canada's fourth-largest city, but its rank slipped afterwards.
From 1854 railway building linked Halifax to the continent, and the Intercolonial Railway was briefly headquartered in the city in 1872. A late-19th-century boom brought a cotton factory, two sugar refineries and a railcar plant, but central Canadian competition limited growth and the big banks moved to Toronto and Montreal. Large ocean terminals for exporting prairie grain were built in 1913.
After more than 150 years, the British garrison departed Halifax in 1906 and handed the Citadel to the Canadian militia. The fort was declared a national historic park in 1951 and is now one of the city's major attractions.
After the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, the White Star Line chartered four ships, beginning with the cable ship Mackay-Bennett from Halifax, to recover bodies; together they recovered 328. In total 150 victims were buried in Halifax, in Fairview Lawn, Mount Olivet and Baron de Hirsch cemeteries.
At 9:04 a.m., the French munitions ship Mont-Blanc, which had collided with the Norwegian ship Imo in the Narrows, exploded in one of the largest human-made blasts before the atomic bomb. Nearly 2,000 people died, about 9,000 were injured or blinded, and more than 25,000 were left without adequate shelter, with a blizzard striking the next day. The Richmond district was flattened, the Mi'kmaw settlement at Turtle Grove in Dartmouth was destroyed, and Africville was damaged.
💡 Fun fact
Did you know? Railway dispatcher Vincent Coleman died at his post after telegraphing a warning to stop incoming trains.
On February 4, 1918, Justice Arthur Drysdale's inquiry found Mont-Blanc solely at fault. Mont-Blanc's captain and pilot Francis Mackey and the harbour's naval commander were charged with manslaughter, but the charges were dropped for lack of evidence, and in 1919 the Supreme Court of Canada found the two ships equally at fault. Relief from Boston and the Massachusetts–Halifax Relief Committee was especially large.
The Pier 21 immigration terminal opened on the waterfront in 1928 and was the point of entry for about one million immigrants until 1971. In 1951 alone it received almost 94,000 newcomers, 48 per cent of Canada's total, many of them displaced persons and Holocaust survivors.
The only residential school in the Maritimes opened at Shubenacadie, north of Halifax, in 1930 and took Mi'kmaw and Wolastoqiyik children from Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Quebec. It was funded by the federal government, managed first by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Halifax and later the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and staffed by the Sisters of Charity. It closed in 1967.
⚖️ Officially acknowledged
Officially acknowledgedParks Canada records that students endured hard labour, harsh punishment, malnutrition, nutritional experimentation, suppression of their languages and physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for residential schools in 2008, and the school was designated a national historic site on September 1, 2020.
Transatlantic convoys carrying troops and supplies gathered at Halifax, and about 500,000 Canadian service members left for the war through Pier 21. The city's population rose nearly 60 per cent between 1939 and 1944, straining housing, water and electricity.
Poorly planned victory celebrations broke down into two days of drinking, vandalism and looting in Halifax and Dartmouth by several thousand sailors, merchant seamen and civilians. Three people died. A federal royal commission led by Justice Kellock blamed the naval authorities.
1946 – 1995
Growth, bridges and redevelopment, and the destruction of Africville.
Halifax businesswoman Viola Desmond, who ran a beauty school for Black women, refused to leave the whites-only section of a theatre in New Glasgow. She was dragged out, jailed overnight and charged with defrauding the province of a one-cent amusement tax. Her stand inspired later generations; in 2018 she became the first Canadian woman featured by herself on the face of a banknote.
⚖️ Officially acknowledged
Officially acknowledgedLieutenant-Governor Mayann Francis granted Viola Desmond a free pardon in 2010.
The Angus L. Macdonald Bridge linked Halifax and Dartmouth in 1955, followed by the A. Murray MacKay Bridge in 1970. That year Leonard Kitz, who was Jewish, was elected mayor, ending a century-old practice of alternating Catholic and Protestant mayors.
Halifax International Airport (now Stanfield International) opened in 1960 and became the main full-service airport for Atlantic Canada. In 1969 the city annexed suburban districts from Halifax County, boosting its population considerably.
After decades of placing a prison, infectious diseases hospital and dump near Africville, city council voted in 1961 to remove its residents for industrial development; at a 1962 meeting residents voted strongly against relocation. Land expropriation began in 1964, homes were bulldozed over five years, some belongings were moved in city dump trucks, and Seaview church was demolished at night in 1967. The last of about 400 residents left in 1969.
⚖️ Officially acknowledged
Officially acknowledgedOn February 24, 2010, Halifax Regional Municipality Mayor Peter Kelly apologized for the destruction of Africville and the city committed to building a replica of the church, which opened as a museum in 2012.
In 1970, former resident Eddie Carvery, then 24, pitched a tent on the Africville site to demand a public inquiry and compensation. He occupied the site on and off for almost five decades, one of the longest civil rights protests in Canada, until his camp was dismantled in November 2019.
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien hosted the leaders of the seven leading industrialized nations in Halifax in June 1995, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin joining for part of the meeting. The leaders agreed on measures on jobs, trade and the war in the former Yugoslavia.
1996 – today
An amalgamated region facing storms, disasters and a reckoning with its past.
Halifax, Dartmouth, Bedford and Halifax County were merged into the Halifax Regional Municipality, ending more than 150 years of separate city government. That year Africville and Pier 21 were both designated national historic sites, and the Canadian Museum of Immigration opened at Pier 21 in 1999.
A New York–Geneva flight crashed into the sea off Peggy's Cove, killing all 215 passengers and 14 crew. The Transportation Safety Board found a fire started by electrical arcing. Remains were taken to a morgue at CFB Shearwater in Dartmouth, and identifying all 229 victims took until December 1998.
Hurricane Juan struck Halifax early on September 29, 2003, killing two people and causing an estimated $40 million in damage to the city. Point Pleasant Park lost about 75 per cent of its 80,000 trees, and the Public Gardens were badly damaged.
After withdrawing its bid for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in 2007 over cost, Halifax hosted the 2011 Canada Winter Games, a two-week event with about 2,700 athletes.
The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, in the Halifax area, opened in 1921 as a publicly funded private institution for African Nova Scotian children and closed in 2014. Former residents described abuse and neglect, sued, and reached a settlement. A Restorative Inquiry set up in 2015 released its final report in Halifax in November 2019.
⚖️ Officially acknowledged
Officially acknowledgedPremier Stephen McNeil publicly apologized to former residents in 2014, calling the Home part of "a history of systemic racism and inequality" in the province.
The statue of Edward Cornwallis, erected in 1931, had become the focus of protests over the scalping proclamation. Halifax Regional Council voted 12–4 to remove it, and crews lifted it from its pedestal in Cornwallis Park the next afternoon.
A wildfire in the Upper Tantallon and Hammonds Plains area of Halifax destroyed about 200 buildings and forced more than 16,000 residents to evacuate before it was fully contained in early June 2023.
In 2024 Africville was designated Canada's first UNESCO Place of History and Memory linked to enslavement and the slave trade. Enslaved Africans had helped build Halifax after 1749, and former residents and descendants still hold reunions on the site each summer.
About this timeline
Halifax stands on Kjipuktuk, the "great harbour" of the Mi'kmaq, whose ancestors have lived in this region for about 13,000 years. Britain founded the town in 1749 as a fortified naval base, offering bounties on Mi'kmaw people as it did so, and made it the capital of Nova Scotia. A garrison and port city through two centuries of war, Halifax was devastated by the 1917 Explosion, served as Canada's Atlantic gateway for immigrants and convoys, and in the 1960s destroyed the Black community of Africville, a decision it apologized for in 2010.
6 moments on this page carry a government record note.
FAQ
Edward Cornwallis arrived on June 21, 1749, with about 2,500 settlers to found Halifax as a British naval and military base. It was incorporated as a city in 1841 and became part of Halifax Regional Municipality on April 1, 1996.
It was named after George Dunk, Earl of Halifax, head of the Board of Trade, who planned the settlement. The site was first called Chebucto, from the Mi'kmaw Kjipuktuk, meaning "great harbour".
The Mi'kmaq called the harbour Kjipuktuk (Jipugtug), which the English wrote as Chebucto.
Nearly 2,000 people died and about 9,000 were injured when the munitions ship Mont-Blanc exploded on December 6, 1917, after colliding with the Imo.
The City of Halifax expropriated and demolished the Black community of Africville between 1964 and 1969 and relocated its roughly 400 residents. The municipality apologized on February 24, 2010.
Written from the sources linked on each moment: the Canadian Encyclopedia, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Parks Canada, Library and Archives Canada, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, provincial and city archives, and others. Where governments acted wrongly, we say so and note whether it has been officially acknowledged, is established by the record, or is disputed. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix it.
Newfoundland and Labrador
Prince Edward Island
New Brunswick
Quebec
Ontario
Manitoba
Saskatchewan
Alberta
British Columbia
Northwest Territories