Enjoying Cape Breton

This was the Cape Breton Island sunset I savored from my porch at the Silver Dart Lodge in Baddeck (Buh-DECK) two nights in a row. The lodge overlooks Bras d”or (Arm of Gold), one of the world’s largest saltwater lakes. Inflows from both the open sea and freshwater rivers make its brackish water a fruitful natural habitat. In 2011, the lake was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. I will remember it most for its gorgeous sunsets like this one.

I wondered why our lodge was called the Silver Dart, and I also wondered why this small Cape Breton town had an Alexander Graham Bell museum. Both questions were answered when we visited the museum. Apparently Baddeck reminded Bell so much of his childhood in Scotland that, beginning in 1885, he built a summer estate and several research labs there.

 I knew, as we all do, about the telephone, but I didn’t know Bell had experimented with aviation and overseen design of the first powered flight in Canada. The Silver Dart (contraption pictured below) was pulled onto the ice of Baddeck Bay on February 23, 1909. More than 100 of Bell’s Cape Breton neighbors witnessed this first flight of a British subject, namely pilot J.A.D. McCurdy. Aviation has certainly come a long way since 1909!

As I wandered the various rooms of the Bell museum, I came across a display showcasing Bell’s demonstration of his first functioning telephone at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. That display triggered the memory that my own maternal great grandfather had watched that demonstration himself. Winters Sheridan Mitchell was a farmer in northwest Pennsylvania at the time and rarely left Crawford County. However, his handwritten 1876 diary, which is mostly filled with weather and crop reports, contains a detailed account of the grand trip he and his wife made by train to Philadelphia for the exposition. Among his notes is a reference to watching Bell demonstrate his telephone.