Teasers: Tales from the Buccaneer Lodge by Frank Leaman
“My life has revolved around Halifax harbour, Mahone Bay, and my father, Frank Manual Leaman. We ran seven business together and that meant a lot of juggling. Often, I started my day in Dartmouth, across the harbour from Halifax, and ended it an hour’s drive away in the village of Chester on Nova Scotia’s South Shore.
My father was a larger-than-life figure. He was a visionary. In the North End of Dartmouth, where he and I were both born, there is a street called Leaman Drive. We built that street. It almost broke us, but we built it. It was around 1953 or 1954 when my father bought about 225 acres of land in the area from the prominent Stairs family, made up of merchants and shippers. Believing that the area was going to grow, my father envisioned turning the land, home to Big Albro Lake and Little Albro Lake, into subdivisions. By selling two of these lots of land to a developer he got enough money to buy a hunting and fishing lodge in Chester in the late 1950s and enter the province’s adventure tourism business.
It was a bright, sunny day at the courthouse in Chester when the sheriff’s hammer came down on the final bid that made my father the new owner of Owl’s Head Lodge and Tuna Camps in East Chester. We later changed the name to the Buccaneer Motel and Cottages, or as we liked to call it, the Buccaneer Lodge.”
–Excerpted from Tales from the Buccaneer Lodge by Frank Leaman. © by Frank Leaman. Published by Boulder Books. boulderbooks.ca
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