Mahone Bay’s boat building history begins with the Mi’kmaq. The Mi’kmaq were very skilled at building birch bark canoes and had been living in this area for over thirteen thousand years before Mahone Bay and Lunenburg were settled in 1753-1754 by “British Subjects” mostly from France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. [...]The British claimed this land as theirs and this particular area was ideal for sawmills due to vast amounts of timber and the two rivers emptying into the bay, which made for easy transport of logs to the sawmills. These sawmills established by the early settlers produced first-rate lumber for shipbuilding.