Overview
Louisbourg Lighthouse is an active Canadian lighthouse in Louisbourg, Nova Scotia. The current tower is the fourth in a series of lighthouses that have been built on the site, the earliest was the first lighthouse in Canada.
The French military founded the Fortress of Louisbourg in 1713 and its fortified seaport on the southwest part of the harbour, naming it in honour of Louis XIV. They did so by transplanting settlers there from the evacuated Terre-Neuve colony. The harbour had been used by European mariners since at least the 1590s, when it was known as English Port and Havre à l'Anglois, the French settlement that dated from 1713. The settlement was burned the first day the British landed during the Siege of Louisbourg (1745). The French were terrorized and abandoned the Grand Battery, which the British occupied the following day. It was returned to France in 1748 but recaptured by the British in 1758.
After the capture in 1758, its fortifications were demolished in 1760 and the town-site abandoned by British forces in 1768. A small civilian population continued to live there after the military left.
English settlers subsequently built a small fishing village across the harbour from the abandoned site of the fortress. The village grew slowly with additional Loyalists settlers in the 1780s. The harbour grew more accessible with the construction of the second Louisbourg Lighthouse in 1842 on the site of the original French lighthouse destroyed in 1758. A railway first reached Louisbourg in 1877, but it was poorly built and abandoned after a forest fire. However the arrival of Sydney and Louisburg Railway in 1894 brought heavy volumes of winter coal exports to Louisbourg Harbour's ice-free waters as a winter coal port. The harbour was used by the Canadian government ship Montmagny in 1912 to land bodies from the sinking of the RMS Titanic. In 1913 the Marconi Company established a transatlantic radio transmitting station here.
Incorporated in 1901, the Town of Louisbourg was disincorporated when all municipal units in Cape Breton County were merged into a single tier regional municipality in 1995.
