Stewiacke

The town is located in the Stewiacke Valley, at the confluence of the Stewiacke and Shubenacadie Rivers, and is a service and support centre for local agricultural communities as well as a service exit on Highway 102.

The town is noted as being located halfway between the North Pole and the Equator (which is actually in Alton, Nova Scotia).^[3] Controversy in the past over that claim stems from the fact that the Earth is not a perfect sphere and so the halfway mark lies approximately 16 km north of the 45th parallel.^[4]

Stewiacke was named in the language of the local Mi'kmaq First Nations and is a word meaning "flowing out in small streams" and "winding river" or "whimpering or whining as it goes".^[5] During the French and Indian War, the British built Fort Ellis in the area to protect New England Planters from Mi'kmaq raids.

In the late 1990s, a tourism attraction named Mastodon Ridge opened near the town's highway exit, based on a local discovery of a mastodon skeleton. The Mastodon Ridge Complex features a craft store, toy store, a mini golf and interpretive centre which displays several of the mastodon's bones.

Stewiacke is home to a bar, a pharmacy, a grocery store, a pizzeria, numerous fast food restaurants, two gas stations, a hardware store, an 18-hole golf course and a newly built elementary school that consolidates 2 former local schools.

Stewiacke is also home to a volunteer fire brigade that was the first department in North America to use specialized foam as a fire suppression agent, alongside other achievements involving the implementation of certain fire apparatus.

The town's most notorious event occurred on April 12, 2001, when a local teenager, at home on a school in-service day, tampered with a railway switch on the CN Rail Halifax-Montreal mainline, causing Via Rail Canada's Ocean to derail several minutes later when it passed through the centre of the community.^[6] Several buildings and rail cars were destroyed and many people were injured, including some severely, although no fatalities resulted.^[6][7]

On June 30, 2021, Stewiacke was hit by an EF1 tornado.

In 2023, the Boston Christmas Tree came from Stewiacke.^[8]

In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, Stewiacke had a population of 1,557 living in 713 of its 739 total private dwellings, a change of 13.4% from its 2016 population of 1,373. With a land area of 17.62 km² (6.80 sq mi), it had a population density of 88.4/km² (228.9/sq mi) in 2021.^[12]

• Hanson Dowell (1906–2000), president of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association and member of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly^[13]

• List of municipalities in Nova Scotia