Painting by Bernard Pelletier . © Parks Canada, Bernard
Pelletier Old Town Lunenburg, where all streets are straight and
all corners square, is the best surviving example of a British
colonial policy of creating new settlements by imposing a pre-
designed "model town" plan on whatever tract of wilderness it
was the King's pleasure to colonize. At least 21 North American
settlements, from Cornwall and Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario to
Savannah, Georgia, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, benefited
from this policy. But none has survived in such pristine
condition as the little south-coast Nova Scotia town of
Lunenburg. The settlement was created in June 1753 as a home for
1,453 mostly German-speaking Protestant German, Swiss and
Montbéliardian French colonists. The townsite, true to then-
current convention, consisted of seven north-south streets, 48
feet wide (with the exception of King Street, which is 80 feet),
intersected at right angles by nine east-west streets, each 40
feet wide, creating blocks that were fu