Dieppe
First recorded as a small fishing settlement in 1030, Dieppe was an important prize fought over during the Hundred Years' War.
Dieppe housed the most advanced French school of cartography in the 16th century. Two of France's best navigators, Michel le Vasseur and his brother Thomas le Vasseur, lived in Dieppe when they were recruited to join the expedition of René Goulaine de Laudonnière which departed Le Havre for Florida on April 20, 1564. The expedition resulted in the construction of Fort Caroline, the first French colony in the New World. Another expedition two years before where Goulaine de Laudonnière was under command of Jean Ribault, a local Huguenot captain, had resulted in the foundation of Charlesfort, now in South Carolina. Dieppe was the premier port of the kingdom in the 17th century.
On July 23, 1632, 300 colonists heading to New France departed from Dieppe.
At the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Dieppe lost 3,000 of its Huguenot citizens, who fled abroad.
Dieppe, New Brunswick
Dieppe was known as Upper Village after the Expulsion and was settled by the Surette, Maillet, and Thibodeau families, while Chartersville was called Leblanc's Village and also included members of the Boudreau's clan. Prior to 1800, Pierre Bourgeois had established himself on the ("Ruisseau des Renards") Fox Creek salt marsh. Agriculture, forestry and some fishing sustained these Acadian families up until the mid-1800s, when shipbuilding and railways created employment opportunities for Acadians around the Moncton area. After a bridge was completed in 1867 at the mouth of Hall's Creek ("Nacadie" during the French settlement at "Le Coude"), a road was constructed that link the incorporated Town of Moncton's Westmorland Road (Main Street) to the (French Village) Dieppe area. This road went through farmland that had belong to the Leger family and intersected the old road (Acadie Avenue) that had taken travellers up and around Hall's Creek to the community of Lewisville to get to Moncton. By 1900, the little area around the intersection became known as Léger's Corner, and with the increasing traffic from the bridge, merchants became attracted to the corner and soon set up shops and services around the intersection. Prior to the First World War, a small residential development was erected, and the community continue to grow until the Second World War. Then a population explosion occurred. Léger's Corner received the largest influx of military personnel in southeastern New Brunswick. Ten thousand airmen (due to the airport) and their support staff arrived overnight in 1940, and soon temporary warehouses and housing were erected. When Léger's Corner became incorporated as a municipal village in 1946, the community was renamed Dieppe, after a port in France on the English Channel, to honour the 913 Canadian servicemen who took part in the Dieppe Raid, the bloody landing by Allied soldiers, on August 19, 1942, during the Second World War. Then, part of Lakeburn was annexed in 1946 and Dieppe-East in 1948. A referendum (262 for, 232 against) marginally favoured the village to incorporate as the Town of Dieppe in 1952. At that time, Dieppe had over 3,000 inhabitants within its boundaries. Growth continued unabated throughout the 1950s and 1960s as Dieppe annexed the villages of Saint-Anselme and Chartersville and the local service districts of Fox Creek-Dover(Upper Dover), the latter in 1973. With its rural expansion came a growth in population exceeding 8,500 in the 1981 census. Within the 1980s and early 1990s, the Town of Dieppe, like the rest of the region, went through an economic downfall which limited its growth in population. By 2001, the Greater Moncton area and Dieppe's economy flourished and with it came a population increment of nearly 15,000 in 2001 to over 23,000 in 2011. To preserve its heritage, culture and identity as a community in Southern New Brunswick, Dieppe opted to incorporate itself as a city on January 1, 2003. At that time it became New Brunswick's eighth incorporated city.