After the First World War, the province offered returning soldiers land in Merville as part of a settlement scheme meant to give veterans a fresh start. What they found when they arrived was old-growth forest that had been logged but never cleared; a landscape of enormous stumps that had to be blasted, burned, and dragged out by hand before anything could be planted.

Kelly Black’s reporting for The Discourse follows that grinding, often-failed effort to turn stump land into working farms, and what it cost the men who tried. It’s the same historical backdrop novelist Jack Hodgins later drew on for Broken Ground, his 1998 novel set in a fictionalized version of Merville.

A clear-eyed look at a settlement story that gets romanticized more often than it gets examined.