John Frederic Herbin

by George Dance John Frederic Herbin (February 8, 1860 - December 29, 1923) was a Canadian poet, novelist, and historian who worked as a jeweller and optometrist.

Life
Herbin was born in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, the son of Marie-Marguerite (Robichaud), a native Acadian, and John Herbin, a Huguenot immigrant from France. Despite the fact both of his parents spoke French, he was taught to speak only English. Herbin left school before the age of 10 to assist his father, who worked as a watchmaker in nearby Bedford. The family moved to Halifax in 1870, but in 1877 returned to Wolfville, where both father and son worked as watchmakers..

In 1882 the Herbins moved to the United States. In 1884, though, John Frederic Herbin returned alone to Wolfville, where he found work with a local watchmaker. In 1885 he established Herbin Jewellers (a firm that celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2005).

In 1886 Herbin became a studen at Wolfville's Acadia College; reportedly he "was very active in campus athletics and led the campaign for the construction of a gymnasium and playing field." He also began writing prose and poetry while at Acadia,. publishing in local press and the college paper, the Acadia Athenaeum. He graduated with an honors B.A. in 1890.

In 1891 he began teaching shorthand; in 1896 he took a brief course in optometry, graduating at the top of his class. In 1897, he married 3 June 1897 Minnie Rounsefell (Simson) of Grand Pré, N.S., who bore him five children, of whom two sons and two daughters survived infancy. Through all this his business continued to prosper and he became a town councillor of Wolfville and, in 1902-1903, its mayor.

Grand Pre memorial park
Herbin had great sympathy for his ancestors, the Acadians, who had been deported from the province in 1755. He now made it his "mission to work and write" (as he told a reporter in 1905) ""to preserve for the interested the name and memory of my people, the terribly wronged Acadians." In 1906 he wrote the Prime Minister and others proposing a campaign to build a memorial park on the site of the original Acadian community of Grand Pre, writing to the Prime Minister and others. In 1907 he bought 14 acres of the land on which Grand Pre had stood. In 1909 he erected a cross on the site of the former Grand Pre cemetery (now called the Herbin Cross), made with stones beleived to be from the foundations of the Acadians' homes.

Little else came of Herbin's plans in the next decade, and in 1916 he sold the land to the Dominion and Atlantic Railway, which hoped that a park would capitalize on the growing American tourism (inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's long poem about the deportation, Evangeline. In 1920 the DAR unveiled a statue of Evangeline in the park, and deeded a portion of the land to the Societe Nationale l'Assomption to reconstruct the community church (which was completed in 1930). Finally, in 1961, the government declared the land a National Historic Site.

Writing
In 1891, Bliss Carman printed Herbin's poetry in the New York Independent. The same year saw the issue of Herbin's first poetry collection, Canada and other poems. A second collection, The Marshlands, followed in 1893, and a third (The Turn of the Tides, printed together with The Marshlands) was published in Toronto in 1899, with a second edition in 1909. Charles G.D. Roberts and Theodore Harding Rand, among others, praised Herbin's mastery of the sonnet, while philosopher William James wrote to him: "I don't know that I have ever met so complete a marriage of a man's soul with the land which he inhabits."

In addition to poetry Herbert also wrote novels and popular histories of the area. The most successful of those was undoubtedly his 1921 historical monograph The Land of Evangeline: printed by Musson Books of Toronto together with Longfellow's poem Evangeline, it sold 15,000 copies that year alone.

Recognition
Herbin was recognized by the Acadian community in a 1924 article in the Acadian newspaper L'Evangeline, and the following year a commemorative plaque honoring his efforts to tell their story was placed on the Herbin Cross on the Grand Pre site.

Poetry

 * Canada, and other poems. Windsor, NS: J.J. Anslow, 1891.
 * The Marshlands: a souvenir in song of the land of Evangeline. Windsor, NS: J.J. Anslow, 1893.
 * The Marshlands; and The Trail of the Tide. Toronto: William Briggs, 1899. Second edition, Toronto: William Briggs, 1909.

Fiction

 * The Heir to Grand-Pré. Toronto: William Briggs, 1907.
 * Jen of the Marshes. Cornhill, 1921.

Non-fiction

 * Grand-Pré: a sketch of the Acadian occupation of the shores of the basin of Minas. Toronto and Montreal, 1898
 * The History of Grand-Pré: the home of Longfellow's "Evangeline". Toronto: William Briggs, 1900.
 * The Land of Evangeline: the authentic story of her country and her people. Toronto: Musson, 1921.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the [[Dictionary of Canadian Biography.