Halifax suffered the largest man-made blast before the atomic bomb
On December 6, 1917, a French munitions ship collided with a Belgian relief vessel in the Narrows of Halifax Harbour. The resulting explosion flattened the city's Richmond district, killed about 2,000 people and injured nearly 9,000. Until nuclear weapons, no human-made explosion was bigger. Help arrived from Boston, forging a lasting bond.
Long before the British arrived, the Mi'kmaq called the harbour K'jipuktuk or Chebookt, meaning great or chief harbour, and one account gives the hillside a name meaning place of many pines. In 1749 King George II ordered Edward Cornwallis to build a new capital to replace Annapolis Royal. He arrived with 13 transports, a sloop of war and 1,176 settlers, founded the town on June 21, 1749, and named it after the Earl of Halifax. Because the settlement broke treaties made with the Mi'kmaq in 1726, its founding triggered Father Le Loutre's War, and forts rose on Citadel Hill and across the harbour.
The town grew into a hub of military government, trade and shipbuilding. When the Intercolonial Railway was completed in 1876, Halifax became a major winter gateway for Atlantic trade, since ice closed the St Lawrence ports for months. Its strategic importance explains why a munitions ship was in the harbour during the First World War.
Modern Halifax is a merger. On April 1, 1996, the province combined the cities of Halifax and Dartmouth, the town of Bedford and Halifax County into the Halifax Regional Municipality, which takes in the whole county apart from several Mi'kmaq reserves. It contains more than 200 official communities, yet the built-up urban area covers less than five percent of its land. The metropolitan population was estimated at 530,167 in 2024.
The sea shapes daily life. The Gulf Stream keeps winters relatively mild for Canada, and summers lag so far behind the calendar that August is much warmer than June. Hurricanes are a recurring threat; Juan did considerable damage in 2003. Downtown towers sit beneath the Citadel Hill fortress and its town clock, while the Grand Parade square from the original 1749 street grid still hosts City Hall and the Remembrance Day ceremony.
Source: Halifax, Nova Scotia
