LE BLANC, PIERRE, co-founder of Pointe-de-l’Église (Church Point, N. S.); b. c. 1720 at Grand Pré, Nova Scotia, son of Jacques Le Blanc and Élisabeth Boudrot; m. 4 Oct. 1745 Marie-Madeleine Babin and they had at least ten children; d. 6 July 1799 at Pointe-de-l’Église.

Soon after his marriage Pierre Le Blanc settled on the Rivière aux Canards (Canard River, N. S.), and at the time of the Acadian deportation in 1755 he owned three horses, five oxen, seven cows, 13 head of young cattle, 18 pigs, and 55 ewes. With their four children Pierre and his wife were deported to Boston, Massachusetts, where on 25 Nov. 1755, soon after their arrival, a fourth daughter was born on the quay. The Le Blancs apparently lived at Lynn, near Boston, and they were still there in April 1767 when a tenth child was born. They must have been reasonably well off since, unlike most of the Acadians in Massachusetts, they did not leave the colony in 1766. Of those that did, a number returned to Nova Scotia, where, in the interests of opening up the colony, the British authorities had since 1764 allowed Acadians who took the oath of allegiance to settle.

It was not until 1771 that Le Blanc and François Doucet, a fellow exile, set out by boat to explore the coast of the district of Clare in Nova Scotia, where Acadians had been established since 1768. They returned to the region with their families in 1772 and settled at a place later called Pointe-de-l’Église. Tradition has it that on their arrival one of the Le Blanc daughters, Madeleine, dite La Couèche, revived the flagging courage of her weary and discouraged elders by seizing an axe and beginning to cut the trees and branches needed for a shelter. By 1775 22 families were settled in the region, including that of Pierre Doucet, François’s son.

That year Pierre Le Blanc obtained a grant of 200 acres of land, and in 1785 he bought or was granted 350 more. His descendants and those of François Doucet today constitute the majority of the population of Church Point and Little Brook. One of Le Blanc’s sons, Joseph, was a pioneer of present-day Wedgeport, settling in that area in 1778; many of his descendants are still there.

J.-Alphonse Deveau

Archives paroissiales, Sainte-Marie (Church Point, N.-É.), Registre des baptêmes, mariages et sépultures, 1799–1801. N.S., Dept. of Lands and Forests, Crown Lands Office, Index sheet no.6. PAC, MG 30, C20, 13. Arsenault, Hist. et généalogie des Acadiens, 733. P.-M. Dagnaud, Les Français du sud-ouest de la Nouvelle Écosse . . . (Besançon, France, 1905), 24–25. C. J. d’Entremont, Histoire de Wedgeport, Nouvelle-Écosse (s.l., 1967). I. W. Wilson, A geography and history of the county of Digby, Nova Scotia (Halifax, 1900), 42.