Simon Pelletret (c1610 – 1642/1645): A Walk Through Port Royal – 52 Ancestors #460

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Unfortunately, we know very little about Simon Pelletret, one of the founding settlers in Port Royal, Acadia, today’s Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia.

For decades, we only knew his surname through his daughters. Simon was long deceased by the time the first Acadian census was taken in Port Royal in 1671.

In that and subsequent censuses, his two daughters are shown with the birth surname Pelletret. His widow, Perrine Bourg, had remarried to Rene Landry by about 1645, because their first child was born about 1646.

Simon’s oldest daughter, Henriette Pelletret, was born about 1640 or 1641 in Port Royal, and married Pierre Doucet in about 1660.

Simon’s younger daughter, Jeanne, was born about 1643 and married Barnabe Martin about 1666, followed by Jacques Le Vanier about 1691.

Perrine Bourg, Simon’s wife, was born about 1626, someplace in France, so she would have been about 14 or 15 when they married.

Typically, Acadian men married when they were about 30. Based on that calculation, Simon was probably born about 1610.

Most of the early Acadian settlers were recruited first by Isaac de Razilly before his 1635 death, then by Charles d’Aulnay from the area around Loudon, Martaize, La Chaussee, and La Rochelle. The tiny Acadian fort at La Heve was established about 1632, but it’s not believed that families arrived before 1636, according to later depositions.

However, 300 soldiers, laborers and skilled craftsmen did make the 1632 journey. Some stayed, some died, and others made the return trip. Simon could certainly have been at La Heve before Port Royal.

Many ships arrived whose passenger lists did not survive. We know Simon Pelletret was not on the St. Jehan in 1636 with the earliest families. That ship landed at La Heve, reinforcing that colony. He was already in Acadia before the next ship with a roster arrived in 1642.

Early Port Royal

This earliest French fort in the Annapolis River Valley was located across the river and west of what would become the town of Port Royal, on the northern banks of the Annapolis River, and is historically reconstructed today.

Known as The Habitation, it was built as a trading outpost by Samuel Champlain in 1605, but destroyed by the English in 1613.  

The next fort was Charles Fort, built in Port Royal by the Scots in 1629, but relinquished by treaty in 1632, returning the region to French control.

After Razilly’s 1635 death, his brother, Claude de Razilly, received a grant of Port Royal from the company of New France. Charles D’Aulnay, who governed this part of Acadia for Razilly moved the seat of Acadia from La Heve to Port Royal and built Le Fort du Port Royal about 1635, replacing Charles Fort in Port Royal.

The fort, rebuilt and expanded, was later renamed Fort Anne in 1710 when the British captured Port Royal and renamed the town Annapolis Royal.

It was reported that Razilly had brought 40 families over, but I have never found substantiation for that claim. The museum at La Heve mentions soldiers and priests, but not families, although we can’t say it didn’t happen.

There are a couple of things that we do know. For example, we know that in 1654, there were about 270 residents in Port Royal and along the river. They would have resided in about 45 households.

We do know that d’Aulnay was very focused on settlement, and he was reported to have brought an additional 20 families. Eight families plus one couple traveled on the St. Jehan in 1636.

If there were 60+ families that had arrived by 1640 or so, where did they go by 1654? We also know that d’Aulnay made several trips back to France and would have brought new settlers and soldiers with each subsequent trip, so we would expect the number of households to increase with time.

Land in Port Royal

The fort in Port Royal survived several attacks and underwent multiple renovations. At least twice, it fell into extreme disrepair.

In 1705, the old fort needed to be expanded, which meant that several pieces of land adjacent the original fort, owned by the families of several founding families, needed to be expropriated.

The earliest documentation of Simon Pelletret in Port Royal was found by Stephen A. White in a document that referenced the expropriation of that land.

On the list of expropriations from 1705 are the names of François Gautrot, Guillaume Trahan, Jean Blanchard, Simon Pelletret, and Michel Boudrot, as owners of the plots “adjoining the old fort.” Four of these five names belong to first settlers of Port-Royal. Trahan, for example, arrived aboard the Saint-Jehan in 1636, and Boudrot was a syndic in Port-Royal in 1639. By 1705, all four had long since passed away, and it must be assumed that their heirs were the current owners of these plots at the time of the expropriations. We believe the same was true for Simon Pelletret. Since there was no male of this name in the Acadian censuses from 1671 onwards, it seems likely that this Simon must have been the first husband of Perrine Bourg. Simon Pelletret would have thus received, like François Gautrot, Guillaume Trahan, Jean Blanchard, and Michel Boudrot, one of the first land grants in Port-Royal, very close to the fort. He owned a lot adjoining the side of the old Fort.

Nicole Barrieau, in her 1994 thesis, provided a drawing of the properties.

We know that Simon Pelletret married Perrine Bourg about 1640, had two children by 1643, and died sometime between the conception of the second child and when Perrine remarried about 1645. Therefore, Simon died between 1642 and 1645 meaning we can deduce that Simon received his land appropriation along with the other earliest settlers in Port Royal.

Simon, along with the others whose land was expropriated, were probably settled here and had established farms by 1640 when he married.

Since Simon’s descendants were to receive compensation, and Perrine died between 1693 and 1698, the funds would have fallen to Henriette and her sister, Jeanne. Henriette had also died before 1705, so her children might have inherited in her stead. Jeanne died in 1706, and based on complaints by other families who were owned money from that transaction, it’s probable that Jeanne never saw any of the money either.

What probably did occur is that the daughters continued to own the land, and one of them may have lived there, at least until the fires of 1690 and 1693.

Houses in Port Royal

By 1640, the founding settlers of Port Royal would have had homes with adjacent gardens, outbuildings to support their trade, whatever it was, and to shelter their livestock. Even though they lived on the riverfront, the long skinny parcels suggested that they built their homes near the road, and the land between the house and the river was used for farming.

We don’t know Simon’s occupation, which would have informed his social status, but we do know that the upper echelon of Acadia lived near the fort. The Governor, the King’s lawyers and clerks, the engineer, the Fort Commander, Louis Allain, the miller, Jacques Bourgeois, the surgeon, Abraham Dugas, the armourer, and Michael Boudrot, the syndic.

Most Acadian houses belonged to the farming peasants and were quite small, consisting of one room and a loft.

A reproduction stands in the Annapolis Royal Historic Gardens, today.

While most homes were indeed humble abodes, that’s not necessarily the case with the original homes along the river.

In 1687, Louis Allain was awarded land 5 or 6 houses away from where Simon had once lived. Louis was quite prosperous, and in addition to owning the mill, owned at least two ships that could dock at his property. His expropriation on December 2, 1705 noted that his house was 30 feet long by 22 feet wide, further described as “old”, with a board roof, revetted on the outside with half-rotten four inch blanks, a mud chimney and a very poor floor. A partition of plain boards and two cabinets, which were smaller rooms created by moveable walls, were formed from boards that were not tongue and groove.

Allain’s land was outside the fort, but in the area to be prepared for the parade ground.

Brenda Dunn, in her paper titled, Acadian Architecture in Port-Royal, tells us more about the early homesteads gleaned from archaeological excavations.

The typical home utilized half-timbered construction, known as charpente or colombage where heavy beams are assembled with mortice and tenon joints held in place with wooden pegs.

My hand, with my mother’s ring descended from her Acadian lineage, is shown here against an original portion of the fort’s barracks which seems to be this same type of construction.

The timbers were then filled in with other materials, as shown above. Typically, the fill was clay and mud, but in the garrison, it included bricks and stone.

The Acadian house frames rested on sills, which were placed upon a foundation. The Gaudet family specialized in this type of construction. In 1702, Pierre Gaudet was hired to hew timbers and assemble the frames of the fort’s new buildings. He might even have hewed these timbers,

Brenda tells us that:

When the French engineer Pierre-Paul Delabat arrived to design and build the new fort in 1702, he made a study of local half-timber buildings in the Port-Royal area. He was struck by the impermanence of the Acadian buildings, which he claimed often did not have foundations but sat directly on the ground.

Delabat claimed that Acadians renewed the frames of their buildings every 12 to 14 years, or at least every 20 years. He complained that they used unseasoned wood, which caused the framing to crack and the joints to work, opening up the house to the weather. He also criticized the size and placement of the mortice and tenon joints in the framing. According to Delabat, the interiors were usually finished with panelling (lambrissage), possibly only boards, which he considered a waste of wood and nails. He noted the common use of cellars in Acadian houses, a detail documented elsewhere. His are the only contemporary comments on Acadian charpente construction.

Major de Villieu purchased another house, in the centre of town, which was 46 pieds by 24 pieds and consisted of “a kitchen, a parlour and five cabinets with a cellar underneath.” Described as “a house of brick and wood,” it may have been a frame building with brick fill.

Two archaeological excavations occurred across the river, one at BelleIsle on the Savoie land dating from the late 1600s, and one in the Melanson settlement.

One of the most interesting aspects of both excavations is that the original homes had burned, and the replacement home was built right on top of where the original home had stood.

The BelleIsle excavations uncovered evidence of two half-timber houses, built one after the other on the same foundation. The Acadian builders had placed tamped clay over the remains of the first house, which had burned, and immediately began construction of its replacement.

The original Savoie home, based on the excavation, was about 25 by 36 feet, with an extension on the east end.

The most remarkable feature of the house was a fireplace/oven complex, located on the west end wall. The oven was built against the outside wall on a stone foundation 2.5 metres in diameter. Locally produced clay bricks seem to have been used to line the fireplace while local blue slate tiles served as hearth tiles.

At the BelleIsle Hall Acadian Cultural Center, located on the original Savoie land, Charlie Tibodeau has reconstructed an Acadian oven, and uses it regularly for visitor demonstrations and family reunions.

If you return to the Acadian homeland, be sure to stop at the Center, but call first to make arrangements, because they aren’t always there.

I wrote about the Francois Savoie homestead and archaeological site, here.

The second archaeological site, the Melanson or Melancon village eventually hosted the homes of about a dozen family members. One of those homes had been rebuilt four times. The first two were of a different type of construction, and the third and fourth were the more traditional half-timber, the walls being filled with clay and chopped marsh grass.

In both locations, tamped clay was spread to prepare the site for the replacement home. Sometimes the ovens were reused. Two styles of ovens were found. The Savoie oven was made with unfired clay tiles, embedded in clay over a plank base. The Melanson oven did not have a plank base, but was built on a wooden platform.

While both sites had some window glass, it was very limited and the Melanson site glass was stamped with a 1740 date.

Today, nothing but nature remains of the Melanson village site.

At least nothing above the earth.

Imagine how much history is buried in Port Royal and other locations beneath development, the fort – or simply beneath fields.

One of the most fascinating tidbits that Brenda reveals is that in 1701, a house in the main settlement of Port Royal, near the fort, was described as having paper windows.

Glass was a luxury, but people needed light. Oiled or greased paper was translucent and was commonly used for windows on the American frontier, and apparently in Acadia too. Greased paper was waterproof and protected the interior from the elements, and insects, while admitting light.

Did Simon’s original home have paper windows?

From what little we know about the early buildings, it sounds like fire was an unwelcome but all too common danger. Rebuilding was a way of life. Some fires would have occurred from open flames maintained for both warmth and cooking, but others were intentionally set.

Acadia, while stunningly beautiful and deceptively tranquil today, was not peaceful then.

What Happened in the 1640s?

Simon was a man in his prime when he died, probably between 32 and 35. Of course, there was all kinds of danger in Port Royal. Everything from a housefire to a capsized boat, to a hunting accident, to dysentery, to a cut turned septic, to pneumonia. Illnesses and accidents that modern medicine routinely saves us from today were fatal then.

Aside from that, there was also chronic warfare between two warring Acadian Governors.

Charles d’Aulnay, and Charles La Tour were supposed to essentially be co-governors of Acadia, responsible for different locations. Suffice it to say that didn’t go well, and the Acadian Civil War resulted.

Whether these events took Simon’s life, or something else did, this chronic clash would very much have been front and center in his life. Port Royal was a bullseye, dead center in the middle of the conflict, and the residents always had to be on guard.

La Tour’s headquarters lay across the bay, at the mouth of the River Saint John at Fort Sainte-Marie. From the mouth of the Saint John River to the mouth of the Riviere Dauphin was about 40 miles, and another 15 or so on upriver to Port Royal.

Depending on the conditions, a ship could cover 100 miles a day, so in essence, the forts, and domains, of these two feuding men weren’t far apart at all.

La Tour actively traded with New England, Boston in particular, and was gone for months at a time. D’Aulnay had a hostile relationship with the English and made trips back and forth to France to recruit new settlers to expand Port Royal.

Another bone of contention between the two men in their escalating feud was that La Tour was Protestant, as were the English, and d’Aulnay was Catholic, as were most of the Acadians (except Charles Melanson), which fostered an atmosphere of distrust.

La Tour was gone to Boston for five months in 1642, and d’Aulnay took advantage of his absence by blockading his fort across the bay.

La Tour returned, angry as a wet hen, with four ships and 270 men to reclaim his fort. He chased d’Aulnay back across the bay to Port Royal, but turned around and returned home without actually catching him.

D’Aulnay had La Tour charged with treason and disrespect to the French crown.

That ratcheted things up more than a notch or two.

The following year, the situation turned deadly when La Tour, on his way to Boston to trade once again, chased d’Aulnay to Penobscot Bay in present-day Maine. D’Aulnay had to run two of his ships aground. He turned to fight La Tour, losing another ship, and three men. He also managed to kill three of La Tour’s men before La Tour proceeded on to Boston.

While in Boston, La Tour garnered sympathy and gathered resources. La Tour attacked Port Royal with English mercenaries on his return trip from Boston. La Tour commanded 270 Puritan and Huguenot men who rampaged through Port Royal, killing three people, burning the mill, slaughtering cattle, and seizing more than 18,000 livres worth of furs that were destined for the next trading trip to France. One livre was worth about a pound of silver.

Another seven Port Royal men were injured.

D’Aulnay was seething, and preparing.

On Easter Sunday in 1645, d’Aulnay summoned every man in Acadia capable of carrying a gun, about 200. They boarded ships, sailed across the bay, and attacked La Tour’s fort – once again while he was in New England.

By this point, it was kill or be killed, because La Tour was in Boston seeking reinforcements and planning to violently take Port Royal. With the English and Boston merchants on La Tour’s side, d’Aulnay was in essence doing battle with a traitor who had access to a LOT more resources than d’Aulnay did. France had neglected Acadia for quite some time. Out of sight, out of mind – but that negligence made Acadia, who was vastly outnumbered, all the more attractive to La Tour and his English conspiratorial buddies.

For three days, La Tour’s wife, Francoise-Marie Jacquelin, and his 40 or 45 soldiers defended the fort. D’Aulnay lost 33 men, but on the third day, managed to breach the fort. D’Aulnay and Francoise-Marie agreed to surrender terms the following day, which included sparing the lives of La Tour’s soldiers. On the fifth day, d’Aulnay, in spite of his promise, hung every soldier from the gallows, in front of Francoise-Marie who was forced to stand on the gallows platform, with a noose around her neck, watching. She was taken prisoner and died three weeks later.

La Tour learned of these events while in New England and sought refuge in Quebec for the next several years.

While this is not the end of the Acadian saga, it’s the end of the portion that involves Simon Pelletret.

Was Simon one of the six men who died at La Tour’s hand in 1643, or one of the people who died or was injured in Port Royal later that year? Was he one of the 33 men who died on Easter Sunday in 1645?

We will never know, but what we do know is that his wife, Perrine Bourg remarried to Rene Landry around 1645, and according to the 1671 census, they had their first baby the following year.

Simon’s Land and the Fort

I visited Annapolis Royal in the summer of 2024, not realizing at the time that I was literally standing on the original land of Simon Pelletret. In fact, if we dug down beneath the fort’s ramparts, glacis and parade ground in just the right spot, we’d find the remains of Simon’s home – at least the stone foundation, if nothing else.

We know roughly where Simon lived based on the 1705 expropriation of the land within Port Royal for the fort expansion and parade ground.

We also know from Barrieau’s map approximately where she placed Simon’s land, along with the value recorded in livres. Simon’s land, along with his neighbor, Jean Blanchard, were worth 73 livres.

You can see:

  1. The original fort according to the Saccardy plan
  2. The fort according to the interpretation of Brenda Dunn, National Parks historian
  3. Boundary of the new 1703-1705 fort
  4. Dashed line indicating the glacis of the new fort

Glacis are sloped earthworks positioned in front of a fort’s wall or rampart that absorbs or deflects cannon fire and helps prevent surprise attacks.

These features are still in place today. In aerial images, you can see the fort’s ramparts, plus the glacis where the walking path surrounds the fort on top of the glacis walls. A moat ran between the two, between the glacis and the ramparts.

The approximate site of Simon’s land is marked in red.

With the aerial view rotated 90 degrees, I’ve overlayed the Pelletret slice of land to the best of my ability to match the Barrieau map.

Simon’s land included some marais near the water, a part of the glacis, a slice of the moat and extended into and across the rampart.

Keep in mind that significant erosion has occurred on the banks of the river, so the land would have stretched further into what is the water, today.

The Annapolis River, then the Riviere Dauphin, is a tidal river, and the brown portion on the riverbanks in the Google satellite photo below is tidal mud.

For perspective, this satellite photo shows the fort, part of the Annapolis Royal waterfront, plus the river and the land across the river where Acadian families also settled. I can just see La Tour’s ships sailing up to the Fort. Simon’s land is marked with the red arrow.

Also visible is the Queen’s Wharf, marked by the red star just above the end of the arrow, where Simon’s descendants were herded onto the English deportation ships in 1755.

This land is so richly infused with Acadian memories, and blood.

Let’s take a walk on top of the fort’s glacis and visit Simon’s land. The small tree or large bush at right is probably on his land. If not, it’s very near.

Of course, when Simon lived here, his land would have been closer in elevation to the water, but the view overlooking the river would still have been spectacular. The mouth of the river is a dozen miles to the left.

Standing on Simon’s land, looking over the Queen’s Whart and across the river. Depending on the accuracy of Barrieau’s drawing and the actual angle of Simon’s land, it’s possible that it included at least a portion of where the wharf would be built decades later.

Just over 100 years after Simon built his homestead where I’m standing, his descendants would be herded onto English ships, separated, and shipped to parts unknown.

It took more than a century, but yes, eventually the English defeated the Acadians and removed them from their homeland.

Here, standing on the wharf, the Pelletret land can probably be seen in its entirely from river level, beginning to the right of the wharf by the marsh stream, and extending up to about where the white Monument du Mons stands, at left. The white building with the three chimneys is the garrison.

Before the glacis, a fortified hill of earth and stone, was built, Simon’s land, shown here, would have included more marshland. He would have dyked and drained his land to reclaim it from the saltwater so that he could farm productively and graze his cattle. That process took about 3 years to be productive, so he might have just begun to reap the benefits of his efforts when he died. His wife may have continued living there after she remarried. 

Everyone needed dry land to build their house and barn, but the marais, or marsh, to be dyked and drained, was prime real estate too. This explains the long, skinny, parcels – assuring that everyone received some dry, higher land, and some marsh.

Standing near the wharf, looking upriver towards the town, plus the beautiful view across the river. The hills on both sides of the river protected the valley.

The white granite de Mons Monument that stands on the glacis today is either on or just beside Simon’s land.

Climbing up the hill, across the glacis, and then onto the rampart, we look out over Simon’s land, the wharf, the river and the hills beyond. You can see the tide flowing in the river, either in or out.

Standing near where Simon’s house stood, we look eastward towards town, across the lots belonging to Michel Boudrot, Jean Blanchard, Guillaume Trahan, Francois Gautrot, and others who lived adjacent the fort and were Simon’s friends and neighbors.

Turning to the left and looking the other direction, we see the rest of the glacis overlooking the river and part of the now-dry moat. The end of the fort by the river, at far left, has been eaten away by erosion.

In front of the garrison, where the contemporary road crosses the old bastion, we find the widest portion of Simon’s land where his house likely stood. At one time, this was part of the main street of Port Royal.

The bastions are steep and tall, which, after all, is the entire point of a defensive structure.

One of Simon’s two daughters, Jeanne Pelletret, who married Barnabe Martin and then Jacques Le Vanier, died in 1706, so she may have lived long enough to receive her share of the payment for Simon’s expropriated land. His eldest daughter, Henriette Pelletret, who married Pierre Doucet, had died by 1694, so hopefully, her children received her share.

As slow as France was to sent money or assistance of any kind, it may well have been Simon’s grandchildren who were the ultimate beneficiaries.

Looking down from the top of the rampart illustrates how high they stand today.

While the new fort’s ramparts were built on Simon’s land half a century after his death, the original fort would have had ramparts within view too.

Simon, and all of the Acadian men would feel very much at home here.

I sat here, with Simon’s spirit, to let it all soak in.

As I sat with Simon, I realized that remembrance isn’t only about stones or places or names – it’s about presence. The wind, the river, and the earth remember what we cannot see.

Simon is still here. He walked these hallowed grounds for at least a few years – too few. His life cut short by some unknown calamity, leaving his wife and two very young daughters to carry on without him.

Did Simon die here, defending the fort from La Tour’s men?

Regardless of how Simon met his fate, his family gathered here for his Requiem Mass in the church – now commemorated solely by this solitary marker that stands as a silent sentinel on the far rampart.

Simon’s earthly remains were carried from the church and laid to rest in the churchyard which lies just beyond where the church once stood, now beneath the rampart, opposite Simon’s home.

The priest would have spoken a final prayer – his young widow weeping, his daughters crying – as the clods of Acadian clay fell hollowly upon his coffin.

His grave, once marked with a wooden cross, so close, but so far away from the life he had shared along the river’s shore, beside the fort, with Perrine, Henriette, and Jeanne.

Only the river and the wind remember now. The wind gently whispers Simon’s story as it dances through the old fort, swirling past his home, and across the river that still murmurs his name.

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