People

The Mi’kmaq have lived on Cape Breton Island for about 10,000 years. The first Europeans to visit the coast of Cape Breton Island were the Vikings, about 1,000 years ago. John Cabot found Cape Breton Island for England in 1497 and took back interesting news about the island—the waters around it were filled with fish! Soon other countries such as Portugal, Spain and France heard about the fish. It wasn’t long before fishermen from all these countries were fishing near Cape Breton Island.

For more than 100 years, the English and French fought battles to take control over what are now the Atlantic provinces. The French controlled the island for a time before finally losing it to England in 1763. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, thousands of Scottish people came to Cape Breton Island. Around the year 1900, people came from many other countries to work in the island’s coal mines and steel plants. The island had its most people by about 1940. The jobs in steel and coal are gone now and some people are leaving the island. In 1996, 117,849 people lived on the island. By 2001, there were only 109,330 people living on Cape Breton Island.

Cape Breton Island’s Counties

Cape Breton Island is part of the province of Nova Scotia. It has four counties. People are elected in each county to look after such things as fire protection, garbage collection, building permits and collecting property taxes. In 1835, the Nova Scotia government divided the island into three counties— Cape Breton County, (in the northeast of the island), Richmond County (in the south) and Juste au Corps (in the northwest of the island), which was later called Inverness County. In 1852, Victoria County was carved out of Cape Breton County to make four counties.