Experience the smallest of small

Experience the smallest of small-town vibes at Pioneers Place

If you visit Saint-François-de-Madawaska, you can also visit a much smaller version of Saint-François

New Brunswick has more than 100 museums and heritage sites. In our summer series Museum Road Trip, CBC News will highlight eight small-town historic places.

Saint-François-de-Madawaska is a small community nestled in the New Brunswick panhandle between Maine and Quebec.

The Place des Pionniers, or Pioneer Place, is an even smaller village, a small-scale reproduction of Saint-François-de-Madawaska.

The village of miniature buildings — miniature being a relative term as some are several metres tall — was born as a project to celebrate the 2014 World Acadian Congress, which was held in the town.

“We want to make a replication of our village, and we have businesses and we have some houses and many, many things to make sure the people come in and they remember we got that in Saint-François,” said Gaetane Saucier Nadeau of the Société culturelle de Saint-François-de-Madawaska.

The miniature village features many buildings that once stood, and in some cases still stand, in the village of about 470 people.

The buildings were built with funding from members of the community, often those who owned the homes and businesses portrayed.

This includes a post office, school and church, a reproduction of the first church in the village, which features pews from a decommissioned church in Quebec.

Some buildings can be toured inside, although it might be a tight fight for some.

When entering Saint-François-de-Madawaska, visitors are greeted by a giant statue of a chicken.

Fitting for a community that dubs itself the chicken capital of Canada, and this can be seen in the fact that Pioneers Place features two miniature poultry-processing plants: one representing the older plants and one the newer plants.

Saucier Nadeau said the industry is still a major part of the community, which is now part of the larger town of Haute-Madawaska.

“ I used to work there too, 17 years … that was hard work,” Saucier Nadeau said of the poultry plant.

“A lot of people from Saint-François, they work at the Nadeau Poultrice,”

Pioneers Place also features a reproduction of the Saint-François-de-Madawaska home of the first person to be a Canadian citizen at birth.

Nicole Cyr was born on Jan. 1, 1947, less than a minute after the Canadian Citizenship Act went into effect.

Prior to 1947, everyone who was born in Canada was considered a British subject. Although Cyr was born 80 years after Confederation, it's fair to say she was the first-born Canadian.

“That's a big, big thing,” Saucier Nadeau said. "That's massive having Mme. Nicole here."

Pioneer’s Place isn’t the only museum in town.

Just a short walk away visitors can see the Jos. B. Michaud Blacksmith Shop Museum.

The shop opened in 1894 and was in operation until 1984.

It was operated by Jos. B. Michaud, who worked as a blacksmith until his death in 1984, making his final pair of horseshoes just the day before.

Mélodie Morneault, a student tour guide at the museum, is only 17 but has memories of the blacksmith shop. She visited the museum as a student, when one of Michaud's sons was operating the forge.

“We would come here every year and visit, and he would show us how it worked and how to do that,” Morneault said.

Pioneers Place is open daily between 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Jos. B. Michaud Blacksmith Shop Museum is open weekdays from 9 a.m to 3 p.m. and weekends from 1 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Jordan Gill is a reporter based in Fredericton, New Brunswick.