Description of Historic Place

The Argyle Township Court House Archives is a one-and-a-half storey Gothic church of wood construction located on a small lot along Highway #3 in the centre of the village of Tusket, NS. With the gable end facing the Tusket River, the building is situated on the property immediately to the south of the Argyle Township Court House, Canada's oldest standing courthouse, which is a National Historic Site of Canada. The building and surrounding land are included in the municipal heritage designation.

Heritage Value

The Tusket Methodist Church is valued for its history as a place of worship and its association with prominent members of the community. It was the fourth church building to be constructed in the village of Tusket in 1877. One of the founding members was Peter Lent Hatfield and local tradition has it that he mortgaged his own home to finance the construction of this church. The original church was opened for divine worship on Sunday, 3 February 1878. It was not until after the official opening that the deed for the land on which the church is located was executed on 22 February 1878. The congregation of the Tusket Methodist Church was always a small one.

The original church was a very plain building and underwent a major refurbishment less than twenty years after its original construction. Around 1885, a corner tower and steeple were added. The interior was finished and an entirely new gable roof put on the building at the same time. There is an architectural drawing of the front elevation of the church found in the “Toots” Hatfield papers at the Yarmouth County Museum, drawn by the architectural firm of Kinney and Haley, Yarmouth, NS which is dated 1894. In 1925, with the union of many Methodist, Presbyterian and Congreational churches in Canada it became a “United Church". On 13 April 1973, it became a Seventh-Day Adventist Church and remained as such until 2000 when it was purchased by the Argyle Municipality Historical and Genealogical Society. They purchased the building for the purposes of adaptive reuse. The interior of the building was transformed into a modern archival facility in 2005/2006 while the heritage exterior of the building was preserved.

Source: Argyle Municipal Heritage Files, file #006

Character-Defining Elements

Character-defining elements of the Argyle Township Court House Archives include:

- corner tower and steeple;
- steeply pitched gable roof;
- Gothic motifs on front elevation above windows;
- Gothic details and motifs on steeple;
- Fleur-de-lis on the steeple;
- miniature steeples located on the remaining three corners of the main church building; with two additional scaled down miniature steeples on the rear corners of the extension;
- triangular window located at the attic level on the front elevation;
- three symmetrically arranged six-over-six paned windows on both the north and south ridge walls.