Happy Canadian Thanksgiving (and the story of an economic paradigm shift that was catalyst for a move to California)

Mostly, I'm thankful for the Canadian who left her beautiful country to live with me. Thank you Sandi. Sandi is a classic Canadian. Her four grandparents came from four different European countries to meet and marry in Canada.

In the mid-1700s, my ancestors moved from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia, which had just become a British colony. By the late 1800s, Hantsport, Nova Scotia had 32 sea captains with the last name of Davison and John Fox Davison was the Master Shipbuilder in Hantsport. In the last half of the 1800s, a "business trip" lasted a month or even years, depending on whether a ship was simply heading down the coast, across the Atlantic or around the world.

It was a monumental shift in technology that was catalyst for a Davison ancestor leaving Canada for California.

In September 1886, the maritime town of Hantsport, Nova Scotia, ground to a halt. Flags lined the Avon River, brass bands played, and crowds gathered at the foot of Prince Street to witness a historic triumph. Slipping into the waters of the Bay of Fundy was the barque Hamburg, designed and constructed under the management of its Master Shipbuilder, John Fox Davison. Registering at nearly 1,700 tons, the Hamburg was a leviathan—the largest three-masted wooden merchant vessel ever constructed in Canada.

The launch of the Hamburg represented the end of a four-hundred-year-old economic paradigm, though. John Fox had brought the ancient art of wooden shipbuilding to its mathematical and physical limits. Beyond a hull length of roughly 300 feet, organic timber naturally flexes and warps under its own weight; biology had hit a ceiling.

As the Hamburg slipped into the ocean, across the Atlantic, European yards were churning out massive vessels forged from industrial Bessemer steel and powered by coal-fired steam engines. These new steel-hulled ships did not care about wind patterns, could hold twice the cargo, and operated on strict, unyielding calendar schedules. The crossing of the "Sail-Steam Divide" was swift and merciless. A paradigm shift. Within a decade, the macroeconomic reality of steel made a lifetime of elite wooden craftsmanship obsolete. The great shipyard went quiet, and the fortunes anchored to them dissolved. John Fox Davison had built the ultimate monument to a world that history left behind.

John Fox's son Arthur was my great grandpa who left Nova Scotia for California, sailing around the tip of South America in 1881. After 25 years in Nova Scotia, he spent his next 72 in the California redwoods.