Editorial: Memramcook Institute survives

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News the five-story historic Memramcook Institute was sold in a deal finalized last week to Moncton-based Heritage Developments Ltd. is welcome news after more than a decade of efforts to save it and its facilities.

Its central role to the very makeup, history and culture of the province, going right back to just before the deportation of Acadians, cannot be exaggerated. The institute is a symbol of, and key participant in, the survival of l’Acadie.

Now, like the Acadians so long ago, the village and its former college will survive too. The village, its people, and Saint Joseph College, founded in 1864, have played an outsized role in New Brunswick’s history. Its role began roughly a century after the village and its small industrious population was one of the few to escape any attempt to deport them. It logically flowed from intervening years when those original village generations helped remaining Acadians protect themselves by creating villages in then-remote places like Bouctouche, Richibucto and other still-heavily Acadian regions. It was recognized that people need education and spiritual sustenance too. Memramcook led the way. By 1963 Memramcook’s St.-Joseph College was incorporated into the Université de Moncton campus, a spur to the Acadian renaissance. In 1996 the college and its renowned chapel were renamed the Memramcook Institute and operated as a hotel and school teaching the French language.

And that’s just a few highlights to show New Brunswick simply wouldn’t be what we know today without the village, its people and its college. It merits saving, restoration and repurposing without question. It’s been a struggle in a fiscally challenged province, but the village rallied again.

Memramcook Mayor Maxime Bourgeois, heavily involved, is delighted a more secure future now exists for this landmark in every meaning of the word. And Heritage Developments has the know-how.