A Bit of History
Fundy Folk Night was a popular mostly open mike event that had been running at the Margaretsville Fire Hall for most of the 90’s.
For Christmas 1998 we had been invited to run our night at the Evergreen Baptist Church in East Margaretsville with a Christmas theme. It was a great success.
In early 1999 a decision was made by the Evergreen’s owner (the Margaretville Baptist Church) to de-commission the church and offer it to the community for another use. Fundy Folk presented a plan to convert the building into a theatre. After a certain amount of back and forth politicking in the community the offer was accepted.
Fundy Folk had an especially ambitious Board of Directors that year and a grand scheme was hatched. The opening night would be a special Gala that would actually commission new works for the evening from singer-songwriters who had been playing at Fundy Folk Nights and actually pay them $500 each for their contribution. The Fundy Folk Songwriters Project would then be toured across the province.
Arts Nova Scotia bought into the scheme with a $13,000 grant and we were off!
Tickets for the event (at $10.00) sold madly and on September 11, 1999 we crammed well over 200 folks into those not too comfortable pews (the fire marshall was fortunately absent) for the first show in our new venue. CBC Radio was there to tape the proceedings and broadcast the results in a three part series later that year.
And here we are, twenty five years later, courtesy of a generation or two of great musicians and music lovers like you.
The Evergreen Theatre is the sole project of the Fundy Folk Association; founded in 1991 as a not-for-profit, volunteer-run organization with a committed Board of Directors.
Our Mandate is:
To offer quality professional performing arts with an emphasis on music.
To provide cultural enrichment, and social and volunteer opportunities for our rural community.
To provide a performance venue, meeting, and workshop space for the use of the local community.
Acknowledgement
The Evergreen Theatre would like to acknowledge that we are in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded land of the Mi’kmaq People. This ancestral land is covered by the “Treaties of Peace and Friendship” which Mi’kmaq, Wəlastəkwiyik (Maliseet), and Passamaquoddy Peoples first signed with the British Crown in 1726. The treaties did not deal with the surrender of lands and resources but in fact, recognized Mi’kmaq and Wəlastəkwiyik title and established the rules for what was to be an ongoing relationship between nations.