Living History, Lively City - Step through a doorway in time into a magnificent French town whose streets are a bustle of 18th-century activity. Inside the massive stone gates, the year is 1744. Stroll lively streets where costumed washerwomen, bread sellers, soldiers, noblemen and musicians are going about their daily business. Explore historic period gardens, watch musket and cannon drills, roam through the king\'s storehouses, and visit the homes of commoners, merchants, and wealthy residents. This is Fortress Louisbourg, the largest historic reconstruction in North America, meticulously rebuilt on the foundations of the original fortress-the site from which the French hoped to reign over all North Atlantic navigation in the 1700s.
The roots of the technical and industrial age can be found throughout this area. The Marconi National Historic Site marks the location of the first west-to-east transatlantic radio transmission in 1902. In Louisbourg, the Sydney & Louisburg Railway Museum pays tribute to the region\'s rich railway heritage. The history of coal mining in Canada\'s richest coal country is captured at Glace Bay\'s Miners\' Museum, where visitors can tour a turn-of-the-century miners\' village and actually enter a coal mine, the Ocean Deeps Colliery, with guides who once worked in the mines.