Rockingham is a community located within the urban area of the Municipality of Halifax, in Nova Scotia, Canada.
History
The first Europeans to settle in what was to become Rockingham were foreign Protestant farmers and innkeepers, starting in 1784. While the inns were too close to the city to benefit from stage coach traffic, they were conveniently located for drovers bringing their livestock to the Halifax market. Drovers lodged at the inns and kept their animals in the pastures while they arranged for their sale and slaughter.
In the 1840s, William Evens and William Davey bought properties on the western shore of the basin. Evens, a butcher, built a slaughterhouse, while Davey established a large inn called the Four Mile House. When the Nova Scotia Railway was being built the two men persuaded the railway board to locate the first stop at Four Mile House. On 1 February 1855, the first ceremonial run of the Nova Scotia Railway came to Four Mile House. The village that grew up around the railway station took the name "Four Mile House".
The construction of the Nova Scotia Railway in 1855 altered the character of the community. Destruction of the shoreline cut off farmers from some resources, but eventually the railway helped the village to grow and prosper. Country life was now easily accessible; wealthy families built grand summer homes and transient visitors enjoyed staying at the Wayside Inn (formerly the Five Mile House) and other tourist accommodations in Rockingham.
The Four Mile House district was selected by the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul in the early 1870s for a convent and institution of higher learning. Mount Saint Vincent was built up the hill on a large parcel of land almost directly opposite the Nova Scotia Railway station. In 1873, the convent, along with its women's finishing school, Mount Saint Vincent Academy and associated residence facilities opened after approximately one year of construction.
In 1886, the residents of the Four Mile House district decided their community needed a name that better reflected its growing prosperity. The name Rockingham Station was inspired by the Rockingham Inn that had been located north at Prince's Lodge. This particular inn had burned down in 1833, but lived on in memory due to its links with Lieutenant Governor Sir John Wentworth, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, and Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, a powerful English noble and friend of the Wentworths.
The Intercolonial Railway, which had taken over the Nova Scotia Railway, expropriated waterfront land at Rockingham Station from the Sisters of Charity during the early 1900s to widen its trackage leading to Fairview. Immediately prior to the Halifax Explosion, telegraph operator Vince Coleman (train dispatcher) managed to warn an incoming passenger train to hold at Rockingham Station's passenger station (the last Intercolonial Railway station stop before Richmond terminal), ultimately saving countless lives. The new rock cut being built for the railway through south end Halifax was finished in 1918 under the newly created Canadian National Railways, with some of the blasted rock being used as infill to create the Halifax Ocean Terminals in the south end of the city, as well as infill of Bedford Basin off Rockingham Station to create what is now the Rockingham Railway Yard.
In 1925, Mount St. Vincent Academy was upgraded in status to a women's junior college. The community of Rockingham Station began to experience some subdivision of land as it was located in a cheaper tax jurisdiction (the Municipality of the County of Halifax) as opposed to the adjacent city which ended at Fairview.
On 5 April 1961, the village's name was formally simplified by the provincial government to just Rockingham.
The creation of Bicentennial Drive, an all-weather bypass highway to Bedford, likely spurred construction of the first major subdivision developments in 1962, although much of the Rockingham area on the hillside overlooking Bedford Basin would require significant blasting to create streets and underground services. Mount St. Vincent College was upgraded to a full university, named Mount St. Vincent University, in 1966. Many homes that faced the original road, had to move or be renovated as the entrances no longer faced the street.
On 1 January 1969, the community of Rockingham--as well as Princes Lodges, Armdale, Clayton Park, Fairview, and Spryfield--were annexed into the City of Halifax.