In 2009 and 2010, Bill Zimmerman, Susan Hauer, and their son Ned Zimmerman stepped forward to protect two wild islands near Vogler’s Cove on the South Shore. They had long wished to ensure that both islands – Great and Selig – would be kept forever in their natural state, but they chose to wait until their son Ned reached the age of maturity and could fully participate in the decision. Their gift was the first piece in what is now a fully protected archipelago in Medway Harbour, as well as a gift to Nova Scotia’s broader coastal legacy. Bill passed away in September 2024, and in memory of him and his family’s leadership in conservation, we’re honoured to share more about their story.

Bill Zimmerman and Susan Hauer first heard about Great Island while they were living on a different island – Whidbey Island – in Washington State in the early 1970s. They had arrived there after a post-graduation visit to Washington D.C., when they had decided that a mid-Vietnam War career with the U.S. government wasn’t for them and drove straight to the opposite side of the country instead. During their time on Whidbey, they both taught on the mainland; they also started the island’s first glass recycling program, setting up collection points and taking bottles to a recycling plant on the mainland on their daily ferry commute.

A local friend connected them with the then-owner of Great Island, who was also from Washington State and happened to be in the process of putting the island up for sale. In 1973 Bill and Susan bought the island and drove back across the continent – in an old school bus painted blue, with their dog and six cats, until the bus broke down in New England and they switched to a trailer – to begin a new life in Nova Scotia.

For the first year, they lived in a geodesic dome that Bill had designed and fabricated (and which they had hauled with them cross-country), as they built their family home. The house they built was a conduit for putting into practice their ideas and training from Bill’s broad-ranging career as a theatre designer and stage carpenter as well as a researcher and journalist on alternative energy policy.

Susan laughs as she recalls the laborious process of getting building materials to the island.

“We had to build a barge first, but we didn’t have a barge for a while,” she explains. “We ordered a dory from Lunenburg, but it wasn’t ready.” They ended up making their first trip to the island in a Canadian Tire rubber raft, bringing their dog along with them in the boat (which, as their son Ned remarks, was maybe not the best idea – sharp toenails and all).
The vision for the house grew to match not only the realities of life on the island but also their commitment to environmental responsibility and living with a low impact.

“You should call it ‘the house of arrogant youth,’” Susan says.

It started out as a small Cape Cod-style house with a passive solar roof. But they immediately realized that the inside of the house was just too hot in the summer, so they built straight up to reduce the angle of the sunshine on the south side, immediately making the house twice the size of what they had started with. Then Susan wanted to add a tower on one side to look out to the view of the harbour; the house eventually ended up at four stories, with turrets, all built using hand tools.

“The thing was, you know, I have a basic standard of housekeeping,” laughs Susan, “and you can’t wash the windows, especially when they’re triple glazed. You can’t even reach them, unless you get scaffolding! Like, what is this? Why would I ever even allow this?” The white pine V-groove floors – impossible to clean, “an absolute dirt-catcher” – are a similar example of the finely handcrafted (if somewhat impractical) uniqueness of the house. Ned adds, “I find it very helpful to contextualize the building of the house with the fact that my parents were 27 when they decided to start doing it.”

There was of course no running water, but they did install a windmill to generate electricity – enough to even power a second-hand washing machine for baby Ned’s diapers, after he arrived in 1985. Ned remembers Bill getting into some quite funny interactions about their living situation, like receiving a bill that included a streetlight tax. (The island didn’t, and still doesn’t, have a road, let alone a streetlight.)

But living a low-impact life on a wild island was filled with magic.

“The first summer that that Bill and I were there,” Susan recounts, “it rained every day in July, every day. It was a real trial. But we saw mushrooms that year in the fall that we have never seen again.” In fact, the Ta’n Weji-sqalia’tiek: Mi’kmaw Place Names Digital Atlas documents the Mi’kmaw name for the area around Port Medway as L’ketuk, meaning “mushroom.” Susan, who had learned about mushroom foraging while living in Washington State, was delighted to find chanterelles and other edible mushrooms on the island, along with other edible plants like cattails, seed plants, and at least seven different types of berries.

Susan and Ned have countless stories about the wildlife they shared encounters with on the island, like seeing fifty Blue Herons at once, or the mysterious sea gooseberries that washed up on shore (actually a type of comb jelly). And Ned vividly describes the special part of the summer “when there’s so much phosphorescence in the water [that] if you’re taking the boat across after dusk, it’s like a meteor tail behind you.”

Bill and Susan knew that the island was special, and they started looking for pathways to protecting it as soon as they arrived in 1973, finding nothing available to them at that point that they wanted to pursue. The Nova Scotia Nature Trust formed in 1994, and they reached out early in the organization’s history – but they wanted to wait to formalize any protection of the island until Ned turned 18 and could be part of the process. In 2009, they began working with the Nature Trust in earnest, putting the adjacent Selig Island into the permanent care of the Nature Trust and signing a conservation easement the following year to protect Great Island in perpetuity, ensuring its natural values would remain forever wild while still allowing them to use the island.

The continued use of the island was very important to the family. Beyond the house and life they had built for themselves there, they also recognized the historic importance of the island to the local community. “It’s a magical place, and it has been a special place for people in the community,” Ned says. “A lot of families in the area have traditions about going over for a beach picnic in the summer. There are even photos of people in maybe the twenties doing the same thing, having their fancy tea with their boats on the beach. That’s something we’ve welcomed.” Susan describes pictures of nineteenth-century ladies wearing full dresses and parasols, having a day of it on the Great Island shore. The stories of the island also include the ill-fated Tuna Inn and the so-called Witch of Hopkins Cove; over the years the family found many artifacts of the island’s earlier incarnations, including wells and foundations. Great Island also had centuries of use as a Mi’kmaw summer fishing camp.

For Bill and Susan, the island’s community connection was an opportunity to nurture artistic expression. They established an informal artist residency on the island; “my dad always liked to say that the only rule was that you had to eat whatever we cooked,” Ned says.

They hosted writers, dancers, painters, photographers; “theatre artists came and workshopped a show on the island one summer when I was very young,” remembers Ned. One of the first and most famous artists to spend time on the island was renowned master watercolourist Roger Savage. “He just showed up out of the fog,” says Susan. He designed the 1978 commemorative “Canadian Unity” $100 gold coin on the island. (He also lost a leg of his tripod while there on a visit; Susan remembers joking with him that the Witch of Hopkins Cove must have decided to play havoc with him.)

“I have letters from people who said that their life changed, coming and staying with us,” Susan says.

Susan and Bill moved to Wolfville in 1994 (after brief intervening stints in Hawai’i and London, England). Bill served as Technical Director for Acadia University’s department of theatre and served two terms as a councillor for the Town of Wolfville. They continued to visit the island regularly, before and after protecting it through the Nature Trust.

Ned also continued the artist residency, establishing the Great Island Artist Co-op from 2016-2019 with his partner, Faith Wiley. “It was a special place for the artists who did get to participate in those years,” he says. He wanted to follow in the path his parents had laid out, offering Great Island as both a natural space and a space that could foster people’s creativity in connection with the land and the ocean and the tides. Although the pandemic and parenthood have kept Ned and Faith from reviving the artist program, it’s something that continues to be close to the family’s hearts, deeply intertwined with the island itself.

“My dad was a very unconventional thinker in a lot of ways,” Ned says. “My parents’ vision for the island was pretty remarkable, and people are always amazed to see what they built there. It’s quite something to go out there and see the geodesic dome, which is still there, fifty-two years later, and the house too.

“And I think he was very happy to have that confidence that that land would be forever wild and would be able to be enjoyed in the way our family and others in the community have enjoyed it.”

In 2013, Bill was invited by MIT – where he had completed a concurrent Bachelors degree in engineering and Master of Systems and Design – to come speak to alumni about something important to him. Inspired by a fellow Wolfville town councillor’s remark that “In perpetuity is a very long time,” Bill chose to talk about the conservation of Great and Selig Island, with Ned co-presenting by his side. “That was the thing that he wanted to share,” says Ned. “Protecting that land is one of the things he was most proud of. And he wanted to share that with anybody who would listen.”

As our Executive Director Bonnie Sutherland said in 2010 when the family protected Great and Selig Islands, “Saving our treasured coastal legacy relies on visionary and forward-thinking landowners like the Zimmerman/ Hauer family.” Learn more about how you can protect your land, too.

Bill would have turned 78 on August 12; his birthday always coincided with the peak of the Perseids meteor shower (which is why he liked to tell people he came from outer space). Perhaps not coincidentally, Great Island is a great place for stargazing.