Legacy of a Weymouth Woman is the story of Lillian May Henshaw, a resourceful and talented woman, an advocate for education and an early feminist who, perhaps, was just a little bit ahead of her time. Growing up in the shipbuilding community of Weymouth, she had a penchant for stories about the exploits and adventures of the local ships and the men who sailed them. She often wrote about them as a young freelance correspondent for the Halifax Chronicle Herald near the end of the golden era of sail. She was also a creative and astute business woman, who crafted fashionable ladies hats and opened her own millinery and ladies wear shop in Weymouth while still in her teens. In her adult life, while raising five children, she was a persuasive and effective political campaign worker, first for the Progressive Conservatives and later for the CCF (now NDP) as campaign manager for one of the first CCF candidates to run in western Nova Scotia. A strong advocate for education, she endured many hardships and challenges to ensure that her children had access to a high school education. In the 1940s, alone in rural Nova Scotia with three young children, she once shot a menacing moose with a .22 calibre pistol. She was also well known as a "death sitter," often called upon to sit at bedside with people who were dying.
