prospered as farmers by enclosing the estuarine salt marshes with dykes, and successfully converting the reclaimed lands into fertile fields for crops and pasturage. In 1710, however, Acadia was lost by the French crown after the English laid siege to Port Royal/Annapolis Royal. Under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, signed at the close of the War of the Spanish Succession, Acadia was ceded for the final time to the British. For the next thirty-six years, until the establishment of Halifax in 1749, the British remained at Annapolis Royal and Canso. The French-speaking Catholic population grew over the intervening years to well over 10,000 and the Minas region (Wolfville and environs) quickly became the principal settlement. Acadia was a borderland region between two empires, and this caused a complex socio-political environment to develop for the Acadians. Both the British and the French coaxed and threatened the Acadians in attempts to secure their loyalty as is evidenced by the various oaths of allegiance each side attempted to extract from them. This complex situation led many Acadians to attempt to maintain a neutral path; while others openly supported either the French or the British. During the War of the Austrian Succession, the Acadians in the Wolfville area were implicated in the Battle of Grand Pré, during which a French Canadian military force, reinforced by Mi'kmaq and Acadians, defeated a British force. With the onset of the Seven Years' War between Great Britain and France, the Acadians in the Wolfville area, along with all Acadians in peninsular Nova Scotia, suffered under the deportations that took place during the British Expulsion of the Acadians (see also the Bay of Fundy Campaign). Beginning in September 1755 and continuing into the fall, approximately 2,000 Acadians were deported from the area around Wolfville. The villages lying beyond Grand-Pré were burned by the British forces, and still more buildings were destroyed by both sides during the guerrilla war that took place until 1758. British rule Around 1760, the British government in Nova Scotia made several township plots of land available in the Annapolis Valley for colonization by English settlers. Horton Township was created in the Grand-Pré/Wolfville Area. Because of pressure on agricultural lands in New England, Anglophone farmers moved north in search of fertile land at a reasonable price. It is thought that between 1760 and 1789, more than 8,000 people known as New England Planters immigrated to the