agricultural community between the towns of Kentville and Wolfville. The Dominion Atlantic Railway operated a gravel quarry at Oak Island in New Minas and served a growing number of food and bulk feed plants at New Minas in the mid 19th Century. However development increased with the construction of the Highway 101 expressway in the 1970s. With the village's low tax rate and the location between the population centres of Kentville and Wolfville, New Minas soon saw a shopping centre and numerous big box retail outlets and fast food shops established to make the village the retail centre for the eastern Annapolis Valley. Recent history Over the past ten years, New Minas has been witness to a commercial boom which has seen many large retail outlets set up shop, while pre-existing retailers and many others have rebuilt into larger venues. One of the woes of the village is its heavy concentration of minimum-wage, service industry jobs. Other similarly sized communities nearby have a much wider range of income opportunities: Wolfville is an area supported by higher-education jobs with Acadia University, and Kentville is an area which supports itself with an industrial park, hospital and an orientation toward professional centers. Due to New Minas having no hospital of its own, citizens must travel to Kentville by way of public transit or by use of their own vehicles to go to the hospital. In recent years, New Minas has been lampooned by many of its citizens and tourists as having notoriously poor side-roads. However, in the last 2–3 years, the Village of New Minas has been working on coercing the Province of Nova Scotia to focus on repairing these roads. New Minas played host to the film crew of the popular television show Call Me Fitz. Where the filming took place used to be the old home of the local Kia Motors, but the local branch had moved to the other end of the town, so the showroom was converted into Fitzpatrick Motors. Recently, a rotary was installed in the middle of New Minas to accommodate the increasing number of businesses and the new highway off-ramp from the nearby Highway 101 which has since finished construction as of 2018. References External links Communities in Kings County, Nova Scotia Villages in Nova Scotia General Service Areas in Nova Scotia