English-style pub at 643 Main Street overlooking Mahone Bay harbour, serving as an informal gathering point where the Oak Island team regularly discusses findings, reviews research, and debates theories over drinks.
About This Site
The Mug and Anchor Pub is an English-style pub at 643 Main Street in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, overlooking the harbour and the bay that contains Oak Island. The pub has served as an unofficial extension of the War Room across multiple seasons, providing a relaxed setting where team members discuss the day's findings, review research, and debate theories. Its location in Mahone Bay, the nearest mainland town to Oak Island, makes it a natural gathering point before and after operations on the island.
Connection to Oak Island
The Mug and Anchor has hosted numerous significant discussions across the show's history. In Season 5, historian Doug Crowell presented research at the pub into the La Rochefoucauld family, whose name appears on the alleged 14th-century Templar map provided by researcher Zena Halpern. Doug traced the Rochefoucaulds as a prominent French noble house dating to the 10th century with direct connections to the Crusades through the Lusignan family, who ruled in Jerusalem. The presentation set the stage for the team's visit to the Centre of Geographic Sciences, where the Rochefoucauld-Dugua marriage connection was discovered.
In Season 7, the team discussed Carmen Legge's identification of a burned ship strap dating to 1710-1790 and a mid-18th-century pickax at the pub, connecting the artifacts to the ship-shaped anomaly in the swamp and the theory that a vessel was deliberately burned and sunk there. The pub also featured in Season 7 when the team toasted to the swamp after five experts from four disciplines confirmed the paved area was man-made.
Fieldwork Notes
The Mug and Anchor serves as an informal research and discussion venue rather than a fieldwork site. Notable sessions include the Rochefoucauld research presentation (S05E08), the burned ship strap discussion (S07E14), and the swamp celebration after expert confirmation of the paved area (S07E18).
