The idea for the village emerged in 1965, a decade after Canada began to reckon more seriously with the Acadian story. A feasibility study followed in 1969, and between 1973 and 1976, historic buildings from across New Brunswick were identified, dismantled, transported, and reassembled on the site. The village opened to visitors in 1977 with a mission that went beyond nostalgia: to document and preserve the material culture of a people who had been forcibly expelled from their homeland beginning in 1755. Today, thirty-eight original historic buildings dating from 1770 to 1939 stand alongside nine faithful reproductions. Together, they house a collection of more than eight thousand Acadian heritage artifacts, from cooking implements and furniture to farming equipment and religious objects.

A 2.2-kilometre trail winds through the village, and every building along it is staffed by bilingual interpreters in period costume who do not merely explain the past but inhabit it. In the Mazerolle farm, crops grow according to the old calendar. At the Robin warehouse, the commercial realities of the cod trade come into focus. The Riordon mill grinds grain. The Godin house shows how a family lived in the years following the deportation, when survival depended on resourcefulness and community solidarity. The progression through the village follows a rough chronology, moving from the spare, determined world of the late eighteenth century through the modest prosperity of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, when an Irving gas station marks the arrival of the modern economy.

Among the village's most distinctive features is the Hotel Chateau Albert, a faithful replica of a turn-of-the-century hotel that once stood in Caraquet before fire destroyed it in 1955. Guests can spend the night in period-decorated rooms, dine in the hotel's restaurant, and wake up inside the village before it opens to the public. It is the rare museum experience that does not end when the gift shop closes. The village also offers a restaurant serving traditional Acadian cuisine and two shops with regional crafts. In 1996, the Society of American Travel Writers honored it with the Phoenix Award, and Attractions Canada recognized it in 2001 and 2002.

The Village Historique Acadien is open from June through September for its full living-history program, but visitors can walk the grounds during the fall, winter, and spring months free of charge. In those quieter seasons, the buildings stand empty and the interpreters are gone, but the landscape itself tells the story. The marshes, the river, the low-angled Maritime light on weathered clapboard, all of it speaks to the environment that shaped Acadian life after the deportation. What the village preserves is not just a collection of old buildings. It is evidence of adaptation, of a people who arrived on this shore with almost nothing and, within a generation, had built a world complete enough to be worth remembering. The artifacts behind the glass and the demonstrations at the forge are important. But the deeper lesson is in the simple fact that these buildings exist at all, that the Acadians who built them had already survived the worst thing that could happen to a community and chose to start again.