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F

rançois-Xavier Antoine Labelle was born in 1833, the son of a shoemaker in Ste. Rose. Although his family had no financial resources to help him get an education, he pursued his studies first at the seminary in Ste. Therese, and then, from age 19, at le Grand Séminaire de Montréal. After his ordination in 1856, he was vicar in several small parishes where he witnessed a massive exodus. In 1867 he informed his superior, Mgr. Bourget, that, as so many members of his congregations had moved to New England, he felt obliged to follow them. Mgr. Bourget, feeling that he was too valuable to lose to the States, offered him the post of St. Jerome, which was a rich and prospering parish. His father had passed away in 1861 and his mother had found a position, probably with her son’s help, in the presbytery at St. Jerome. True to the adage ‘behind every great man….’ the Curé’s mother had considerable influence in the parish and became known as ‘Madame le Curé.’ She continued to look after the presbytery for the balance of Labelle’s life

From his vantage point in this new, rich parish, Curé Labelle began his mission. Working with business people and the Church, he promoted a vision of rapid colonisation of the North-West. He envisaged French- Catholic parishes from St. Jerome north-west, through present-day northern Ontario, all the way to Winnipeg. He spoke with conviction and authority. A tall, energetic and imposing man, well over six feet and weighing more than 300 pounds, he was not the kind of person often contradicted. Wherever he was, when he spoke of his dream, people followed. Arthur Buies, a writer who was his contemporary, began his career criticising the Church, but, after meeting the Curé, became his greatest admirer and ultimately wrote of the mission and life of the great priest, in the book Au Portique des Laurentides : Une Paroisse Moderne.

Antoine Labelle carried his huge weight up the trails and over the portages north of Ste. Agathe and was said to have kept a good pace. On those rough early trails horses and wagon were essential to any serious traveling, but the passengers would often have had to walk along behind. Among the more famous of these trails was the one that climbed the hill called La Repousse, so-named because it repulsed all attempts to build a road over it. Located a bit to the north-east of Mountain Acres golf course in St. Faustin, the road north of Ivry was the approach to this challenging pass.

The Curé became known as L’Apôtre de la Colonisation and Le Roi du Nord. He was so positive and convinced of his mission that people were in awe of him. Among Labelle’s companions was Narcisse Ménard, the first homesteader in Morin Township, whom we met previously. He was also over six feet tall. These were big men whose presence was felt. One can imagine that their arrival in a village was an event.

In 1873, Amable Godon of Ste. Agathe had his auberge license revoked. Depressed, he decided to sell his farm at a ruinously low price and move on. Around this time, Curé Labelle came to stay at the auberge on his way to investigate the mountain calledLa Repousse. In the morning he found some fresh butter and bread in his bag, placed there by the Godons. After thanking his hosts and explaining to them that he was a poor priest, he told them that the only way he could repay them was to give them a good piece of advice. He told them that they should not sell, that one day Ste. Agathe would grow into a much bigger town, and would absorb their farm. If you know Ste. Agathe well, Godon’s farm can be located by the names of his children, commemorated in the names of the streets that once were a part of his fields: St. Bruno, St. Donat, St. Antoine, St. Joseph and St. Amable which was subsequently renamed Ste. Agathe, the whole bordered by rue Godon.

Among his friends,Labelle could boast both Adolphe Chapleau, Prime Minister MacDonald’s Quebec leader, and Honoré Mercier, the Premier of Quebec. How the son of a shoemaker from an outlying village became the intimate of such powerful men may be less a testimonial to our democracy than a demonstration of the great charm and energy of the man himself. He never lost sight of his vision. It is hard to know if he foresaw the disaster that would befall the Laurentian colonists once the wood ran out, or whether he wanted to push the development ahead as fast as possible. Whichever, he knew that his north-country needed the train. In 1868 it did not even extend to St. Jerome. In the winter of 1871-72, Montreal experienced a firewood shortage. Labelle, seeing an opportunity to demonstrate how valuable the St. Jerome region could be to Montreal, organised a huge bee to collect firewood for the poorer families in Montreal. The city of Montreal contributed a million dollars towards the construction of the rail line to St. Jerome in the following years.To Labelle, this was only a first step in his plans to have the train run right through his colony. He made repeated trips up the Chemin de la Repousse, helping to establish the village of La Repousse, (subsequently renamed St. Faustin), in 1870 and St. Jovite in 1875. The discovery of the fertile valley of the Red and Devil rivers spurred him on and by 1881, 200 families had made their way over the notorious hill to find homes in this new area. Serge Laurin points out in his book Histoire des Laurentides that the Curé thereby stopped the advance of the Protestants beyond Arundel. It is doubtful that the Protestants were aware that they had been outflanked, since their development did not seem to have any agenda or particular direction. Surprisingly, many of the new homesteaders and colonists were the children of farmers who had established in Ste. Agathe. In many cases their parents’ farms were on poor, rocky soil, and they responded to the news of a more fertile valley beyond the Repousse.

The Curé continued to work towards the building of a railroad that would link his northern valley to his parish. He managed to get a lottery accepted to finance the project, a very unusual means of fund-raising in those conservative times. It is hard to imagine what drove him on. Did he imagine train-loads of produce finding its way from the northern valleys to Montreal or did he see the train as a means of bringing more and wealthier settlers north? He was clearly spearheading a movement to build Catholic communities, to stop the exodus that he had witnessed in his earlier years. Sadly he didn’t live to see the train arrive in Ste. Agathe or climb La Repousse. He died in 1891, the year before the completion of the rail link to Ste. Agathe. The old photos of the first train arriving with all the important men posed before the station represent the beginning of a whole new age, an era of holiday and recreational use, of hospitals and ski-hills, of hotels and camps. Ironically, had Curé Labelle been standing in the middle of the picture with these ambitious, happy men, he would have looked like an anomaly, an anachronism.

Joseph Graham has written a book that features a select number of stories of Laurentian places and how they got their names. To learn more, click here.

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