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T

he North River's name can be traced back to the time of the granting of the first seigniory of Argenteuil in 1682. The focal area was at its mouth where it joins the Ottawa River and the early maps show the North River with the West River flowing into it. G. R. Rigby in his 1964 history of Lachute notes that early surveyors marked La Chute (The Falls) on the North just upstream of where the West joins it.

It is not surprising that the mouth of the river was settled well before the source, but each end of the river system held attractions for James Crocket Wilson and his descendants.

James Crocket Wilson was born in Ireland in 1841 the son of Samuel Wilson and Elizabeth Crocket. They arrived in Montreal in the spring of 1842, five years before the beginning of the Irish potato famine. While his father had no marketable skills upon their arrival, he taught himself the rudiments of carpentry and mechanics and eventually landed employment with the Grand Trunk Railway making their cars. He is credited with the design of the first railway snowplough.

J.C. Wilson initially followed his father in mechanics until an accident left him injured. Thanks to the kindness of a friend, he enrolled in a Model School, then the in McGill Normal School, a teacher's college. Subsequently, while working in Beauharnois J.C. Wilson met his future wife, Jeannie Kilgour.

After working in an assortment of jobs in Toronto and New York, he found himself a position in paper manufacturing back in Montreal. In 1870, he set up his own company manufacturing paper bags and is credited with making the first flat-bottomed paper bag and with being the first to supply paper bags to grocery stores in Canada. He also published some of Canada's earliest postcards known to collectors today as Pioneer or Patriotic Cards. In 1880, he built a large paper mill in Lachute.

Whereas today we talk about the rag content of quality paper, we generally accept that paper comes from trees. When James Crocket Wilson founded J.C. Wilson Paper, this was not the case. Paper came from rags, flax and linen. Cardboard came from trees. Charles Fenerty is credited with the invention of paper from wood fibres. Fenerty, of New Brunswick, appears to have been the first to develop the process, but not the first to patent it. Whoever is credited, J.C. Wilson determined that paper could be made from wood pulp. In 1893 he purchased the Delisle pulp mill, which had been set up in 1880 in St. Jerome and subsequently moved to Saunderson Falls in Cordon, just to the north. The Delisles' mill turned wood pulp into cardboard boxes. Delisle and Wilson were in no way competitors nor was one the supplier to the other.

Soon after the purchase, Saunderson Falls became Wilson Falls or Les Chutes Wilson. Wilson Falls is now a park just to the east of the Autoroute where it turns from three lanes into two.

James Crocket Wilson died in 1899. In addition to his role as founder of J.C. Wilson Paper, he served two terms as Alderman for the St. Lawrence Ward of Montreal, was elected MP for Argenteuil in 1887, served as president of the Fish and Game Protection Club of Quebec, president of the Irish-Protestant Benevolent Society, vice-president and life-time governor of the Montreal Dispensary, was a governor of the Protestant Insane Asylums of Quebec and served on the board of the Protestant School Commissioners of Montreal. After his death Wilson Paper continued under the skilful guidance of his son William Walter C. Wilson, with the help of two more of his sons, Frank Howard and Edwin Howlett Wilson. E.H. Wilson guided the mill while his brothers ran the business from Montreal. It became one of the largest paper companies in Canada having mills in Lachute and St. Jerome together with a factory and warehouse at Montreal, and warehouses at Winnipeg and Vancouver. Although it became a publicly traded company, it stayed in the control of the family into the 1950's. The Price Brothers, today Abitibi Paper, eventually absorbed it.

Frank Howard Wilson, the third president of J.C. Wilson Paper, explored the source of the North River and found himself at Lac Brûlé. He also found his wife, E. Graham Stewart, daughter of Eliza Shearer and William Stewart. F.H. Wilson engaged the Maxwell brothers who built a country home for him, but it burned down in 1928. Undaunted, he engaged David Robertson Brown a Montreal architect, who designed a striking cedar shake home, and this historic home is still in the family today. Over the one hundred and twenty two years that the Wilson family and its descendants have been in the Laurentians, they have migrated from the mouth of the North River in Lachute to its source in Ste. Agathe. Although few of them carry the Wilson name, several members of the fifth generation still live at both ends of the river today.

Acknowledgements to George (Duff) Mitchell, Our Kindred Spirits, Serge Laurin, Histoire des Laurentides and with special thanks to Patty Brown, great-great-grand-daughter of J.C. Wilson

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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This material may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the author. © Joseph Graham