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I

n Dr. Grignon's Album Historique de Ste. Agathe, written in 1912 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the parish, he describes the first three colonists who homesteaded in our region. These three men, Narcisse and Olivier Ménard and their brother-in-law Jean-Baptiste Dufresne, had clearly responded to A.N. Morin's initiative in encouraging homesteading of the north country. Despite Morin's noble efforts with potatoes, however, the real economic mainstay would never be the farm, but rather, the pine tree, and these three men were well equipped to exploit it. The Ménard brothers were both over 6 feet tall, and their sister, Flavie, who married Dufresne, as well as their mother, were also big, sturdy people. The mother, the legendary "La Vieille Ménard", was close to six feet tall herself. They came, as Dr. Grignon describes them in 1912, determined to win a battle against the forest: "Ces soldats d'un nouveau genre…c'était des colons. Leur arme c'était la hache du défricheur."

Even though the forest was the fuel driving the motor of the economy, people did not see it that way. They saw the trees as something that had to be removed in order to farm. Catherine Parr Traill, the author of Roughing It In the Bush, sailing up the St. Lawrence in 1832 is quoted as having seen only "…a great portion of forest which it will take years of labour to remove." There was a massive drive to eliminate the forest to build ordered communities like those farms of European memory and the ones that had been built along the fertile shores of the St. Lawrence.

The Laurentian forests had suddenly become an important commodity because, during the Napoleonic wars, the French had tried to block access to the Baltic, forcing the English to look elsewhere for the large pines needed to rig their ships. Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore, the story of Australia's founding, described one English ship: "The mainmast of a 74-gun first-rater was three feet thick at the base, and rose 108 feet from keelson to truck - a single tree, dead straight and flawlessly solid. Such a vessel needed some 22 masts and yards as well." The only wood that could satisfy was the pine. Aside from its slow taper and its size, its sap formed a binding resin that gave it an unusual flexibility.

Our pine forest canopy was 15 storeys high in areas, and as early as 1805, English surveyors branded standing trees with the sign of the broad arrow, thereby claiming them for the Crown. Such trees could not be touched without proper authority, but when they were felled, a second selection was made and the straightest were floated down to Quebec. The rest were left to rot or scavenged for other purposes. Once the war was over, a whole forest industry developed. There was a huge demand for squared logs until the middle of the 19th century and a way of life grew up around the industry. Men would cut through the winter and drag their logs to the rivers where they would be locked on top of the ice until the thaw. When the waters reached their spring high, the keylog was removed, and the logs would flow downstream, accompanied by teams of men who broke log-jams. Each log was marked with a bushmark identifying the company that owned it, and in wider waters these logs would be tied into cribs. At the St. Lawrence, 100 cribs would be bound together to make a raft. These rafts were huge. Bartlett's paintings shows them floating down the river with sails rigged on them and shelters built where the loggers lived for the months that the trip took.

A government study published in 1850 declared that there was enough timber in the Ottawa Valley to last 600 years. By that date, the demand for wood at the saw mills was beginning to outstrip the demand for squared logs, and communities began to develop around the mills. Potash, a fertilizer made from wood ashes, also became a major export as the communities grew and the farmers cleared the last vestiges of the forests. It took the ashes of 60 mature maple trees rendered down to make a quintal (approximately 100 pounds) of potash. This sold for hard currency, but the real benefit in the homesteader's mind was a cleared field.

By the mid-1860's, lumbering had reached its zenith and the homesteaders were discovering that underneath the canopy, the remaining soil would never sustain a way of life. Before he died last year, Ernest Piché, grandson of Nazaire Piché, described his grandfather's farm to me. Their farm was on the shore of Lac Brulé, and it was farmed from the 1860's. Nazaire acquired the farm from his partner, Boismenu. Each in his turn made his living by cutting and squaring logs during the winter and each tried to build up the farm in the summer. Boismenu died, still a young man, and Nazaire bought the farm. Within a few years, his wife died, and Nazaire married his late partner's widow. Together they reared eight children. For these children the forestry industry would already be a thing of the past. They saw themselves as farmers, but the farm was in fact a luxury that could not sustain itself once the forest was gone. The way of life that passed was that of the foresters, not of the farmers.

- A special thanks to Lyle Elder of the Argenteuil Historical Society.

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