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T

here is no evidence of any settlement of Europeans, English or French, in the Ste-Agathe area prior to the community that began with the Dufresnes and the Menards in 1849. There may have been camps for coureurs de bois and for lumberjacks, but nothing more. Loyalists and British veterans had been settling along the Ottawa Valley since the end of the American War of Independence, and they tended to move upstream along the tributaries. Thus the English towns of Lachute and Brownsburg a little further upstream along the North River from St. Andrew’s, and the English townships that spread up the Red River towards Harrington and Arundel.

During these early days of the 1800’s, the French-Canadians were under the influence not just of the disenfranchised seigneurs, but also of the Catholic Church, and the latter was much stronger. The Church’s concerns were different from those of the seigneurs. It was less concerned with the well-being of the seigneurs’ fiefs than with the strength of its own parishes. They perceived the English as a threat less because of their language than because they were Protestant. In the 1840’s there was a large influx of Swiss Protestants, and their French-speaking Protestant congregations were a serious concern to the Church. Even though Serge Laurin in Histoire des Laurentides states that the proselytizing of these Protestant parishes had little influence, the Church perceived them apprehensively. They were one of the catalysts that brought about the systematic encouragement of Catholic settlement of the North River above St-Jerome and ultimately to Ste-Agathe. Laurin suggests that all the French-Canadian colonists who moved into this area were part of a conscious movement to "assurer la survie de la ‘race’” but in fact there were too many conflicting forces at work in French-Canadian society at that time to credit such an idea and such a high level of consciousness. After all, it was Maximilien Globensky who headed the thousands of French Loyalist forces in the battle against the Patriotes in St-Eustache and it was A.N. Morin who picked up the pieces and eliminated the seigneurial system afterwards. French society was clearly in flux and subject to the whims of the different power elites jockeying for control. It is fair, however, to credit the Church with a coherent plan to create as many Catholic parishes as possible and to try thereby to stem the advance of the Protestants.

From 1850, a rapid colonisation of the Ste- Agathe area began. The families that were arriving to homestead were French Catholic and they were coming from seigneuries and villages where opportunities did not exist. The system of tenant farming was falling apart. The new generation found that they could no longer simply divide the family holding and farm more intensively on smaller plots. At the same time, the power struggles and social collapse of the early part of the century had left the people leaderless except for the Church. The more ambitious were going to New England to work in factories and the more conservative were being lured northwest to places like ours by initiatives such as those undertaken by A. N. Morin. It was, in a way, a great winnowing. Those who chose to come to the Laurentian townships were determined to maintain the values of their parents, while the emigrants were disillusioned and determined to find a better life. As a result our towns were built by a selection of the most conservative and most loyal families that could be assembled. They were farmers for whom any other activity was just a distraction, something that kept them from their destinies on the soil. Paul Meunier is a good example. After successive crop failures in the 1860’s, he abandoned his rocky fields on the shore of Lake Manitou and went to work as a lumberjack as far away as Michigan simply to raise some money so that he could come back to his fields and try again.

Among the pioneers of this small hamlet in its first generation was a doctor named Luc Eusèbe Larocque. He traveled in his early days to California where he is reported to have amassed a small fortune during the gold rush. When he acquired his property in Trout Lake, he was already the oldest practicing physician in St-Jerome. One imagines that he was a romantic who was struggling against the tide of change as were virtually all the pioneers of Ste-Agathe. He must have wanted to set up a seigneury, for he acquired several farms, one of which was at Trout Lake and the other ran along the west side of rue Principale down to the water of Lac des Sables. Each summer, neglecting his practice, he came north to Ste- Agathe by horse and buggy and looked after the farmers to whom he’d let out his land. His wife refused to accompany him because she did not like the north, but he never gave up trying to change her mind. He’d write poems about the beauty of Trout Lake and send them to her hoping to soften her resistance. She, in reaction, painted landscapes inspired by his poetry to show him upon his return, but never accepted to come out herself.

Over the years, he got out onto the fields to help his farmers in their failing enterprise and did all he could to bolster the small colony. On the 29^th of April, 1861, he deeded half of his northern farm to the ‘Corporation Episcopale de Montréal’ in order to encourage the construction of a chapel and this land is the site of the current Catholic church. His name lives on in the name of the street that runs behind the church and down to the water. Eventually his fortune was weakened and after his death his children had to sell the balance of the farm at a sacrifice price.

Many of today’s families arrived during this period and the area experienced an initial healthy growth. The forest was removed in the form of lumber or potash and the first grain crops turned out well, but the willing farmers of the 1850’s and 1860’s were discovering that grain could not be grown in our soil. The crop flourished for a year or so, and then the soil was exhausted. Slowly the farmers were turning their fields over to cattle. Sadly, with our short seasons and rocky soil, it was very difficult to harvest enough hay to winter a herd, and the farms, instead of being the rich valley farms that these pioneers had left behind, were subsistence operations. Nevertheless, determined families stuck by their fields and the community maintained. The first generation that grew up without a memory of the rich seigneuries that their parents had left were a hardier breed and had a lesser legacy to leave to their children.

Meanwhile, Protestant colonisation was pushing its way up the fertile valley of the Red River and by 1856 the town of Arundel was created. This predates the town of Ste- Agathe by 6 years and added greatly to the sense of rivalry that the Catholic Church perceived as existing between these two communities. By the late 1860’s this perceived rivalry had become nothing short of an obsession on the part of the Catholic Church and in 1868 the Church finally found a champion who could carry this mission forward. Antoine Labelle was named Curé of the Parish of St. Jérome in 1868.

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