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W

e have often been told that we live on the oldest mountains in the world, but what does that mean? How old are these hills? Aren't all rocks and stone just a part of the world? Apparently not. The rocky surface of our world is made up of a number of large plates that actually float on a molten interior. These plates are always moving and leaving gaps between or banging into and slipping under each other. This has been going on for so long that all surfaces are eventually pushed underground. The particular part of the plate that we live on has been on the surface for the longest time, and it is therefore the oldest. Our specific neighbourhood is called the Grenville Geological Province.

The Canadian Shield is composed of seven of these provinces. Ours runs along the north of the St. Lawrence Valley roughly parallel to the river from north of Goose Bay on the Labrador coast to around Sudbury northwest of the Great Lakes. It also extends south into the eastern central states. The Canadian Shield it is called Precambrian. Scientists have classified rock according to the fossil record, and the three oldest classifications are, from youngest to oldest, Devonian, Silurian and Cambrian. Any rock that formed before the fossil record is simply classified as pre-Cambrian.

To try to understand how old our mountains are, I took an adding machine roll and unrolled the whole thing along a corridor. With some coloured pencils I marked off the different eras of the past. The roll was 23 feet or 276 inches long (app 7 metres). I discovered that the Precambrian geological period, measured from when the world began until the Cambrian, when fossils first became readily evident, ended a bit after 20 feet or 242 inches (6.1 m) leaving me only about 3 feet (1 m) for the balance of the history of the world. The balance, to the present, was divided into eleven periods, including the Cambrian, Jurassic, Cretaceous and so on. At 22 feet 8 inches or 272 inches (6.9 m) there was still no sign of humans. I had four inches to go. Each inch (2.5 cm) of the roll represented 16,666,667 years, and humans only appeared in their most primitive form 2,000,000 years ago, or an eighth of an inch (3 mm) before the end of the roll. Considering that written history began about 5,000 years ago, I could not find a pencil sharp enough to note it at the edge. These hills are old.

The name Grenville grew out of the naming of a specific band of marble found near Grenville in the Ottawa Valley in the 1860's. Sir William Logan first used the term, and soon extended it to include a variety of rock types. His choice of the name was thereby extended to cover the whole area that has the same basic rock type. To follow back further, the Commission du Toponymie tells us that Grenville, the town, was named for the British prime minister, Lord George Grenville (1712-1770). Grenville was never a popular man and made enemies throughout his political career. He seems to have been the most surprised when he was asked to take over as Prime Minister after his predecessor had named most of the Cabinet. Perhaps he was being set up for a fall during a very difficult time; the Seven Years' War had drained the government coffers. He was Prime Minister of England from the signing of the Peace of Paris in 1763 until 1765. During those two years he had John Wilkes arrested for criticising the King's speech at the Peace of Paris; was forced to let him go, thereby providing a major precedent to the British right to freedom of speech; introduced the Sugar Tax; extended the Stamp Tax to the Colonies and generally created the conditions for the American War of Independence. He was dismissed by King George III, who did not like him because he tried to keep the books balanced, depriving the King of some of his pleasures. It is interesting to see how the costs of winning one war, and acquiring Canada from France, led so quickly to the next, the American War of Independence.

Considering that a very large part of the Grenville Province is in the United States, it may be one of those professional oversights that American geologists accepted that it bear the name of a man who was identified with the hated Stamp Act. Best we look to the man who chose the name.

Sir William Logan, born in Montreal in 1798, managed a mining company in South Wales and developed a system for locating coal deposits. The Geological Society of Great Britain adopted his techniques, establishing his reputation as a geologist. He was subsequently hired as the geologist for Canada in the hope of assessing the colony's coal deposits. His studies predicted that none would be found, but in the course of his work, he also predicted that large copper deposits would be found on the north shore of Lake Superior and he mapped and charted the colony. As a result of his work he became the first Canadian inducted into the Royal Society of London, was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honour in France and received a knighthood. He was Canada's first geologist and the first director of the Geological Survey of Canada.

References: The Canadian Encyclopedia; Encyclopedia Britannica copyright 1946; www.ucmp.berkeley.edu ; The Victorian Web; Toponymie Quebec; Special thanks to Lawrence Anna, United States Geological Survey and to Sheila Eskenazi

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