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T

he Commission de Toponymie names three pioneers who contributed to the founding of Brownsburg, George Brown, Daniel Smith and Arthur Howard. Neither Smith nor Howard had anything to do with the original concessions or settlement though. Their roles were played much later. In 1885, the Colt Firearms Company of Connecticut sent Howard and a Gatling gun up to the Canadian Militia to help put down the Métis uprising in the North-West Territories. He was hailed as a hero out west, where he met the Hon. J.J.C. Abbott of St. Andrews East, the future Prime Minister of Canada. He convinced Abbott of the viability of a cartridge factory, and Abbott thereby backed the creation of the Dominion Cartridge Company in his own electoral jurisdiction, acquiring and retooling Daniel Smith's powder mill in Brownsburg in the process. CIL eventually acquired the company and it operates under that name today.

When George Brown and his family arrived in St. Andrews from England in the early 1800's, they are said to have had just enough money to buy a loaf of bread. Mr. C. Thomas, in his History of Argenteuil, describes him as a man of enterprise and great influence, and it wasn't long before he was working at a mill in Lachute. In 1818, he obtained a land grant on the West River and over the next years he built both a sawmill and a gristmill. At the time all roads lead up the concession lines. Even though there was a large settlement also growing around Dalesville, the accesses to them were parallel east-west roads that headed back towards the North River. Thus Dalesville would eventually have its own sawmill, and it would not be until 1838 that the two mill towns would be directly linked.

It took a while in the growth of a homestead community for a miller to specialize, and George Brown would have been a farmer as well as a miller. In those early days, and on the family farms that the homesteads grew into, the idea was to be as self-sufficient as possible, and that meant diversifying, or keeping more than one iron in the fire. A miller who was also a farmer was more resilient. Archibald MacArthur, one of Brown's neighbours who had a homestead in the Brownsburg area as early as the 1820's, endured a major loss one winter night when wolves devoured his sheep. If he had been solely a sheep farmer, he would have been in serious trouble, but he was also a lumberjack and a woodlot owner.

While wolves were an ongoing aggravation, there seems to have been little else to stop the homesteaders from setting up. The ownership of the grants was uncontested by the Algonquians, as far as my references show, but this may have been because the indigenous people had a much different concept of ownership of land and a great deal of faith in the goodwill of the community hierarchy. While looking for information about George Brown, I learned a story about another George Brown in the Chaudière Falls area. This man had 'gone native', in the sense that he had married into an Algonquin family. When Philomen Wright began cutting down the forest in that area in the spring of 1800, the Algonquians, who happened to be making maple syrup at the time, dropped by to introduce themselves to their new neighbour. They gave him and his men maple sugar and tried to understand why they would cut down the maple trees. Such action, aside from destroying the source of their sugar, would also eliminate the habitat of the deer that they depended upon. They asked George Brown to come and interpret for them, and they received assurances that Mr. Wright's actions were condoned by Sir John Johnson, the Indian Agent, as well as the 'Great Father' King George III. Who were they to question such an authority? In their traditions, a leader would never act in a way that would prove detrimental to his people, and weren't they his people? It is possible that the remaining indigenous people in the Chatham area reacted similarly to the arrival of the homesteaders. In any case, the great majority of them were still in the 'care' of the Sulpicians in the Lake of Two Mountains area.

Despite the plentiful forests and the high level of lumbering before that time, the number of mills flourished only after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. This was because of the British Navy's huge appetite for squared timber. Up until the defeat of Napoleon, the British navy, the largest navy under sail in the history of the world, was very dependant on its Canadian colonies for lumber. The best trees were expropriated and it was a criminal offence to cut them, even on your own land, once the Royal Navy surveyors had marked them with the mark of the arrow.

At the end of the war, the demand for squared lumber dropped off, in part because the British could once again buy from the Baltic suppliers. In the Ottawa Valley, the reduction of demand for this squared timber was rapidly replaced by demand from the American market. Happily, the Americans were not looking for the same squared logs but for boards and building timber, stimulating the construction of mills. This factor, coupled with increased immigration from Europe as refugees began to flood in, initiated a period of growth.

George Brown's mills were not the only ones built in Brownsburg. In fact, the area became known for its mills. Even so, like so many mill towns, it did eventually acquire its name from his mills. At first it was also known as Brownsbury, and only became more regularly called Brownsburg once the post office was opened in 1854.

References: History of the Counties of Argenteuil & Prescott, C. Thomas; A History of Lachute, G.R. Rigby; War Museum of Canada archives website; Commission de Toponymie du Québec

Thank you to those many people who helped me acquire my very own copy of C. Thomas's book, History of the Counties of Argenteuil & Prescott. I am always looking for local history references, and especially private records that you would be willing to share.

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