Scottish-Irish Influences
These stories result from settlement that came generally up the trail from St. Andrew’s, describing colonists who came to the Laurentians originally by way of the Ottawa River.
The Matriarchs of Mille Isles
The Irish of St. Columban
Les Chutes Wilson
Lake Louisa
Lachute, Or How Barron Lake Was Named
Cushing, Quebec
Christieville
Brownsburg
Beaven Lake
Arundel
The Irish of St. Columban
Les Chutes Wilson
Lake Louisa
Lachute, Or How Barron Lake Was Named
Cushing, Quebec
Christieville
Brownsburg
Beaven Lake
Arundel
The Matriarchs of Mille Isles
Part I: The Matriarchs
Marie and Elisabeth Moyen watched in horror as a band of Iroquois invaded their parents’ farm on Ile aux Oies below Quebec City. It was a spring day, the 13th of June 1655, and the Moyen family had yet to celebrate its first anniversary in New France. The regular soldiers were away from the settlement and the few remaining adults were quickly overwhelmed and slaughtered as the terrified girls, just 12 and 14 years old, struggled in the arms of the Iroquois warriors.
The colony was small and the news of the massacre spread swiftly up the river, but during the winter of 1655-56, people got on with their lives, and the memory of the Moyen family faded.
In the late summer of 1656, a party led by Lambert Closse routed an Iroquois band and captured some warriors and chieftains. They were bartered for any French prisoners the Iroquois held, and in the course of the exchange, a number of half-starved children arrived at Ville Marie. They were taken to Jeanne Mance, the courageous woman who had founded Hotel Dieu, and under her care, Marie and Elizabeth Moyen shared their story.
Young Marie Moyen would attend her sister’s marriage to their hero and liberator Lambert Closse a year later. Elizabeth was 16 years old and her husband was 39. Closse, a legend in his own time, was a bachelor and a man of great stature in the settlement. He arrived from France around 1648 in a contingent of soldiers chosen by Maisonneuve, and Closse, trained by the Jesuits, would win the respect of the Governor, rising to his side in command of the colony. Ever a soldier, he would die at the hands of the Iroquois only five years after his marriage, leaving his young wife with a daughter.
The widow Elizabeth Closse attended her sister’s wedding in 1667. Marie married another hardened soldier and defender of the colony, Michel-Sidrac Dugué de Boisbriand. The new couple established themselves on the safe haven of Ste. Therese Island, east of Montreal.
Dugué became involved in the fur trade and was a controversial figure who promoted free trade in spirits with the indigenous peoples. In 1683, five years before his death, he was awarded the Seigneury of Mille-Îles. The seigneury had been named for the many islands in Rivière Jésus, soon to be renamed St. Jean, but today called Rivière Mille Îles. The original seigneury followed the river and comprised most of the flat lands to the north, but did not include the area of present-day Mille Isle.
Dugué died a year after his wife, in 1688, leaving seven children. Despite his reputation and acumen in the fur trade, he had done a poor job of managing his assets and, upon his death, Elizabeth Moyen Closse, a widow for 26 years, won custody of her nieces and nephews. She fought hard for control of his estate.
Elisabeth Moyen Closse, widow of the respected Lambert Closse and survivor of the massacre at Ile aux Oies, had chosen to stay in New France after the death of her husband. She could have returned to France, to her native village, where she would have been celebrated as a heroine. Instead, she dedicated herself to the development of Ville Marie and is remembered as one of the first lay volunteers in New France. Even today, the Société de généalogie de Saint-Eustache honours her memory with their prix Élisabeth-Moyen-Closse given to outstanding volunteerism in the community. Still, she was a woman, and in her time she had to fight for the right to raise her own daughter and for the recognition of the rights and privileges of her nephews and nieces.
Dugué had done nothing with the seigneury of Mille-Îles during the last five years of his life. In the declaration awarding him the property, he was obliged to clear land and begin some form of basic development. Usually a seigneur would lease the land to a less fortunate family who would fulfill the seigneur’s obligations and pay him rent for the privilege. The seigneur would take some of the rental money to pay his own living and invest the rest back into improving roads, building mills and so on, which would ultimately increase his revenues. Dugué was a military man, and during this same period, he was called upon to fight in the war with the Iroquois. By 1688, the 50-year-old Dugué was exhausted, and he passed away. The colonial authority would eventually repossess Mille Îles.
After Dugué’s death, his three sons opted for a life in the military while two of his four daughters joined a religious order. Elizabeth thus had her responsibilities reduced over time to the care of the remaining two daughters. She had proven herself an able manager, having to personally take two gentlemen to court to force them to honour commitments to the estate of Dugué, and it is very likely that she also played a part in having the Mille Îles seigneury restored to these two young women, Charlotte and Marie-Therese, and their husbands, Charles-Gaspard Piot de Langloiserie and Jean Petit, in 1714.
Sadly, Langloiserie, the husband of Marie-Thérèse, died a year later leaving the young widow with a large number of children. Elizabeth, her aging aunt, was still there to give courage and guidance, but she passed away in 1722 at 82 years of age.
Marie- Thérèse was left not only with her children, but also with the management of the original seigneury on Ste. Therese Island as well as the development of the eastern half of Mille Îles. She rose to the occasion showing a resolve worthy of her aunt. It was she who personally led the first colonists to their settlement in Mille Îles in 1730, and over the balance of her life, she promoted and managed the growth and colonization of the seigneury. When she passed away in 1744, her daughter, Suzanne Piot de Langloiserie followed in the tradition of her mother and grand-aunt.
Married to Jean-Baptiste Céloron De Blainville, she became known as Suzanne de Blainville and her name figures on the land grants into the mid 1750s. Upon her death, her daughter, who became known as Thérèse de Blainville, another spiritual heir to Elisabeth Moyen Closse, took over the reins and ran the seigneury until her death in 1806. Her name is commemorated in the naming of Ste. Therese and she left behind a smoothly running, well-developed seigneury.
Charlotte Dugué and Jean Petit managed the western section of the seigneurie, and it was their son-in-law, Eustache Lambert-Dumont, who was accorded the Augmentation of Mille Îles in 1752. The territory of modern-day Mille Isles falls into the Augmentation, and when the first Irish settlers arrived in the 1830s, they would have acquired leases in the seigneurie. By the time they established the village that we know today, the seigneurial system had been legislated out of existence, but the archaic French spelling of Mille Isles survived along with the spirit of the matriarchs, as we shall see next month.
References include the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and La Société de généalogie de Saint-Eustache.
Part II: The Scots and Irish
The Siegneury of Mille Îles did not originally include that small northern section that we know today as the town of Mille Isles. It was not until the Augmentation of Mille Îles in 1752 that this northern section, unsurveyed and not officially inhabited, became available for homesteading.
By the 1830s the sons and daughters of the southern seigneuries were still expanding into farmland close to home or pouring into Montreal. Few Lower Canadian Catholics were moving up into the hills above the St. Lawrence valley. There were homesteaders from the southwest, but these settlers were Scots-Irish, Irish, Scottish or the children of people who had come from the British Isles. Some had left places like the stony fields in County Down, County Antrim and other regions of Northern Ireland, evicted as a result of the Penal Laws and some were willing emigrants, craftsmen and trades people moving in family groups ahead of a collapsing, overburdened Irish farm economy.
From the mid-1700s Ireland had been experiencing steady growth. An agricultural economy based largely on the potato, Ireland had become a net exporter to England, and Irish prosperity was reflected in runaway population growth, especially during the long years of the Napoleonic Wars. The population doubled from 2.3 million in the 1750s to almost 5 million in 1800. By 1821 it had climbed to 6.8 million and twenty years later it would top 8 million souls. While it was still growing at a rapid pace, after the defeat of Napoleon in 1814 the economy began to collapse. Food prices became more competitive in English markets as mainland suppliers returned, and prices in Ireland crashed. Simultaneously, in 1816-18, storms destroyed crops and plagues of smallpox and typhus ravaged the countryside killing 50,000 people. The Protestant Irish Ascendancy responded by protecting its own and the Penal Laws, designed to give preference to members of the Church of Ireland, disenfranchised both Catholics and Presbyterians. In Northern Ireland, the Presbyterian Scots-Irish communities were generally better organized and better educated than the Catholics, and when it became clear that Ireland was heading for disaster, many emigrated, tearing themselves from their homeland.
With the British still boycotting American shipping and ports, these emigrants began to arrive in the St. Lawrence River, some hoping to travel overland to the United States, and others tempted to stay, with offers of land readily available for homesteading. Traveling in ill-suited ships that were designed to bring lumber and other materials from Quebec and Montreal to England, they suffered in the empty holds for the return voyage, being treated as little more than ballast that would cover the cost of returning the ships to pick up more raw materials. Soon the colony, importing cholera along with new settlers, forced these ships to stop at quarantine stations set up on Grosse Île. Many never made it that far and many more died there.
The family groups that survived the ordeal came from tough stock and were ready to get on. Among them were the first Kirkpatricks, or Kilpatricks, who arrived in the small settlement in the northern part of the Mille Île Seigneury. They took on the challenge of clearing the forests and building farms reminiscent of home. While they worked long hard hours to build these homesteads from the woodlands, the women carried the added burden of birthing ten to twelve children and sometimes many more.
Among the Scots and Irish settlers were the families Dey, Kilpatrick, Boyd, Elder, Maxwell, Morrow, Pollock, Simon and many others. The first post office that opened to serve this population in 1857 was called Britonville, a name that would survive into the next century and identify the region. Next came Mille Isles, opened the same year, and then Cambria in 1872 and Morin Flats in 1875.
One of the most prevalent names was Kilpatrick, or Kirkpatrick. While there are a lot of explanations for the two spellings in the family, the most likely one traces back to the Irish Kil for church or the Scottish Kirk for church, both being the Church of Patrick. The two names reflect how the family lived on both sides of the North Channel, at different times, in both Ireland and Scotland.
Discovering the rocky soil once the forests were gone, the next generation persevered, ploughing around boulders and raising new families. Mary Jane Kilpatrick married Robert Dey and they had the good fortune to have ten sons…and one daughter, Ida. When Robert Dey died of diabetes, Mary Jane and Ida worked tirelessly to feed and support their ten men. Ida went on to marry, but found herself a widow with two children at 22 years of age. She married again, survived her second husband, buried a son killed in combat on Christmas Day 1943 in Hong Kong and she lived to 105 years old.
Another Ida first climbed up onto a stool to wash the family dishes when she was five years old. The eleventh of twelve children, her responsibilities began in earnest when her father died from the kick of a horse the year before. His name was John Ward, the grandson of Susan Ward, who had her first child, also named John, out of wedlock in 1822. She married John Fisher in Ireland, had two more children, arrived in Grosse Île in 1836, became a widow, now charged with three children, and survived another husband, John Heath. Ida herself lived to 97 and two of her elder sisters married Kirkpatrick brothers—well, one was a Kilpatrick—contributing to the gene pool of Mille Isles.
The Scots and Irish descendants of Mille Isles are spread across Canada today, contributing to the fabric of the country. They still remember Mille Isles and many have returned for visits. The older ones recall that their grandparents, or perhaps their great-grandparents, had some influence in choosing the name Mille Isles one-hundred-and-fifty years ago. The names Britonville and Cambria did not survive, and some of the old-timers never did learn to pronounce Mille Isles the French way, but pronounced the “I” of Isles the long way, as in ‘eye’. Whatever attracted them to this rock-strewn northern corner of the seigneury? When they arrived in St. Andrews in the 1830s and 1840s, why did some follow the rough St. Andrews road off into the wilderness of the lower Laurentians? Why, when the seigneury was dissolved in 1854-5 did that French name ‘Mille Isles’ survive while the more British names Britonville and Cambria did not? They could tell you. They told their granddaughter Marion Kirkpatrick Roberts. Back in County Down, a ways north of Downpatrick but a bit south of Bangor and Donaghadee, on the Ards Peninsula, among the towns they left behind, was a water-covered, rocky expanse named Millisle (of course, pronounced the Scots-Irish way with the long I as in īsle).
Thanks for the large amount of information and help I received from Shirley Dey Captain, Sandra Stock, Judith Kirkpatrick Coulter, Marion Kirkpatrick Roberts, and Elizabeth Crossley. It was a challenge to distill it down to the length of an article.
Marie and Elisabeth Moyen watched in horror as a band of Iroquois invaded their parents’ farm on Ile aux Oies below Quebec City. It was a spring day, the 13th of June 1655, and the Moyen family had yet to celebrate its first anniversary in New France. The regular soldiers were away from the settlement and the few remaining adults were quickly overwhelmed and slaughtered as the terrified girls, just 12 and 14 years old, struggled in the arms of the Iroquois warriors.
The colony was small and the news of the massacre spread swiftly up the river, but during the winter of 1655-56, people got on with their lives, and the memory of the Moyen family faded.
In the late summer of 1656, a party led by Lambert Closse routed an Iroquois band and captured some warriors and chieftains. They were bartered for any French prisoners the Iroquois held, and in the course of the exchange, a number of half-starved children arrived at Ville Marie. They were taken to Jeanne Mance, the courageous woman who had founded Hotel Dieu, and under her care, Marie and Elizabeth Moyen shared their story.
Young Marie Moyen would attend her sister’s marriage to their hero and liberator Lambert Closse a year later. Elizabeth was 16 years old and her husband was 39. Closse, a legend in his own time, was a bachelor and a man of great stature in the settlement. He arrived from France around 1648 in a contingent of soldiers chosen by Maisonneuve, and Closse, trained by the Jesuits, would win the respect of the Governor, rising to his side in command of the colony. Ever a soldier, he would die at the hands of the Iroquois only five years after his marriage, leaving his young wife with a daughter.
The widow Elizabeth Closse attended her sister’s wedding in 1667. Marie married another hardened soldier and defender of the colony, Michel-Sidrac Dugué de Boisbriand. The new couple established themselves on the safe haven of Ste. Therese Island, east of Montreal.
Dugué became involved in the fur trade and was a controversial figure who promoted free trade in spirits with the indigenous peoples. In 1683, five years before his death, he was awarded the Seigneury of Mille-Îles. The seigneury had been named for the many islands in Rivière Jésus, soon to be renamed St. Jean, but today called Rivière Mille Îles. The original seigneury followed the river and comprised most of the flat lands to the north, but did not include the area of present-day Mille Isle.
Dugué died a year after his wife, in 1688, leaving seven children. Despite his reputation and acumen in the fur trade, he had done a poor job of managing his assets and, upon his death, Elizabeth Moyen Closse, a widow for 26 years, won custody of her nieces and nephews. She fought hard for control of his estate.
Elisabeth Moyen Closse, widow of the respected Lambert Closse and survivor of the massacre at Ile aux Oies, had chosen to stay in New France after the death of her husband. She could have returned to France, to her native village, where she would have been celebrated as a heroine. Instead, she dedicated herself to the development of Ville Marie and is remembered as one of the first lay volunteers in New France. Even today, the Société de généalogie de Saint-Eustache honours her memory with their prix Élisabeth-Moyen-Closse given to outstanding volunteerism in the community. Still, she was a woman, and in her time she had to fight for the right to raise her own daughter and for the recognition of the rights and privileges of her nephews and nieces.
Dugué had done nothing with the seigneury of Mille-Îles during the last five years of his life. In the declaration awarding him the property, he was obliged to clear land and begin some form of basic development. Usually a seigneur would lease the land to a less fortunate family who would fulfill the seigneur’s obligations and pay him rent for the privilege. The seigneur would take some of the rental money to pay his own living and invest the rest back into improving roads, building mills and so on, which would ultimately increase his revenues. Dugué was a military man, and during this same period, he was called upon to fight in the war with the Iroquois. By 1688, the 50-year-old Dugué was exhausted, and he passed away. The colonial authority would eventually repossess Mille Îles.
After Dugué’s death, his three sons opted for a life in the military while two of his four daughters joined a religious order. Elizabeth thus had her responsibilities reduced over time to the care of the remaining two daughters. She had proven herself an able manager, having to personally take two gentlemen to court to force them to honour commitments to the estate of Dugué, and it is very likely that she also played a part in having the Mille Îles seigneury restored to these two young women, Charlotte and Marie-Therese, and their husbands, Charles-Gaspard Piot de Langloiserie and Jean Petit, in 1714.
Sadly, Langloiserie, the husband of Marie-Thérèse, died a year later leaving the young widow with a large number of children. Elizabeth, her aging aunt, was still there to give courage and guidance, but she passed away in 1722 at 82 years of age.
Marie- Thérèse was left not only with her children, but also with the management of the original seigneury on Ste. Therese Island as well as the development of the eastern half of Mille Îles. She rose to the occasion showing a resolve worthy of her aunt. It was she who personally led the first colonists to their settlement in Mille Îles in 1730, and over the balance of her life, she promoted and managed the growth and colonization of the seigneury. When she passed away in 1744, her daughter, Suzanne Piot de Langloiserie followed in the tradition of her mother and grand-aunt.
Married to Jean-Baptiste Céloron De Blainville, she became known as Suzanne de Blainville and her name figures on the land grants into the mid 1750s. Upon her death, her daughter, who became known as Thérèse de Blainville, another spiritual heir to Elisabeth Moyen Closse, took over the reins and ran the seigneury until her death in 1806. Her name is commemorated in the naming of Ste. Therese and she left behind a smoothly running, well-developed seigneury.
Charlotte Dugué and Jean Petit managed the western section of the seigneurie, and it was their son-in-law, Eustache Lambert-Dumont, who was accorded the Augmentation of Mille Îles in 1752. The territory of modern-day Mille Isles falls into the Augmentation, and when the first Irish settlers arrived in the 1830s, they would have acquired leases in the seigneurie. By the time they established the village that we know today, the seigneurial system had been legislated out of existence, but the archaic French spelling of Mille Isles survived along with the spirit of the matriarchs, as we shall see next month.
References include the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and La Société de généalogie de Saint-Eustache.
Part II: The Scots and Irish
The Siegneury of Mille Îles did not originally include that small northern section that we know today as the town of Mille Isles. It was not until the Augmentation of Mille Îles in 1752 that this northern section, unsurveyed and not officially inhabited, became available for homesteading.
By the 1830s the sons and daughters of the southern seigneuries were still expanding into farmland close to home or pouring into Montreal. Few Lower Canadian Catholics were moving up into the hills above the St. Lawrence valley. There were homesteaders from the southwest, but these settlers were Scots-Irish, Irish, Scottish or the children of people who had come from the British Isles. Some had left places like the stony fields in County Down, County Antrim and other regions of Northern Ireland, evicted as a result of the Penal Laws and some were willing emigrants, craftsmen and trades people moving in family groups ahead of a collapsing, overburdened Irish farm economy.
From the mid-1700s Ireland had been experiencing steady growth. An agricultural economy based largely on the potato, Ireland had become a net exporter to England, and Irish prosperity was reflected in runaway population growth, especially during the long years of the Napoleonic Wars. The population doubled from 2.3 million in the 1750s to almost 5 million in 1800. By 1821 it had climbed to 6.8 million and twenty years later it would top 8 million souls. While it was still growing at a rapid pace, after the defeat of Napoleon in 1814 the economy began to collapse. Food prices became more competitive in English markets as mainland suppliers returned, and prices in Ireland crashed. Simultaneously, in 1816-18, storms destroyed crops and plagues of smallpox and typhus ravaged the countryside killing 50,000 people. The Protestant Irish Ascendancy responded by protecting its own and the Penal Laws, designed to give preference to members of the Church of Ireland, disenfranchised both Catholics and Presbyterians. In Northern Ireland, the Presbyterian Scots-Irish communities were generally better organized and better educated than the Catholics, and when it became clear that Ireland was heading for disaster, many emigrated, tearing themselves from their homeland.
With the British still boycotting American shipping and ports, these emigrants began to arrive in the St. Lawrence River, some hoping to travel overland to the United States, and others tempted to stay, with offers of land readily available for homesteading. Traveling in ill-suited ships that were designed to bring lumber and other materials from Quebec and Montreal to England, they suffered in the empty holds for the return voyage, being treated as little more than ballast that would cover the cost of returning the ships to pick up more raw materials. Soon the colony, importing cholera along with new settlers, forced these ships to stop at quarantine stations set up on Grosse Île. Many never made it that far and many more died there.
The family groups that survived the ordeal came from tough stock and were ready to get on. Among them were the first Kirkpatricks, or Kilpatricks, who arrived in the small settlement in the northern part of the Mille Île Seigneury. They took on the challenge of clearing the forests and building farms reminiscent of home. While they worked long hard hours to build these homesteads from the woodlands, the women carried the added burden of birthing ten to twelve children and sometimes many more.
Among the Scots and Irish settlers were the families Dey, Kilpatrick, Boyd, Elder, Maxwell, Morrow, Pollock, Simon and many others. The first post office that opened to serve this population in 1857 was called Britonville, a name that would survive into the next century and identify the region. Next came Mille Isles, opened the same year, and then Cambria in 1872 and Morin Flats in 1875.
One of the most prevalent names was Kilpatrick, or Kirkpatrick. While there are a lot of explanations for the two spellings in the family, the most likely one traces back to the Irish Kil for church or the Scottish Kirk for church, both being the Church of Patrick. The two names reflect how the family lived on both sides of the North Channel, at different times, in both Ireland and Scotland.
Discovering the rocky soil once the forests were gone, the next generation persevered, ploughing around boulders and raising new families. Mary Jane Kilpatrick married Robert Dey and they had the good fortune to have ten sons…and one daughter, Ida. When Robert Dey died of diabetes, Mary Jane and Ida worked tirelessly to feed and support their ten men. Ida went on to marry, but found herself a widow with two children at 22 years of age. She married again, survived her second husband, buried a son killed in combat on Christmas Day 1943 in Hong Kong and she lived to 105 years old.
Another Ida first climbed up onto a stool to wash the family dishes when she was five years old. The eleventh of twelve children, her responsibilities began in earnest when her father died from the kick of a horse the year before. His name was John Ward, the grandson of Susan Ward, who had her first child, also named John, out of wedlock in 1822. She married John Fisher in Ireland, had two more children, arrived in Grosse Île in 1836, became a widow, now charged with three children, and survived another husband, John Heath. Ida herself lived to 97 and two of her elder sisters married Kirkpatrick brothers—well, one was a Kilpatrick—contributing to the gene pool of Mille Isles.
The Scots and Irish descendants of Mille Isles are spread across Canada today, contributing to the fabric of the country. They still remember Mille Isles and many have returned for visits. The older ones recall that their grandparents, or perhaps their great-grandparents, had some influence in choosing the name Mille Isles one-hundred-and-fifty years ago. The names Britonville and Cambria did not survive, and some of the old-timers never did learn to pronounce Mille Isles the French way, but pronounced the “I” of Isles the long way, as in ‘eye’. Whatever attracted them to this rock-strewn northern corner of the seigneury? When they arrived in St. Andrews in the 1830s and 1840s, why did some follow the rough St. Andrews road off into the wilderness of the lower Laurentians? Why, when the seigneury was dissolved in 1854-5 did that French name ‘Mille Isles’ survive while the more British names Britonville and Cambria did not? They could tell you. They told their granddaughter Marion Kirkpatrick Roberts. Back in County Down, a ways north of Downpatrick but a bit south of Bangor and Donaghadee, on the Ards Peninsula, among the towns they left behind, was a water-covered, rocky expanse named Millisle (of course, pronounced the Scots-Irish way with the long I as in īsle).
Thanks for the large amount of information and help I received from Shirley Dey Captain, Sandra Stock, Judith Kirkpatrick Coulter, Marion Kirkpatrick Roberts, and Elizabeth Crossley. It was a challenge to distill it down to the length of an article.
The Irish of St. Columban
In the province of Leinster, Ireland, in the year 560, Columcille was obsessed with the beauty of his master’s book of psalms. In the dark of night, he secretly copied it. A monk, he was also a capable warrior, once named Crimthann, the Fox. When he was forced to give up his copy, his injury festered, contributing to an act of revenge for the death of one of his followers. His revenge left him victorious and in possession of his copy of the psalms, but he was still a monk, and the Church exiled him, setting him to the task of converting 3001 souls to Christianity in penance for those he had killed.
Today, he is known as St. Columba, from the Latin for dove, the Irish monk who set the pattern for the Irish monastic tradition that brought writing back to Western Europe after the fall of Rome. The abbey structure that he established included simple huts for the monks, a dining hall, a kitchen, a scriptorium for transcribing documents, a library, and the fundamentals of a good farm. When an abbey reached 150 monks, a leader would choose 12 monks, as Columcille had done upon his exile, and would set off to re-establish at a new location. One of his successors, St. Columban, also of Leinster, was a monk with a much less violent history. Following St. Columba’s example, he set off for the Continent with 12 monks and established some of the most important abbeys of the seventh century.
In 406 AD, the Rhine River had frozen solid. The Rhine and the Danube had always kept the eastern tribes out of the Roman Empire, but that winter the Rhine ceased to be a barrier to the Vandals, allowing them to establish a permanent beachhead on their far shore. Thereafter, barbarian hordes poured west destroying the very fabric of Roman society. While the Church hierarchy withstood the onslaught, most of the written culture was lost. The tireless monks of St. Columba created abbeys and diligently transcribed and preserved the old documents that had remained out of reach in Ireland. They spread their copies throughout their network during the Dark Ages. In the process, they had a huge impact on all aspects of European life.
Father Patrick Phelan, a Gentleman of the Order of St. Sulpice, was born in that same Irish province, Leinster, in 1795. While his family moved to Boston, his vocation took him to the Grand Seminary in Montreal. His ordination to the priesthood coincided with the arrival of a first wave of Irish immigrants, and the Bishop of Montreal encouraged him to join the Sulpicians in order to minister to these new, impoverished arrivals.
The Sulpicians, whose founding vision had resulted in the creation of Montreal, owned a seigneury north of Laval, centred in Oka. Like St. Columban, their vision was of an order of brothers and priests who would minister to the needy in the name of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.
Father Phelan would have known about his Leinster predecessors, and about St. Jerome, among the earliest of monks, and St. Scholastica, the soul sister of St. Benedict. He encouraged his Irish immigrants to colonize the territory in the northeast of the Sulpician seigneury and he founded their parish, naming it for his spiritual forebear.
As early as 1825, there were 250 people in the homestead, and others not far away in St. Jerome. The success of a settlement of Irish Catholics was dependent upon a strong parish priest, but in the beginning, they had not even a chapel, traveling to St. Scholastique when they must. This lack was mitigated by the erection of a cross, allowing them to go to it and pray when time did not permit the longer overland trip to the nearest church. Well after their first chapel was finally built in 1831, at the location of the cross, the early settlers continued to refer to a trip to the chapel as ‘going to The Cross’.
***
As early as 1825, there were 250 people in the homestead, and others not far away in St. Jerome. The success of a settlement of Irish Catholics was dependent upon a strong parish priest, but in the beginning, they had not even a chapel, traveling to St. Scholastique when they must. This lack was mitigated by the erection of a cross, allowing them to go to it and pray when time did not permit the longer overland trip to the nearest church. Well after their first chapel was finally built in 1831, at the location of the cross, the early settlers continued to refer to a trip to the chapel as ‘going to The Cross’.
Their first priest, Father Blythe, moved on to become the first priest of St. Jerome, and their second lasted only two years, but the third, Father John Falvey, arrived in 1840 and remained for 45 years. A priest in a small community was much more than a spiritual advisor. He was the person that parties would come to in order to settle differences, draft agreements, register a family event such as a birth, death or marriage or officiate at any community event. He was expected to take the community’s needs to the higher authorities and argue them, and he was also expected to have a business mind, be kind and patient, set an example of generosity and establish proper education for the children. Father Falvey, according to all the records, went beyond expectations.
They had no railway connection, nor even a decent road access, and the soil, like so much of the higher lands of the Laurentians, was thinly spread in crevices in a rocky terrain. Farming, with long, cold winters and hot, dry summers left no surpluses. Seeing what they had to deal with, Falvey encouraged his congregants to build mills on the North River and they fared better with lumber, boasting five mills.
Father Falvey was assisted in his mission by a woman, the niece of Father Phelan. Sister Mary St. Patrick, born in County Kilkenny, Leinster, Ireland, took her vows at her parents’ home in St. Columban and worked tirelessly for the parish, caring for the sick and teaching at the small school until her death at 77 in 1905.
Descended from the spirit of these missionary pioneers, the Irish of St. Columban also moved away, building different parts of Canada and the United States. They took with them their memories of family gatherings, children playing on a grey Laurentian rock, the music, the wagon in a field, horse-drawn and piled high with hay, the northern lights and the quiet of winter. Somewhere in their memories, the quilting bees go on, the pump organ plays and the sap is being gathered in the maple grove. Trout fishing, walking to the schoolhouse through familiar short-cuts, they are all far in the past today, but the Irish descendants, the people of St. Columban, return nostalgically, and inevitably end at The Cross, at the church where the cemetery bears witness to their roots.
The Irish have suffered many calamities through history, but they always pick up and start over. It is a tradition older than St. Columba. Recently, some descendants of St. Columban, going to The Cross, discovered that the tombstones were gone, broken and piled in a discreet location behind the church, confusing the records of the dead. They got together and straightened things up to honour the ancestors of St. Columban: The Dwyers, the Duffys, the Keyes, the McAndrews and many others. On July 3, 2010, they dedicated the St. Columban Cemetery Monument.
Ref: www.catholic.org; How the Irish saved Civilization -Thomas Cahill; Thanks to Fergus Keyes, www.stcolumban-irish.com.
Today, he is known as St. Columba, from the Latin for dove, the Irish monk who set the pattern for the Irish monastic tradition that brought writing back to Western Europe after the fall of Rome. The abbey structure that he established included simple huts for the monks, a dining hall, a kitchen, a scriptorium for transcribing documents, a library, and the fundamentals of a good farm. When an abbey reached 150 monks, a leader would choose 12 monks, as Columcille had done upon his exile, and would set off to re-establish at a new location. One of his successors, St. Columban, also of Leinster, was a monk with a much less violent history. Following St. Columba’s example, he set off for the Continent with 12 monks and established some of the most important abbeys of the seventh century.
In 406 AD, the Rhine River had frozen solid. The Rhine and the Danube had always kept the eastern tribes out of the Roman Empire, but that winter the Rhine ceased to be a barrier to the Vandals, allowing them to establish a permanent beachhead on their far shore. Thereafter, barbarian hordes poured west destroying the very fabric of Roman society. While the Church hierarchy withstood the onslaught, most of the written culture was lost. The tireless monks of St. Columba created abbeys and diligently transcribed and preserved the old documents that had remained out of reach in Ireland. They spread their copies throughout their network during the Dark Ages. In the process, they had a huge impact on all aspects of European life.
Father Patrick Phelan, a Gentleman of the Order of St. Sulpice, was born in that same Irish province, Leinster, in 1795. While his family moved to Boston, his vocation took him to the Grand Seminary in Montreal. His ordination to the priesthood coincided with the arrival of a first wave of Irish immigrants, and the Bishop of Montreal encouraged him to join the Sulpicians in order to minister to these new, impoverished arrivals.
The Sulpicians, whose founding vision had resulted in the creation of Montreal, owned a seigneury north of Laval, centred in Oka. Like St. Columban, their vision was of an order of brothers and priests who would minister to the needy in the name of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.
Father Phelan would have known about his Leinster predecessors, and about St. Jerome, among the earliest of monks, and St. Scholastica, the soul sister of St. Benedict. He encouraged his Irish immigrants to colonize the territory in the northeast of the Sulpician seigneury and he founded their parish, naming it for his spiritual forebear.
As early as 1825, there were 250 people in the homestead, and others not far away in St. Jerome. The success of a settlement of Irish Catholics was dependent upon a strong parish priest, but in the beginning, they had not even a chapel, traveling to St. Scholastique when they must. This lack was mitigated by the erection of a cross, allowing them to go to it and pray when time did not permit the longer overland trip to the nearest church. Well after their first chapel was finally built in 1831, at the location of the cross, the early settlers continued to refer to a trip to the chapel as ‘going to The Cross’.
***
As early as 1825, there were 250 people in the homestead, and others not far away in St. Jerome. The success of a settlement of Irish Catholics was dependent upon a strong parish priest, but in the beginning, they had not even a chapel, traveling to St. Scholastique when they must. This lack was mitigated by the erection of a cross, allowing them to go to it and pray when time did not permit the longer overland trip to the nearest church. Well after their first chapel was finally built in 1831, at the location of the cross, the early settlers continued to refer to a trip to the chapel as ‘going to The Cross’.
Their first priest, Father Blythe, moved on to become the first priest of St. Jerome, and their second lasted only two years, but the third, Father John Falvey, arrived in 1840 and remained for 45 years. A priest in a small community was much more than a spiritual advisor. He was the person that parties would come to in order to settle differences, draft agreements, register a family event such as a birth, death or marriage or officiate at any community event. He was expected to take the community’s needs to the higher authorities and argue them, and he was also expected to have a business mind, be kind and patient, set an example of generosity and establish proper education for the children. Father Falvey, according to all the records, went beyond expectations.
They had no railway connection, nor even a decent road access, and the soil, like so much of the higher lands of the Laurentians, was thinly spread in crevices in a rocky terrain. Farming, with long, cold winters and hot, dry summers left no surpluses. Seeing what they had to deal with, Falvey encouraged his congregants to build mills on the North River and they fared better with lumber, boasting five mills.
Father Falvey was assisted in his mission by a woman, the niece of Father Phelan. Sister Mary St. Patrick, born in County Kilkenny, Leinster, Ireland, took her vows at her parents’ home in St. Columban and worked tirelessly for the parish, caring for the sick and teaching at the small school until her death at 77 in 1905.
Descended from the spirit of these missionary pioneers, the Irish of St. Columban also moved away, building different parts of Canada and the United States. They took with them their memories of family gatherings, children playing on a grey Laurentian rock, the music, the wagon in a field, horse-drawn and piled high with hay, the northern lights and the quiet of winter. Somewhere in their memories, the quilting bees go on, the pump organ plays and the sap is being gathered in the maple grove. Trout fishing, walking to the schoolhouse through familiar short-cuts, they are all far in the past today, but the Irish descendants, the people of St. Columban, return nostalgically, and inevitably end at The Cross, at the church where the cemetery bears witness to their roots.
The Irish have suffered many calamities through history, but they always pick up and start over. It is a tradition older than St. Columba. Recently, some descendants of St. Columban, going to The Cross, discovered that the tombstones were gone, broken and piled in a discreet location behind the church, confusing the records of the dead. They got together and straightened things up to honour the ancestors of St. Columban: The Dwyers, the Duffys, the Keyes, the McAndrews and many others. On July 3, 2010, they dedicated the St. Columban Cemetery Monument.
Ref: www.catholic.org; How the Irish saved Civilization -Thomas Cahill; Thanks to Fergus Keyes, www.stcolumban-irish.com.
Les Chutes Wilson
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 Irish potato famine hit. 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 railway 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 subsequently enrolled in the Model School, then the McGill Normal School. 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. In 1880, he built a large paper mill in Lachute.
In 1880, the Delisles set up the Delisle pulp mill in St. Jerome and soon moved it to Saunderson Falls in Cordon, north of St. Jerome. The Delisles’ mill turned wood pulp into cardboard boxes. 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. Delisle and Wilson were in no way competitors nor was one the supplier to the other.
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 mill and soon Saunderson Falls became Wilson Falls or Les Chutes Wilson.
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 M. P. 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 Wilson and Edwin Howlett Wilson. 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. Abitibi Paper, today Abitibi Price, eventually absorbed it.
Wilson Falls is now a park, just to the east of the Autoroute where it turns from three lanes into two.
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
J.C. Wilson initially followed his father in mechanics until an accident left him injured. Thanks to the kindness of a friend, he subsequently enrolled in the Model School, then the McGill Normal School. 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. In 1880, he built a large paper mill in Lachute.
In 1880, the Delisles set up the Delisle pulp mill in St. Jerome and soon moved it to Saunderson Falls in Cordon, north of St. Jerome. The Delisles’ mill turned wood pulp into cardboard boxes. 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. Delisle and Wilson were in no way competitors nor was one the supplier to the other.
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 mill and soon Saunderson Falls became Wilson Falls or Les Chutes Wilson.
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 M. P. 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 Wilson and Edwin Howlett Wilson. 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. Abitibi Paper, today Abitibi Price, eventually absorbed it.
Wilson Falls is now a park, just to the east of the Autoroute where it turns from three lanes into two.
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
Lake Louisa
The Quebec government maintains a website on all the place names in the province. If you check it out at www.toponymie.gouv.qc.ca and look at how Lake Louisa got its name, you will find two and a half somewhat conflicting stories. In one, they describe a talented musician named Louisa M. Holland who performed for some surveyors in the 1840′s and they subsequently named the lake in her honour. In the second, there is the sad story of Louisa who drowned in the lake near the outflow in the early 1800′s, and in the half- story, it goes on to say that the lake was called Lac Louise between 1970 and 1984 after Louise Lafleur who often fished off a rock that dominated the lake. It does not say when she lived, or why the lake would have been named for her. It leaves one going back over and checking the date. ‘Did they mean 1970 or 1870?’ But it seems they meant 1970.
In the book Louisa and her Lake, written by H.C (Herb) Montgomery and published in 2002, the author documents the era of vacation homes and the happy times of regattas and outings that characterized the twentieth century at Lake Louisa. He describes the Hollands, who first visited the area in the 1870′s. Louisa, their daughter, subsequently took a summer job working in the home of the Abbott family, the local MP. One of the gathering places was the Meikle’s store in Lachute. It was a place where people could exchange stories, whiling away the evenings, sometimes singing and playing the piano.
During the course of one such evening, a group of surveyors, flirting with Louisa and encouraging her to sing one more song to her father’s piano music, promised to name a lake after her.
Montgomery says that this happened in the 1870′s, not the 1840′s. The Toponymie people probably tied their version of the story to when the first official survey was done. Lake Louisa is in Wentworth Township and the township system displaced the seigneurial system in the 1840′s.
It seems improbable that the lake was not already named, and so it is possible that the story is fanciful, but it marks the time when the lake’s destination was changing from that of farming to a community of ‘campers’. The MP, the honourable John Abbott referred to in Montgomery’s story, had acquired 73 acres of the Robinson farm sometime between 1867 and 1874. He called his property Liberty Hall. He was not a camper, but he was certainly not directly dependent on the land. He was close to Prime Minister MacDonald and became Prime Minister himself in 1891, making him the first Canadian-born prime minister.
The early settlers among whom Abbott built Liberty Hall were Irish and Scottish immigrants who went through the backbreaking process of clearing the land. As in other areas, they burned the trees and turned the ashes into potash that sold for hard cash. With this money they could buy essentials, including seed stock. In the fields, once the trees and roots were gone, there was little soil left. Lake Louisa is a headwater, higher than neighbouring areas, and as in such areas, the glaciers long ago pushed the soil away. These farmers, George Seale, Zachariah Robinson, Charles Vary and others, discovered soon enough that the soil would never allow a really prosperous farm. The thin soil dried rapidly between summer storms, exposing crops to a regular risk of drought and weathering, while the shimmering lake lying in the fields below mocked their efforts. One can imagine the sad story of a drowned Louisa standing as a cautionary tale to the younger children of the farmers. Their families often numbered 12 to 14 and, while they could help with the field and farm work, there was little time to watch the younger ones. Stories like the drowned Louisa would have been used to curb the children’s sense of adventure. One can almost hear Zachariah or another farmer telling his daughter while the other children listened round-eyed around them, “Why her name would be Louisa, wouldn’t it? Just like yours, only she didn’t listen and she drowned, didn’t she?”
The story of Louisa Holland was a happier myth for the campers who followed. As the farmers aged and their children left for the towns and the city, they sold their properties to the affluent city people, mostly from Lachute, and by the early years of the twentieth century, a vacation community had replaced the farms.
H.C. Montgomery goes on to document how the lake began to appear on maps as Lac Louise in the 1970′s and 80′s, and says that it was part of the Parti Québécois’ attempt to francise place-names and how it took a concerted effort on the part of local citizens to have the name corrected to Louisa in 1988. Under questioning from the mayor at the time, the Commission de la Toponymie said that they had been given the name Louise from residents of one of the bays on the lake. Perhaps this was the story of Louise Lafleur, a new myth for a new era. It proved to be a myth that served no real purpose and so it vanished.
The story of the naming of Lake Louisa and its origins stands itself as a cautionary tale to us today. The naming of things often reflects the wishes of the present rather than the truth of the past. It is up to all of us to find and protect our history and our place-names, many of which speak of the Irish and Scottish pioneer influences, particularly in the Lower Laurentians. Today, we live in a healthy mature society in which we can celebrate our origins together and can show our respect for the influences of our ancestors simply by learning how they named what they named.
In the book Louisa and her Lake, written by H.C (Herb) Montgomery and published in 2002, the author documents the era of vacation homes and the happy times of regattas and outings that characterized the twentieth century at Lake Louisa. He describes the Hollands, who first visited the area in the 1870′s. Louisa, their daughter, subsequently took a summer job working in the home of the Abbott family, the local MP. One of the gathering places was the Meikle’s store in Lachute. It was a place where people could exchange stories, whiling away the evenings, sometimes singing and playing the piano.
During the course of one such evening, a group of surveyors, flirting with Louisa and encouraging her to sing one more song to her father’s piano music, promised to name a lake after her.
Montgomery says that this happened in the 1870′s, not the 1840′s. The Toponymie people probably tied their version of the story to when the first official survey was done. Lake Louisa is in Wentworth Township and the township system displaced the seigneurial system in the 1840′s.
It seems improbable that the lake was not already named, and so it is possible that the story is fanciful, but it marks the time when the lake’s destination was changing from that of farming to a community of ‘campers’. The MP, the honourable John Abbott referred to in Montgomery’s story, had acquired 73 acres of the Robinson farm sometime between 1867 and 1874. He called his property Liberty Hall. He was not a camper, but he was certainly not directly dependent on the land. He was close to Prime Minister MacDonald and became Prime Minister himself in 1891, making him the first Canadian-born prime minister.
The early settlers among whom Abbott built Liberty Hall were Irish and Scottish immigrants who went through the backbreaking process of clearing the land. As in other areas, they burned the trees and turned the ashes into potash that sold for hard cash. With this money they could buy essentials, including seed stock. In the fields, once the trees and roots were gone, there was little soil left. Lake Louisa is a headwater, higher than neighbouring areas, and as in such areas, the glaciers long ago pushed the soil away. These farmers, George Seale, Zachariah Robinson, Charles Vary and others, discovered soon enough that the soil would never allow a really prosperous farm. The thin soil dried rapidly between summer storms, exposing crops to a regular risk of drought and weathering, while the shimmering lake lying in the fields below mocked their efforts. One can imagine the sad story of a drowned Louisa standing as a cautionary tale to the younger children of the farmers. Their families often numbered 12 to 14 and, while they could help with the field and farm work, there was little time to watch the younger ones. Stories like the drowned Louisa would have been used to curb the children’s sense of adventure. One can almost hear Zachariah or another farmer telling his daughter while the other children listened round-eyed around them, “Why her name would be Louisa, wouldn’t it? Just like yours, only she didn’t listen and she drowned, didn’t she?”
The story of Louisa Holland was a happier myth for the campers who followed. As the farmers aged and their children left for the towns and the city, they sold their properties to the affluent city people, mostly from Lachute, and by the early years of the twentieth century, a vacation community had replaced the farms.
H.C. Montgomery goes on to document how the lake began to appear on maps as Lac Louise in the 1970′s and 80′s, and says that it was part of the Parti Québécois’ attempt to francise place-names and how it took a concerted effort on the part of local citizens to have the name corrected to Louisa in 1988. Under questioning from the mayor at the time, the Commission de la Toponymie said that they had been given the name Louise from residents of one of the bays on the lake. Perhaps this was the story of Louise Lafleur, a new myth for a new era. It proved to be a myth that served no real purpose and so it vanished.
The story of the naming of Lake Louisa and its origins stands itself as a cautionary tale to us today. The naming of things often reflects the wishes of the present rather than the truth of the past. It is up to all of us to find and protect our history and our place-names, many of which speak of the Irish and Scottish pioneer influences, particularly in the Lower Laurentians. Today, we live in a healthy mature society in which we can celebrate our origins together and can show our respect for the influences of our ancestors simply by learning how they named what they named.
Lachute, Or How Barron Lake Was Named
Lachute is at the centre of the early English-speaking settlements of the Laurentians, and many historic trails lead back to it. There is no mystery as to where its name came from, though. Both La Riviere du Nord and La Chute appeared on maps made during the French regime, prior to 1760 and the property was designated as a seigneury as early as 1682. All the same, the land where the town is today and some of its surrounding area was once described as Lane’s Purchase, and was first officially called the Parish of St-Jerusalem.
Under the seigneurial system, the Seigneur did not sell his property, but simply rented it, and then lived on the rental income. While the British did not abolish the seigneurial system, their policy of selling the land did influence the management of the seigneuries, and sometimes parcels were sold. When Jedediah Lane visited his sister and brother-in-law on their property at Carillon in the 1790′s, he saw a development opportunity, and decided to buy a stretch of the Ottawa riverfront for resale. So much of it had already been sold or leased, though, that he finally settled for a large parcel on either side of the North River around the falls, or La Chute, ideally located because rivers were the only corridors of transportation. Lane was from Jericho, Vermont, a town high in the Green Mountains and he marketed his land there, bringing settlers up from the United States. Jericho was not a farming area, and while these mountain people were rugged, they were not here for the rich fields that hid under the canopy of the old forests. They were here for the trees, and they cut and burned the forest for a dozen years. Their primary revenue came from potash made from hardwood. To make potash, they burned maple and beech trees and leached water through the dry ash. This resulted in a liquor that was evaporated in an iron pot until it crystallized. The crystals were composed of potassium hydroxide, or lye, which was shipped off down the river and sold to the highest bidder, and ultimately used in bleaching cloth. To produce enough lye to be marketable, a lot of trees had to be burned. The appetite for hard currency was the driving force that cleared the fields, and, while they grew some corn and potatoes for their own consumption, these early settlers did not have the skills to establish sustainable farms. Their techniques earned them money, but food was soon in such short supply that pork quadrupled in price over the ten-year period ending in 1811. In theory, settlers were supposed to create homesteads, groups of farms that would evolve into communities, but many of these early settlers were focussed solely on the cash that could be obtained from the ashes of the once majestic forests. They had no long-term plans and little understanding of Lower Canada. In 1807 Captain James Murray, the owner of the seignieury of Argenteuil, was forced to sue the American residents of Lane’s Purchase for his seigniorial dues, and in 1810, the remnants of the community collapsed under the weight of a famine.
When Thomas Barron arrived in Lachute in 1809, a lot of Americans were eager to sell their woodcuts. By the time the War of 1812 began, those who saw themselves as Americans were glad to take what they could get, and leave. Those who stayed behind, who had successfully adapted to this new environment, would form the core of what became Lachute.
Barron, arriving in this period of rapid decline, saw only opportunity. When he first arrived in North America, he stayed with his uncle in Hawksbury, and the earliest reports show him marrying Eliza Hastings, the sister of a successful Lachute resident, so it is safe to imagine that he could count on some local connections and backing. He encouraged others to come from Scotland and apply their Scottish agricultural techniques to the fields of stumps that the Americans had abandoned. There was a glut of such properties to be had, and so the prices were reasonable. The Scottish Lowlanders had developed modern farming techniques and strategies, inspired in part by Lord Kames who for years had cajoled Scottish landlords to encourage experimentation and innovation in their farming practices. As a result, these farmers were well suited to the task of converting the fertile lands around Lachute into prosperous farms.
Although Barron did not ‘found’ Lachute, his family, originally from Morayshire in the Scottish lowlands, was very influential in Lachute’s early development. G.R. Rigby, in his book “A History of Lachute” wrote that “..if Jedediah Lane was the founder of Lachute, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Barron was its first squire.” A testimony to his influence is seen in the fact that the land that Barron acquired eventually became the centre of the town of Lachute. Among other undertakings, he joined the Militia during the War of 1812 and proved himself as a soldier, rising from Major to Lieutenant Colonel. After the war, his influence increased and he became Justice of the Peace and eventually Crown Land Agent for the surrounding regions of Chatham, Wentworth, Gore, Morin and Howard.
Among those who followed Thomas Barron from Scotland was his brother John. Thomas and Eliza were childless, but his brother had two sons, the first one, also named Thomas, born upon the family’s arrival in Lachute. This namesake of the Colonel followed in the footsteps of his uncle, holding important positions in Lachute society and eventually rising to the post of Mayor. He had 12 children and thus the clan of the Barrons of Lachute was established. In 1864, upon the death of Colonel Thomas Barron, the Scottish and Irish settlers of the region of Gore named Barron Lake in his honour, and many of the streets in the core of Lachute were named in memory of his nephew and descendants. Thomas, Robert, Mary, Barron, Henry and Sydney Streets were all named in this manner and serve as a reminder of this important family.
Sources: The History of Lachute, -G.R. Rigby; History of the Counties of Argenteuil, Quebec & Prescott, Ontario -C. Thomas; Hurling Down the Pine -John W. Hughson and Courtney C.J. Bond; Magdaleine Frenette, greffiere adjointe de la ville de Lachute for Our History, Ville de Lachute.
Under the seigneurial system, the Seigneur did not sell his property, but simply rented it, and then lived on the rental income. While the British did not abolish the seigneurial system, their policy of selling the land did influence the management of the seigneuries, and sometimes parcels were sold. When Jedediah Lane visited his sister and brother-in-law on their property at Carillon in the 1790′s, he saw a development opportunity, and decided to buy a stretch of the Ottawa riverfront for resale. So much of it had already been sold or leased, though, that he finally settled for a large parcel on either side of the North River around the falls, or La Chute, ideally located because rivers were the only corridors of transportation. Lane was from Jericho, Vermont, a town high in the Green Mountains and he marketed his land there, bringing settlers up from the United States. Jericho was not a farming area, and while these mountain people were rugged, they were not here for the rich fields that hid under the canopy of the old forests. They were here for the trees, and they cut and burned the forest for a dozen years. Their primary revenue came from potash made from hardwood. To make potash, they burned maple and beech trees and leached water through the dry ash. This resulted in a liquor that was evaporated in an iron pot until it crystallized. The crystals were composed of potassium hydroxide, or lye, which was shipped off down the river and sold to the highest bidder, and ultimately used in bleaching cloth. To produce enough lye to be marketable, a lot of trees had to be burned. The appetite for hard currency was the driving force that cleared the fields, and, while they grew some corn and potatoes for their own consumption, these early settlers did not have the skills to establish sustainable farms. Their techniques earned them money, but food was soon in such short supply that pork quadrupled in price over the ten-year period ending in 1811. In theory, settlers were supposed to create homesteads, groups of farms that would evolve into communities, but many of these early settlers were focussed solely on the cash that could be obtained from the ashes of the once majestic forests. They had no long-term plans and little understanding of Lower Canada. In 1807 Captain James Murray, the owner of the seignieury of Argenteuil, was forced to sue the American residents of Lane’s Purchase for his seigniorial dues, and in 1810, the remnants of the community collapsed under the weight of a famine.
When Thomas Barron arrived in Lachute in 1809, a lot of Americans were eager to sell their woodcuts. By the time the War of 1812 began, those who saw themselves as Americans were glad to take what they could get, and leave. Those who stayed behind, who had successfully adapted to this new environment, would form the core of what became Lachute.
Barron, arriving in this period of rapid decline, saw only opportunity. When he first arrived in North America, he stayed with his uncle in Hawksbury, and the earliest reports show him marrying Eliza Hastings, the sister of a successful Lachute resident, so it is safe to imagine that he could count on some local connections and backing. He encouraged others to come from Scotland and apply their Scottish agricultural techniques to the fields of stumps that the Americans had abandoned. There was a glut of such properties to be had, and so the prices were reasonable. The Scottish Lowlanders had developed modern farming techniques and strategies, inspired in part by Lord Kames who for years had cajoled Scottish landlords to encourage experimentation and innovation in their farming practices. As a result, these farmers were well suited to the task of converting the fertile lands around Lachute into prosperous farms.
Although Barron did not ‘found’ Lachute, his family, originally from Morayshire in the Scottish lowlands, was very influential in Lachute’s early development. G.R. Rigby, in his book “A History of Lachute” wrote that “..if Jedediah Lane was the founder of Lachute, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Barron was its first squire.” A testimony to his influence is seen in the fact that the land that Barron acquired eventually became the centre of the town of Lachute. Among other undertakings, he joined the Militia during the War of 1812 and proved himself as a soldier, rising from Major to Lieutenant Colonel. After the war, his influence increased and he became Justice of the Peace and eventually Crown Land Agent for the surrounding regions of Chatham, Wentworth, Gore, Morin and Howard.
Among those who followed Thomas Barron from Scotland was his brother John. Thomas and Eliza were childless, but his brother had two sons, the first one, also named Thomas, born upon the family’s arrival in Lachute. This namesake of the Colonel followed in the footsteps of his uncle, holding important positions in Lachute society and eventually rising to the post of Mayor. He had 12 children and thus the clan of the Barrons of Lachute was established. In 1864, upon the death of Colonel Thomas Barron, the Scottish and Irish settlers of the region of Gore named Barron Lake in his honour, and many of the streets in the core of Lachute were named in memory of his nephew and descendants. Thomas, Robert, Mary, Barron, Henry and Sydney Streets were all named in this manner and serve as a reminder of this important family.
Sources: The History of Lachute, -G.R. Rigby; History of the Counties of Argenteuil, Quebec & Prescott, Ontario -C. Thomas; Hurling Down the Pine -John W. Hughson and Courtney C.J. Bond; Magdaleine Frenette, greffiere adjointe de la ville de Lachute for Our History, Ville de Lachute.
Cushing, Quebec
Lemuel Cushing arrived in Chatham in 1822. He was 16 years old and looking for work. While he grew up in Trois Rivières and Montreal, his first work experience was a short apprenticeship with cousins in Peacham, Vermont. Years before, while living in Trois Rivières, his elder brother Hezekiel had been given a horse and $5.00 and told to find his relatives in Peacham, travelling in some cases through trackless forest. Hezekiel, who was only twelve, had accomplished this task before Lemuel was born. He had gone on to serve for the colony in the War of 1812, and was now a successful farmer in Rigaud. He was an inspiration and a hard act to follow for the young Lemuel.
Lemuel’s father, Job, moved his family to Montreal when Lemuel was eight, and the story of his brother faded into the background as he learned his new life. It was not until his father died seven years later that he considered following his brother’s path and travelled to Peacham to learn the lessons that had served his brother so well. His stay was short, because many young men were leaving Vermont to find work in the rapidly developing Ottawa Valley. Within a year, he was headed back north and facing a new challenge.
In Chatham, Lemuel soon found work in lumbering, and within a short time saw an angle that would allow him to work as a middleman. He managed to parlay his profits into a stable business, and was among the most important citizens in Chatham by the time he was 25 years old. To accomplish this task, he traded in shillings, louis, dollars, promissory notes and barter, purchasing and selling in Montreal and wherever else he could while keeping inventory in those pre-electronic days with only well organized, hand-written ledgers. His store, built in stone somewhere between the late 1820s and the mid 1830s, survives today. Lemuel married Catherine Hutchins of Lachute in 1836, just before the ‘Troubles.’ The Troubles of 1837 and 1838, also called the Patriot Rebellion and the 1837 Insurrection, are much romanticized today, but at the time they tore society apart, especially in rural areas where the issues were often interpreted around local divisions, pitting the French inhabitants of the seigneuries against English and other immigrant homesteaders. Cushing supplied arms for a militia and led a party of men to St. Eustache, where they saw action in the aftermath of the uprising, stopping rowdy armed men from pillaging, and saving the local records at St. Benoit. Dependent upon good, clear ledgers, it is not surprising that Cushing could appreciate the value of the registry of documents.
The Cushing family boasted a military tradition on both sides of the border. His grandfather, Job Cushing II, rose to the rank of Colonel in the American War of Independence, and fortuitously passed away before his grandson, Lemuel’s brother, fought the Americans in the War of 1812. Lemuel’s role in the Patriot Rebellion would have given him pause. The patriots, after all, were inspired in large part by Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers of the United States. While he had served with Benedict Arnold, Colonel Cushing had not joined Arnold when the latter changed sides. In fact, it is altogether curious that an American war hero of that time would choose to retire in a British Colony. Lemuel could speculate on why his grandfather had left the United States. His uncle Elmer, the most colourful family member at the time, could well have been the cause.
Elmer Cushing came to Montreal, not as a Loyalist, but more as a young man seeking opportunity. Montreal was a boomtown in the period after American Independence. This was the time that Molson’s Brewery and other all Canadian enterprises began, and the city, flooded with immigrants, many from the United States, was rapidly growing and changing to fulfill its new role as the largest British city in North America. Elmer set up a hostel called the American Coffee House. While he had some success with it, he soon found that he had grown too fast, and was in debt to what he called the ‘Gentlemen of the City.’ Around this same time, he received a visitor, a man named David Mc’Lane. Mc’Lane was an American who solicited Elmer Cushing’s cooperation to set up a safe house for an advance party who declared that they intended to recapture the colony for France.
From Mc’Lane’s point of view, Cushing must have looked like a fair bet. He was an American, son of a hero of the War of Independence, the American Revolutionary War, and could well have been judged a sympathizer with such an American-French plot. He was down on his luck, being seriously in debt to members of the British elite, and owned an establishment called the American Coffee House. Mc’Lane was wrong. Was David Mc’Lane really a spy, sent to prepare for an invasion, or was he just a big talker? The invasion never happened. Is it because the Colonial authorities were tipped off? Was it nipped in the bud, or did Mc’Lane fall victim to a very nervous and paranoid administration?
Cushing lost the American Coffee House to his creditors, but in a peculiar twist the Colonial authority awarded him Shipton Township, an area of 58,692 acres. Was it compensation for service to the Crown in turning in a spy?
***
While the Cushing name does not appear on the passenger list of the famous Mayflower voyage of 1620, the family, including 5 children, moved from Hingham, Norfolk, England in 1638, and all ended their lives in Hingham, Plymouth, Massachusetts. The coincidence of the Hingham place-name suggests they had a strong influence, and the Cushing name has risen to prominence many times throughout American history. Lemuel Cushing, for whom Cushing, Quebec is named, was one of these Cushings of stature, but how his branch of the family became Canadian is a murkier story.
During the American War of Independence, Job Cushing II, Lemuel’s grandfather, was recognised as a war hero, retiring as a colonel. After the war, in 1792, his son Elmer, Lemuel’s uncle, founded a hostel in Montreal. Called the American Coffee House, it was initially very successful, but due to a fire, by 1797 his establishment was seriously in debt and he was teetering on the verge of financial ruin. It was at this time that one of his hostel guests, David Mc’Lane, confided in him the details of a plot organised in the United States and backed by France to invade and recapture New France.
The English business elite at that time had no idea how French Canadians would react to such an invasion, and they lived in an atmosphere of fear and insecurity. The rebels who led the American War of Independence had already tried to capture Canada, and that without the French flag waving at the head of their troops. To add to their concerns, the French were actively trying to get Louisiana back from the Spanish, and were supporting Jefferson for President with the understanding that the Americans would help them invade and retake New France. Stephen Sewell, the younger brother of the Attorney General, Jonathan Sewell, was convinced that Citizen Pierre-Auguste Adet, the French representative to the American government, had already secretly visited Montreal in preparation for the eventual invasion.
Looking back, it is possible that Mc’Lane was associated with people who were planning an invasion, but it is also possible that he was just a braggart. In his memoirs published in Stanstead in 1826, Elmer Cushing went to great lengths to explain that he would not participate in any such scheme, and declared that he told Mc’Lane so right up front. He records a long, chiding speech that he made to Mc’Lane, pointed enough to warn Mc’Lane to get out of the colony if he really was an agent of an organised movement.
When Elmer Cushing sought out Stephen Sewell to tell him about Mc’Lane, Sewell took the story very seriously. Sewell’s older brother Jonathan, the Attorney General, was also the chief prosecutor. While his legal work has been highly praised in most cases, and he is credited with reducing the incidence of capital punishment, in the case of Mc’Lane, he acted vigorously, not simply to get a conviction, but to make a public example of the would-be traitor. Leading up to the trial in Quebec City in July, 1797, Sewell and the authorities were dealing with riots over a law that obliged the Canadiens to contribute their time, equipment and teams of horses towards the construction of roads. Also, they were refusing to join militias for fear of being posted far from home. With these tensions and the talk of spies and an imminent invasion, someone like Mc’Lane, with no family or community to rally to his cause locally, was the perfect scapegoat. A conviction would allow the authorities to demonstrate what they could do if people did not fall into line.
William Barnard and John Black came forward as witnesses for the Crown. Barnard testified under oath that he had met Mc’Lane in Vermont, and later in Montreal, and that Mc’Lane had admitted that he wanted to promote revolution in Canada. Black, a ship’s carpenter who was also a member of the House of Assembly, arranged for the authorities arrest Mc’Lane at Black’s house, and testified that Mc’Lane had solicited him to join in a coup.
No associated rebels were found. Two novice lawyers were appointed to defend Mc’Lane, who pled his innocence, and when he was found guilty of high treason, they petitioned the court to have the ruling overturned because he was not a citizen, and therefore could not be a traitor. Chief Justice William Osgoode rejected the petition and sentenced Mc’Lane to be publicly disembowelled while still alive and hung until dead. Luckily for Mc’Lane, he was hung first.
The action sent a chill through society and was written up in the United States as an example of British cruelty and injustice, but the American government did not protest. In discreet recognition of their loyalty, John Black was awarded 53,000 acres in Dorset Township, William Barnard, 40,200 acres in Brompton, and Elmer Cushing 58,692 acres in Shipton Township.
It was during this period that Colonel Job Cushing and Elmer’s brother, Job the third, moved to Canada. Could they have moved to stand with Elmer during these difficult times? Job III tried to work with his brother in Shipton, but soon returned to be with his father in Trois Rivières. It was there that his sons Ezekiel and Lemuel were born.
Although he lost the American Coffee House to creditors, Elmer Cushing had proven his loyalty to the British Crown and been rewarded, but the story haunted Cushing even as he wrote his memoirs decades later. His nephews, Ezekiel and Lemuel, did not seek a future in Shipton Township.
***
When Lemuel Cushing acquired the right to have a post office in his store in Chatham in 1841, he was 35 years old, and he and Catherine Hutchins, originally of Lachute, had yet to celebrate their 5th wedding anniversary. Eventually they would have 13 children, including 8 sons.
The 1840s were a period of growth for the region, and Cushing, young, dynamic and cautious, was well positioned to appreciate it and take full advantage of the opportunities. He was a councillor, mayor of the township and county warden as well as a very successful merchant and businessman. He was probably among the first to recognise the potential and importance of tourism, and became interested in Caledonia Springs, a natural salt-water source in Prescott County, across the Ottawa River. As early as 1835, he bought land and built a hotel there, called Canada House, which he subsequently sold to William Parker. The original hotel was destroyed by fire soon after, and Parker built a larger one with the same name. Even though Parker sold land to raise money, Cushing must have stayed involved at some level, because by 1866, the property was acquired by the Caledonia Springs Hotel Company, of which Cushing was the most important shareholder. Caledonia Springs was a destination of choice during this period, and the developer counted among his clients Peter McGill and John Sandfield MacDonald, the lawyer who would become premier of the province of Ontario, as well as members of the Legislative Assemblies of both Lower and Upper Canada.
Lemuel Cushing’s name also figures in the list of patent letters issued for 200 acres of land in Chatham County, meaning that he acquired this parcel from the Crown. He bought and sold goods, maintaining a dock on the Ottawa, probably at Carillon, and a home on Metcalfe Street, Montreal, in order to give himself the best access to the markets. Goods and products coming in and going out of the Chatham area were transported by water when the river was not frozen over, and that meant that it was hard to get goods, not just to and from Chatham, but also to and from Montreal. Cushing would have been very aware of this problem, and like many men of his calibre, would have watched the development of the railroad with great interest. The Montreal Board of Trade in the 1840s entertained proposals from a number of coastal cities hoping to become its winter port. Among the contenders were a group that proposed a rail line from Quebec City to Halifax and two American groups, one from Portland, Maine and the other from Boston, Massachusetts. The lower colonies offered free land and petitioned the British Government to build their rail link, entirely in the British territories, but the British could not see the importance, so the real rivalry rapidly fell to Boston and Portland. In fact, Boston was on the verge of signing an understanding when an enterprising lawyer named John Poor, who was promoting the Portland route, heard that the decision would be taken at the Board of Trade meeting in Montreal on Monday, February 10th, 1845. He was in Portland in the middle of a blizzard on Tuesday evening the 4th, and he knew that his whole venture and the economy of Portland depended upon his presenting his option to the Board. In ideal conditions, he could have hired a sleigh and, with changes of horses, made it to Montreal in 30 hours, but under the circumstances, he had difficulty even finding a driver. He ventured out on his own to evaluate the possibility of making the trip and discovered fierce winds, hail and huge drifts of snow interspaced with glare ice. Undaunted, before sunrise he had found a driver, and they ventured north. The story of his trip is one of the great snow stories of the time. He lost his way 5 times in the storm-ravaged countryside, changed horses, drivers and sleighs, climbed 45 degree snow banks with the assistance of local young men and teams of horses in towns that he passed through, and successfully covered the distance in 5 days, or 123 hours, instead of the usual day-and-a-half. Arriving in Montreal at 5:30 AM Monday the 10th, he slept for 3 hours before meeting with the Board of Trade and convincing them to postpone their decision to sign with his rivals.
An agreement was forged whereby a steamer would drop mail at Portland and Boston, for transfer overland to Montreal. Teams were set up along the route to assist both couriers, but the mail arrived from Portland in 12 hours less time than the mail from Boston. The distance from Portland was 246 miles, and from Boston, 351. Mr. Poor’s proposal carried the day, and the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railway was established, leasing its services to the Grand Trunk in 1853.
The Grand Trunk was incorporated in 1852, and Lemuel Cushing would certainly have been among its supporters, and likely a founding shareholder. By 1859, he had acquired a large island in Casco Bay, Portland, called Bangs Island. It is impossible to know whether he knew that Ezekiel Cushing, a distant ancestor, had sold the island to Joshua Bangs in 1760, but he soon changed its name back, and today it is called Cushing Island. Following through with his interest in tourism, he built the Ottawa House Hostel on the island. His son, Francis Cushing, would convert the island to a vacation colony, hiring Frederick Law Olmstead, the same man who designed Mount Royal Park in Montreal and Central Park in New York, to landscape it. He also rebuilt the Ottawa House in 1888.
James Brock Cushing, Lemuel’s eldest son, took over responsibility for the Cushing Post Office and store, and rose to inherit many of his father’s other responsibilities and titles, becoming Justice of the Peace, and eventually Colonel of the Militia.
The next postmaster of Cushing was Thomas Weir, and the post office closed when he retired in 1915. Ninety-one years later, the name Cushing persists, and the Commission de Toponymie describes it as a ‘hameau’ in the municipality of Brownsburg-Chatham. Hameau translates as hamlet, and one definition of a hamlet is a village without a church of its own, but belonging to another village or town. This fits well with Cushing today, but when Lemuel still lived there, he was a stalwart supporter of St. Mungos Presbyterian Church, where he was finally laid to rest in 1875.
References include “An Appeal Addressed to a Candid Public….” By Elmer Cushing, printed in Stanstead in 1826, among others.
Lemuel’s father, Job, moved his family to Montreal when Lemuel was eight, and the story of his brother faded into the background as he learned his new life. It was not until his father died seven years later that he considered following his brother’s path and travelled to Peacham to learn the lessons that had served his brother so well. His stay was short, because many young men were leaving Vermont to find work in the rapidly developing Ottawa Valley. Within a year, he was headed back north and facing a new challenge.
In Chatham, Lemuel soon found work in lumbering, and within a short time saw an angle that would allow him to work as a middleman. He managed to parlay his profits into a stable business, and was among the most important citizens in Chatham by the time he was 25 years old. To accomplish this task, he traded in shillings, louis, dollars, promissory notes and barter, purchasing and selling in Montreal and wherever else he could while keeping inventory in those pre-electronic days with only well organized, hand-written ledgers. His store, built in stone somewhere between the late 1820s and the mid 1830s, survives today. Lemuel married Catherine Hutchins of Lachute in 1836, just before the ‘Troubles.’ The Troubles of 1837 and 1838, also called the Patriot Rebellion and the 1837 Insurrection, are much romanticized today, but at the time they tore society apart, especially in rural areas where the issues were often interpreted around local divisions, pitting the French inhabitants of the seigneuries against English and other immigrant homesteaders. Cushing supplied arms for a militia and led a party of men to St. Eustache, where they saw action in the aftermath of the uprising, stopping rowdy armed men from pillaging, and saving the local records at St. Benoit. Dependent upon good, clear ledgers, it is not surprising that Cushing could appreciate the value of the registry of documents.
The Cushing family boasted a military tradition on both sides of the border. His grandfather, Job Cushing II, rose to the rank of Colonel in the American War of Independence, and fortuitously passed away before his grandson, Lemuel’s brother, fought the Americans in the War of 1812. Lemuel’s role in the Patriot Rebellion would have given him pause. The patriots, after all, were inspired in large part by Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers of the United States. While he had served with Benedict Arnold, Colonel Cushing had not joined Arnold when the latter changed sides. In fact, it is altogether curious that an American war hero of that time would choose to retire in a British Colony. Lemuel could speculate on why his grandfather had left the United States. His uncle Elmer, the most colourful family member at the time, could well have been the cause.
Elmer Cushing came to Montreal, not as a Loyalist, but more as a young man seeking opportunity. Montreal was a boomtown in the period after American Independence. This was the time that Molson’s Brewery and other all Canadian enterprises began, and the city, flooded with immigrants, many from the United States, was rapidly growing and changing to fulfill its new role as the largest British city in North America. Elmer set up a hostel called the American Coffee House. While he had some success with it, he soon found that he had grown too fast, and was in debt to what he called the ‘Gentlemen of the City.’ Around this same time, he received a visitor, a man named David Mc’Lane. Mc’Lane was an American who solicited Elmer Cushing’s cooperation to set up a safe house for an advance party who declared that they intended to recapture the colony for France.
From Mc’Lane’s point of view, Cushing must have looked like a fair bet. He was an American, son of a hero of the War of Independence, the American Revolutionary War, and could well have been judged a sympathizer with such an American-French plot. He was down on his luck, being seriously in debt to members of the British elite, and owned an establishment called the American Coffee House. Mc’Lane was wrong. Was David Mc’Lane really a spy, sent to prepare for an invasion, or was he just a big talker? The invasion never happened. Is it because the Colonial authorities were tipped off? Was it nipped in the bud, or did Mc’Lane fall victim to a very nervous and paranoid administration?
Cushing lost the American Coffee House to his creditors, but in a peculiar twist the Colonial authority awarded him Shipton Township, an area of 58,692 acres. Was it compensation for service to the Crown in turning in a spy?
***
While the Cushing name does not appear on the passenger list of the famous Mayflower voyage of 1620, the family, including 5 children, moved from Hingham, Norfolk, England in 1638, and all ended their lives in Hingham, Plymouth, Massachusetts. The coincidence of the Hingham place-name suggests they had a strong influence, and the Cushing name has risen to prominence many times throughout American history. Lemuel Cushing, for whom Cushing, Quebec is named, was one of these Cushings of stature, but how his branch of the family became Canadian is a murkier story.
During the American War of Independence, Job Cushing II, Lemuel’s grandfather, was recognised as a war hero, retiring as a colonel. After the war, in 1792, his son Elmer, Lemuel’s uncle, founded a hostel in Montreal. Called the American Coffee House, it was initially very successful, but due to a fire, by 1797 his establishment was seriously in debt and he was teetering on the verge of financial ruin. It was at this time that one of his hostel guests, David Mc’Lane, confided in him the details of a plot organised in the United States and backed by France to invade and recapture New France.
The English business elite at that time had no idea how French Canadians would react to such an invasion, and they lived in an atmosphere of fear and insecurity. The rebels who led the American War of Independence had already tried to capture Canada, and that without the French flag waving at the head of their troops. To add to their concerns, the French were actively trying to get Louisiana back from the Spanish, and were supporting Jefferson for President with the understanding that the Americans would help them invade and retake New France. Stephen Sewell, the younger brother of the Attorney General, Jonathan Sewell, was convinced that Citizen Pierre-Auguste Adet, the French representative to the American government, had already secretly visited Montreal in preparation for the eventual invasion.
Looking back, it is possible that Mc’Lane was associated with people who were planning an invasion, but it is also possible that he was just a braggart. In his memoirs published in Stanstead in 1826, Elmer Cushing went to great lengths to explain that he would not participate in any such scheme, and declared that he told Mc’Lane so right up front. He records a long, chiding speech that he made to Mc’Lane, pointed enough to warn Mc’Lane to get out of the colony if he really was an agent of an organised movement.
When Elmer Cushing sought out Stephen Sewell to tell him about Mc’Lane, Sewell took the story very seriously. Sewell’s older brother Jonathan, the Attorney General, was also the chief prosecutor. While his legal work has been highly praised in most cases, and he is credited with reducing the incidence of capital punishment, in the case of Mc’Lane, he acted vigorously, not simply to get a conviction, but to make a public example of the would-be traitor. Leading up to the trial in Quebec City in July, 1797, Sewell and the authorities were dealing with riots over a law that obliged the Canadiens to contribute their time, equipment and teams of horses towards the construction of roads. Also, they were refusing to join militias for fear of being posted far from home. With these tensions and the talk of spies and an imminent invasion, someone like Mc’Lane, with no family or community to rally to his cause locally, was the perfect scapegoat. A conviction would allow the authorities to demonstrate what they could do if people did not fall into line.
William Barnard and John Black came forward as witnesses for the Crown. Barnard testified under oath that he had met Mc’Lane in Vermont, and later in Montreal, and that Mc’Lane had admitted that he wanted to promote revolution in Canada. Black, a ship’s carpenter who was also a member of the House of Assembly, arranged for the authorities arrest Mc’Lane at Black’s house, and testified that Mc’Lane had solicited him to join in a coup.
No associated rebels were found. Two novice lawyers were appointed to defend Mc’Lane, who pled his innocence, and when he was found guilty of high treason, they petitioned the court to have the ruling overturned because he was not a citizen, and therefore could not be a traitor. Chief Justice William Osgoode rejected the petition and sentenced Mc’Lane to be publicly disembowelled while still alive and hung until dead. Luckily for Mc’Lane, he was hung first.
The action sent a chill through society and was written up in the United States as an example of British cruelty and injustice, but the American government did not protest. In discreet recognition of their loyalty, John Black was awarded 53,000 acres in Dorset Township, William Barnard, 40,200 acres in Brompton, and Elmer Cushing 58,692 acres in Shipton Township.
It was during this period that Colonel Job Cushing and Elmer’s brother, Job the third, moved to Canada. Could they have moved to stand with Elmer during these difficult times? Job III tried to work with his brother in Shipton, but soon returned to be with his father in Trois Rivières. It was there that his sons Ezekiel and Lemuel were born.
Although he lost the American Coffee House to creditors, Elmer Cushing had proven his loyalty to the British Crown and been rewarded, but the story haunted Cushing even as he wrote his memoirs decades later. His nephews, Ezekiel and Lemuel, did not seek a future in Shipton Township.
***
When Lemuel Cushing acquired the right to have a post office in his store in Chatham in 1841, he was 35 years old, and he and Catherine Hutchins, originally of Lachute, had yet to celebrate their 5th wedding anniversary. Eventually they would have 13 children, including 8 sons.
The 1840s were a period of growth for the region, and Cushing, young, dynamic and cautious, was well positioned to appreciate it and take full advantage of the opportunities. He was a councillor, mayor of the township and county warden as well as a very successful merchant and businessman. He was probably among the first to recognise the potential and importance of tourism, and became interested in Caledonia Springs, a natural salt-water source in Prescott County, across the Ottawa River. As early as 1835, he bought land and built a hotel there, called Canada House, which he subsequently sold to William Parker. The original hotel was destroyed by fire soon after, and Parker built a larger one with the same name. Even though Parker sold land to raise money, Cushing must have stayed involved at some level, because by 1866, the property was acquired by the Caledonia Springs Hotel Company, of which Cushing was the most important shareholder. Caledonia Springs was a destination of choice during this period, and the developer counted among his clients Peter McGill and John Sandfield MacDonald, the lawyer who would become premier of the province of Ontario, as well as members of the Legislative Assemblies of both Lower and Upper Canada.
Lemuel Cushing’s name also figures in the list of patent letters issued for 200 acres of land in Chatham County, meaning that he acquired this parcel from the Crown. He bought and sold goods, maintaining a dock on the Ottawa, probably at Carillon, and a home on Metcalfe Street, Montreal, in order to give himself the best access to the markets. Goods and products coming in and going out of the Chatham area were transported by water when the river was not frozen over, and that meant that it was hard to get goods, not just to and from Chatham, but also to and from Montreal. Cushing would have been very aware of this problem, and like many men of his calibre, would have watched the development of the railroad with great interest. The Montreal Board of Trade in the 1840s entertained proposals from a number of coastal cities hoping to become its winter port. Among the contenders were a group that proposed a rail line from Quebec City to Halifax and two American groups, one from Portland, Maine and the other from Boston, Massachusetts. The lower colonies offered free land and petitioned the British Government to build their rail link, entirely in the British territories, but the British could not see the importance, so the real rivalry rapidly fell to Boston and Portland. In fact, Boston was on the verge of signing an understanding when an enterprising lawyer named John Poor, who was promoting the Portland route, heard that the decision would be taken at the Board of Trade meeting in Montreal on Monday, February 10th, 1845. He was in Portland in the middle of a blizzard on Tuesday evening the 4th, and he knew that his whole venture and the economy of Portland depended upon his presenting his option to the Board. In ideal conditions, he could have hired a sleigh and, with changes of horses, made it to Montreal in 30 hours, but under the circumstances, he had difficulty even finding a driver. He ventured out on his own to evaluate the possibility of making the trip and discovered fierce winds, hail and huge drifts of snow interspaced with glare ice. Undaunted, before sunrise he had found a driver, and they ventured north. The story of his trip is one of the great snow stories of the time. He lost his way 5 times in the storm-ravaged countryside, changed horses, drivers and sleighs, climbed 45 degree snow banks with the assistance of local young men and teams of horses in towns that he passed through, and successfully covered the distance in 5 days, or 123 hours, instead of the usual day-and-a-half. Arriving in Montreal at 5:30 AM Monday the 10th, he slept for 3 hours before meeting with the Board of Trade and convincing them to postpone their decision to sign with his rivals.
An agreement was forged whereby a steamer would drop mail at Portland and Boston, for transfer overland to Montreal. Teams were set up along the route to assist both couriers, but the mail arrived from Portland in 12 hours less time than the mail from Boston. The distance from Portland was 246 miles, and from Boston, 351. Mr. Poor’s proposal carried the day, and the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railway was established, leasing its services to the Grand Trunk in 1853.
The Grand Trunk was incorporated in 1852, and Lemuel Cushing would certainly have been among its supporters, and likely a founding shareholder. By 1859, he had acquired a large island in Casco Bay, Portland, called Bangs Island. It is impossible to know whether he knew that Ezekiel Cushing, a distant ancestor, had sold the island to Joshua Bangs in 1760, but he soon changed its name back, and today it is called Cushing Island. Following through with his interest in tourism, he built the Ottawa House Hostel on the island. His son, Francis Cushing, would convert the island to a vacation colony, hiring Frederick Law Olmstead, the same man who designed Mount Royal Park in Montreal and Central Park in New York, to landscape it. He also rebuilt the Ottawa House in 1888.
James Brock Cushing, Lemuel’s eldest son, took over responsibility for the Cushing Post Office and store, and rose to inherit many of his father’s other responsibilities and titles, becoming Justice of the Peace, and eventually Colonel of the Militia.
The next postmaster of Cushing was Thomas Weir, and the post office closed when he retired in 1915. Ninety-one years later, the name Cushing persists, and the Commission de Toponymie describes it as a ‘hameau’ in the municipality of Brownsburg-Chatham. Hameau translates as hamlet, and one definition of a hamlet is a village without a church of its own, but belonging to another village or town. This fits well with Cushing today, but when Lemuel still lived there, he was a stalwart supporter of St. Mungos Presbyterian Church, where he was finally laid to rest in 1875.
References include “An Appeal Addressed to a Candid Public….” By Elmer Cushing, printed in Stanstead in 1826, among others.
Christieville
In the late 1870′s the Laurentians was experiencing a period of growth and prosperity. A Canadian currency had been created, successfully stabilizing trade, and the railway era was in full swing. As a result, lumber was becoming a more important product along the routes serviced by rail. Up until the trains arrived, the lumber industry was more dependent upon the river systems, and that meant that the forests further away were in less demand. Since it was uneconomical to transport lumber from where there were no river or rail links, the trees were burned and the ashes, transformed into potash, were carried out for sale.
The Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa and Occidental Railway arrived in St. Jerome in 1875. The railway terminus enabled the surrounding countryside to grow, allowing exports of sawn wood. It also left the rivers free to power the mills. A typical mill had a waterwheel that supplied as much as 100 horsepower, dependent upon a seasonally fluctuating flow of water, but this horsepower could be the backbone of a community, allowing dozens of families to make a living, firstly working the mill, secondly, lumber jacking to supply it and thirdly, supplying the first two groups with their needs.
In 1878 the Conservative party was re-elected in Ottawa, after four years in opposition, and John A MacDonald, its leader, had to find a seat through a by-election. He found it in Victoria, B.C. Henri-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière was elected Québec’s premier, head of a weak Liberal government. He lost a vote of non-confidence a year later after the opposition leader Adolphe Chapleau courted several of his members away.
Elsewhere, Gilbert and Sullivan auditioned the H.M.S. Pinafore and Karl Benz, the inventor of the motor car, built a motorized tricycle with a top speed of 7 miles per hour. This was the time of Rodin, Renoir and Cézanne. Ibsen, R.L. Stevenson and Dostoevsky were producing their great works. The three-year period commencing in 1878 saw the first large-scale skiing contest in Norway, the invention of Bingo, the electro-static generator and the microphone, the manufacture of the first bicycles in America, the development of the first practical domestic light bulbs, the first repeater rifle, and Pasteur’s discovery of a cholera vaccine. It was an age of optimism and growth. It was the golden age of the British Empire, the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria and a period of rapid scientific development.
In a corner of Morin Township where the Campbells, Hammonds, Newtons and Davis’s had homesteaded, the Hammonds and Davis’s accepted the Christie brothers, David and Ebenezer into their fold, both through marriage. These two brothers, entrepreneurs and promoters, soon became synonymous with this corner of Morin Township, and it became known as Christieville. They controlled the lumber trade and converted the gristmill to a sawmill. They took advantage of the latest technologies and transport links and contributed to the growth of a thriving agricultural and lumbering community.
Most of the English-speaking settlers in this region were of Irish and Scottish descent, and the Christie name, while reputedly Irish, was not to be confused with Dr. Thomas Christie, Member of Parliament for Argenteuil from 1875 to 1880 and again from 1891 to1895, and resident of Lachute. While the Commission de la Toponymie proposes that Christieville is named for him, it seems that the evidence is stronger in favour of the Christie brothers.
Unknown to the Christie brothers, living, as they were, on the frontiers of civilisation, history was just about to turn a page. That same three-year period saw the births of Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, George Elliot (Mary Ann Evans), Upton Sinclair, Albert Einstein, Douglas MacArthur and Lord Beaverbrook.
Today, there are no Christies listed in the phonebook in Christieville. None of the Christies in the general area profess connection to David or Ebenezer. The neighbourhood is part of the municipality of Morin Heights and seems destined to lose its distinctive identity, just as it has lost the thread of its original namesakes.
Thanks to Sandra Stock of the Morin Heights Historical Association and Bob Murray of Montfort
The Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa and Occidental Railway arrived in St. Jerome in 1875. The railway terminus enabled the surrounding countryside to grow, allowing exports of sawn wood. It also left the rivers free to power the mills. A typical mill had a waterwheel that supplied as much as 100 horsepower, dependent upon a seasonally fluctuating flow of water, but this horsepower could be the backbone of a community, allowing dozens of families to make a living, firstly working the mill, secondly, lumber jacking to supply it and thirdly, supplying the first two groups with their needs.
In 1878 the Conservative party was re-elected in Ottawa, after four years in opposition, and John A MacDonald, its leader, had to find a seat through a by-election. He found it in Victoria, B.C. Henri-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière was elected Québec’s premier, head of a weak Liberal government. He lost a vote of non-confidence a year later after the opposition leader Adolphe Chapleau courted several of his members away.
Elsewhere, Gilbert and Sullivan auditioned the H.M.S. Pinafore and Karl Benz, the inventor of the motor car, built a motorized tricycle with a top speed of 7 miles per hour. This was the time of Rodin, Renoir and Cézanne. Ibsen, R.L. Stevenson and Dostoevsky were producing their great works. The three-year period commencing in 1878 saw the first large-scale skiing contest in Norway, the invention of Bingo, the electro-static generator and the microphone, the manufacture of the first bicycles in America, the development of the first practical domestic light bulbs, the first repeater rifle, and Pasteur’s discovery of a cholera vaccine. It was an age of optimism and growth. It was the golden age of the British Empire, the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria and a period of rapid scientific development.
In a corner of Morin Township where the Campbells, Hammonds, Newtons and Davis’s had homesteaded, the Hammonds and Davis’s accepted the Christie brothers, David and Ebenezer into their fold, both through marriage. These two brothers, entrepreneurs and promoters, soon became synonymous with this corner of Morin Township, and it became known as Christieville. They controlled the lumber trade and converted the gristmill to a sawmill. They took advantage of the latest technologies and transport links and contributed to the growth of a thriving agricultural and lumbering community.
Most of the English-speaking settlers in this region were of Irish and Scottish descent, and the Christie name, while reputedly Irish, was not to be confused with Dr. Thomas Christie, Member of Parliament for Argenteuil from 1875 to 1880 and again from 1891 to1895, and resident of Lachute. While the Commission de la Toponymie proposes that Christieville is named for him, it seems that the evidence is stronger in favour of the Christie brothers.
Unknown to the Christie brothers, living, as they were, on the frontiers of civilisation, history was just about to turn a page. That same three-year period saw the births of Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, George Elliot (Mary Ann Evans), Upton Sinclair, Albert Einstein, Douglas MacArthur and Lord Beaverbrook.
Today, there are no Christies listed in the phonebook in Christieville. None of the Christies in the general area profess connection to David or Ebenezer. The neighbourhood is part of the municipality of Morin Heights and seems destined to lose its distinctive identity, just as it has lost the thread of its original namesakes.
Thanks to Sandra Stock of the Morin Heights Historical Association and Bob Murray of Montfort
Brownsburg
The 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
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
Beaven Lake
Unlike most immigrants of his time, Stephen Jakes Beaven integrated as much into the Indian world as the colonial one. Born in England in 1799, he and his family came first to Montreal, where his father set up a ropewalk, a business that manufactured rope, so called because of a technique still in use elsewhere today. It involves walking backwards away from a large wheel that feeds the cords out while making sure the strands twine together and the tension is right. Stephen senior was clearly mechanically adept. He was subsequently hired to build a gristmill in Belleville, in Upper Canada, a move that would have a huge impact on his son’s future. Once the mill was finished, he got caught in the mechanism and was killed.
The records do not mention any other children or any of the female side of the Beaven family, and there are no Beavens listed as living in Belleville today. In the early days of Belleville, there was a band of the Mississauga Nation, an Algonquin people, living there. The Mississauga would have represented an important percentage of the population, and Stephen Jakes must have interacted very early in his life with them, learning an Algonkian dialect. He drifted away from the mechanical vocation of his father, and hired on with the Hudson’s Bay Company as an interpreter, quickly learning to appreciate the potential for profits in the fur trade. Before long, he left the company, hunting, trapping and trading for his own account in the Ottawa Valley. He was said to have known every lake and stream, and his best recorded year, working with a partner, he killed 180 deer and 40 beaver.
Beaven (also recorded as Bevin and Bevan), was, according to Cyrus Thomas writing in the 1890s, “…more generally regarded as belonging to the red men than to the Anglo-Saxon race.” At the time that Sidney Bellingham established the Township of Arundel in 1857, this would have been a convenient way of dismissing any title claims from someone like Beaven, who settled before titles had been established. The colonial attitude disinherited virtually all of the First Nations’ claims to their lands, right across the continent, but the Beaven name endured and is present elsewhere in the Arundel township records, suggesting that his family adapted well enough to the changes that settlement brought.
Stephen Jakes was twenty-three when he first established himself on the Rouge River, building a cabin and a storehouse at the stream joining Beaven Lake to the Rouge, well-located below the rapids at a wide turn in the river. The Algonquin came down the Rouge to trade, so he would have had to keep his storehouse supplied with items of exchange. It is intriguing to imagine what the area was like then. Surrounded by tall, quiet forests, dependent on the river for transport and drinking water, the natural bounty could easily have supplied basic needs. From our perspective, it was idyllic. Beaven would have had to return regularly to Lachute and stock up on trade items. Such a trip would be well planned and take a long time. Some supplies would have to be ordered from Montreal, to be delivered to Lachute by boat. Given the distances and the lack of facilities, it is possible that he did not actually live at his idyllic trading post, but arrived with supplies in anticipation of the Algonquin coming down the river. However, if he had really become more of an Algonquin than an Anglo-Saxon, it is plausible that he and his family lived in solitude in that beautiful countryside and that he left on trading trips, leaving his family to fend for themselves until he returned. Even though no mention is made of a spouse, he had five sons and a daughter. It is intriguing to think that his spouse may have been Algonquin, but whatever her origin, she would have had to be as well adapted as he was.
When George Allbright and his team of surveyors began their work in the 1850s, it must have changed the world that Beaven lived in. Thirty-five years of a life of solitude and routine would have been shattered. Questions of title, competition and the company of ‘Anglo-Saxons’ would have seriously altered his relationship, not just with the Algonquin, but with nature itself. Once the first settler, William Thomson, arrived in 1857, the historical record no longer talks about a trading post. Instead, Thomson became the postmaster. More settlers arrived the next year, and the tall, pristine forests fell to the axe.
The name Stephen J. Beaven shows up in the land registry as acquiring a 100-acre lot near Beaven Lake in 1865, but far from where his trading post would have been. He was sixty-six years old then, a little beyond the age of homesteading, and the name Stephen I. Beaven is registered as acquiring the lot next door 10 years later. Cyrus Thomas recorded that Stephen Jakes Beaven died in Arundel while living with his son George in 1886. He was 87 years old.
Whether or not the settlers respected Beaven’s land title, the legends of the man, the trader, and his life on Beaven Creek inspired their respect. His name lives on in Beaven Lake and his memory forms an integral part of Arundel and its history. As Cyrus Thomas put it, “Thus it will be seen, this lake and its outlet form a lasting memorial of the old hunter who lived so long upon their shores.”
The records do not mention any other children or any of the female side of the Beaven family, and there are no Beavens listed as living in Belleville today. In the early days of Belleville, there was a band of the Mississauga Nation, an Algonquin people, living there. The Mississauga would have represented an important percentage of the population, and Stephen Jakes must have interacted very early in his life with them, learning an Algonkian dialect. He drifted away from the mechanical vocation of his father, and hired on with the Hudson’s Bay Company as an interpreter, quickly learning to appreciate the potential for profits in the fur trade. Before long, he left the company, hunting, trapping and trading for his own account in the Ottawa Valley. He was said to have known every lake and stream, and his best recorded year, working with a partner, he killed 180 deer and 40 beaver.
Beaven (also recorded as Bevin and Bevan), was, according to Cyrus Thomas writing in the 1890s, “…more generally regarded as belonging to the red men than to the Anglo-Saxon race.” At the time that Sidney Bellingham established the Township of Arundel in 1857, this would have been a convenient way of dismissing any title claims from someone like Beaven, who settled before titles had been established. The colonial attitude disinherited virtually all of the First Nations’ claims to their lands, right across the continent, but the Beaven name endured and is present elsewhere in the Arundel township records, suggesting that his family adapted well enough to the changes that settlement brought.
Stephen Jakes was twenty-three when he first established himself on the Rouge River, building a cabin and a storehouse at the stream joining Beaven Lake to the Rouge, well-located below the rapids at a wide turn in the river. The Algonquin came down the Rouge to trade, so he would have had to keep his storehouse supplied with items of exchange. It is intriguing to imagine what the area was like then. Surrounded by tall, quiet forests, dependent on the river for transport and drinking water, the natural bounty could easily have supplied basic needs. From our perspective, it was idyllic. Beaven would have had to return regularly to Lachute and stock up on trade items. Such a trip would be well planned and take a long time. Some supplies would have to be ordered from Montreal, to be delivered to Lachute by boat. Given the distances and the lack of facilities, it is possible that he did not actually live at his idyllic trading post, but arrived with supplies in anticipation of the Algonquin coming down the river. However, if he had really become more of an Algonquin than an Anglo-Saxon, it is plausible that he and his family lived in solitude in that beautiful countryside and that he left on trading trips, leaving his family to fend for themselves until he returned. Even though no mention is made of a spouse, he had five sons and a daughter. It is intriguing to think that his spouse may have been Algonquin, but whatever her origin, she would have had to be as well adapted as he was.
When George Allbright and his team of surveyors began their work in the 1850s, it must have changed the world that Beaven lived in. Thirty-five years of a life of solitude and routine would have been shattered. Questions of title, competition and the company of ‘Anglo-Saxons’ would have seriously altered his relationship, not just with the Algonquin, but with nature itself. Once the first settler, William Thomson, arrived in 1857, the historical record no longer talks about a trading post. Instead, Thomson became the postmaster. More settlers arrived the next year, and the tall, pristine forests fell to the axe.
The name Stephen J. Beaven shows up in the land registry as acquiring a 100-acre lot near Beaven Lake in 1865, but far from where his trading post would have been. He was sixty-six years old then, a little beyond the age of homesteading, and the name Stephen I. Beaven is registered as acquiring the lot next door 10 years later. Cyrus Thomas recorded that Stephen Jakes Beaven died in Arundel while living with his son George in 1886. He was 87 years old.
Whether or not the settlers respected Beaven’s land title, the legends of the man, the trader, and his life on Beaven Creek inspired their respect. His name lives on in Beaven Lake and his memory forms an integral part of Arundel and its history. As Cyrus Thomas put it, “Thus it will be seen, this lake and its outlet form a lasting memorial of the old hunter who lived so long upon their shores.”
Arundel
William Thomson is credited as the first settler in Arundel, but the Weskarinis had been in the region for hundreds of years, and Stephen Jakes Bevin was already resident. Bevin was a hunter, trapper and fur trader who lived more with the Algonquin and Iroquois than with the Europeans and he had traveled up the Rouge River and set up a fur trade outpost well before the settlers moved in.
Thomson arrived with his wife, Margaret Currie, and their children on a March day in 1857. They spent their first night in a shanty that had been built by the surveyor who had just finished surveying the township. They had acquired 300 acres from the local Member of Parliament, Sidney Bellingham, and Thomson had abandoned a secure career as a teacher in Belle Rivière in the southern Laurentians to become a homesteader. His son William described tying the horses to a tree on that first night, leaving them standing in three feet of snow with very little to eat. He also reported that it was only his father’s “Scotch pride” that kept him from abandoning the whole project and leaving with the survey team the next day. The family stayed on, though, and eventually cleared 75 acres for fields.
While other settlers soon followed Thomson, the man behind the scenes, the real founder of Arundel, was Sidney Robert Bellingham, MP. He was born in County Louth, Ireland, in 1808. At 16 years of age, he left home by himself and came to Montreal where he found a job as an office clerk. At 19, he opened an office for a lumber merchant and 2 years later, in 1831, he went into partnership in an import-export business. During the uprising in 1837, he served as aide-de-camp for an officer in the Royal Montreal Cavalry. He was not the only man eventually associated with Arundel who served the British authority during the uprising; Coral Cooke and Charles Moore, both early settlers in Arundel, also served. Cooke saw action in St. Eustache, one of the hot spots, and Moore was a volunteer. By contrast, Augustin-Norbert Morin in the Eastern Laurentians was more likely to attract Patriotes such as Adolphe Marier who settled in Ste. Agathe in the 1850′s. The Patriotes were the rebels that Bellingham and others had a hand in putting down.
Bellingham returned to studies after the uprising, apprenticing in law, and was called to the Bar in 1840. He worked for the legal office of William Walker, the lawyer who defended one of the most famous Patriotes, Robert Nelson. Bellingham subsequently became the editor of the Canada Times and pursued a career in journalism, which took him into politics. He ran for the Reform Party in 1854 and won for Argenteuil in 1856. He became a Conservative member of the Quebec Assembly in 1867 and held the seat until 1878, when he returned to Ireland.
During this period he actively supported the construction of a railway line that was to run from Montreal to Ottawa, working with two brothers from England named Sikes. One was a mechanical engineer, and, although the project failed, it was through no fault of theirs. They had worked for two years successfully running lines from Carillon to Grenville and were anticipating the arrival of a third brother, a banker from Sikes DeBerg and Company in England, but he never arrived. His ship was lost at sea, and his partner back in England called their loans. Bellingham was among the investors who lost a lot of money, and the only section that was built, the Carillon & Grenville Railway, was sold to the Ottawa River Navigation Company in 1863. Bellingham’s interest in the project was tied to his desire to colonize the northern sector of Argenteuil County and he was successful in this venture despite the loss. He was a highly respected man who was involved in many aspects of Argenteuil’s development including the creation of the Lachute Academy, the funding for the surveying of Arundel Township and the opening of a post office under the name of Fitzalan, although it was soon changed to Arundel. William Thomson operated it, and, once a week, a member of the family would walk the 35 miles to Lachute to deliver and pick up the mail and any other supplies that could be carried back. When the train finally arrived in St. Jovite in the 1890′s, the mail was routed that way, a distance of only 12 miles.
In many cases, we cannot discover who chose the name of a township, or why the particular name was chosen. In the case of Arundel, we know who, but why is not clear. Bellingham apparently chose the name in honour of the Fitzalan family of Arundel Castle in Sussex, England. Why he chose their name instead of his own, or why he chose an English name may have something to do with Catholic solidarity, although the subsequent settlement did not attract people on a religious basis.
In the Laurentians, we pronounce the town aRUNdl, but in Arundel, Sussex, no-one would understand that without listening carefully, because they call it ArunDELL, with the emphasis on the first and last syllables. One Englishman claimed that it’s name comes from the French hirondelle, for swallow, and while their pronunciation is closer to the bird, the given-name Arundel, Arndel and Arnold mean “from the eagle’s dell”, hardly suggesting a songbird.
Thomson arrived with his wife, Margaret Currie, and their children on a March day in 1857. They spent their first night in a shanty that had been built by the surveyor who had just finished surveying the township. They had acquired 300 acres from the local Member of Parliament, Sidney Bellingham, and Thomson had abandoned a secure career as a teacher in Belle Rivière in the southern Laurentians to become a homesteader. His son William described tying the horses to a tree on that first night, leaving them standing in three feet of snow with very little to eat. He also reported that it was only his father’s “Scotch pride” that kept him from abandoning the whole project and leaving with the survey team the next day. The family stayed on, though, and eventually cleared 75 acres for fields.
While other settlers soon followed Thomson, the man behind the scenes, the real founder of Arundel, was Sidney Robert Bellingham, MP. He was born in County Louth, Ireland, in 1808. At 16 years of age, he left home by himself and came to Montreal where he found a job as an office clerk. At 19, he opened an office for a lumber merchant and 2 years later, in 1831, he went into partnership in an import-export business. During the uprising in 1837, he served as aide-de-camp for an officer in the Royal Montreal Cavalry. He was not the only man eventually associated with Arundel who served the British authority during the uprising; Coral Cooke and Charles Moore, both early settlers in Arundel, also served. Cooke saw action in St. Eustache, one of the hot spots, and Moore was a volunteer. By contrast, Augustin-Norbert Morin in the Eastern Laurentians was more likely to attract Patriotes such as Adolphe Marier who settled in Ste. Agathe in the 1850′s. The Patriotes were the rebels that Bellingham and others had a hand in putting down.
Bellingham returned to studies after the uprising, apprenticing in law, and was called to the Bar in 1840. He worked for the legal office of William Walker, the lawyer who defended one of the most famous Patriotes, Robert Nelson. Bellingham subsequently became the editor of the Canada Times and pursued a career in journalism, which took him into politics. He ran for the Reform Party in 1854 and won for Argenteuil in 1856. He became a Conservative member of the Quebec Assembly in 1867 and held the seat until 1878, when he returned to Ireland.
During this period he actively supported the construction of a railway line that was to run from Montreal to Ottawa, working with two brothers from England named Sikes. One was a mechanical engineer, and, although the project failed, it was through no fault of theirs. They had worked for two years successfully running lines from Carillon to Grenville and were anticipating the arrival of a third brother, a banker from Sikes DeBerg and Company in England, but he never arrived. His ship was lost at sea, and his partner back in England called their loans. Bellingham was among the investors who lost a lot of money, and the only section that was built, the Carillon & Grenville Railway, was sold to the Ottawa River Navigation Company in 1863. Bellingham’s interest in the project was tied to his desire to colonize the northern sector of Argenteuil County and he was successful in this venture despite the loss. He was a highly respected man who was involved in many aspects of Argenteuil’s development including the creation of the Lachute Academy, the funding for the surveying of Arundel Township and the opening of a post office under the name of Fitzalan, although it was soon changed to Arundel. William Thomson operated it, and, once a week, a member of the family would walk the 35 miles to Lachute to deliver and pick up the mail and any other supplies that could be carried back. When the train finally arrived in St. Jovite in the 1890′s, the mail was routed that way, a distance of only 12 miles.
In many cases, we cannot discover who chose the name of a township, or why the particular name was chosen. In the case of Arundel, we know who, but why is not clear. Bellingham apparently chose the name in honour of the Fitzalan family of Arundel Castle in Sussex, England. Why he chose their name instead of his own, or why he chose an English name may have something to do with Catholic solidarity, although the subsequent settlement did not attract people on a religious basis.
In the Laurentians, we pronounce the town aRUNdl, but in Arundel, Sussex, no-one would understand that without listening carefully, because they call it ArunDELL, with the emphasis on the first and last syllables. One Englishman claimed that it’s name comes from the French hirondelle, for swallow, and while their pronunciation is closer to the bird, the given-name Arundel, Arndel and Arnold mean “from the eagle’s dell”, hardly suggesting a songbird.