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Herman Smith-Johannsen is considered one of the world’s great ski pioneers. Born in Norway in 1875, he was a mechanical engineer by training, educated in Norway and Germany. As a young man, his career took him to the United States.

1) Sainte-Adèle was named in whose honour? a) The patron saint of skiers. b) The wife of a local politician. c) Maurice Duplessis’s aunt. d) None of the above. 2) The former name of Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts was what? a) Agathaville. b) Lac-des-Sables. c) Sainte-Agathe-des-Champs. d) All of the above. 3) Saint-Lin-Laurentides is the birthplace of which Canadian Prime Minister? a) Sir John Abbott. b) Brian Mulroney. c) Louis Saint-Laurent. d) Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

1) b) Adèle Raymond, who was the wife of Member of the Legislative Assembly Augustin-Norbert Morin. Morin had donated land for the erection of a church at this location. 2) b) Lac-des-Sables is the former name of Sainte-Agathe. It is also the lake around which the town is built. 3) d) Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who was prime Minister of Canada from 1896 to 1911. 4) d) All of the above. 5) a) Saint-Lin-Laurentides is actually in the adjacent Lanaudière Administrative Region. 6) a) Big Hill.

Author’s note: This is the product of the combined efforts of three people. Without the assistance of Daniel Parkinson as researcher and editor, this would be just another history of Rawdon. Thanks to his unwavering support and generous input, I am able to claim that this is the most accurate history of Rawdon available. The second person is Glenn Cartwright, who supplied information, leads to pertinent documents, and who was responsible for this article being posted on the Internet. To these two gentlemen I extend my thanks and appreciation.

The Argenteuil Agricultural Society, best known for its sponsorship of the Lachute Fair, celebrated its 175th anniversary in 2000. Founded in 1826, the Society has held an annual fair ever since. Today, the Lachute Fair is one of the oldest continuous fairs in Canada.

Morin Heights has been celebrated as a centre for cross-country skiing for many years. Much of this reputation can be credited to the Viking Ski Club, established permanently in Morin Heights since the 1950s and active in that part of the Laurentians since its beginnings in the winter of 1929-30.

Very, very long ago – over a billion years at least – the first mountain range on Earth was squeezed upward by the movements of tectonic plates deep beneath the surface of the planet. These first mountains are still here, although altered by ancient volcanic activity and worn and scraped by several ice ages. In Quebec, this mountainous area is called the Laurentians.

(Continued from Part 1)

Born in Saint-Michel-de-Bellechasse in 1803, Augustin-Norbert Morin was one of eleven children of a prosperous farming family. Though not robust physically, he showed quick intelligence and was encouraged by the local priest to study at the seminary in Quebec City. Morin had great academic success and chose to study law.

“I hate politics… I hate notoriety, public meetings, public speeches, caucuses, and everything that I know of that is apparently the necessary incident of politics - except doing public work to the best of my ability.” John Abbott (1891) Born in 1821 in St. Andrew’s East (now Saint-André-d’Argenteuil), John Abbott was the son of an Anglican minister. At the age of seventeen, Abbott went to work in the dry-goods trade, where he learned bookkeeping and business. In 1849, he married Mary Bethune (1823-1898). The couple had nine children.

Thousands of tributaries, streams, springs and small lakes contribute to the headwaters of the North River system. Most of them seem to bubble right out of the ground as though the Laurentian Mountains were a place where water itself was created. This extraordinary system ties the whole lower Laurentians together in its sustaining web, belying the arbitrary-sounding name that it bears. Ironically the North is the southernmost river in the Laurentians. It is also the least navigable and generally runs at a higher elevation.

In the early 1600s, when Samuel de Champlain first explored the St Lawrence beyond Hochelaga, the North American continent was peopled with a series of small nations with amorphous borders. These peoples had highly ritualized communications among them and long-standing enemies and trading partners. Champlain could not know that the Algonquin nations that he met were in the middle of border skirmishes with the Iroquois nations to the south, but he realised quickly that he had to choose sides when his meeting party was attacked.

The town of Val David, the location of the first settlements north of Ste- Adele, was once known by t its post office, Mont Morin. Named for A.-N. Morin, it opened in 1873. The first few families, the Ménards and the Dufresnes, were larger than life, both figuratively and physically. Two Menard brothers married Dufresne sisters and the Dufresne brother did right by a Menard sister. It is no surprise that the Ménards' mother became known far and wide as La Mère Ménard. Smaller than her sons, she was about six feet tall and was a woman to be reckoned with.

As cross-country skiing grew in popularity, and after World War I, overtook showshoeing as the winter sport of choice in Montreal, improvements continued to be made to the sport. The most obvious was the invention of the ski tow. It meant no more puffing up the hill for what felt like hours just to whiz down in what felt like minutes!

The quiet dirt road is canopied by large maple and elm trees. The edge of the road drops off towards small lakes and marshes bordered by poplars and willows, with dogwood and reeds along the shores. On the other side, the low, rolling hills of this, the beginning of the Laurentian Shield, are tree-covered, as well. There are no squared log farmhouses, no cleared fields, no domestic animals, no barns, no schoolhouse, no mail delivery, no blacksmith, no stores, no Orange Lodge, no community dances, no picnics, no children playing… There is a church and cemetery -- that’s all.

Before the mid-19th century, there were only seasonal Indigenous hunters in the Morin Heights region, most likely Mohawks.Government minister Augustin-Norbert Morin came with his Indigenous guide, Simon, in 1850 to survey the area. In the same year the first permanent settlers --three Seale brothers, originally from Connaught, Ireland -- arrived from Lachute.

Curé François-Xavier Antoine Labelle promoted a vision of rapid colonisation of the North-West. He envisaged French- Catholic parishes from St. Jerome north-west, through present-day northern Ontario, all the way to Winnipeg. He spoke with conviction and authority. A tall, energetic and imposing man, well over six feet and weighing more than 300 pounds, he was rarely contradicted. Wherever he was, when he spoke of his dream, people followed. He became known as L'Apôtre de la Colonisation and Le Roi du Nord. He was so positive and convinced of his mission that people were in awe of him.

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.

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.

A number of the place-names in the mid- to upper Laurentians have come down to us from the original human inhabitants, the Weskarinis Algonquins. This tribe lived principally along the Ottawa River and its Laurentian tributaries, the Lièvre, the Petite Nation, the Rouge and the North. We can only imagine their lives, small family groups living in a hierarchy dominated by ancient traditions and coloured by myth. The summer must have been a time of plenty and of celebration.