Articles

(Continued from Part 1)

In the lovely windswept high places of early 19th century Dunham, among old-growth forests and newly ploughed fields, where the earliest beginnings of tender apple shoots were beginning to take root, a sinister and corrupt enterprise thrived and threatened to destroy the placidity of the newly settled pastoral community.

In the 1860s, many Irishmen living in the United States wanted Britain to grant independence to Ireland. Ireland was under English rule and most of its people lived in severe poverty. The Irish potato famine of the 1840s had decimated Ireland's population and England had offered little help.

No account of the Eastern Townships would be complete without mentioning Rogers' Rangers and what has become one of the more infamous episodes in Townships lore. After the fall of Quebec in 1759, but before the war was completely over, British General Jeffery Amherst decided to punish the St.

THE REBELLIONS OF 1837-1838

(**Continued from The Rebellions Part 1: The Political Context)

The border separating Quebec’s Eastern Townships from the United States was determined by the terms of the Quebec Act in 1774. At that time, both Canada and the American colonies to the south were dependencies of Great Britain. The border was established – on paper at least -- at 45 degrees north latitude.

Smuggling has been a problem in the Eastern Townships for a long time. At first, there were no customs offices at all. People could buy whatever they pleased in the U.S. and bring it back over the border, no questions asked. In 1821, the government set up a border post at Stanstead. Some people paid the duty, but many continued to smuggle.

In the early 19th century, there were no police, courts, or prisons in the Eastern Townships. The region was a distant frontier, far from the cities of Lower Canada. In theory, the law was enforced by part-time magistrates living in the scattered settlements. In times of emergency, the magistrates were assisted by the local militia.

--July 3, 2019. In honour of the 125th anniversary of "Megantic Outlaw" Donald Morrison's death, QAHN is pleased to re-issue the following short article on the response to Morrison's arrest by the Scottish community of the Eastern Townships.

The St. Albans Raid of October 19, 1864 is one of the most celebrated incidents in Border lore. Considered the northernmost engagement of the American Civil War, it involved about twenty Confederate soldiers who, under the command of a young lieutenant, Bennett Young, carried out a successful raid on three banks in St. Albans, Vermont.

Born in 1845 on his parents' farm at Kingscroft, in Barnston Township, Arthur Osmore Norton studied at nearby Barnston Academy. By age 16, Norton was working as a clerk in a local general store. In 1870, he married Helen Richardson of Coaticook. The couple would have two children together.

From 1860 to the early 1900s, the St. Francis Valley was the main centre in Canada for the production of slate. At that time, there were no less than ten slate quarries in the area around Richmond, Melbourne, Kingsey, and Danville. Entire villages grew up around the quarries which provided a living to hundreds of workers for the most part from Great Britain.

Three components make up the explosive combination of black powder: saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulphur, and charcoal (carbon). In its heyday, black powder had two primary applications: blasting powder for use in mining operations, and gunpowder for hunting.

Since about the 1870s, the inhabitants of this area, some twenty kilometres northeast of Richmond, were aware of the strange substance which veined the rocks on a hillside known as "Webb's Ledge." It was a Welsh miner named Evan Williams, who, visiting his parents in 1881, first identified the substance as the mineral asbestos, and recognized its commercial value.

In its infancy, hydroelectric power in the Eastern Townships was in the hands of a variety of small, local companies.

Beginning in the 1850s, the Eastern Townships were the centre of a massive "copper rush". One of the first copper mines in the area was in Leeds Township. Immense deposits were soon discovered in Acton, Bolton, and most important of all, Ascot, where rich concentrations of copper ore (and sulphur) were discovered in 1859.

Stanstead’s local indigenous stone, and the mainstay of the local economy, is a variety of granite most often referred to as “Stanstead grey.” Stanstead grey has been quarried and worked in and around Beebe (which is now a part of Stanstead) for generations. But what exactly is this durable stone?

In the early years of settlement, farmers had to make their own shoes, harnesses, and other leather necessities. When a cow died, the farmer and his wife would scrape, cure, and stretch the hide. The leather could then be used for making everything from patches for mending clothing to door hinges. When tanneries began to appear in villages, the nasty chore of curing cowhides was not one that was widely missed by many people.

An animal that was essential to the settlers was the sheep, whose fleece could be used to produce wool. On the farms each spring, sheep would be sheared and the wool washed of its natural grease and dirt, combed, and finally carded. Carding was the untangling of the fibres. Hand cards were used.