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Ste. Agathe, a sleepy farming village in the hills, became a railroad boomtown with the arrival of the train. These big, snorting steam engines captured the hearts of people and changed the social structure everywhere in the world. More than a railroad town, Ste. Agathe became a vacation destination for the builders of this new society, including the railroad men. For the entire article, click here: http://www.ballyhoo.ca/history/LordShaughnessy.shtml

According to Quebec’s Commission de toponymie, the chain of mountains known as the Laurentians (les Laurentides in French) extends from Lake Témiscamingue on the Ontario border all the way across Quebec to Labrador. Geologically, the Laurentians were formed over a billion years ago and constitute Quebec’s portion of that vast u-shaped region around Hudson Bay known as the Canadian Shield. The Laurentians are famous for their lakes, mountains, and abundant natural resources. They are also home to some of the finest skiing in eastern North America.

The story of Douglas Lorne McGibbon is the story of the forgotten benefactor of Ste-Agathe and of tuberculosis treatment in Canada. D. Lorne McGibbon may well have given all he had to Ste. Agathe in his fight against the disease. For the entire article, click here: http://www.ballyhoo.ca/history/DLorneMcGibbon.shtml

Sir Mortimer Barnet Davis was born in Montreal on February 6, 1866 to Samuel Davis and Minnie Falk Davis. The senior Davis couple had emigrated from England in 1861 and Mortimer was their third son, one of seven children. He attended Montreal High School and upon graduation joined his family's cigar business: S. Davis and Sons. By the time he was 21, he was already someone to contend with. He experimented with tobacco and is credited with having established its cultivation in Canada.

Laurentian development did not all take place around the big lakes like Lac des Sables and Lake Manitou. Many people came here for the wilderness pleasures available on some of the smaller lakes, surrounded by many acres of what was once farmland, but which has now grown back into extensive forest holdings. It began with the arrival of the train in 1892, and among the families that chose that route were several of the descendents of John Molson and Sarah Inslay Vaughan.

The Ogier family of Chêne-de-Cur, Sarthe, France, are the descendants of Philippe Ogier, secretary to King Charles V (1338-1380) of France. Ogier's role was one of influence and there are many official notations in the Paris Parliament and the administrative records of the realm that confirm the noble status of the family. In respect of their long tenure of office, during his reign, Louis XVI awarded the title of Count to the head of the family. In this way the Ogier family, which had holdings in Ivry, not far from Paris, obtained the title Comte Ogier d'Ivry.

The year was 1895 and the train to Ste. Agathe had been in operation for only three years. Elizabeth Wand, a nurse from New York City, a single American woman of the Victorian age, arrived in our small town and began to assess its potential as a health spa. She had read something about the area in Harper's Magazine and decided that it sounded like a great location to look after 'nervous wrecks and convalescents'. At age forty, she walked away from fifteen years of nursing and became a pioneer in a new country, with a new language, setting up a health retreat.

Théophile Thibodeau became curé of the parish of Ste. Agathe in 1878 and simultaneously homesteaded a large peninsula at the far end of Lac des Sables. He was the community’s spiritual leader during Ste. Agathe’s most difficult years. He inherited a parish that was just discovering that the fields would not yield, and the local farmers were either leaving or looking for other ways to make a living. Several of these hard-working pioneers built hotels.

In 1894, Dr. Camille Laviolette of Laval University convinced the Provincial Government to set aside a large parcel of Laurentian property for the creation of a forestry reserve. His plan was to build a tuberculosis sanitarium in a completely protected environment. The proposal, originally drafted in 1893, was accepted in July 1894. Dr. Laviolette had studied in Paris, London and Berlin. He was a member of la Société Française d’Otologie et de Laryngologie de Paris, a specialist at l’Institution des Sourdes et Muettes, and was a medical doctor at the University of Laval.

Dr. Grignon, in his Album historique de la Paroisse de Ste-Agathe-des-Monts suggests that Octavien Rolland gave rise to the huge influx of wealthy businessmen who purchased large properties in our area. In French, these people are called villégiateurs. It translates as “people who stay, sojourn or vacation in the country”, but to date I have failed to find an English noun that expresses the same meaning.

In 1895 Alfred Baumgarten acquired the St. Aubin farm on the Tour du Lac. This was the property from which the small village received its first public water supply through wooden pipes, 17 years earlier, the property that Dr. Lallier, Curé Thibodeau and Edouard St. Aubin exploited through La Compagnie de l’aquaduc de Ste. Agathe des Monts. For the entire article, click here: https://www.ballyhoo.ca/regional-history.html

Three canals, the Carillon, Chute-à-Blondeau, and Grenville, were constructed on the north side of the Ottawa River between 1819 and 1833. Bypassing a formidable thirteen mile (21 km) stretch of rapids known as the Long Sault, they were conceived in the years following the War of 1812. At that time, the St. Lawrence was still considered vulnerable to attack from a potentially hostile United States. The canals would make the Ottawa River a navigable alternative to the St. Lawrence as a route to Kingston.

According to Serge Laurin, the author of Histoire des Laurentides, the Algonquin Amerindians who lived in this region were the Weskarinis, a small branch of the Lower Algonquin tribe. The Upper Algonquins lived in the Abitibi region. For the entire article, click here: http://www.ballyhoo.ca/history/TheWeskarinis.shtml

The signing of La Grande Paix by the Iroquois and the French in Montreal in 1701 brought to an end the wild days of the French-Indian Wars. These wars reflected the European conflicts: the French fought the Iroquois who were allied with the British, while the Huron, Nipissing and Algonquin were either neutral or took the side of the French. As we saw last time, the Weskarinis, who were the indiginous people of our Laurentian area, were casualties of these wars, having been massacred by the Iroquois on the shores of Petit Lac Nominingue in 1751.

In Dr. Grignon's Album Historique de Ste. Agathe, written in 1912 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the parish, he describes the first three colonists who homesteaded in our region. These three men, Narcisse and Olivier Ménard and their brother-in-law Jean-Baptiste Dufresne, had clearly responded to A.N. Morin's initiative in encouraging homesteading of the north country. Despite Morin's noble efforts with potatoes, however, the real economic mainstay would never be the farm, but rather, the pine tree, and these three men were well equipped to exploit it.

There is no evidence of any settlement of Europeans, English or French, in the Ste-Agathe area prior to the community that began with the Dufresnes and the Menards in 1849. There may have been camps for coureurs de bois and for lumberjacks, but nothing more. Loyalists and British veterans had been settling along the Ottawa Valley since the end of the American War of Independence, and they tended to move upstream along the tributaries. Thus the English towns of Lachute and Brownsburg a little further upstream along the North River from St.

Curé Labelle’s time, 1868 to 1891, was one of great change in Ste Agathe. While the town grew, the forests almost disappeared and along with them went species of wildlife we’ll never know. When Jacques Cartier first visited the St. Lawrence River in the 1500’s, he reported fauna of much greater variety than we find today. His chronicler made particular mention of the large number of seals that lived in the St. Lawrence valley. The horsehead, or grey seal, is mentioned, along with its smaller cousin, the harbour (phoca)or dotar.

In 1894 Harper’s Magazine carried an article about the Laurentians by McGill University principal Sir William Dawson. A young nurse in New York, upon reading it, decided that she had to visit, and set off to Ste. Agathe. Her name was Elizabeth Wand, and her seven year love-affair with our area is documented in her memoirs. For the entire article, click here: http://www.ballyhoo.ca/history/FreshAirandCleanWater.shtml

As the economy of the lower Laurentians evolved after the start of settlement in the 1830s, certain areas thrived and grew, or withered and dwindled at different times.

The Laurentians are situated in the Grenville geological province, a slowly moving land mass that collided with the Canadian Shield a billion years ago. It is precambrian. That means that is it was formed before there were any signs of animal life. The cambrian period began with the first signs of animal life only 650,000,000 years ago. For the entire article, click here: http://www.ballyhoo.ca/history/InTheBeginning.shtml