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 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Trois canaux, Carillon, Chute-à-Blondeau et Grenville furent construits sur la rive nord de la rivière des Outaouais entre 1829 et 1833. Contournant les bouillonnants rapides du Long-Sault hauts de 21 km (13 miles), leur conception date des années suivant la Guerre de 1812. À cette époque, on considérait le Saint-Laurent vulnérable et il pouvait devenir la cible d’attaquants venus des États-Unis. Les canaux sur la rivière des Outaouais allaient offrir une voie navigable en direction de Kingston, alternative à celle du fleuve.
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.
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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.