Local History

"From 1869 to 1948 more than 100,000 children were immigrated from Great Britain to work on farms in the rapidly growing rural communities across Canada.

Lake Memphremagog is one of the jewels of the Eastern Townships. Reputedly Abenaki for "Beautiful Waters," or less romantically "the Great Pond Place," Memphremagog is blessed with some of the most stunning scenery in the region. The lake stretches 27 miles (44 km) from below Newport, Vermont in the south, all the way up to Magog, Quebec in the north.

The Cherry River Marsh, or Le Marais de la Rivière aux Cerises, as it is known officially, today constitutes one of the most important wetland areas in the Lake Memphremagog watershed. It is also a site that is growing in popularity as a place to walk and to appreciate the beauties of nature.

In 1976, I got my first full-time summer job as a member of the Memphremagog Conservation Patrol. I was sixteen years old. I had worked on the patrol as a volunteer for a few days during the two preceding summers, making $5.00 a day the first year and $7.00 the second.

On Saturday, August 22, 2009, at La Providence Hospital in Magog, Muriel Ball Duckworth, died peacefully, at the age of 100, surrounded by her children. Mrs. Duckworth had fallen and broken her leg shortly after arriving in Austin for her annual summer visit. She was a descendent of Nicholas and Phebe Austin, the founder of Bolton Township.

Like most people, I never paid much attention to cemeteries when I was young. I would see them alongside roads in travels with my parents and I knew that I had ancestors buried in some of them. But in general, cemeteries were places for kids to avoid.

It was mid-November and the sky overhead was a brilliant shade of blue when we arrived at the Sherbrooke home of our guide for the day, Isabell MacArthur Beattie.

(Continued from On the Trail of the Scots, Part 1)

EUROPEAN TRADITION
Europeans have always been fond of public clocks. One has only to visit the downtown of almost any major city, town, or village, to see the timepieces, often beautiful and elaborate, that grace all manner of public buildings. Some of these clocks date back to the Middle Ages and are now famous tourist attractions.

I am often dismayed by all the ‘negative news’ in the press, perpetuating what I see as a culture of fear; headlines about all the dangers out there, real and invented. I fully understand that these kinds of headlines are what lure readers in a highly competitive market.