Laurentian Heritage WebMagazine

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

For the entire article, click here: http://www.ballyhoo.ca/history/FreshAirandCleanWater.shtml

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.