Townships Heritage WebMagazine

A good hay crop was vital for the survival of any farm. It was hay that fed the animals over the long winter, when the fields were covered in a deep layer of snow.

After the long Townships winter, spring was the time to do repairs and renovations on the farmhouse and outbuildings. Before the fields could be worked, there was a lot of work to be done.

Apart from Henry Seth Taylor, who built Canada's first steam-powered horseless carriage in 1867, another Eastern Townships man who deserves mention as an early carmaker is George Foote Foss. Born in 1876, Foss was a prosperous mechanic, blacksmith, and bicycle repairman from Sherbrooke. Like Taylor before him, he was also an ingenious tinkerer.

The first man in history to send wireless broadcasts of voice and music, and the inventor of the sonic depth finder, submarine signaling devices, and over 500 patents, was Reginald Fessenden, a native of the Eastern Townships. Born in Brome County in 1866, the son of an Anglican minister, Fessenden spent much of his youth in Ontario.

Henry Seth Taylor was a natural tinkerer. Born in Stanstead in 1833, he loved to experiment with machines, and during his lifetime he is said to have invented a number of things, including the first sofa-bed and an early "talking machine". Taylor is best known, however, for building Canada's first steam-powered car, which he unveiled at the Stanstead Fair in 1867.

Born in Coaticook in 1862 and educated at the Coaticook Academy, Frank Henry Sleeper was the nephew of industrialist Lewis Sleeper, and the son of mechanical inventor Wright Sleeper, both also of Coaticook. From a very early age, Frank Henry Sleeper, like his father, was fascinated by the intricate workings of machinery.

One of the greatest inventors and industrialists of the Eastern Townships, Joseph-Armand Bombardier, was born in Valcourt in 1907 to Anna Gravel and Alfred Bombardier, a farmer turned general merchant. The eldest of eight children, Bombardier, from an early age, combined a talent for tinkering with a passion for machines.

Created in 1954 from the Catholic Séminaire St-Charles Borromée, the French-language Université de Sherbrooke was at first a three-faculty university granting degrees in law, arts, and science.

The first Catholic school for girls to be established in the Eastern Townships was Mont Notre-Dame in Sherbrooke.

Unlike their English Protestant counterparts, in the late nineteenth century, French Catholic schools in the Eastern Townships became increasingly dominated by religious orders.

By the early 1900s, schools run by Catholic nuns and brothers were established in most towns of any significant size all across the Townships.