COLONIZING AN EASTERN FRONTIER: COMPTON COUNTY, QUâBEC
J.I. Little
The Natural Setting
Compton is one of the counties (electoral districts) in the region of QuÄbec known as the Eastern Townships. The Townships, an area of freehold tenure, are located in the southeast corner of the province. On the south they border the United States, and on other sides they are surrounded by the former Yamaska-Richelieu, St. Lawrence and ChaudiÅre seigneuries. Roughly 23,500 square kilometres in area, the Eastern Townships lie at the northern edge of the old Appalachian range of mountains, forming a large peneplain which slopes gently downward from Compton County to the St. Lawrence Valley in the northwest. Compton is the most mountainous county in the region and also the most isolated, lying at the shallow southeastern headwaters of the rivers that drain the area. Its high altitude considerably shortens the growing season and the soil is not even well-suited to wheat, Canada's staple crop. Due to the double handicap of a rugged terrain and relatively inaccessible markets, a large part of Compton remained uninhabited for longer than the rest of the Eastern Townships. In fact most of the county (defined here with its 1853-1915 boundaries) is better suited for timber production than for agriculture, and some of its nineteenth-century settlements have returned to the forest.
American Settlement
During the French regime and the early post-American Revolution years of the British regime, the Eastern Townships were deliberately maintained as a wilderness buffer zone between the St. Lawrence seigneuries and New England. In fact they served as the designated hunting grounds of the Abenaki Indians at the mouth of the St. Francis River. Then, in 1793, the government responded to the petitions of American Loyalists and their land-hungry neighbours by having the area surveyed into roughly square townships of 48,000 acres (19,200 hectares). American colonists had already ascended the Connecticut River as far as mountainous Hereford Township in 1792. Four years later others followed via Lake Memphremagog to the west. As is evident from their late arrival, very few of these families were genuine Loyalist refugees.
Because it was impossible to colonize an isolated frontier effectively without some form of group organization, British authorities tacitly recognized the New England system of corporate proprietors known as the leader and associates system. They did so with considerable reluctance because while the official policy was to grant only 200 acres (80 hectares) to an individual (as many as 1,200 acres (480 hectares) could be alienated in exceptional circumstances), each "leader" expected to hold 40,000 acres (16,000 hectares) in trust for the financial backers of his colonization project. His forty "associates" would settle the other 8,000 acres (3,200 hectares). The British-appointed governor and his councillors not only feared the decentralization of power which such a system entailed, they coveted the large land grants for themselves. Capitalizing on reservations in England about the republican sympathies of American settlers, these officials succeeded in wresting control of much of the Eastern Townships from the original petitioners and placing it in their own hands and those of their merchant allies in the town of QuÄbec. Nevertheless some of the first Compton County settlers did manage to make good their claims to at least part of their respective townships.
Although immigration from the United States was interrupted by the War of 1812, in 1815 Surveyor-General Joseph Bouchette reported flourishing settlements in both Compton and Eaton Townships. There were 1,300 colonists, several saw and grist mills, some potash and pearlash manufacturers and roads and bridges providing communication with the main thoroughfares to QuÄbec and Vermont. Aside from a small number of settlers in the less fertile Clifton, Hereford, Newport and Westbury Townships, the remainder of the future county of Compton was still deserted.
There was little progress over the next fifteen years, partially owing to summer frosts which killed much of the harvests between 1816 and 1820. In 1876, Alden Learned of Eaton Township recalled his family's experiences sixty years earlier, when he was thirteen years old.
The spring of 1816 was late, but the ground was dry soon after the snow left. We got our crops in on the ploughed ground and cleared six acres of new land and sowed it to wheat. It was near the first of June when we finished harrowing and it rained the last two or three days and continued wet till the 6th, when it turned cold as winter, froze hard nights, and snowed through the day for three days. The leaves were all killed on the trees, and most of the small birds we could pick up by the dozen after the snow left. Father and James went to Drummondville after spring work to work on a government road. Royal and I did the hoeing, cleared a small piece and sowed it to turnips; took care of everything until haying when they came home. I do not remember the exact date we had the hard frost, but it spoiled all our new land wheat. We reaped and bound it. There was a heavy growth of straw. We threshed some of it and got a little frost bitten stuff not fit for human food. Father got disheartened; he could not make the farm produce enough to support his family, and wheat was from two and a half to three dollars a bushel; flour from fifteen to eighteen dollars per bushel; and his stock of cattle getting much reduced he wanted to sell his farm and go to Ohio where he had a brother-in-law, from whom he kept receiving glowing accounts of the country. He would have sold for one tenth what it could be bought for today, but he could not find a buyer at any price. There were some in Newport that got discouraged, left their farms and went west. Nearly one half of the settlers left.
Another handicap for the settlers was that many of the absentee proprietors who had acquired large tracts of land through the leader and associates system did little to develop their holdings. Furthermore, the French-Canadian majority in the Legislative Assembly was reluctant to vote funds for road construction which would benefit the land-owning oligarchy and encourage Anglo- Protestant settlement within the province. Finally, even an active land development and road construction programme would have failed to compensate for the lack of a single, obstacle-free river artery from the Eastern Townships to the St. Lawrence River and the outside world. Barges and scows were used on the St. Francis River between Sherbrooke and the St. Lawrence, but freight had to be discharged and reloaded at two waterfalls along the way. With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, American land-seekers, including many of those who had settled in the Eastern Townships, were diverted to their own Midwest. In 1831 there were still fewer than 3,000 settlers in Compton County, and 2,500 of these were in Compton and Eaton Townships.
British Settlement
Although the termination of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 began thirty-five years of heavy British emigration to the North American colonies, all but a small percentage of those who landed at QuÄbec bypassed the Eastern Townships for the more accessible land of Upper Canada. To remedy this situation the British authorities in 1833 decided to sell most of the crown land in the Eastern Townships to the London-based British American Land Company. This included all the unsettled crown reserves (more than 100,000 hectares) as well as the unsurveyed St. Francis Tract (238,530 hectares), most of which would become part of Compton County. In addition, the company purchased about 160,000 hectares in clergy reserves and private holdings. (Crown and clergy reserves, which had been serious impediments to settlement, constituted about two lots in seven within each township).
During the 1830s the British American Land Company invested heavily in roads and mills in its St. Francis Tract, but by 1840 the three principal townsites of Robinson, Gould and Victoria were all but deserted. The Rebellion of 1837-38 had interrupted British immigration to Lower Canada, making it impossible to replace the English agricultural labourers who had departed for the United States when the Company presented them with bills for their ship passages, provisions and land grants. Financial problems and an unsympathetic new government in Lower Canada forced the Company to relinquish much of its St. Francis reserve in 1841.
During the 1840s there was an influx of Gaelic-speaking, Presbyterian Scots, primarily from the famine-stricken Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides. The British American Land Company, burdened with debt, not only refused to assist them with their passages, it offered no more than one season's work to the immigrants. In August, 1841, they were reported to be starving. A decade later the Scots again faced starvation after many families moved from their company lots to take advantage of the free, twenty-hectare grants on the government-built colonization roads in Winslow Township (part of the rescinded St. Francis Tract). Within the next few years, however, the Scots became relatively successful farmers, consolidating their holdings and adapting their agricultural practices to external market demand.
By 1851 there were approximately 1,000 Scottish-born residents in Compton County. During the next two or three decades they helped to advance the settlement frontier eastward towards Lake Megantic. But migration to the factory towns of New England and the rich soil of the American Midwest proved a more attractive alternative for many of them, and few immigrants came to reinforce their numbers. Furthermore, the descendants of the early American settlers refused to move beyond the fertile southwestern area, even during the 1870s when Compton's member of Parliament, John Henry Pope, built the International Railroad across the county to Lake Megantic. As a result, two Scottish and one London-based colonization companies were granted large reserves in eastern Compton. They were required to establish settlers from the profits they made in marketing timber, but they failed completely to fulfil this obligation.
French-Canadian Settlement
As early as 1851 French-Canadian settlers from seigneuries along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River had moved to the northern tip of Compton County where three newly-built colonization roads merged in Winslow Township. Though 20 hectares were available free for each family, settlers still had to clear 4.8 hectares in the first four years. In contrast to the Scots who settled the southern part of Winslow, few French Canadians purchased the extra crown land acreage available at four shillings (one dollar) per acre. This meant that there was enough land that the number of their families continued to grow while the population of Scots remained relatively stable since their land remained in relatively few hands. Even though the curÄ claimed that the colony was already overcrowded with 749 French-Canadian settlers in 1860, supplementary income from the timber industry allowed them to expand to 895 by 1870.
During the early 1860s a second wave of French-Canadian colonization was directed to Hereford and Auckland Townships at the mountainous southern extremity of the county. Three priests from the MontrÄal area organized on behalf of a number of their parishioners the purchase of 12,500 hectares of crown land. They then chose the town sites and engineered the construction of government colonization roads into the two townships, which had 868 French-Canadian residents by 1870.
The Church remained an active colonization agent, but with Confederation and the delegation of responsibility for crown lands to the provincial sphere, there was renewed government support for colonization in QuÄbec. In 1869 the provincial legislature passed the Colonization Societies Act which offered financial assistance (up to $600 per year) and land reserves (a maximum of 4,800 hectares) to groups who organized new settlements. Encouraged by the projected construction of colonization railroads through central and eastern Compton, the majority of the province's societies focussed their attention on this area. Ten of them reserved over 26,000 hectares and collected close to $10,000 from the government, but after five years of land clearing and road building the only settlement that had actually taken root was Piopolis on the southwestern shore of Lake Megantic.
When the Colonization Societies Act expired in 1875, the provincial government decided to take a more direct hand in encouraging settlement. It designated Ditton, Chesham and Emberton Townships as "repatriation" colonies for French Canadians wishing to return from the depression-stricken cotton mill towns of New England. Close to 800 Franco-Americans actually took advantage of the opportunity to collect government loans for clearing their lots, but most returned to their factory jobs when the depression ended in 1879. However, about 800 French-speaking Quebeckers also took part in the project, and by 1880 there were over 2,000 residents in the three townships.
In 1881 the former manager of the repatriation colony, Jerome Adolphe Chicoyne, followed the English example by organizing a colonization company with French capital. Like its British counterparts, this company invested more energy and money in logging and sawmills than in settlement, but it did stimulate development in the young town of Lake Megantic and the township of Woburn (Beauce County), its two centres of operation.
By 1890, when the major colonization projects had ended, there were close to 11,000 French Canadians in Compton County, an increase from ten to fifty percent of the total population within forty years. This increase had come about primarily through the colonization of undeveloped land. There were still only 1,800 francophones in the older, English-speaking townships and not more than 1,000 in the towns of East Angus (Westbury Township) and Lake Megantic (the Whitton Township side) which appeared with the railroads during the 1880s. Nevertheless, industrialization held the key to French-Canadian growth in the county, especially for the immediate future. Almost half of the population increase between 1890 and 1900 was in the townships of Westbury and Whitton. Within a few years, the sale of farms by westward-migrating English Canadians would also provide an incentive for French-Canadian population expansion.
Society and Economy
The social institutions of the colonists were necessarily organized around clearing land and making a home in the wilderness. During the first few years of settlement, the pioneer family was largely dependent upon its own manpower and remained particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of nature. Failures were commonplace, particularly in areas where the land was too barren to respond to the backbreaking work that went into clearing it. In general early settlers chose the higher, well-drained and more thinly-treed slopes, though the lighter soil was exhausted more quickly than that of the low-lying areas. As a result, many of the very first settlements in the Eastern Townships were eventually abandoned.
One of the first tasks of the settler family was to put up a log shanty chinked with available materials such as wood chips, mud, moss and sand. A flat roof, sloping from two metres in front to just over a metre in the rear was constructed of bark, rough boards or overlapping, hollowed logs. These buildings provided scanty protection from the elements, particularly in winter, so settlers replaced them with larger, square timber houses, within a few months if possible. The timbers were carefully mortised, or fitted at the joints, and the roof, often covered by shingles, sloped both ways from a central peak. These sturdy buildings were frequently used for as long as twenty years before frame houses were built.
Once the settler erected his shanty, he began clearing his land, usually at the rate of about a hectare each year if he had no older sons. Most of the trees were chopped into sections and burned in large piles. While this saved time in the clearing process, it destroyed much of the organic soil cover as well as wasting wood. But timber markets were seldom accessible during the early years of settlement in the Eastern Townships and, even if they had been, prior to 1861 Lower Canadian settlers were not allowed to sell logs from their clearings. This restriction was meant to discourage timber operators from avoiding license payments by posing as settlers. Nevertheless, the ashes from hardwood trees became the pioneers' first source of income for they could be leached to produce lye which was boiled down in large iron kettles to yield potash (black salts). Before shipping this product out of the region, it was often baked in larger ovens to produce pearlash (potassium carbonate). At Trois-RiviÅres 200 kilograms of potash, the product of half a hectare of virgin forest, fetched approximately seventy dollars. It was shipped to Great Britain for use in the textile, soap and glass industries.
After the burning, the settler used a ready-made drag, often a large tree branch, to level the land and scatter the remaining ashes. Stumps remained to rot in the clearing for several years so crops had to be sowed either with a sharp, heavy hoe or with an A- shaped harrow holding nine to twelve large iron teeth capable of cutting through roots. Slow as they were, the docile temperament and hardy constitution of oxen made them more practical than horses for the arduous task of clearing land.
Potatoes were the major crop for all the Eastern Townships colonists because they could be planted and harvested with relative ease among the stumps, and they produced a very good yield. As a result, colonists generally had a rather monotonous, though nourishing diet. Even after the Staceys had been on their Ascot Township farm for fifteen years, the daughter Louisa wrote to her English grandparents in May, 1853:
We have not had anything but bread and butter to eat for a long time, except partridge and a little fish now and then. But I must not grumble for we fared well, for us, in the winter. Our potatoes, roots, and a little corn kept us going. But, oh, how I miss your good old English fare, and I am determined soon to buy some meat for a treat. It is hard for you to imagine our circumstances, but they are not unusual out here.
Ploughs were not necessary until the stumps were removed and grass seed was sown with the oats for pasture, thereby forming a sod. Prior to mid-century, grain was cut with the primitive sickle, then gathered and bound into sheaves, a process which required thirty to forty hours of labour for a half hectare of land yielding 725 litres of wheat. Threshing was usually done in the winter, with the sheaves laid on the barn floor and flailed by hand to separate the grain from the straw. The chaff was then blown off by shaking the grain on a sheet in the wind. Much less time was required to harvest hay, the most important seed crop in the livestock producing Eastern Townships. It was simply cut with a scythe and raked into windrows to dry before being bunched and hauled to the barn as winter fodder. Nevertheless, the Ascot Township settler George Stacey in 1846 described haying as "without exception the most laborious part of farming, as we commence very early and do not leave off till sunset.... When I come from work I am obliged to change my shirt and trousers they being as wet as if I had been ducked in the river..."
The geographic isolation of the Eastern Townships kept their settlers at a relatively self-sufficient stage of economic development much longer than settlers in Upper Canada, who enjoyed easy access to the St. Lawrence River. Whereas Upper Canadian colonists were shipping wheat to Great Britain as early as 1794, those in the Eastern Townships had to rely for cash upon low bulk products such as potato whiskey and potash. The village asheries and distilleries finally began to disappear in the late 1820s when slowly-improving road links and a growing population made it profitable to use raw materials less wastefully. Sawmills produced lumber principally for local use, while fodder crops were fed to cattle which in turn could be walked to external markets. As late as 1850, transportation costs took fifty percent of any grain shipped from Compton or Eaton Township to MontrÄal. In 1831 the average Compton Township farmer owned eight or nine cattle, eleven sheep (wolves and bears were still a major threat to sheep), five or six pigs and one or two horses. His harvest of approximately 9,000 litres was almost three-quarters potatoes (used in part as winter fodder), with oats, corn, wheat and rye constituting most of the remainder. Barely enough wheat was grown for the settlers' own consumption so farmwives frequently mixed boiled potatoes and stewed pumpkins with flour to make bread.
American competition in the MontrÄal market seriously retarded the economic development of the Eastern Townships until the late 1840s, when rapid economic development in the United States finally stimulated a healthy American demand for agricultural produce. By 1851 the average Compton Township farmer had become specialized to the point of owning one sheep and four pigs fewer but three or four more cattle than he had twenty years earlier. The arrival of the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad in 1852 accelerated the trend towards specialization by finally giving the Eastern Townships easy access to outside markets and by introducing cheap western grain and beef. The region's farmers therefore had to take advantage of their proximity to the major eastern cities by turning increasingly to the manufacture of the perishable dairy products, butter and cheese. The more advantageously located counties to the west of Compton were, however, much faster to concentrate on dairy production. Only one of the region's twenty-one cheese factories was to be found in Compton in 1870. Rather than being eliminated by western competition, the more progressive beef producers in the older townships of Compton began to raise top quality British breeding stock to supply western ranches, first in the United States after the Civil War, then in the southern foothills of the Canadian Rockies in the 1880s.
The settlers who colonized the more isolated townships in Compton were much less able to participate in the international economy. In the recently-settled Winslow of 1851, the average French-Canadian family owned nine pigs, but only a single steer or cow, one sheep, and a horse for two families. The average harvest of 2,900 litres was half potatoes. Scottish farmers were at a considerably more advanced stage, owning four cattle and four sheep each, though only one pig and no horses. The Scots had cleared less land but their harvests were fifty percent larger. Adverse weather conditions forced both groups to seek outside aid in 1852.
Between 1850 and 1870 Winslow's pioneer Scots more than doubled the number of their cattle to nine per family, but this was still four fewer than the average Compton Township farmer raised. Furthermore, the quality seems to have been far inferior for even though each Compton farmer had an average of only one more cow, he produced two and half times more homemade butter and cheese. The contrast with Winslow's French Canadians was still greater, for in spite of the fact that their crop yields were close to those of the Scots, their farms were half the size, and dairy production only half as much. Most French Canadians in fact were not full-time farmers at all, spending much of their time working in the woods. They chopped ten times as many logs as the Scots and many of them undoubtedly worked in the sawmills for the two French-Canadian entrepreneurs who produced most of the square timber cut in the township. With the extension of the railroad through eastern Compton County during the 1870s, further colonization became a response to the external demand for timber as much as for agricultural produce. This helps to explain why the French Canadians tended to dominate the settlement frontier from this point onward.
Colonists on the advancing edge of the settlement frontier continued to perform the same basic tasks in establishing their farms. Even in the older, more prosperous townships agricultural techniques long remained labour-intensive. Mechanization revolutionized the harvesting of grain after mid-century, but hay was the principal crop in the Eastern Townships and horse-drawn mowers were not available until the 1880s. Large numbers of children were needed therefore to provide manpower for the farm. Throughout much of the nineteenth century both French and English- Canadian families had an average of six or seven children still at home when their mothers were between the ages of forty and forty-four. In his History of Eaton Township, published in 1894, C.S. Lebourveau recalls that:
every child that was big enough to pick up chips had to do something to help keep the wolf away from the door. Everybody had to work from ten years and up. Boys of that age had to take an axe, go into the woods and help clear the forest and help put in a crop, and in the fall take their sickle and help reap the grain.
Inside the house one would see:
the grandmother sitting at the little wheel spinning linen or flax, as it was then called, the younger girls spinning tow, the elder ones wool, and the mother upstairs with the loom weaving it into cloth to clothe the family.
Farm children obviously had little time for formal education. In fact school attendance tended to be sporadic and few went at all beyond the age of twelve. As it was, the education offered tended to be inferior. Few books were available and teachers were paid so poorly that few took the profession seriously. In 1847 George Stacey wrote regarding his son:
Alfred is very ready to learn but finds the company at school unpleasant and very rough, which is a pity as he is decidedly fond of books, and has taught himself all he knows. I think he learns more in his own home than in that school, which in any case is several miles away and, in bad weather, inaccessible.
The family was the most important social institution in the countryside, for the early settlers simply did not have the time or means to maintain the community institutions they had left behind. Eaton Township's pioneers formed a Free Masons' Lodge, but had to give up their charter in 1820. It was not renewed until 1879. During the 1790s Newport Township organized its own town council system, as in New England, but this was moribund by 1812. Local self-government was not revived until the province legislated an official system during the 1840s. There were not even any law courts in the Eastern Townships before 1826, forcing settlers to go to Trois-RiviÅres or MontrÄal to settle their legal problems. Their chief contact with officialdom was through the township leader, who took charge of surveying, laying out roads, registering land titles and managing relations in general with the none-to-sympathetic governing authorities.
Self-sufficient as they were, pioneer families did develop their own informal institutions. Building or logging bees provided mutual assistance as well as opportunities for social interaction The local historian Lebourveau writes:
If a man wanted to put up a house or barn all he had to do was to set the day, notify his neighbours, get a gallon of whiskey, and they would be there early in the morning, and before night would have it up, the roof covered with spruce bark, and the gables boarded with the same. And the juvenile classes looked forward to the day with as much anticipation as they do today to a circus or fair. If a man had a piece to log off in the spring and no team, he would (especially if it was getting late) make the same preparations as for the log house, with like results, those that had teams bringing them.
The early American settlers also valued education enough to establish their own rudimentary schools without state aid. In fact Compton Township was found to have one of the most literate populations in the province in 1838, though this was not saying a great deal considering the sad state of the educational system in the seigneuries. Because it had less practical value, organized religion was considerably lower on the pioneers' list of priorities. The majority had been Congregationalists in New England, but state-supported Church of England missionaries and itinerant Methodist preachers remained their chief contact with churches for many years. Eaton's first resident minister arrived in 1815 to serve all denominations in the township, as well as teach school, yet he had some difficulty in collecting his promised ú50 ($250) a year.
With frequent migrations back and forth across the border, there long remained very little to distinguish the older townships culturally from New England. Even the school texts were American until the 1840s. In Compton County the British settlers tended to move to the more remote townships owned by the British American Land Company, so they too maintained a distinct identity for many years. The Highland Scots, preserving a strong oral tradition, continued to speak Gaelic as an everyday language as late as the third generation. As staunch Free Church Presbyterians, they intermarried very infrequently with their Catholic French-Canadian neighbours. The eventual demise of the Scottish identity in Compton was more the result of emigration from the province than of assimilation as English Canadians.
As we have already seen, the Roman Catholic Church was an active agent in the French-Canadian colonization of Compton County. The parish as an institution was therefore perpetuated in essentially the same form as that which had existed in the St. Lawrence seigneuries. Even though the collection of tithes could be legally enforced only for the grain harvest, French-Canadian settlers paid their curÄs a supplement from their potato and hay crops. The chief source of dissension was the choice of a site for the first church but this was also common whenever the home parishes were divided into smaller ones. Once this rift was healed, the curÄ seldom had any serious social disturbances to report, though he frequently criticized his charge's love for dancing and drink.
Conclusion
The expansion of Canada's settlement frontier is commonly associated with a steady progression from east to west during the nineteenth century. From a very large scale perspective this is what happened, but many thousands of settlers filled in the eastern backwaters while the mainstream pushed westward. Although the colonization of Compton County began in the eighteenth century, it continued into the twentieth. The popular image of individual families pushing independently into the wilderness to carve out new homes simply does not apply here. Because of the marginal nature of the county's location and soil, certain inducements had to be offered to attract colonists. The fundamental social and economic infrastructure was supposed to be organized by township leaders for the early New England settlers, by the British American Land Company for the Highland Scots, and by priests and government for the French Canadians. The Americans settled the more fertile and advantageously-located townships but lengthy roads had to be built to overcome the absence of a good water system of transportation. Nearly half a century later the Scots were lured to hilly, rocky land by the offer of ready-made roads, mills and towns, while the first French Canadians were promised free or inexpensive land and a continuation of their parish-centred social life.
But regardless of a family's cultural origins and of why and when it moved to the frontier, it had to face the same basic task of carving a home out of the wilderness with rudimentary resources and primitive implements. The later settlers could sell timber and raise cattle rather than make potash and potato whiskey, but their first buildings, crops, livestock and daily tasks varied little from those of the American pioneers. This does not mean that cultural traditions were forgotten; in fact the isolated environment tended to preserve them. Each group had its own religious institutions, separate schools and municipal councils, all of which helped to maintain its distinct identity. Different groups also faced different economic prospects. The Scots and French-Canadians could never hope to reach the level of prosperity enjoyed by the English Canadians in the older townships because the specialization stimulated by technological advances only made their rocky upland farms economically less viable. This had important ramifications for the ethnic composition of the area. The Scottish solution was eventually to abandon Compton County while the French Canadians stayed and supplemented their farm incomes with seasonal work in the woods.
