Colonization projects continued well into the twentieth century. Lawrence Colony is one of several Compton products of the back-to-the-land movement launched during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Designated to provide indirect public assistance to indigent English-speaking QuÄbeckers, it was founded in 1936 by an Anglican Church-organized colonization society. In addition to fifteen dollars per month per person, the provincial government provided a grant for a small school and church, road work at ten cents an hour and construction materials for houses. Equipped with nothing but axes and shovels, the approximately 150 settlers were expected to become self sufficient upon sixty-one lots of forty thin-soiled, poorly-drained hectares. World War II rescued most of the settlers but Lawrence Colony is still a dependent pocket of English-speaking rural poverty.
