In 1881 la Compagnie de Colonisation et de Credit des Cantons de l'Est was organized by J.-A. Chicoyne and financed principally by a wealthy French priest and his circle of friends and relatives in Nantes. They reserved 3,780 hectares of crown land (at sixty cents per .4 hectare) and purchased 1,850 hectares from a speculator (at three dollars per .4 hectare), all in Woburn Township. They planned to clear one tenth of each government lot and have the timber sawed into lumber at their new village of Channay. The lots would then be sold to colonists at a price covering company expenses, but all commercial wood, except that used for heat and building, would be reserved by the company. Not surprisingly, few colonists were interested, but this did not worry Chicoyne for his attention had been diverted from Channay to the railhead town of Lake Megantic where he built a large modern sawmill at a cost of $18,500. At the same time he purchased thirty-seven town lots ($17,280) for speculative purposes and 42.2 hectares at the end of Lake Megantic to serve as a station for the steamboat which would haul the log booms to the new mill. Unfortunately the international timber market began to decline the very same year, finally collapsing in 1884. Chicoyne attempted to save the project by concentrating on settlement, as had originally been planned, but this was not profitable enough to make the company a success. Chicoyne was invited to resign in 1885 and the company closed its books in 1893, having invested over $60,000 in its operations.
This photograph shows a crew of men on a timber drive between Woburn and Lake Megantic. The shallow water at this spot illustrates why the drive had to catch the spring runoff and why it employed large numbers of farmers in addition to the woodsmen who chopped logs all winter. Note the peaveys for clearing log jams and the long pike pole for directing them down the river. While timber companies in the more remote areas of northern QuÄbec were employing mostly full-time workers by the turn of the century, the smaller operators in Compton continued to employ French-Canadian farmers and their sons on a seasonal basis. In fact it was on the basis of this symbiotic relationship between logging and farming that the colonization companies were brought into existence in the first place.
Courtesy: La SociÄtÄ d'Histoire des Cantons de l'Est, Sherbrooke
