Of Timber, Asbestos, and the Kings of Megantic County

When my great-great-grandfather Joseph Vermette moved his family from the ancestral parish near the St. Lawrence to the frontier land of the Eastern Townships, he purchased a plot of land. His purchase was a tiny section of one of the rectangular blocks laid out by English-speaking surveyors in what was then known as Nelson Township, Megantic County. The Vermette property on Range 12, Lot 7 was a 22-acre portion of a 200-acre lot. This portion had been purchased from an Irishman named Richard Neil who occupied the other 178 acres of Lot 7.

Nelson Township was split into two divisions. For the Roman Catholics, these two sections were associated roughly with the church one attended. Division One of Nelson Township was associated with the parish of Sainte-Anastasie called Sainte-Anastasie-de-Nelson or Sainte-Anastasie-de-Lyster. The second division of Nelson Township, where the Vermettes resided, was associated with the parish of Sainte-Agathe-de-Lotbinière, although this division was not part of the former seignuerie of Lotbinière but within the borders of the County of Megantic.

The Vermettes had the smallest plot of land in Nelson Township, Division Two. The 1871 Census of Canada reports that of Joseph’s 22 acres only eight were “improved” and of these eight, four acres were given over to pasturage. Although the family did grow wheat, oats, potatoes, flax, hemp and tobacco on their small farm, Joseph’s occupation is listed as “blacksmith” in this census. Farming was supplementary to other occupations.

Range 12, Lot 7 of the former Nelson Township (2005):
They're still farming here

Next door to the Vermettes lived the family of Michel Turgeon, a prosperous farmer and man of many trades. He originally hailed from Bellechasse, as did Joseph and many of the recent French-speaking arrivals in Nelson Township, Division Two. The Turgeons owned the whole rectangular lot of 200 acres (Range 13, Lot 6) of which 72 were improved. The Turgeon and Vermette families were to form a close alliance. Two years after the 1864 death of Joseph Vermette’s first wife, my great-great-grandmother, Joseph would marry Michel Turgeon’s 17-year-old daughter Rebecca.

The fact that Joseph had an 18-year-old daughter and other teenage children must have made for an awkward situation vis-à-vis his new wife. The family stories deriving from my great-grandfather, who was six years old when his father remarried, reflect that. The alliance between the Vermettes and Turgeons was confirmed when Joseph’s daughter Zoë married Michel Turgeon’s son Théophile. In one of those delightfully convoluted relationships typical of that age in rural Québec, Zoë’s stepmother was also her sister-in-law and her husband was also her step-uncle.

Michel Turgeon had both a gristmill and a sawmill on his property, one of three sawmills in Nelson Township. Although successful farms existed here (and still do) the real wealth of Megantic County was the old growth forests above the ground and the treasures beneath them. In Division One of Nelson Township lived the King Brothers, wealthy Anglophones who had arrived relatively recently from the British Isles. They were aptly named since the Kings were poised to become monarchs of the trade in timber and minerals.

The patriarch of this family, Charles King, was born in England and came to Québec in the 1830s. He evidently had access to considerable capital since he bought large concessions of land for the trade in lumber.  He purchased tracts of land in both the townships and in the lands formerly under the seigneurial system. His sawmill in Nelson Township, Division One was near the Grand Trunk Railway giving him access to faraway markets. His sons eventually took over his business and the King Brothers built up a huge concern in timber.

A comparison between Michel Turgeon’s sawmill and the King Brothers’ in the same township tells the tale. According to the 1871 Census of Canada, Turgeon’s mill had a fixed capital of $300 with floating capital of $70. In the year prior to the census, his mill processed 700 of “all sorts of logs” producing boards worth $420. By contrast, the King’s sawmill had a fixed capital of $5000, floating capital of $1000, and employed 31 men. It processed 11,000 logs, producing work valued at $16,000. This was but one of the King’s mills. They appear to have owned and operated at least two others.

There are family stories of my great-grandfather Charles Vermette and his brother François working in lumber camps as little boys. The story goes that when they were too small to help with the hard work of lumberjacking they assisted the cook in the camp. Their day as full-fledged lumberjacks would come soon enough. These stories fit well into what we know of the Nelson Township milieu. The stories may be connected with either Michel Turgeon’s sawmill or the much larger King holdings.

The King brothers weren’t finished building their empire. In 1876, a farmer named Fecteau who lived in the Township of Thetford, south of Nelson, discovered an unusual fibrous rock while digging on his farm. He had found asbestos, which was tantamount to striking gold or oil. The King Brothers already owned a number of lots in Thetford Township but they now swept down, purchased more lots, and by 1878 were in the lucrative asbestos mining business. Their new boomtown, known as Kingsville, was later re-christened Thetford-Mines.

 

Workers in the King asbestos mines (1896)

Within several years of the opening of the King asbestos mines, the entire Vermette/Turgeon clan, with old Michel as the vanguard, moved to Thetford-Mines. They left their farms and rustic trades in Nelson Township for the life of industrial wage earners. Joseph and at least two generations of his progeny would labor in the asbestos mines.

The period in Nelson Township in the 1860s and 1870s was transitional. When the Vermettes left the old parish of Saint-Gervais-de-Bellechasse around 1862, little had changed in the seigneuries in the St. Lawrence valley since the 17th c. When Joseph went to work in the asbestos mines in the 1880s, he was a harbinger of the 20th c. world of big business, large scale, international enterprise, in a cash economy. I have often wondered if Joseph Vermette, who died exactly 100 years ago, thought of this transition as an improvement.

Land Tenure, Seigneurie, and Social Systems: How We Look at Land and Life

Around 1862 my line of the Vermette family moved to a place then called Nelson Township, Megantic County. The family had lived for nearly two hundred years in the region of Québec known as Bellechasse, part of the settled, older regions of the country on the South Bank of the St. Lawrence not far from Québec City.

Their new home in Nelson Township was on the very edge of the Eastern Townships region of Québec. It was situated along a fault line between two languages, two religions, two social outlooks, and two systems of land tenure. The way we look at land is culturally determined and the portion of Nelson Township where they lived was the liminal space where two ways of looking at the land – and perhaps at life – came together.

The Eastern Townships is a large region stretching east of Montréal, filling in the area between the old parishes of the former New France and the USA border. Attempts had been made to settle Loyalists from the American Revolution in this area. Immigrants from the British Isles found a home in this rugged frontier in the early 19th century, but it became settled quickly when the area was opened to French-Canadian settlement by mid-century.

The old parishes along the St. Lawrence were established under the seigneurial system a development of the feudalism of medieval times. In brief, the theory was that the King held all land in his domain and he granted a tract (seigneurie) to a seigneur (lord) on the condition that he met certain obligations. The seigneur then granted measured portions of his seigneurie to settlers, known as censitaires officially but habitants colloquially, in exchange for certain payments and concessions. The seigneurial system was abolished in the 1850s but it left a deep mark on Québec to this day.

Along with this system came a way of dividing and distributing land. The plots granted to the habitants were about 1,600 meters deep and 150 meters wide. The narrow front of the property was along the river and the farmland was laid out in a long, narrow rectangular strip perpendicular to the water. The house was generally built on the riverfront portion of the property, which meant that the farmhouses attached to these narrow strips were close together and as many people as possible had water access. Since water routes were the main arteries, and the houses were built in relatively close contact along the river, this system facilitated transportation, communication, and mutual defense and assistance.

The rows of properties along a river were called a rang (range). Once the river front property was laid out more properties were granted inland. These properties were established behind the riverfront ranges. In these inland ranges, roads took the place of the river. Houses were built close to the road while the farmland stretched out in a long, narrow strip behind the road.

Place names in rural Québec were indicated by rang and parish. For instance, around 1815 my third great grandfather, Augustin Vermette, acquired the use of a farm en seigneurie in the Deuxième Rang Est de Saint-Gervais that is in the second range east of the parish of Saint-Gervais, Bellechasse. His descendants, my distant cousins who still live in Saint-Gervais were able to show me exactly where this farm was.

The Eastern Townships were originally intended as an Anglophone enclave in Québec. The land was held not according to the seigneurial regime but by freehold land tenure according to English law. In freehold tenure a property is owned “free and clear” and in perpetuity with few obligations owed to anyone else. The English way of dividing land was to lay it out in squares or compact rectangles. Square lots laid out along a river meant that only a small number of people had riverfront property. In the Francophone’s system, the logical place to build the home was on the portion of the lot closest to the river or the road. On a square lot there is no single, logical place to build a house. One can build a home on the lot wherever it seems most convenient given lighting, weather conditions, or aesthetics.

Nelson Township plan of rectangular lots
still called "rangs" by the French speakers.
The Vermette property, a small subsection of a lot
in "Rang XII", is indicated in red*

This Anglophone way of dividing, holding and occupying land encourages the proprietor to think of himself as the lord of his little domain surrounded by his own land on all sides of his house. The Francophone’s system of dividing land in narrow strips meant that someone else’s land was always close at hand. This would tend to encourage a sense of community, equality, and mutual dependence on one’s neighbor. The English sense of absolute ownership, entitlement, and individuality upon his “private property” is arguably both the strength and the weakness of his worldview. This is one aspect of the unconscious Anglo-Saxon assumptions that I find alien to my family’s culture despite the fact that we spoke English at home.

The English system of land tenure, however, also favored the development of a village at the center of the township where business could be contracted. The French system did not favor the development of such town squares or central villages. When I observed these two systems side-by-side in this part of Québec it dawned on me that in the older cities of the East Coast USA major neighborhoods are called squares, for example Union Square in New York City or Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This use of the word square here refers to the intersection of major streets, nonetheless in many small towns in New England the village square is still preserved.

While English speakers categorize location in terms of squares the French North American mind has a whole different set of connections. Even in modern, secularized Québec what an English speaker might call “a town” is often referred to as a paroisse or parish. And of course this French vocabulary also persists in Louisiana.

In Nelson Township, the Vermettes in the 1860s and 1870s were balanced on the line between these two systems. The parish of Ste-Agathe in the old seigneurie of Lotbinière was to one side of their small property. The County of Megantic with place names like Nelson, Inverness, Ireland and Thetford was on the other side. The Vermettes attended the Catholic Parish church of Sainte-Agathe but they lived in the township of Nelson. In old Québec, one’s parish was also one’s geography but not so in the Vermette’s new environment.

Here we find a collision of worlds. Here was neither the French parish system nor entirely the English township system. For the first time since his ancestor came from France in the 1660s a Vermette of my line would have to learn to live in a nouveau monde, a world where language, religion, social system, land divisions and tenure were in transition on the threshold between earlier and later developments. It’s uncomfortable to stand on a threshold. Nelson Township was a way station for the Vermettes, a transitional stage to new adventures.

Source for the picture above: A History of Megantic County: Downhomers of Quebec's Eastern Townships, Gwen Rawlings, Barry Evans Books, 1999, p 99.