Historical Essay
Historical Essay
(written by me)
(written by me)
by Peter J. MacDonald (updated 2025-08-19)
The southern townships of the Canadian province of Quebec are known collectively as "The Eastern Townships" or "L'Estrie" in French. It is a fairly large portion of the province and consists today of 11 (?) counties, each subdivided into dozens of townships. The southern border of the Eastern Townships is shared with the states of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. The terrain varies from very mountainous to flat plains, but it is beautiful throughout. There are many rivers and picturesque mountain lakes that have been favorably compared to those of Switzerland. This comparison is somewhat exaggerated, for though Lake Memphrenog is indeed gorgeous, the highest mountain in the Eastern Townships is only 3,000 feet. Nevertheless, Mount Megantic was high enough to be chosen in 19?? as the cite for an astronomical observatory (the Mount Megantic Astronical observatory) that touts itself as "the premier observatory in the eastern part of North America."
Until the 18th century the only humans in the Eastern Townships were the Abenaquis Indians who lived nearby and used this area for hunting.
After the initial explorations of the area by Champlain in 1608, the first substantial European presence in the region was that of French missionaries who were sent by King Henry IV of France in 1615 to convert the Indians. Encouraged by the missionary experiences and in order to escape the feudal tyrannies of France, Frenchmen in general began to immigrate and settled on the fertile land along the St. Lawrence River. From 1608 to 1759, when the British won Canada, some 10,000 Frenchmen came to the region. For the most part, the French inhabitants were poor farmers tied to the land along the St. Lawrence under strict control of the French officials of the Catholic Church. The region became an important part of "Nouvelle France" or "New France," with Quebec City as its capitol.
The French immigrants became so numerous that the British, who dominated the rest of Canada, considered their presence a threat to the British plans to colonize this part of Canada too.
After a series of battles between the French and the British over the territory, the British prevailed and in 1763 most disputed parts of Canada became British possessions. Most of the French speakers remained, but they were now officially governed by the British. Many of them, however, moved and resettled in upper New York state on land that the Americans gave them.
In 1791 Canada was divided into two parts: Upper Canada, which later became Ontario, and Lower Canada, which became the province of Quebec. The region known today as the "Eastern Townships," or "L'Estrie" in French, was then referred to as either "The St. Francis River District" or the "domain of the Abenakis (Boisvert, 1987, p. 2, who is quoting Rev. Jean Mercier, 1964).
For many years, the Upper St. Francis District was intentionally left uninhabited because it shared a border with the United States. The Canadian officials thought that if the area were settled, the residents would naturally want to clear roads, which could be exploited by U.S. troops to invade Canada if the American Revolutionary War against the British ever escalated to include hostilities with Canada.
The first English-speaking settlers in the St. Francis River District were Americans who migrated north during the American Revolutionary War. The Americans who came during the war to Canada had British ancestry and preferred living under British rule to the revolution-minded American government. They were called the "Loyalists." Though most of them settled in Ontario and New Brunswick, some settled in the southern and western parts of Lower Canada (as Quebec was called then). However, this still left much of Quebec unoccupied, especially the central and eastern parts.
In the 1790's these unoccupied territories were divided up into small townships, which were all given english-sounding names. The governor of Lower Canada allowed anyone to move into these townships free of charge if they agreed to develop the land. English speakers took advantage of this offer at first and English became the dominant language and culture of the region. These townships became known as the "Eastern Townships" of Canada because they were situated to the east of the English-speaking townships of Ontario, which was the center of Canada's English-speaking community.
During the entire 19th century, the province of Quebec was administered by English speakers who lived mostly in the cities of Montreal and Quebec, which were the only real cities in all of Canada at the time. Despite their political and economic advantage in the province of Quebec, the English speakers were still outnumbered by the French-speakers, most of whom still lived along the St. Lawrence River. When the French-speakers started settling their families in the English-speaking Eastern Townships, the English-speakers prepared a plan to quell the "invasion".
In the 1830's an organization called the British American Land Company (BALC) was sold land in the Eastern Townships by the British government for a pittance on the understanding that the company would use the land for settling English-speakers in those townships before more of the French from the St. Lawrence region moved in.
The first thirty families that the BALC brought into the Eastern Townships were from England and Ireland in 1835. These settlers were given free passage, money to build homes, furnishings, farming tools, clothes, and food for the first year. They were settled in an area about three miles west of present day Scotstown in an area that was called Victoria. Starting the Victoria settlement and supplying it with enough houses, churches, schools, and government offices stretched the resources available to the BALC. Unfortunately, this first settlement disbanded after just a few years due to the hardships the members encountered and the financial troubles experienced by the BALC because of their generosity.
The BALC reduced the amount of its subsidies, but continued to took for people ready to emigrate. There were some parts of Great Britain such as the Scottish Island and Highlands that were good candidates for immigration due to poverty and hunger caused by factors such as lack of property rights, overcrowding of family farms, and failed crops due to bad weather and disease.
The first Hebridean Scots to inhabit the Eastern Townships came in 1838 from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. They were probably unaware of the extreme hardships ahead of them. Their deplorable situation in Lewis, however, drove them to emigration--not the lure of Canada as "the Promised land." This first group of settlers from the Isle of Lewis came from the village of Mealista on the west side of Uig and were settled by the BALC in the township of Lingwick which was in the region known as the Upper St. Francis District. They arrived only "with the clothes they wore, sometimes a piece of furniture, the tools of their trade, and their beloved Bible" (McLeod, 1977:1).
Unfortunately, the BALC could not pay for the passage of these Hebridean immigrants. They had to pay for their tickets themselves, but the BALC sold the land to them cheaply and on very favorable terms of interest. They did not have to start paying the Company back until a year after their arrival. In return the settlers agreed to clear one-tenth of the land within four years and to clear a road 20 feet wide in front of their lots.
This arrangement attracted an increasing number of immigrants from the Isle of Lewis and Harris, with a sprinkling from other Hebridean islands like Skye and the two Uists.
When first settled, this part of the Eastern Townships had no road, was thickly forested with many swampy areas along the Salmon River which flowed through Lingwick. Some officials considered the area unfit for habitation. It apparently seemed so to some of the newcomers, some of whom went back to Lewis and others moved to other parts of Canada after a few years in Lingwick.
The first few years of the Lewis Scots in Lingwick were indeed difficult ones. The journalist L.S. Channell described the hardships in this way half a century later:
"The first eight families... all settled on the road between Bury and Gould, as close together as they could. This was always the main thought with the Scotch settlers in those days. ... They wanted to have a settlement of their own, where they could live like Highlanders, 'shoulder to shoulder.' None of them in those days thought of owning a larger farm than fifty acres.
"The cabins built by the settlers the first year were very small.... The cabins had no fire places or chimneys the first winter... A hole was made in the roof to let all the smoke out that was inclined to escape. The roof was generally so badly constructed that whenever it rained outside it rained inside also.
"The settlers lived the first year principally on oatmeal, advanced by the B.A.L. Company. They paid for this the following summer at the rate of $5 for one hundred pounds, by grubbing out a road from Bury to Gould." (Channell (1896:256-57)
One of the first things the Lewis Scots would have noticed upon settling in Canada was the difference in the weather patterns from those on Lewis. In comparison to Lewis, Quebec must have seemed much warmer in summer, colder and snowier in winter, and generally drier and sunnier than anything they had ever experienced before. The following figures bear this out.
TEMPERATURE
MEAN AVE. LOW/HIGH
MONTHLY TEMP. MONTHLY TEMP.
JAN. JULY JAN JULY
-----------------------------------------------------------
Lewis 41 56 26/51 39/69
Montreal 14 70 14/52 52/87
-----------------------------------------------------------
RAINFALL
AVE. MONTHLY
RAINFALL NUMBER OF TOTAL
JAN. JULY RAINY DAYS/YR ANNUAL
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Lewis 6.61" 2.93" 260 50
Montreal .61" 4.54" 94 28
-----------------------------------------------------------------
SNOWFALL
AVE. MONTHLY TOTAL ANNUAL
JAN. SNOWFALL
--------------------------------------------
Lewis 25" 0"
Montreal 60" 118"
--------------------------------------------
(Figures gathered from Patterson (1883:44,46,47) and Hance (1949:32).)
In 1841 a second group of Lewis Scots immigrated, 27 families in all. These 78 people arrived on the ship "Lady Hood" and 45 on the "Charles" (Little 1992, p. 37). They profited from the experience of the first settlers, but they had to endure basically the same hardships of pioneer life as did the original group.
Despite the many difficulties in Canada, the Scots were happy to be free of the tyrannical landlords of their homeland. The land they lived on and worked was now their own and they were bound and determined to transform it into a community.
By 18xx, there were126 families (552 people) all of which except 19 families were immigrants from the Isle of Lewis. (According to a petition for financial assistance for the inhabitants of the Salmon River region (Little, 1992, p. 38)).
J.I. Little relates that "within the first three years each family had cleared ten to fifteen acres and acquired one to three cows." Their hard work was starting to pay off with successful crops and sale of lumber (Little, 1992, p. 35).
Until 1850 most Lewis Scots settled in Lingwick and Bury townships in areas called the Old Settlement, Red Mountain and North Hill (in Lingwick Township), Spring Hill (in Whitton Township, now Nantes), and Ness Hill (near Lake Megantic).
At first there were no roads connecting any of the settlements. In the 1850's the provincial government of Lower Canada started offering 50 acres of land free to anyone who would settle in areas such as Winslow and Whitton, where the land was more suitable for agriculture than in Lingwick and Bury where the Scots had so far been concentrated. To take advantage of the offer some Scots moved into these adjacent townships. In 1855 another group of Lewis Scots arrived and many of them settled in Whitton.
The provincial government hired local men to clear areas for roads. More towns sprang up along these roads such as Gould and Stornoway.
When the the railroad tracks were laid through the region between 1850 and 1880, cities such as Bury, Scotstown, Milan, and Spring Hill sprung up along its path.
At its height in the 1890's, the area settled by the Lewis Scots covered an area of only about 50 square miles between the St. Francis River on the west and Lake Megantic on the east.
By the late 19th century, Hebridean immigrants made up about one third of the population of the entire Eastern Townships. Most of the rest were English, Irish, or French. But because the Hebridean immigrants clustered together, they made up a much larger percent of the population of the few townships in which they chose to live. By 1896 there were around 450 Scottish families living in the relatively small area between the St. Francis River and Lake Megantic.
As immigration picked up, the Scots cleared more land of its trees and rocks and built more dwellings. Clusters of farms were given names for that were borrowed from towns back on Lewis like Galson, Tolsta, Gisla, Balallan, and others.
Little money circulated in those days. People lived by bartering services and having "bees" to raise homes and barns, to cut and haul wood, thresh hay, etc. Among the first buildings to go up in a new settlement were a school and a church, which often were shared by several settlements.
The Scots tended to be isolated from the surrounding community at first because most of the Scots spoke only Gaelic and transportation to the next community was limited, but even after roads were in place, the Hebridean Scots did not intermarry with either the English speakers or the French speakers until about the turn of the century.
Along with their Gaelic language, the Lewis Scots brought their religion with them from their homeland. They were staunch Presbyterians. Their Bible were in Gaelic and their music was the Psalms sung in Gaelic. However, no musical instruments or hymnals were ever allowed in the churches. Their loyalty to Presbyterianism contributed to their isolation from both the surrounding Anglican/Episcopal (English) and Catholic (French) communities for many decades after their arrival in Canada.
The 1871 census of Canada showed the following distribution of religions in the Province of Quebec:
Presbyterians (& like) 46,165
Roman Catholics 1,019,850
Church of England 62,449
Methodists (& like) 4,100
Baptists 8,686
Protestants 4,195
Congregational 5,240
Adventists 3,150
Universalists 1,937
Swedenbourgians 1,093
Brethren (& like) 672
Jews 549
Lutherans 496
Christian Conference 299
Irvingites 251
Evangelical Assoc. 163
Quakers 117
No Religion 376
(Dominion of Canada, 1873, p. 12)
The elders of the Hebridean community were unbending in their insistence on observing the traditions of their culture and religion. Even innovation in the naming of children was discouraged. While non-Gaelic first names were tolerated for girls, it was far more common for them to have one of the names familiar to them back on Lewis such as Catherine, Ann, Mary, Christina (Christy/Kirsty), or Margaret. Boys were almost always named with one of the traditional names like Donald, Angus, Kenneth, Murdo, John, Malcolm, Norman, or Alexander. The range of surnames of the region is equally limited. Most people had one of these surnames: Buchanan, Campbell, McLeod, McDonald, McIver, McKay, McKenzie, Morrison, Murray, or Matheson. On Lewis these "Mc" names were more commonty spelled "Mac" with the patronymic part written in lower case letters as in "Macdonald" (thanks to Angus Macdonald for pointing this out to me).
[Much more on the culture of these Scots can be found in three research articles (see Bennett-Knight (1980), Gmelch (1980), and Prattis (1980)) collected by Doucette (1980) and the book by Bennett (1999).]
FOOTNOTES
Angus Macdonald was the maintainer of the Ross and Cromarty pages for The UK & Ireland Genealogical Information Service (GENUKI) in 1997. Mr. Macdonald read the August 11, 1997 version of this essay and kindly informed me of some errors in it. He also recommended some changes that I had the sense to make that have improve its phrasing and terminology. However, for any errors that still remain, I insist on being given full credit.
In 1867 the Canadian provinces were unified under the government of Great Britatin and the area previously called "Lower Canada" received the name "The Province of Quebec."
As the Scots moved out, more French moved in to take the jobs and farm land the Scots were leaving behind. The French were in even more desperate economic straits than the Scots and were eager to take any job they could find. The movement of French into all areas of Compton County was encouraged by the Quebec government, which itself was now dominated by French speakers, and there was even an organized appeal from 1870 to 1875 to French Canadians who had gone to New England in the United States to return to live in Quebec.
Many of the French had by now become disenchanted with the United States were encouraged by the respect given French speakers in Quebec and many of them decided to return.
However, the townships in which most of the Gaelic-speakers lived were still relatively undeveloped, so the French were not attracted to them as much as to the English-speaking areas which had been around longer and had more diversified and stable economies.
By 1875 about 400 French families arrived in the areas near the Scots such as Ditton, Emberton, Chesham, and Hampden (Baril 1991, p. 21). In French, they referred to the areas as "Les Townships de l'Est" and later as "Les Cantons de l'Est" (Boisvert, 1997, p. 3).
Scotstown developed around a lumber enterprise started there in 1873 by the Glasgow and Canadian Land Company, which employed 200 men to cut the timber (Baril 1991, p. 23). The first manager of the site was John Scott, after whom the town was named (he had come to the area from Glasgow, Scotland with several families in 1873). By 1874 a sawmill was built on the Salmon River in Scotstown. However, not until 1877, when the old International Railway reached the area, did the area really begin to grow.
The Scots would cut down trees on their land and stack them the railroad tracks where the train would eventually stop and pick them up as it passed. Soon several more saw mills were established along the Salmon River, which ran right through Hampden and Lingwick townships.
This involvement of the Hebridean Scots in lumbering was quite ironic because on the Isle of Lewis, from which the Scots had come, there were few trees.
The coming of the railway through Scotstown in 1877 seemed to be a good omen for the economic future of the town. In 1861 there had been only 11 sawmills in greater Compton County--by 1891 there were 55.
Although the mills were very successful for a time, indiscriminate timbering eventually stripped large tracks of land of its trees and as a result the good topsoil was soon washed away. This resulted in the need to downscale the lumbering enterprises, which nearly destroyed the local economies until more diversity was introduced, mainly dairy farming.
By 1875, the provincial government of Quebec was making an all-out effort to lure more French speakers to the Eastern Township--going so far as to provide land grants to French speakers coming from the United States. The government was selling land in 1875 for 50 to 60 cents per acre (even on the open market it was only about one dollar per acre).2 In order to provide this land so cheaply the government had expropriated land once set aside for more British immigrants, but the waning of British emigration since the 1840's caused it to go unclaimed and undeveloped. In reaction to this action of giving land to repatriated Frenchmen, the local Scots formed the Protestant Defense Alliance (see Little, 1977, p. 72) and the Eastern Townships Colonization (estab. In 1882), which tried to induce greater British immigration to the region.
By 1881 there were 3,999 Scots in Compton County, but they were still only 29% of the population, 30% were English and Irish, and 29% were French. The number of Scots in the Upper St. Francis district reached its all-time high of 3,406 in 1881. From 1881 on, the Scottish population dropped steadily.
The population statistics from the 1891 census showed that the Scots were the dominant population in only the township of Lingwick. In the other townships where Scots had settled the French either outnumbered the Scots or were soon to do so.
TOTAL SCOTTISH FRENCH
POP. POP. POP.
-----------------------------------------------
Lingwick 1,022 844 (83%) 76 (7%)
Marston 1,117 559 (50%) 529 (47%)
Whitton 983 454 (46%) 486 (49%)
Hampden 1,066 467 (44%) 422 (40%)
Winslow 1,499 471 (31%) 1,024 (68%)
-----------------------------------------------
TOTAL ?,??? 2,795 ?,???
1891 Census Figures
When not enough good work was available in and around their home communities, the Scots often did seasonal labor in other communities--some even went to New England to find work (e.g., lumbering and quarry labor for the young men, and domestic work for the women). Some took up residency elsewhere and sent back money to help support their parents back home.
The Scots were becoming very accustomed to working outside the original boundaries of the Hebridean community. The availability of more suitable work elsewhere resulted in many whole families moving to offices in Montreal or to communities near the granite mines of Vermont and New Hampshire.
There were nine elementary schools in the district (usually one-room school houses), one of which was in Dell. There was one high school, called the "Model School," which was built in Gould in 1915-16 (McLeod, 1977:58).
Until 1892 Scotstown had been part of Hampden Township. In that year, with a population of 1,040 persons, it was incorporated and became a municipality all its own. [Of these 1,040 inhabitants 38% were French speakers.] At this time, the Scots and French coexisted without any friction. The social reality was that the Scots were still the bosses and the French-speakers the employees (Baril 1991, p. 23).
As the twentieth century approached, many Scots left for the States partly because of uneasiness with the French-dominated community--but mostly for personal, economic reasons. The discontent many of the Scots were feeling with life in the Eastern Townships was no doubt magnified by the events surrounding the DONALD MORRISON affair.
Donald Morrison was a young Scot who had left home and worked as a cowboy for seven years in the "wild" west frontier of Canada and sent money home to help his father pay off the mortgage on his farm. When his father defaulted on the home loan farm was repossessed by a fellow Scot who had made the loan. Donald returned to Quebec believing that he and his parents had been treated unfairly. When his efforts to legally regain the house had failed and the house had been sold to a French family, he allegedly burned down the house and barn in May of 1888--a charge Morrison always denied. Although he had been charged with the crime, delivering the warrant for his arrest proved to be problematic. No local person, Scot or not, was willing to do so.
Finally, a young American drifter volunteered to serve the warrant himself and was deputized for this purpose alone. He vowed that he would kill Morrison, if necessary. When Morrison saw the "deputy" coming to arrest him, Morrison shot him before he could be shot himself. Morrison then disappeared into the community. Now branded a murderer, he was pursued by a company of provincial police who scoured the countryside to find him, following every lead they could get.
For ten months Morrison was fed and sheltered from the police by the Scottish residents, who were not inclined to cooperate with the government authorities. Even despite the large number of Frenchmen who lived and worked in the Upper St. Francis none of them seemed to have joined in the manhunt or turned him in. Even when a reward for information leading to his arrest was raised to $3,000 and his supporters were threatened with arrest, still none would turn him in. It seems that either Donald's guilt was not as obvious as the authorities believed or perhaps there was apathy in the French community over the incident viewed as one Scot feuding with another. Some of the Scots who aided Morrison were arrested and did serve brief jail sentences only to return to repeat their "crime.
Morrison was eventually shot in the leg and arrested in April of 1889. He was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 18 years in prison. After serving just five years of his sentence, he was released because a hunger strike while in prison led to tuberculosis. He died in 1894 just a month after his release. The Donald Morrison affair became a symbol of the division between the Scots and the numerically dominant francophones in Quebec then. (For more on the Donald Morrison affair, see the epic poem of Oscar Dhu (1892), the narratives of Kidd (1948), Epps (1973), and Wallace (1977), and the analyses of Rudin (1986) and Little (1994).
Most Scots were able to make a decent living on their farms, in their shops, or in the saw mills. The local economy showed some promise. The dairy industry was proving to be a great success, and the sawmills were still doing well. Scotstown was developing into a real city with two hotels, four general stores, three groceries, two butchers, a leather store, two carpenters, two locksmiths, a saddler, a tailor, a carriage maker, a doctor, a jeweler, a cobbler, a bank, a post office, schools and churches (Baril 1991, p. 23-24).
In Hampden township there were about 50 farmers, who above all were engaged in raising sheep as they had been accustomed to doing in Scotland. With a train station and three saw mills, Scotstown looked like a town with a bright future.
However, since coming to Canada, the Lewis Scots had acquired little real political influence. They held political offices in only the few communities in which they were concentrated and now even there they were becoming a minority group.
[NOTE: The following is a list of the mayors of Hampden taken from Baril (1991, p. 93):
Charles H. Parker 1889-1892
D.D. McInnes 1892-1893
Thomas Muir 1893-1893
J.D. Morrison 1894-1897
KENNETH SMITH 1897-1900
ALLAN A. MORRISON 1900-1907
J.D. GRAHAM 1907-1917
JOHN M. MACDONALD 1917-1935
J.D. SMITH 1935-1939
J.C. MORRISON 1939-1944
ALBERT MACLEOD 1944-1947
The following were the mayors of Scotstown:
CHARLES H. PARKER 1892-97
WELLIE F. BOWNAN 1897-1900 - 3 -4 -6 -7
E.M. MCKAY 1900 -1 -4 -5
FRANCOIS-GODFROY ROY 1901 -2 -5 -6 -9 -10 -16 -17
JIM BLACK 1902-03
M.J. MOONEY 1907 -8 -9 -11 -12
M.-ANGUS MCKENZIE 1910 -11 -12 -13
JOSEPH LANGLOIS 1913-14
ANGUS M. MACKENZIE 1914-15 -30 -21, 47-53 -54 -55
J.A. GIFFORD 1915-17 -20
W.C. SCOTT 1921 -23 24 -28
ROBERT D. FARLEY 1922-25
DONAT SAINT-JEAN 1928-29
JOHN MACDONALD 1929-31
FREE START 1931-32
DONALD L. MCRITCHIE 1932-33
G.F. COWAN 1933-40
ARTHUR CHOQUETTE 1940-43
A.M. MACDONALD 1943-44
As the French influence increased, the Scots began to feel more and more out of place. The Scots were not as attached to the province of Quebec as were the French, most of whom had been born there and preferred living among other speakers of French. The Scots were willing to seek other places to live in the English-speaking provinces of Canada and in the United States. Places in Canada they gravitated to especially were Upper Canada and Alberta. In the States many moved to New England, the Dakotas, Montana, and California.
The reasons most Scots left the region was economics. They wanted to find better paying jobs in a more hospitable setting, with better education for their children.
By 1901 even Compton County was 48% French speaking. Twenty years earlier the French were only 29%. The "invasion" of the French into the Eastern Townships is treated by the Scottish-born newspaper editor Robert Seller in his 1907 book The tragedy of Quebec: the expulsion of the Protestant farmers. Unfortunately, it is also a highly-biased anti-Catholic document, but it may give the reader some idea of what the Scots were thinking during this period in Quebec. It ignores the many legitimate reasons the French farmers had for leaving their farms along the St. Lawrence and moving elsewhere--such as too little land for their large families, worn-out soil, and the low price of land offered them in the Eastern Townships by the government if they moved in.
The size of the French families was remaining high whereas the size of the Scots' families was shrinking (Baril 1991, p. 26).
By 1930 only 6% of Compton County were Scots, 31% English, and 60% French. A table comparing the two major language groups in the Eastern Townships as a whole between 1837 and 1931 shows the profound changes that took place in less than a century.
YEAR ENGLISH FRENCH
-------------------------------
1837 90.2% 9.8%
1887 41.5% 58.5%
1931 18.0% 82.0%
-------------------------------
(figures from Dresser 1935:98)
Despite the numerical dominance of the French, aspects of the Scottish presence were still noticeable as evidenced by this 1930 quote that the region "creates for the astonished visitor the illusion of his being at one and the same time in a province of France, of England, and of Scotland" (Along Quebec Highways, p. 90).
Mining for asbestos, chrome, copper, and other minerals became a major industry in the Eastern Townships during the first half of this century. By 1930, 85% of the world's production of asbestos took place in the Eastern Townships ("Along Quebec Highways," 1930:23). Dairying, making maple syrup, growing fruits, canning produce, and raising fur animals kept the local economy alive. But the lack of good roads was holding back real progress.
We learn from the 876-page guide book mentioned above (Along Quebec Highways, 1930), which discusses 702 cities along Quebec's main highways, that Scotstown, Dell, and Milan were not on the main highways of the province. They are not even mentioned in this book.
Until their local roads were upgraded to be traveled comfortably by car, Scotstown and Milan were connected by only a dirt road. But even when the road was upgraded in 1938, it was upgraded to a just a gravel road.
Both Scotstown and Milan did, however, have railway stations as early as 1877, but the lack of easy automobile access stalled their economic growth for some time. Limited telephone service came to Scotstown in 1890, but general use of it was not made until the 1920's and 30's. Houses in Scotstown were wired for electricity in 1922, but Milan homes were not wired until 1948. But the pace of this progress was too slow to hold many of the younger, Canadian-born Scots in their hometowns. The Lewis-born parents remained, but the Canadian-born generation were more and more inclined to leave.
In the 1920's many Scots left the townships to work in industrial factories and office in places like Montreal, Ottawa, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Boston.
It was impossible for the Scots who left Quebec to ignore their upbringing in the Scottish villages of Quebec. A poem written in the early 1970's by Donald N. Morrison of Scotstown, whose ancestors came from Barvas, Isle of Lewis, wrote this poem, quoted in McLeod, (1977:87), about the Scots who had left the Eastern Townships:
When the mill did close in Scotstown
Many families moved away -
Some to many parts of Canada
And others to the USA
They do miss the Salmon River
As it flows down by the mill
While happy memories linger
About the fairground on the hill.
They do miss their place of worship
Steeples reaching for the sky
And wistful are the memories
When they think of Scotstown High.
Stornoway, a city just five? miles from Scotstown and which was named after the largest city on Lewis, is now entirely French speaking. Only Scotstown and Milan have Scottish populations of any size and even there they numbered fewer than 100. Compton County Scots today are all quite elderly and it is certain that the Scottish presence will die when they do.
In 1991 the only Scots Presbyterian church remaining in the area was St. Paul's in Scotstown, which was being maintained by the deacon, Rev. Robert Sandford of Scotstown, who served also the Presbyterian communities of Milan and Lac Mégantic M&(Baril 1991, p. 38).
The 1986 census showed that no one in Scotstown speaks Gaelic at home anymore. Of the 705 respondents, 430 spoke only French, 105 spoke only English, and 170 spoke both English and French. Ethnic origins were given as 515 French and 70 British.
Many of the towns in the area that once bore Scottish names now have French ones or no longer appear on contemporary maps because they have no inhabitants at all. Even the term "The Eastern Townships" has been replaced in local usage by the French "L'Estrie." I have read somewhere that it may only be a matter of time until the town Stornoway is renamed "St. Ornoway."
Along Quebec highways: tourist guide, (s.l., Department of Highways and Mines, Provincial Tourist Board, 1930), 876 p.
Auger (1978?)
Auger, Roland J. "Genealogy in the Province of Québec," in ?, pp. 33-41.
Baril (1991)
Baril, Gilles, Paroisse Saint-Paul de Scotstown: (historique) 1891-1991 (La Patrie, G. Baril, 1991), 110 p.
Bennett-Knight (1980)
Bennett-Knight, Margaret. "Folkways and religion of the Quebec Hebrideans," in Doucette (1980), pp. 45-144.
Bennett (1999)
Bennett, Margaret. "Oatmeal and the Catechism: Scottish Gaelic Settlers in Quebec," John Donald, Edinburgh and McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal, 1998. Second edition, Birlinn, Edinburgh, 2003.
Boisvert (1997)
Boisvert, Jacques (1997), "Origin of the term 'Eastern Townships' and 'L'Estrie,'" in Across the border [Spring 1997], pp. 2-4.
Channel (1896)
Channel, L. S. History of Compton County and sketches of the Eastern Townships, District of St. Francis and Sherbrooke County (Belleville, Ontario, Mika, 1975), 289 p. (Canadian reprint series, no. 70). Reprint of 1896, Cookshire, Que.
Dominion of Canada (1884)
Dominion of Canada. A guide book containing information for intending settlers, with illustrations, 5th ed. (Ottawa, Dept. of Agriculture, 1884), 137 p.
Dominion of Canada (1873)
Dominion of Canada. Information for intending emigrants (Ottawa: Brown Chamberlain), 1873), 56 p.
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