Process: Homesteads and Ghost Towns

Gabrielle Roy's Fragiles lumières de la terre (1978) is a collection of non-fiction that spans her entire career. I found the chapters on immigrant communities quite interesting thinking back on my train trip across the Prairies. The author writes of Manitoba and her encounters with several ethnic communities: the Doukhobors, who immigrated from Russia beginning in 1898; the Hutterites, who arrived from Germany in 1918; and the Mennonites, who settled in Canada from Russia between 1923-1927. The Prairies have always intrigued me because my grandmother hails from a small francophone village in Saskatchewan. And yet this chapter of Canadian history that focuses on the homesteading process is largely unknown to me.

 

Melville, Saskatchewan

 

Case in point. One morning of my train trip, traveling eastward from Vancouver, I sat with a young couple in the dining car for breakfast. They were very soft spoken and I could detect what I thought was a German accent. I was puzzled however because they said they had moved to British Colombia from Paraguay. As we had been talking about Montreal’s multilingual aspect, I thought it odd the fact that they spoke German and Spanish — they were not languages that I normally associated with each other. In retrospect, after reading Roy’s book, I realized that they were probably Mennonites. Upon further research, I discovered that Paraguay was a sought after destination for German immigrants in the 1920’s and 30s as they were promised homesteads, religious freedom and the right to practice their language. A Canadian group from Manitoba founded the Menno colony in Paraguay (1926-1927).

 

Melville, Saskatchewan

 

Reading Susanna Moodie’s “Journey into the Woods” (Roughing It in the Bush, 1852), which describes her family's venture deep into a forested marsh to develop their homestead, I thought of my own grandparents’ attempts to better their lives by moving to a new environment. Though they displaced themselves inter provincially, if one considers Canada’s large landmass and the harsh terrain at the time, it was still a considerable distance to travel to meet the unknown.

Growing up, I never tired of hearing the story of how my grandmother came to Sudbury to marry my grandfather. It’s only now that I recognize how her eastward trip was effectively the same journey  — in reverse — that her own father, Théophile Leclerc, had undertaken to reach his homestead in the wilds of the Saskatchewan bush.

 

 

Théophile Leclerc and Philomène Drolet were married in Ste-Catherine, Québec in 1907 and established themselves in Pont Rouge. The couple moved with their three children to Shell River, Saskatoon five years later. Théophile had accepted a homestead, sight unseen, in Debden, a small village where the majority of the population has Fransaskois origins. The lot of land turned out to be in a remote region, hidden away in thick forest and bogland. He needed to clear the trees before he could even build a makeshift shelter. This shack, originally supposed to be a temporary dwelling, served as the family home for a period of 20 years as Théophile was often away for work in Saskatoon, Marcelin and Edmonton. Philomène was left at home with six children: Ovila, Jeannette, Noella, Cécile, Lucien and my grandmother, Florence.

On October 19th, 1939, Florence Germaine Leclerc took her own journey east in search of work, hitching a ride with other travelers to Northern Ontario. Hardly speaking a word of English, she embarked to start a new life in Sudbury with a mere $400.00 in her pocket. After a brief stint as a chambermaid in a downtown boarding house, the parish priest found her employment with the widower J. A. Lapalme, father of 8 children. They married the following May and she bore him another 7 children. My paternal grandfather's ancestors go back thirteen generations to Martin Janson (1605) in St-Sulpice, Paris, France.

I'd like to travel to Debden someday so that I can fully understand the courage it took for my grandmother to pack up and travel to a place unknown.

 

Falconbrige, Ontario

 

My maternal grandmother, Loretta Alma McPhail (b.1912), grew up on a farm in Whitefish, Ontario with her 4 sisters and one brother. She often spoke of her second adopted brother, Wilbur McNab. Her aunt had also adopted his brother Robert. The children were sent to Canada from overseas (Isle of Mull, Scotland) during the war. Everyone called her brother Charlie. Charlie Hamilton.

As my grandmother was Catholic, she had to elope to marry my grandfather, John Desmond McPhail (b. 1904) a Protestant whose ancestors hailed from Torosay, on the Isle of Mull. They were married August 26, 1932 in Espanola. His parents only learned of the marriage many months later. I remember her telling me stories about how she first met her "Jack". She said she knew upon seeing him for the first time, that she would marry him. He was a tall, handsome fellow playing the banjo at the dance hall.

Her father, Désiré Hamilton, was born in Ste-Félicité in 1879, but raised and educated in Sayabec, Québec. He married Odila Boulay (b. 1974) in Matane, Gaspé. In 1899, they moved to Victoria Mines in Walden, Ontario where he worked until 1910. Désiré then began farming in the summer and working in lumber camps in the winter. He did so until 1917 when he was employed by INCO to work at the old O’Donnell ore roast yard, west of Copper Cliff.

 

Falconbrige, Ontario

 

While the Walden region is made up of the communities of Lively, Naughton, Worthington and Beaver Lake, three ghost towns are also situated within its limits – Victoria Mines, High Falls and Creighton. Victoria Mines was a company town that sprang up around the Canadian Pacific Railway line and the Mond Nickel Company mine and smelter, which was established in 1900. Abandoned after the mine’s closure in 1913, it became a ghost town. In fact, many of the town’s buildings were moved to Coniston using the CP Rail line where a Presbyterian church still remains standing. Jeri Danyleyko’s Ontario Ghost Towns site highlights Victoria Mines complete with historic maps and archival images.

I think of how a good many of my friends seem so mobile today, ready to pack up and move at a moment’s notice for the promise of a good job: off eastward to the Maritimes, off to oil country out west, even overseas. Considering Théophile and Désiré’s displacements a century ago, perhaps today's mobility is not really a new occurrence? People undertook various jobs, often in dangerous conditions, and traveled great distances to support their families. These ghost towns are now the only trace of bustling company towns that attracted workers from all over Canada and beyond.

When I look back on my grandmother’s journey, I think that people also have an innate lust for adventure, a yearning for freedom and new beginnings. Migration and displacement will always play an important part in history based on a multitude of economic and social factors.