Shawn MacWha

By Shawn MacWha

Local Journalism Initiative

Over the course of the past four months we have witnessed the most serious challenge to the international order since the start of the Second World War. The current American administration has unapologetically turned its back on the very economic and security institutions that it helped to create and in doing so has undermined global relationships and trading patterns that have taken generations to establish. So profound are these changes that on March 27, Prime Minister Mark Carney remarked that Canada’s old relationship with the United States, one based upon the integration of our economies and close security and military cooperation was over.

But this is not merely a bi-lateral problem between Canada and the United States. The most recent issue of Foreign Affairs (March/April 2025), one of the world’s leading political journals, focused almost entirely on examining threats to the prevailing liberal order. Across the world freedom is in decline and in 2024 there were more authoritarian states than democracies for the first time in over 20 years. While this may seem jarring to some people such a reversal is not without precedent and perhaps should not come as too much of a surprise. The long slow march towards liberal democracy and free market economics has been halting at times and there has been more than one period of sharp and painful regression. So integrated were the economic and political structures of Europe in the first decade of the 20^th century, for example, that most people thought a war between the region’s major powers unthinkable. That system unravelled with remarkable speed during the summer of 1914 and twenty million people died. We forget such things at our peril.

Throughout most of the last century, from the end of the First World War in 1918 until the end of the Cold War in 1989, the world’s economic and political order was centred around the struggle between capitalism and communism with a brief interlude of fascism thrown in for good measure. This era essentially saw the world divided into ideological camps that were very often at odds with one another. The collapse of the Soviet Union saw this system come to an abrupt and somewhat unexpected end, leaving the United States as the sole superpower on the planet.

In the face of this new reality two major books came out in the 1990s that offered insights into what the new world order would look like. Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 The End of History and the Last Man argued that following a series of failed experiments with fascism and communism free-market liberal democracies had proven themselves to the be only viable means of organizing society. Secure in this knowledge Fukuyama proclaimed that history was over, at least as far as political models were concerned, as it had reached its natural pinnacle. Contrasting with this worldview, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington offered a more dismal future in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.According to Huntington the post-Soviet world would be characterized once again by competing power blocks largely organized along cultural lines that would struggle for regional and global dominance.

Roughly speaking these two books can be seen as popular expressions of two of the main theories underpinning the study of international relations. The first of these approaches, neoliberalism, envisions a world where international agreements, often but not always based upon economic integration, establish clearly understood rules and expectations. These calming forces increase cooperation and reduce the threat of conflict between nations. The second worldview is based on the theory of realism (or more precisely neorealism) and the belief that notwithstanding any unifying factors that may exist between states they will ultimately only follow rules if the outcomes meet their own narrowly defined self-interests. Such a world is much more liable to conflict when states choose to withdraw from international arrangements when they perceive them to be working against their interests.

On the surface, this appears to be what is now happening. The United State is turning its back on long-established mechanisms such as the United Nations, NATO, and the World Trade Organization as well as newer ones like the United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) free trade agreement. We are returning to the world of great power politics where a few blocks dominated by powerful states and their vassals (they’re not really allies anymore) seek to maximize their economic, political and economic status in a zero-sum game with their rivals. In such a world any gain by one must be seen as a loss by the other. And that is partially true, but there are other, darker forces at play in Washington that suggest that the current trend in American politics is not just a return to a Cold War outlook but is rather an outright challenge to the idea of liberal democracy.

In 2007 Chris Hedges, one of the most important but underappreciated thinkers in modern Western society, wrote an eerily prophetic book called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. Hedges saw an America where a generation of workers left behind by globalization had turned to evangelical Christianity to ease the pain of their economic loss. Opportunistic church leaders, and later politicians, picked up on their despair in order to further their own agendas, pulling much of American society towards a conservative and religious worldview not seen anywhere else in the Western world. It is this fundamentalism that gives licence to today’s attacks on such things as minority rights, reproductive freedoms, and immigration. To paraphrase American comedian Jon Stewart what these people are trying to do is force a “factory reset” of American society to the point where the baseline measure of value, competency, and authority is a white male at the centre of a nuclear family.

With the presumed authority of God behind them, right-wing politicians then tapped into nationalist sentiments and a nostalgia for a “simpler” America in order to establish the Make America Great Again narrative. This, coupled with a Huntington-esque perspective on international politics, has led to the fervour by which the current administration is seeking to dismantle the internal and external structures that have formed the basis of both the American and global order for the last 80 years.

Maybe. If we are lucky that is all it is. But it could be worse. Much worse.

Starting around 2007 a new anti-democratic movement known as “The Dark Enlightenment” began to quietly emerge in the United States. Led by American software engineer Curtis Yarvin and British philosopher Nick Land this worldview argued that democracy itself was a failed experiment that needed to be replaced. Proponents of this ideology, sometimes called neoreactionaries, favour a return to authoritarianism wherein political leaders seek to privatize the mechanisms of the state in order to run it like a corporation. There is even a term for this in their thinking – the “gov-corp.” Rather than having an elected political leader supporters of this approach envision the appointment of a national CEO chosen by a board of influential, but unelected, business and thought leaders. Unsurprisingly, most of these would-be King makers are white male elites.

This would be silly if it not so serious, but the idea of such a structure has taken root amongst several influential technology leaders in Silicon Valley and at the highest levels of the modern Republican party. The Vice-President himself has stated that he is sympathetic to Yarvin’s plans to “deconstruct the administrative state” and many argue that the President too is guided by this thinking. It certainly appears that the current administration is implementing some of the ideas behind “The Dark Enlightenment.” One of Yarvin’s key suggestions is the removal of an independent public service that could oppose the corporate vision of a leader through a process that he termed “Retire All Government Employees” or RAGE. Sound familiar?

It would be alarmist to say that America today is becoming like Nazi Germany, although what we are seeing does very much have a 1934 feel to it. In March of this year the head of the Sweden-based Varieties of Democracy Project, Staffan Lindberg, announced that by as early as next year the United States may no longer qualify as a democracy. Similarly, a recent article entitled “The Path to American Authoritarianism” by Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way of the University of Toronto warned that “democracy is in greater peril today than at any time in modern U.S. history.” Even if these are minority opinions the risk of ignoring them completely is significant.  

It may be that America will correct itself, and in doing so will return some predictability to the international order. Surely Fukuyama was right when he suggested that the world had often flirted with alternatives to liberal democracy only to return to it when the new models failed. But current events likewise show that he was wrong in assuming that history was over. It is just repeating itself. Hold on.

Courtesy Wikicommons
Quebec after the 1775 American attack

By Shawn MacWha

Local Journalism Initiative

For more than 150 years, Canada and the United States have stood side by side as sibling countries, born of the same mother. Generations of people have crossed back and forth across the border in search of families, friends, economic prosperity, freedom from prosecution, or maybe just a summer holiday. Our armies have fought and died together to defend our ideals, and our soil, including the time in 1943 when 5,700 Canadian soldiers helped to retake the Alaskan island of Kiska from Japanese invaders – the only time that American territory was occupied during the Second World War. More recently our economies have become almost inextricably intertwined, with goods moving throughout the North American marketplace generating wealth for hundreds of millions of people. 

The recent announcements by the current U.S. administration represent a stark deviation from this pattern of cooperation that has awoken both patriotism and concern amongst Canadians. But the dark words coming out of Washington this winter are by no means the first time that our American neighbours have stricken out at Canada. Indeed during the early years of our history there were several times when relations were so sour that the United States threatened, and even used, military force against our country.

Such aggression was seen at the very beginning of the American nation when, in September 1775, one of the first acts of the Revolutionary Army was to invade Britain’s Canadian possessions. That autumn American Generals Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold led a two-pronged attack upon Montréal and Québec City which came north through the Richelieu and Chaudière valleys, bracketing the territory that would later become the Eastern Townships. The strategy behind this attack was to undermine London’s ability to counter the revolution by diverting British forces away from their American colonies and to inflame French-Canadian opposition to the Crown. Unfortunately for the Americans they encountered stiff resistance at Fort Saint Jean (Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu) and while the British garrison there eventually surrendered after 45 days of fighting Montgomery’s drive north was delayed well into autumn. Bypassing Montréal the Americans resumed their push into Canada and in December, 1775 their two columns met just south of Québec City. Exhausted, frost-bitten, and outnumbered, the Americans attempted to take the city on December 31^st and were soundly defeated, leading them to abandon their aspirations in Canada and retreat south across the border.

Less than 40 years later, during the War of 1812, there were several more American attacks across the border, including into Québec. In November, 1812 American forces under Major-General Henry Dearborn, who was himself a veteran of the failed 1775 incursion, once again sought to take Montréal via the Richelieu valley. Setting off with a force of more than 5,000 men from Champlain, New York Dearborn only made it a few kilometres into Canada before his force ran into trouble. Facing a defensive line along the north shore of the Lacolle River the Americans attempted to encircle the British, Canadian and Mohawk forces. Alas in the confusion of the battle the Americans lost track of the defenders, and each other, and ended upon firing upon their own forces, breaking their momentum, and their will for further battle.

Later American movements into Canadian territory included a November, 1838 raid across the St. Lawrence River when a group known as the Hunter Patriots landed near Prescott, Ontario in the hopes of founding a Canadian republic. Approximately 250 men crossed over from the town of Ogdensburg, New York and in the ensuring Battle of the Windmill were thoroughly defeated by defending British regulars and Canadian militia. Three decades further on Canada once again faced armed attacks from the United States when members of the Fenian Brotherhood, a group of Irish nationalists, conducted a series of raids into Canada between 1866 and 1871. The idea behind these attacks was to seize Canada and then exchange it back to the United Kingdom for Irish independence. Here in the Eastern Townships a force of more than 1,000 Fenians crossed into Québec in June, 1866 and briefly occupied the area around Frelighsburg. They were met with swift and strong Canadian resistance and soon surrendered although another unsuccessful attack was launched against the same area in 1870.

While American regulars have not attacked Canada since Confederation it was largely due to the spectre of a hostile Union Army that we came together as a country in the first place – a country that was forced to dispatch soldiers to reinforce Canadian claims to the Yukon in 1898 and a country that the American military maintained battle plans against until as late as 1939. Most of these American threats and actions against Canada suffered from the same problem in that they greatly underestimated the willingness of Canadians to defend their land. Many of the commanders who led these attacks, and the American journalists who cheered them on, were under the false impression that deep down inside Canadians secretly wanted to be Americans. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.

For all of our lives we have lived with the notion of Canada and the United States sharing the longest undefended border in the world. While the 9/11 terrorist attacks altered that openness somewhat the most recent efforts of the U.S. government represent the greatest change in our bilateral relations in more than 100 years. Yet despite that challenge we will get through this kerfuffle (to use a Canadian word) just as we have gotten through every other American threat to our homes, or as our anthem so poetically puts it, nos foyers. But to do that we need to be crystal clear about who we are as a people. We are a people who love diversity, equity, inclusion, acceptance, bilingualism, the idea that your level of health care should not be determined by your level of wealth and the knowledge that basic manners dictate that you should not yell at a person who you’ve invited into your house. Even if it is a white house.

Courtesy BAnQ

By Shawn MacWha

Local Journalism Initiative

During the past two decades our country has seen a drastic decline in the number of local newspapers. In 2023 alone over 100 daily and weekly papers across the country ceased circulation, taking with them the voices of entire communities. In many ways this sad trend marks the closing of a door that was first opened roughly 250 years ago when a nascent publishing industry first brought word of the outside world to a growing population hungry for knowledge.

In 1752 the Halifax Gazette became the first newspaper in Canada. It was soon followed by daily publications in other major centres such as Montréal, Québec City, and Kingston. During the early years of Canadian media the price and complexity of printing presses limited the number of newspapers being published but by the 1850s costs had come down to the point that a newspaper could generally be viable in almost any small town or city. Much like today’s oft-partisan publications, most early Canadian journals assumed an overtly political viewpoint, telling their readers at the outset if they supported liberal, conservative, national or regional viewpoints. As such, many larger towns boasted two or three newspapers in order to address the varying religious or ideological perspectives of their readers.

In the Eastern Townships there were several small privately-owned newspapers published around the middle of the nineteenth century such as the The Canadian Patriot which was produced in Stanstead, the Waterloo Advertiser and Eastern Townships Advocate and The Sherbrooke Gazette. One of the lesser known of these long-lost newspapers was The Canadian Times which was a weekly bulletin published in Sherbrooke between 1855 and 1858. Billed as a political, agricultural, commercial and literary journal its first issue was published just over 170 years ago, on Jan. 4, 1855. The editors of the paper proclaimed at the outset that “While avowing ourselves the strenuous advocates of religious as well as civil liberty, in its most liberal sense, nothing sectarian will be admitted into our columns.” Instead, the paper sought to provide its readers with a wide range of reporting on matters of general intelligence, literature and farming.

The newspaper’s inaugural edition led with the first chapter of a serialized novel entitled “Maretimo” by then famous British travel writer Bayle St. John. It offered readers a tale of mystery and adventure set against the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea, something that must have been a very welcome distraction from the cold January evenings of 1850s Canada. Other subjects covered in that first issue included a story on the progress of the Crimean War, a (one would hope) useful article “On making and saving manure,” and a short note advising people that the little town of Bytown had just been renamed as “The City of Ottawa.”

Printed by John Edwards in the Beckett Building in downtown Sherbrooke, the newspaper was owned by Ritchie and Company and its first editor was P.W. Ritchie. Its business model was typical of that of most newspapers then and now; income was derived primarily from advertising revenue supplemented by paid subscriptions. To that effect advertisers were charged $1.00 per square of 16 lines for the first instance, and 25 cents for all subsequent publications while readers paid an annual subscription rate of $2.00, which was reduced to a very modest $1.50 if the amount was given in advance. Incomes must have been modest though, given that Sherbrooke’s population at this time was only about 3,000 people.

Nonetheless The Canadian Times operated under these arrangements for most of the next four years, until October 1858 it was purchased by H. Jewitt and Company and George Bottom assumed its editorship. Wanting the re-brand his new newspaper Jewitt ceased publishing it under the name of The Canadian Times at the end of 1858, with the final edition being released on December 30, 1858 after a run of 209 issues. True to its literary roots the last front page featured a story by famed American abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe.

The following week, on Jan.6, 1859 the paper re-emerged with very little fanfare as The Sherbrooke Times although beyond a changed name little differed from the original format. Indeed, even the volume and issue numbers of The Sherbrooke Times picked up where The Canadian Times had left off, with the first issue of the former being counted as issue number 210. A new name, however, could not alter the economics of the publication and on June 30, 1859 The Sherbrooke Times shut down following the resignation of its editor. The cause of the paper’s closure would be sadly familiar to the publishers and editors of today, with George Bottom rhetorically asking “Surely if a man devotes his talents which his Maker has given him to their legitimate use, he has the right to expect recompense for his labors.” He goes on to add that the demands of the business, and the time which it took away from his family and his general interests, were not justified by the “scant remuneration” that he received for his efforts. Thus ended the idea of The Canadian and Sherbrooke Times. Plus ça change.

Journalism has sometimes been credited with producing the rough draft of history, and it is often local newspapers that capture the first sparks of what may someday be great events. And as this newspaper has repeatedly shown, even small and relatively out of the way places like the Eastern Townships have been responsible for their share of historical achievements. That is why it is so important for local voices to have a place to be heard. It was important in the 1850s, just as this country was just starting to coalesce around an idea of unity, and it is important in the 2020s when we are faced with threats of disinformation, the erosion of our social cohesion, and the rise of artificial intelligence. It is important so that we know where we came from, who we are, and where we collectively need to be going.

Photo courtesy
Watching the airship, Sherbrooke Exposition 1907

By Shawn MacWha

Local Journalism Initiative

Most people familiar with the Eastern Townships know that Bombardier, one of the largest civilian aircraft manufacturers in the world, was founded in the town of Valcourt in 1942. What is perhaps less well known is the fact that residents of the Eastern Townships were often among the first people in Canada to witness several aviation firsts in this country. Indeed, starting in the middle of the 19th century local citizens followed the exploits, and accidents, of early “aeronauts” with the same attention that the first astronauts were watched more than 100 years later.

In August, 1856 Eugène Godard, a famous French aeronaut, arrived in Montreal following a tour of the United States. He placed advertisements for seamstresses in local newspapers and, using their labour, oversaw the fabrication of the first balloon made in Canada at that city’s Bonsecours Market. Aptly named “Canada” the craft was 42 feet (12.8 metres) in diameter and had a capacity of 36,860 cubic feet (1044 cubic metres). Using this balloon Godard made three flights from Montreal during the month of September, including the first flight to carry any passengers in Canada when, on Sept. 8, Godard went aloft with three men and floated eastwards from Montreal to the little parish of Saint Mathias near the town of Chambly. While Godard and his balloon never made it closer to the Eastern Townships than the Richelieu River residents of the region were nonetheless deeply interested in his exploits of the air and followed them long after he departed Quebec. In March, 1859, for example, the Sherbrooke Times carried a fascinating story about a Godard expedition in Belgium wherein the unfortunate pioneer found himself being assaulted by a dissatisfied customer 5,000 feet over the countryside.

Crewed flight finally came to the Eastern Townships in early September, 1888 when Professor William Hogan of Jackson, Michigan was contracted by the organizers of the Sherbrooke Exposition to make two balloon ascents during the fair. In addition to performing a trapeze act from a bar hanging beneath his balloon Hogan also made what was almost certainly the first-ever parachute descent in the Province of Quebec (and only the second-even in Canada) from over the fairgrounds on September 4 when he jumped from a height of almost 6,000 feet and floated to the ground.

Following Hogan’s breathtaking performance ballooning became a regular attraction at the Sherbrooke Exposition and by the early 1890s another famous aeronaut, Professor Charles Walcott, was a regular visitor to the region demonstrating both his balloon and his dare-devil parachute jumps from it. At times he also performed “parachute races” from his balloon to the ground with his partner Nellie LeMount. Walcott was a star attraction to the 1894 Sherbrooke Exposition, at which time he also assisted local businessman Seth Nutter, who went on the found the Silver Spring Brewery, by distributing thousands of Nutter’s business cards by throwing them from his balloon as he floated over the townships. Sadly, in October, 1895 Walcott was seriously injured during a parachuting accident in Venezuela where he shattered his ankles and pelvis and broke a femur, several ribs and his spine, thus demonstrating the danger of early excursions into the sky.

The Sherbrooke Exposition was once again the showcase for new flight technology when Lincoln Beachey, an American aviation pioneer, made the first dirigible flight anywhere in Canada on Sept. 4, 1907. Residents and visitors alike were enthralled with Beachey’s machine, with the Montreal Gazette reporting that Beachey took off from the fairgrounds and “sailed over the city for a distance of about a mile and a half and returned again to the grounds. He then circled around the grounds a couple of times, steering his ship first in one direction, then directly in the opposite, demonstrating his perfect control of it.”

On Jan. 26, 1912 it was announced that the planning committee of the Eastern Townships Agricultural Association had secured the attendance of noted French aviator George Mestach and his Borel monoplane at its upcoming fall exhibition. This was at a time when most Canadians had yet to see an airplane and there was much excitement about the prospects of seeing such a craft. While this would be the first plane to fly over the Eastern Townships it was actually not to be the first airplane to visit the area. In mid-July, 1912 an airplane owned by American aviator Harry Atwood was towed through the region behind an automobile (itself a relatively new sight) on its way from Montreal to Newport, Vermont.

In what was clearly the highlight of Sherbrooke’s 1912 exposition, residents and visitors finally got to witness Mestach’s aircraft take flight from East Sherbrooke on Monday, Sept. 2. It was eagerly reported that “His machine sailed high in the air in front of the grandstand, and was absolutely under control of the airman at the helm. He circles round and round, and finally came to ground without the least trouble.” The flight on Sept. 3 was even more spectacular as Mestach flew over the city, allowing thousands of people not at the fairgrounds to witness his craft. Leaving Sherbrooke three days later Mestach proceeded to Montreal where he engaged in a two mile (3.2 kilometre)  race with an automobile and a motorcycle. 

While the pace of aeronautical innovation may appear to have slowed since the early days of the Sherbrooke Exhibition there are still people in this area who reach for the heights just as the first aeronauts did more than 100 years ago. Sherbrooke native Vincent Beaudry, for example, was among the top 32 candidates for the latest round of astronaut selection by the Canadian Space Agency in 2017. Later, in 2022, University of Sherbrooke scientist Myrian Lemelin received funding from the Canadian Space Agency for a project to look for water-ice on the south pole of the moon. In this way people from the Eastern Townships continue to stand at the forefront of modern aviation, even at it carries us away from this earth.

George B. Capel, 1863. Photo: McCord Stewart Museum

By Shawn MacWha

Local Journalism Initiative

When most people think of Lennoxville and beer, their minds likely turn, perhaps a little fuzzily, to the Golden Lion (or, if you prefer, Le Lion d’Or). First opened in 1986 this pub was at the vanguard of Canada’s microbrewery revolution. Since that time, it has served locals, students, and visitors alike with a variety of bitters, lagers, stouts and ales to sooth the soul and fire the imagination. But long before this institution crafted its first pint, another brewery also made fresh beer for hard-working and thirsty locals.

The Lennoxville Brewery was one of the very first beer makers to be established in the Eastern Townships. Opened by British immigrants Thomas Austin and George Slack in 1837 it was located on four acres of land between what is now Queen Street and the Massawippi River in lot 12, range 11 of Ascot Township. Powered by a water wheel, the brewery pulled the water needed for the brewing process directly from the river via a series of pipes. Inside the brew house there was a large cast iron kiln to dry barley, a malt mill, and other vessels necessary to the art of making beer including two large copper kettles and all of the required cooling and storage equipment. Local wheat, barley, hops and clean water were all readily available and the brewery had an impressive capacity of 1,260 litres per batch.

This was, however, a difficult time for a small-scale brewery to open in the Eastern Townships. The region had not yet been reached by any railways and there was only a rudimentary network of roads and trails. As such it was both difficult and expensive to transport beer out of the area to the larger markets of Montreal, Quebec City or the United States. Additionally, the local population was insufficient to permit the business to grow. Only three years earlier, in 1834, there were fewer than 200 people living in Sherbrooke and while the influx of immigrants to the area following the founding of the British American Land Company undoubtedly brought in additional customers there were simply not enough local drinkers to allow Austin and Slack to make any money. To complicate matters, at least from the perspective of aspiring brewers, there was an active temperance movement in Canada during this time committed to riding the country of alcoholic drink. In November and December 1841, for example, R.D. Wadsworth of the Montreal Temperance Society toured the Eastern Townships and while he made many converts to his cause he also noted that the recent establishment of the brewery in Lennoxville had undermined his efforts.

In the face of these pressures the owners were actively trying to sell their brewery as early as June 1841, billing it as “a desirable opportunity” for “emigrants and others” in the Quebec (City) Gazette. Unfortunately for them, they were unable to find a buyer and the enterprise went out of business in the summer of 1843. By this point Austin had moved to St. Johns (Saint-Jean-sur Richelieu) where he was working as a trader while Slack had relocated to Eaton. In an attempt to recoup at least some of their investment the defunct brewery was auctioned off by James Scott at the Merrick’s Hotel in Lennoxville on March 11, 1843 and was purchased by Charles Anderson Richardson, the town’s postmaster, for the modest sum of ₤213 (approximately $46,000 today). This sale included the brewery, granary, stables, all equipment necessary for the production of beer and the land upon which it sat. Alas, for reasons that are lost, Richardson could not pay for his newly acquired brewery and the property was seized by Sheriff Charles Whitcher later that autumn. The site was once again put up for auction at Whitcher’s office in Sherbrooke on October 10, 1843 at which time it was purchased by G. Weston who then went on to sell “Lennoxville Beer” throughout the region for the next 15 years.

In 1858 Weston sold the brewery to George B. Capel, a native of Salisbury, England who had just immigrated to the Eastern Townships following a stint in India. Soon after acquiring the brewery Capel partnered with Robert Atto, a local farmer also from England, to run the business. In what must have been a great relief to the drinking public Capel and Atto ran an advertisement in Sherbrooke’s The Canadian Times newspaper that they would “spare no pains to keep up a constant supply of Good Ale and Beer” to the area. Capel, it should be noted, was a man of keen entrepreneurial spirit and less than a year after buying the brewery he also partnered with local soap manufacturer E. Moe and started selling soap directly from his brew house. Much more importantly, in 1863 Capel discovered copper on his farm south of Lennoxville and lost no time in developing what would become the Capelton Copper Mine. He was also instrumental in founding a number of other companies during this period including the Magog Petroleum Company in 1866 and the Dominion Gold Mining Company the following year before he sold his various businesses and returned to England in 1868.

It is not clear if Capel’s departure from Canada marked the end of the Lennoxville Brewery or not. The last mention of the brewery in any Sherbrooke area newspaper occurred in the summer of 1859, long before Capel returned to England. The Coaticook Historical Society, however, has suggested that the brewery was in business until sometime around 1875. This is supported somewhat by a record of a Thomas Guinan working as a barber at the “old brewery” in Lennoxville in 1876. It would certainly seem that the brew house was closed by then, but that the reference to the former establishment was still recent enough to be meaningful. Regardless, whenever its closure occurred it did not appear to be a newsworthy event which is a pity given how important the enterprise likely was to the earliest inhabitants of Lennoxville. Slàinte Mhath.

Courtesy McCord Stewart Museum

By Shawn MacWha

Local Journalism Initiative

For hundreds of years the Eastern Townships has been a destination for refugees. Whether it was the first Abenaki people fleeing early European incursions along the coast of Maine, United Empire Loyalists following the Crown northwards, or displaced Scottish Highlanders evicted from their ancestral crofts, people have been seeking new beginnings in this land for generations.

Robert Scott Duncanson was such a man. Born in the tiny hamlet of Fayette in the Finger Lakes region of New York sometime in 1821 Duncanson spent much of his childhood in Monroe, Michigan just south of Detroit. In 1840 he moved to Cincinnati and it was there that he emerged as the first internationally recognized African-American artist. Largely self-taught he first practised his art as a young man by making copies of popular prints while earning a living as a house painter. Later, he progressed to portraits and still-life paintings, gaining commissions from some of the more liberal minded citizens of the time who refused to let the colour of his skin mask his inherent talent. Towards the end of the 1840s Duncanson turned to landscape painting and was a founding member of the Ohio River Valley technique which sought to capture the soft beauty of America’s pastoral scenes. By the 1850s many considered Duncanson to be the premier landscape artist in the United States.

Despite these talents Duncanson faced an unceasing tide of racism during his time in Ohio. As a frontier city on the border between slave and free states Cincinnati saw major race riots in 1829, 1836 and 1841 and these tensions remained part of the city’s fabric throughout Duncanson’s time in Ohio. As art historian Joseph Ketner noted in a 1993 “A major portion of Cincinnati’s booming economy depended upon southern trade, forcing Duncanson to face the spectre of slavery daily in the markets, at the docks, and across the river from his home.”

These tensions were only heightened during the American Civil War and in 1863 Duncanson finally decided to leave his homeland and seek a more tolerant audience. He intended to go to Europe to exhibit his works but first stopped in Montreal which he had visited the previous year. Upon his return to that city he was so warmly greeted by the local artistic community that he cancelled his European plans and took up residence in Canada. In September, 1863 he mounted his first serious exhibition in his new homeland, showing his popular paintings Land of the Lotus Eaters and Western Tornado in the home of local photographer William Notman.

For the next two years Duncanson used Montreal as a base of operations as he travelled throughout Central Canada collecting material for future paintings. The Eastern Townships were a favoured destination for him during this time, and his journeys to this area ultimately resulted in some of his most beautiful paintings including Mount Orford and Owl’s Head Mountain. The first of these landscapes was last sold in 2005 when it was purchased at auction for the impressive sum of $296,000 US dollars. The latter work, Owl’s Head Mountain, now forms part of the collection of the National Gallery of Canada along with several of Duncanson’s other paintings. Other notable works from Duncanson’s time in Canada included Mount Royal, Waterfall on Montmorency, and St. Ann’s River. He also produced a number of other major works during this time not associated with the Canadian landscape including his stunningly beautiful Vale of Kashmir. This work showed the influence of British poetry upon his painting, with Alfred Tennyson, John Keats and William Wordsworth being cited as inspirations for his sweeping landscapes.

Not content to merely paint the local countryside, Duncanson also became an important mentor for several emerging Canadian painters during his time in Montreal. The most successful of these artists was Aaron Allan Edson, a native of the Eastern Townships who became a leading Canadian landscape artist himself and was, in 1880, a founder of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Another close associate at the time was Prussian born Canadian artist Otto Reinhold Jacobi.

Following the end of the Civil War Duncanson left Montreal to make his much-delayed trip to Europe, after which he returned to Cincinnati in 1866. He continued to paint for the next several years but by the early 1870s his health was starting to decline. In the autumn of 1872 he suffered from a nervous breakdown while preparing for an exhibition in Detroit and was confined to a nearby “insane asylum.” For the next two months he was beset with dementia and the belief that he was possessed by the soul of deceased artist, with some speculating that his condition was the result of lead poisoning from his earlier work as a house painter in the 1830s and 1840s.

Duncanson died in Detroit on December 21^st, 1872 and was buried alongside his parents and several siblings at the family plot in the Woodland Cemetery in Monroe, Michigan. In a sad and troubling sign of the times his obituary in the Chicago Tribune the following week sought to downplay his work, noting that “It added a special feature of interest to his paintings that Mr. Duncanson had negro blood in his veins, and his pictures were, therefore looked upon with more or less of curiosity, and this feat sometimes gained for them a sale which could not always have been secured for them by their real artistic merit…”  Fortunately, a much more enlightened view of Duncanson’s skills holds today, and he is recognized for his fine artworks in leading museums around the world.

While Duncanson’s time in the Eastern Townships was fleeting, limited only to short expeditions to paint the local landscape, his mark on the region is noteworthy. During his short time in Canada he not only shared the beauty of this land with a global audience, but he also helped a new generation of Canadian artists to do the same. No small feat for a disheartened refugee 160 years ago.

Weedon, c1950s. Courtesy BANQ

By Shawn MacWha

Local Journalism Initiative

Following the end of the War of 1812 in North America and the Napoleonic Wars in Europe the British government decided to set aside large swaths of Lower Canada to provide the soldiers who had fought in those conflicts with farms. Weedon Township, located 50 kilometres northeast of Sherbrooke, was one such tract and although it was surveyed in the spring of 1818 no veterans came to the area until Major Toussaint Hubert Goddu was granted 202 acres on May 4, 1835. Goddu, accompanied by two friends, moved from his farm at Sainte-Marie-de-Mannoir outside of Montreal to his new home that summer, but seeing the loneliness of the place promptly turned around and returned home.

The township remained empty until 1841 when Germain Biron arrived at the site of what would later become the town of Weedon. His family lived there, alone in the wilderness, until 1847 when they were finally joined by several other French-Canadian families who were seeking opportunities away from the crowded seigneuries along the St. Lawrence River. These new arrivals included the Brière, Fortin, Fontaine and Gauthier families and together they formed the basis of a new community.

In August, 1848 Pierre Founier constructed the first saw mill in the area and later, in 1854, the town’s first chapel was erected. It was also around this time that the government began to offer over 12,000 acres of Crown Land for sale along the First, Second, Third, fourth and Fifth ranges of Weedon Township for the astounding price of 60 cents an acre. Fuelled by the new families coming in to open farms on these lands a growing settlement was established around the church and saw mill and on June 21, 1886 the village of Weedon was officially incorporated.   

By the turn of the century Weedon was a thriving commercial hub of almost 400 people which included two sawmills, a hotel, a creamery, a small carriage factory, and a bustling station on the Quebec Central Railway. As with so many other towns in the Eastern Townships it was the railway which formed that backbone of the community, connecting it and its products to the wider world. When James Miller, the local station agent, discovered rich copper and sulphur containing pyrite deposits about six kilometres east of Weedon in 1908 it was the proximity of the railway that permitted the development of a profitable mine. 

As it so happened these deposits were the largest ones in Canada east of the Great Lakes and mining operations began at this site in 1913 under the direction of the East Canada Smelting Company, which leased the project to the Weedon Mining Company the following year. Over the next eight years the mine produced almost 585,000 tons of ore containing an average of 3.5 per cent copper and 40 per cent sulphur. After a failed experience with trucks, the ore was shipped from the mine to Weedon Station by means of an ingenious aerial tramway. From there it was shipped directly to markets in the United States where it was used primarily in the production of copper and sulphuric acid, a key industrial chemical. The mine closed in May, 1921 following the discovery of larger and more economical pyrite deposits in Texas and Louisiana and two years later the pumps were turned off, allowing the shafts to flood.

This was not, however, the end. As 1930 the provincial government had recognized that the mine appeared to contain sufficient copper reserves to warrant a salvage operation to reopen the pit. Unfortunately, this did not happen until the 1950s when, as the Montreal Gazette noted, a “boomlet” of mining activity occurred in the Eastern Townships that saw several decommissioned mines brought back into production in order to meet the post-war demand for minerals. One of these facilities was the old Weedon Mine and in February, 1951 the Weedon Pyrite and Copper Company began the process of bringing the old mine back into production in order to access the estimated 500,000 tons of viable ore that still remained in the ground. Tests showed that this ore averaged 1.5 per cent zinc, 2.5 per cent copper and 35 per cent sulphur content, more than enough to make the effort to recover it worthwhile.

The reopening of the mine was facilitated by the fact that the original operations had seen the construction of three inclined shafts that accessed 13 subterranean levels. It was the existence of this infrastructure that made reopening the mine economically viable as the most significant work required to access the ore was to de-water the old mine. This took place throughout the summer of 1951 and the flooded shafts were pumped out at a rate of about 70 feet per week. Once reopened in 1952 the mine remained in service again until 1960 when a series of cave-ins halted production. By this time the original deposits discovered by Miller had yielded over 19 million pounds of copper, five million pounds of zinc, 113,500 ounces of silver, 11,000 ounces of gold and 200,000 tons of sulphur bearing pyrite. The mine was briefly reopened again in 1969, this time by the Sullivan Mining Group before finally closing for good in 1973.

With the mine closed the focus of the area’s economy returned, once again, to the agriculture and forestry that it has relied upon 100 years earlier. For the most part, that remains the case even today, although over the past few decades tourism has become an increasingly important economic driver. Today Weedon is a thriving town of about 3,000 people living within Le Haut-Saint-Francois Regional County Municipality. An overwhelmingly francophone community its historical path has taken it a long way from its intended destination as a home for retired British soldiers. But such is the nature of the Eastern Townships, and the manner in which First Nations, English, French and more recent arrivals have all come together to form the rich cultural tapestry that runs so deeply through these hills.