Lauzon, Lévis, Québec, Canada (Saint-Joseph-de-la-Pointe-de-Lévy)

People, Pictures and News From the Past

Where is Lauzon, Lévis, Québec, Canada?

...It is hard to choose, but a few should be visited, and among these Point Levis stands first in geographical order and in interest of all kinds.

Landing at Indian Cove, where the descendants of those Iroquois, who got from the English Government so much a-piece for every French scalp, used to build their wigwams, to await the distribution of the annual bounty, one finds a splendid graving dock being built on the very spot where they hauled up their bark canoes. The cliff is a worthy mate for Cape Diamond. From its tree-lined summit rolling hills covered with houses, fields and woods, so that the country looks like an immense park, stretch back to the sky-line, in pleasant contrast with the abrupt outline of the other shore. The main street lies between the river and the jagged face of the rock. At each end it climbs the cliff in zigzags, between old houses whose fantastic shapes, peaked roofs and heavy balconies make the place seem like some old Norman town. At one point where a spring trickles down the cliff, a wooden stairway leads from the lower to the upper town. Close by stand the old and new churches of St. Joseph, the latter a huge stone building of the usual type, the former a rude little chapel, with an image of the saint in a niche over the door. Everywhere there is, as in Quebec, this meeting of the old and the new. The Intercolonial Railway trains shake the foundations of the old houses, and interrupt, with their shrill whistle, the chant of the boys at vespers in the College chapel. Tugs puff noisily along with big ships, where Wolfe's flotilla stole so silently under the cliffs the night before the battle on the Plains of Abraham, and barges of the same pattern as those in which his soldiers crossed lie side by side with Allan steamships. Back of the heights from which his batteries pounded Quebec into ruins, and where Montgomery's men, wasted with their winter march through the wilds, waited for strength to carry out their daring attack, three modern forts dominate the South Channel and the land approaches. Planned with all the skill of the Royal Engineers, their casemates are meant for guns beside which the cannon that last did their work here would look like pop-guns. The view from them is superb. On the east a rolling plateau, densely wooded, stretches to the distant mountains of Maine. Opposite stands Quebec, the lower town in deep shadow beneath the cliff, the upper town glistening in the sun. Up and down the river the eye can roam from Cap Rouge to Grosse Isle, and never weary of the colossal extent of mountain, river and
forest...

Lucius O'Brien - Picturesque Canada (1882–84), Page 88

Lauzon, a town in Lévis county, Quebec, on the St. Lawrence river opposite the end of the island of Orleans, and on the Canadian National Railway. Christened Pointe de Lévy by Champlain in 1625, in honour of Henry de Lévy, Duc de Ventadour, Viceroy of New France, it adopted its present name in 1867, when it was established as a village, in memory of jean de Lauzon, governor of New France (1651-6), to whom was granted the seigniory of Lauzon in 1636. Lauzon was incorporated a town in 1910. The principal industry of the town is the building and repairing of ships, and it has a dry-dock, 1,150 feet in length, and several saw mills and sash and door factories. There is also a good commercial college and a convent in the town.

W. Stewart WALLACE, ed., The Encyclopedia of Canada, Vol. IV, Toronto, University Associates of Canada, 1948, 394p., p. 1.

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