Roxton Falls, Québec, Canada (Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-Roxton)
1849 - Roxton Falls

In the middle of the 19th century, in 1849, precisely, the missionary Jacques-Edmond LeBlond left this testimony on the region of Roxton Falls (on Route 139), on the foothills of the Appalachians, in a letter to the Bishop of Montreal: “Men, women and children run, bustle and work where the wild beasts alone had made their stay. The noise of the clearing ax, the cracking of the trees which succumb, the crackling of the fire which cleans the forest, have replaced the silence of the woods. A good road, made at great expense by the Company, renders access to these places easy and convenient. It is already dotted with small cleared spaces. At the end rises the new village or "future town" of Roxton Falls, which the company had named Metcalfe, but which the inhabitants, with the agreement of the latter, prefer to call by the glorious Canadian name of Iberville. The Black River, the principal of the two branches which, when united, form the Yamaska River, runs in the middle and furnishes numerous and inexhaustible powers of water, for mills and factories of all kinds.

And here is the Colony today with a population of three hundred and thirty inhabitants among whom we find individuals of all trades, with eighty plots of land under cultivation, a village begun, a church built and a missionary who visit every three weeks, an open school, several flour mills, two blacksmith shops in one of which the power of water is used, a potash factory, and then, in addition, the produce of this autumn's harvest."

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Visit Roxton Falls, Québec, Canada (Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-Roxton)
Discover the people who lived there, the places they visited and the stories they shared.