Calumet, Quebec

2,751 miles

Calumet Falls, 1878

Oct 1 – Calumet is a borough of the municipality of Grenville-sur-la-Rouge, Quebec.  Until 2002, it was an independent village, but in this time of population decline, its administration was merged with the township of Grenville.  Each of the two communities became boroughs of the new municipality, and it took the name Grenville-sur-la-Rouge. 

But Calumet is not on the Rouge River; it’s on the Calumet River, which is a completely separate tributary to the Ottawa River.  Just upriver from the highway bridge is a scenic waterfall, but it is located on private land and no one has posted free photos of it.  This is an 1878 view of it, courtesy of the McCord Museum of Canadian History in Montreal.  The Quebecois method of creating bilingual titles is interesting to me.  The French name is Musée McCord, the English is McCord Museum, so the combined form for this is Musée McCord Museum.

        

  

           

In researching this town, I discovered many places named Calumet.  In the northern Midwest of the U.S., there are 17 places with this name.  Several American ships have borne this name.  Two colleges are named Calumet, one in the Illinois and one in Ontario.  And Quebec itself holds three places with the name, and all of them on the Ottawa River:

• ·        this borough on the Calumet River,
• ·        Pointe-Calumet, on a wider part of the Ottawa where the the Rivière des Mille Îles (River of a Thousand Islands) and the Prairies River flow together to become Lac des Deux Montagnes (Lake of the Two Mountains), and
• ·        L'Île-du-Grand-Calumet, a municipality and a large island in the Ottawa River, located in the Outaouais region, northwest of Shawville. 

I wondered why this name was so popular in this region from Pennsylvania to Quebec to Iowa.  What early explorer or Native great chief was so honored in these many ways? 

It all made sense when I learned that a calumet is a French-derived word for a peace pipe.  The places so-named are commemorations of ceremonial attempts to build friendship between the First Peoples and the European immigrants.  

County Seal of Calumet County, Wisconsin

This reminds me of remarks from Bob Goulais of the Nipissing people in Yellek,Ontario.  He commented on the sad contrast between the traditional sacred ceremonial use of tobacco, “in prayer and when we need to ask things of each other and the Spirit World” and the misuse and overuse of tobacco as an addictive and carcinogenic commonplace palliative.  

Rue Principale (Main Street)

The main street of Calumet (Rue Principale) is surprisingly crowded by buildings, although there is much empty land behind them.  The original village seems to have been designed like a medieval European village, with houses right on the edge of the road.  More recent buildings are set back a bit.

Calumet has two streets, the main street and the Rue des Érables (Maple Street) where the old train station sits, boarded up in a grassy yard.

donation box?

This structure next to the Église Saint-Ludger Catholic Church appears to be a donation box for the poor.  Perhaps it is also the place for poor people to go get donated items.

             

Strangely, the English-only sign identifying the Holy Trinity Anglican Church has been blurred out by Google.  Have the Anglican Quebecois been flouting the language laws?  Was Google asked to blur this sign?  This seems like draconian regulation, but I can’t think of any other explanation.

info:  Wikipedia.com

images: Google Images, Google Street Views

Musée McCord Museum:  http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/