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| Noyan farm |
2,856 miles
Nov 8 – Noyan
is a rural municipality without a real town center. About 1,400 permanent residents are spread
around on farmlands, but the shore of the Richelieu River is crowded with
summer homes, inns, campgrounds, and cabins for the additional 1,600 summer
visitors.
Due to its
location between Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River flowing into the Saint
Lawrence Seaway, this area has always held a mixture of human cultures.
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| flag of Nouvelle France |
Among First Peoples, the Iroquois conquered
their neighboring tribes, dominating the resources and pushing other tribes
west. Europeans, both French and
English, traded with and fought against the Iroquois.
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| Union flag of Great Britain |
Because of the European imperialist Seven
Years War, the English took over Nouvelle France (New France).
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| early flag of United States |
During and after the American Revolution, British
Loyalists emigrated to Upper and Lower Canada, and ideas about political
independence travelled across the border, too.
The place
name of Noyan comes from a colonial officer for New France, titled the King’s Lieutenant
in Trois Rivières and Major of Montreal.
He never really inhabited the Seigneurie he had been granted, and this
practice of noble absentee landlords probably gave rise to the use of the word
“habitants” (inhabitants) to refer to the actual settlers in the New World. This land was eventually divided and sold to
one Frenchman (Gabriel Christie. See
Napierville.) and one Englishman (Robert Wright).
From this
point on, two peoples inhabited this land.
Two languages and two versions of Christianity coexisted here,
represented by the Catholic parish of Saint Georges de Noyan and the Anglican
parish of St. Thomas. In 1838, the
population of English-Anglican “Caldwell Manor” amounted to 1,300 souls; that
of French-Catholic “Christie Manor” was 2,500. The Noyantais lived primarily from farming,
especially milk production.
In 1842, the
Webster-Ashburton Treaty (also called the Treaty of Washington) drew the final
borders between the United States and Canada, especially the northern
boundaries of New Hampshire and Maine.
The village of Noyan was the scene of the ceremonial signing of this
historic agreement.
When the old
manorial system of the Seigneuries was abolished in 1854, new settlers arrived:
Irish Catholics and Protestant families from Northern Ireland, as well as more
French Canadians. The French-Catholic
and English-Protestant populations continued to be about equal in numbers. The official language of the government of
Canada, however, was English.
The minutes
of city council meetings in Noyan were written in English until 1927, when they
appeared for the first time in French. Beginning in 1955, the
secretary-treasurer of the municipality was required to issue public notices of
the municipality in both English and French.
A generation later, in 1974, the minutes of the town meetings were
written in both English and French for the first time. In 1985, the City Council of Noyan supported
a draft resolution of Alliance Québec for legislative guarantees that included
the right of Anglophones to have services in their language.
Prohibition,
Americans,
and a Border
Since the
second half of the 19th century, the consumption of alcohol has been
a recurring problem in Noyan. In 1864,
the popularity of the temperance movement moved the town council to decree that
no tavern license would be granted by the City Council in the coming years. It was the end of the sale of alcohol within
the parish until 1870, when the Council authorized and licensed a few shops to
sell alcohol, as long as they paid their license fee.
During the
1920s, the era of national alcohol prohibition in the U.S., Canadian provinces
were able to set their own policies about prohibition or regulation. Canadian border towns experienced special
opportunities for profit through smuggling and for trouble with greedy,
opportunistic rumrunners. In Noyan, the
City Council adopted a regulation which prohibited sale of liquor, wine, beer
and other intoxicating, wholesale or retail within the municipality. But in 1933, a citizen referendum repealed
the prohibition and instituted licensing regulations.
The
Canadian-US Joint Border Inspection
Station between Noyan and Alburgh, Vermont, was opened in 1900. This is my point of re-entry into the US.
Noyan
railway
Transportation
has been important to Noyan for over a century, because their farm products
need to be taken to market cities to be sold.
Not until the early 20th century were roads through town
graveled. And to this day, as my Vermont
cousin has told me, compacted gravel is the best substance to maintain the
roads in this muddy terrain.
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| railway bridge across the Richelieu River at Noyan |
The people
of Noyan also tried many times to get a railroad track built through town. Finally, in 1945 the Board of Transport
Commissioners for Canada decided that the railway linking Saint John sur
Richelieu, Québec, to Swanton, Vermont, would be diverted to pass through
Noyan.
Great Ice
Storm of 1998
In January of
1998, the Great Ice Storm hit the municipality of Noyan and its surrounding
area, called the "triangle of ice."
The Great
Ice Storm of 1998 was a massive combination of five smaller successive ice
storms that struck a relatively narrow swath of land from eastern Ontario
through southern Quebec to Nova Scotia in Canada, and bordering areas from
northern New York to central Maine in the United States.
The Montreal
area typically receives freezing rain between 12 and 17 times a year, averaging
between 45 and 65 total hours of rain. However,
power lines and other equipment are built according to tough standards,
especially in Quebec, to protect resources and infrastructure.
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| crumpled power transmission towers |
This Great
Ice Storm of 1998 was more severe than anyone had anticipated. Millions of trees were brought down by the
weight of ice. Because many trees were
damaged or felled by the heavy ice, the maple syrup and orchard regions
suffered heavy blows and massive losses in the storm. Quebec's maple sugar industry, the largest in
the world, was devastated. Large cities
like Montreal and Ottawa were shut down.
Many power lines broke and over 1,000 transmission towers collapsed in
chain reactions under the weight of the ice.
More than 4 million people were left without electricity, most of them
in southern Quebec. South of Montreal,
the area around Noyan was so affected that it was nicknamed the Triangle of
Darkness for the total lack of electricity for weeks. The village of Noyan was without power for 26
days.
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| Canadian military troops cleaning up ice storm damage |
With many
roads impassable due to heavy snowfall, fallen trees, broken power lines, and
road ice, emergency vehicles could hardly move. The provinces of New Brunswick,
Ontario, and Quebec requested aid from the Canadian Forces, and Operation
Recuperation began. Over 16,000 troops were deployed, 12,000 of them in Quebec
and 4,000 in Ontario at the height of the crisis. It was the largest operational deployment of
Canadian military personnel since the Korean War.
The Canadian government began a massive
effort to reconstruct the power grid.
The people
of Noyan remember the Great Ice Storm as a time of traumatic isolation and local
heroism.
info & images: Wikipedia.com
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