150 s i s t
1868 2018 Fondation de la ville de Rockland Founding of Rockland
It all started with a saw mill 150 years ago… The founding of Rockland
Edwards Street in Rockland, His choice of time and place could not have been better. Rockland was destined to grow rapidly and to be very prosperous for many years to come. Rockland’s First Sawmill We all learned in school that Jacques Cartier was aboard the ship Grande Ermine when he discovered Cape Bona- vista, for the French monarch François I in 1534. W.C. Discovered McCaul Point in Rockland on November 8, 1868 from the deck of the old Caoline Which belonged to the Ottawa Forwarding Company. Actually, he was taking pos- session of 100 acres of land bought from John Cameron in order to erect a small sawmill. A strong man, Edwards dis the actual
digging of the foundation of his saw- mill. With the help of two cohorts from his lumbering days, William Way and Magloire Larivière, as well as William Erskine, a foreman, he built the frame for his sawmill. The machines were sent from Montreal by barge. From the very first year that it was in business, the W.C. Edwards Chartered Company of Rockland produced more than a million square metres of lumber. In the second year, to satisfy the grow- ing demand from the Montreal and European markets – hardwood was used for ship-building – the sawmill, the lumberyard and the docks from where the lumber was shipped were expanded. The sawmill was in operation from April to November. It shut down in
winter when the river froze over. The men then went into the forests up the Gatineau River to cut timber which would keep the mill running the follow- ing summer. At the time, lumber camps stretched from Wakefiled to Maniwaki to Mont-Laurier. In 1868, there were only a few fam- ilies in the area, but by the sawmill’s second year of operation, hundreds of families had arrived. Practically everyone worked for the Edwards Company. The living accomo- dations, sparse and simple. Consisted of a few wooden houses and buildings built by the company on its land around the mill, on Woods, Catherine and Ed- wards streets. The sawmill was equipped with a water tower that had a raised pumping
Before the 1850’s, development of the area around Rockland consisted of a few settlers working hard to clear large wooded areas in order to cultivate a few acres of land, their only means survival at the time. The L’Orignal-Bytown road, built in 1840 by the governement of Upper Canada, greatly helped the growth of the region. Famous for its lumber industry and the Rideau Canal, Bytown became the seat of government under the Union in 1857. The Rockland area, situated between two commercial centres, Bytown and Montreal, was to undergo unprecedented growth in its lumber industry and population. In 1868, a young lumber entrepre- neur from Thurso, at McCaul Point, where we now find Parc du Moulin on
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