The pleasure and contentment of an amateur historian

Marc Clerk

The reading of history is a gratifying pastime for the interested layperson. Researching and writing history is a source of satisfaction for the historian. Both allow one to live vicariously and enjoy the stories of many lives, of past happenings, most far removed from one’s own. But learning the lessons of history is the ultimate challenge. From this knowledge emerges the true picture of a place and its people and, hopefully, its future options.

I would like to share with readers the contentment that historians, professional and amateur, have experienced in gathering information on the history of Sutton.

Most recent Suttonites are hardly aware of the past of the place in which they may be investing time, energy and money—or in which they simply watch the sun set. For them Sutton’s history remains a vague concept. Admittedly, the definitive story of Sutton has yet to be published. It is today a layering of disparate monographs, anecdotes, scrapbook entries, articles, private, civic or government records and censuses, statistical charts, and word-of-mouth remembrances. From these various parts, however, must be composed the picture of the place called Sutton.

In 1866, Sutton native Cyrus Thomas published a three hundred and seventy six page book on the history of the Eastern Townships. In one chapter on Sutton are the names of people Thomas knew, stories he had heard firsthand, events he had witnessed, and original documents he had read. Those few pages covered the flowering of the Township from the late 1700s to his time. Another compendium was published in 1869 by Catherine Day of neighbouring Stukely Township. Its four hundred and seventy pages included a small section on Sutton. Again in 1998, a miniscule Sutton portion of an eight hundred page book, l’Histoire des Cantons de l’Est, provides an even more distant overview of Sutton.

Cyrus Thomas – photo by BCHS

Like the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, Sutton’s tale must be put together from such formal writings but also, mainly, from odd corners and places, from the floor-cracks of la petite histoire.

Sutton Township is essentially a geographic territory. It was surveyed in 1791 by Jesse Pennoyer. He left a prose description of his month-long, sweaty, straight-line, chain-dragging, scramble through woods and bogs and streams. It makes good reading, synopsised in a small booklet entitled Héritage Sutton Sketchbook, No. 1, published here in 2002. The ten-mile square area was slowly inhabited by a small number of New Englanders who each took over a two-hundred acre rectangle of land to call their own.

Who were these people? Where did they come from? Why did they settle here? What did they do? What was their legacy? Some names, occupations, contributions of Sutton’s settlers have been revealed, since 1898, in the books of the Brome County Historical Society in nearby Knowlton. Héritage Sutton publications contain the stories of many others. These two organisations are also repositories for many family papers, early writings and old documents. These latter are primary sources, largely untapped.

Recent arrivals in Sutton are possibly struck by the names of the roads spidering across the landscape. Among these are Elie Road in central Sutton, Courser Road in Glen Sutton, Spencer Road in Abercorn, Jackson, Muir, Jordan, Dyer, or Mudgett Roads near the Town of Sutton, Parmenter Road and the nearby Poissant Road up in the mountains above and to the East of the Town of Sutton. They honour first settlers, recognize long-time residents, or note the contribution of town councillors.

Mount Echo and the road leading to it have been described in Mable Boyce’s wonderful, firsthand story in a Brome County Historical Society Yesterday’s publication. We read of her husband, the legendary Harold, and their life in those now quiet hills. How and when the name of Mount Echo was born remains, however, an intriguing secret worth further research.

The explanation for strange sounding names for other roads is also to be found in these texts. Rosenberry Road in the Township’s centre came from the inattention of a township secretary who, in 1883, misspelled farmer Rosenberger’s name. French Horn Road has a highly interesting story, connected to sheep and coyotes and bleeding-hearts, the background of which is recorded in an early Héritage Sutton sketchbook. Old Notch Road, up in the south-eastern, mountainous part of the Township, was in 1875 a breakneck horseback trail across the mountaintop to Glen Sutton. Its saga is to be found in a BCHS Yesterdays volume.

On the northern border of Sutton Township is Turkey Hill Road. This name first appeared in the Township Minute book of 1855. Both Harry Shufelt and Ernest Taylor, eminent Knowlton historians of the 1900s, have published intriguing monographs on it. Three Parish Road in east central Sutton remains, however, a small historical mystery.

Dennis Cowan, long-time resident of Sutton has, in Héritage Sutton Sketchbook No. 7, provided an interesting, firsthand social and geographic portrayal of the vital highway 139 as it runs north–south through the Township to the Vermont border.

In the Town of Sutton itself, certain street names are the subject of humorous conjecture. Till 1900, Maple Street, leading up to the mountain hills, was logically named Mountain Street. At the southern end of town, a formerly named Maple Street now is called Mountain. Local rumour has it that mischievous youngsters exchanged the street signs on a long-ago Halloween or Guy Fawkes night.

Little has been written about schooling in Sutton Township. It was notably the first and essential element of social life that the first settlers established, beginning in 1806. Alexandrine Poissant of Sutton has written a fine article on Sutton’s first French school in 1890 in Héritage Sutton Sketchbook, No.2. No equivalent study has been made of the English school system, other than en passant in the writings of Ernest Taylor, himself a school inspector, in 1910. There were eighteen elementary schools in the Township in 1869. When were the first schools begun? Who were the teachers? Where were these schools? What was taught? These are all questions meriting in-depth research and writing.

In the field of communications, Edmund Eberdt, founder of Héritage Sutton, wrote in a BCHS Yesterdays about the arrival of the telegraph, telephone, and railway in Sutton Township. From 1963 to 1998 Eberdt gathered artefacts, documents, and photographs of these interesting innovations

Sutton’s Audrey McCaw and Abercorn’s Claire Massé have written fine monographs of Abercorn hotels and other ‘watering holes’, including the infamous “Bucket of Blood”. Sutton Junction’s Train-Master, A. W. Smith, has written, in passing, about the hotels of Sutton. A specific study of the import and contribution of hotels and lodgings to social and economic life would make an interesting contribution to Sutton’s history.

Trains replaced stages in Sutton Village in 1871. The intriguing story of the SECR and the CPR and their stations in Sutton Junction, Sutton Flats, and Richford is told in great and minute detail in “Railways of Southern Quebec”, Vols I and II, written by J. Derek Booth of Bishop’s University.

Edmund Eberdt wrote a highly pertinent article, published in Héritage Sutton sketchbook No. 2, on the early interest in skiing in Sutton, ingeniously initiated in 1920 by Mayor Tartre, promoted by the legendary Jack-Rabbit Johansen in 1932, developed by the Boulanger family in 1960… and the rest is history!

Sutton’s history also contains a number of dramatic, laughable or devastating, occurrences: the summer-less, cropless, year of 1816; a pedlar in (serious) trouble in Glen Sutton 1839; the brutal murder of Joseph Jackson in Dead Man’s Gulch in 1882; the great destructive fire of 1898; Queen Lill’s flagrantly operating bordello on the border at Glen Sutton in 1911. The quizzical study of a charming “rogue”, Dr Frederick Augustus Cutter, has been presented by Carol-Ann Griffin in Héritage Sutton’s sketchbook No. 2. This medical man contributed much and well to Sutton’s social, political and religious life, though he enigmatically hid an important personal secret from all for over fifty years.

Queen Lill Photo by Richford Historical Society

The quizzical study of a charming “rogue”, Dr Frederick Augustus Cutter, has been presented by Carol-Ann Griffin in Héritage Sutton’s sketchbook No. 2. This medical man contributed much and well to Sutton’s social, political and religious life, though he enigmatically hid an important personal secret from all for over fifty years.

Short biographies and other interesting life-stories are published in Héritage Sutton sketchbooks. Robyn Jaquays has given us an engaging portrait of Asa Frary, her ancestor and Sutton’s notable 1800s mayor. Jean-Paul Deslières’ short biography of his politician father, barber, restaurant-owner, wholesaler, mayor and finally member of parliament, Joseph-Léon (Jos) Deslières, presents the life of an interesting, larger-than- life individual.

Jos Deslières Photo by Deslières family

Catherine Eberdt briefly outlines the important contribution made by her father, Edmund Eberdt, to the conservation of Sutton’s history. Jeannine Berger contributed a lively account of her life in Sutton and of her experience as a teacher in the Sutton Junction grade school during the 1940s. “Memories of the Border Town of Abercorn”, by genealogist Jessie Wentworth-Chayer, presents scenes taken from life in that small farming community. Céline Larouche lays out a sensitive picture of her father, J. Alfred Larouche, farmer, township councillor, singer, choirmaster, gentleman (1902-1981). Claudine Francey speaks with great feeling of her and her husband’s decision to emigrate to Sutton from Switzerland to join its expanding Swiss colony. Historian Jean-Rémi Brault of Abercorn has assembled an excellent study of Wilfrid Thibault, long-time mayor of Abercorn. Royce Coleman Dyer, a brave and much decorated First World War military man of Sutton, is the subject of an exciting biography by Jocelyn Vachon. And, in periodic BCHS Yesterdays, Jean McCaw has explored the lives and times of a number of Sutton’s noteworthy people: Dr Robert MacDonald, Arthur Darrah, the Borights and the Godues.

Boright & Safford Store Photo by Héritage Sutton

History is today recorded by pen, computer, camera or tape recorder. In sketchbook No 3, Selma Ludmer described the work of Héritage Sutton in collecting and transcribing the taped oral histories of some eighty elderly citizens of Sutton, going back many years. Their poignant voices underline the very human, very interesting, and very touching lives of the people of the border township of Sutton. These records remain a continuing source of research, writing and knowledge of Sutton.

These monographs, sketches, biographies, and stories have been accompanied, explicated and enriched, by fine photographs of local scenes taken over many years by Frank Wheeler, Alex McCallum, Dennis Cowan, Carol O’Brien, Denis Boulanger, Julien Clerk-Lamalice, Robert Stowe and others. An outstanding photographic record of the 1952 Sutton Street Parade has been enlivened by the descriptions, recollections, and identifications of Marthe Deslières, Madeleine Miltimore-Darrah, Shirley Cowan and Alice Bidwell.

The ethnological development of Sutton has been treated in one of the most valuable but unrecognized contributions made, in comparative silence, by Jocelyne Guilbault of Abercorn in 2001. For a period of over a year and half, shortly before her death, she traced the names, the presence, and the social contributions of Canadians of French extraction as revealed in the Township minute books, from the first inscriptions in 1855 to the year 1895. The research was terminated at that point because, over this forty year period, the canadien lowly farm worker had evolved into Chief Magistrate of the essentially Anglo Saxon place. Briefly touched upon by Pierrette Letarte in a short introductory article in Héritage Sutton sketchbook No. 2, and by a planned first of two monographs in sketchbook No. 6, this admirable legacy should, one day, form the basis of an in-depth sociological study of Sutton’s two founding and partner peoples.

The economic development of Sutton, from its beginnings to the present time, has been studied in different works. In a Héritage Sutton sketchbook, Hélène Leduc has made a detailed analysis of Sutton’s once flourishing agricultural past. Her study raises important questions as to the future disposition of Sutton’s now unused lands. Of major interest also, a study by Edmund Eberdt of the past importance of the dairy industry in the life of Sutton’s farming community appears in Héritage Sutton sketchbook No 7. In a similar vein, the hundred-year-long railroad presence in Sutton and its disappearance as an economic stimulus is presented for consideration in Jeanne Morazain’s plaintive study entitled Quand le train rythmait la vie... And Serge Gagné describes the former presence of copper-mining in various parts of Sutton Township in the mid-1800s.

Haying in Dyer field Photo by National Archives

These texts on Sutton’s economy are accompanied by Dennis Cowan’s highly pertinent chart of Sutton Town’s Main Street businesses as they were in the 1950s. He underscores the deep change that has occurred in the vocation of town businesses in their century-long transition from supply economy to that of a transient-dependant place.

A philosophically important exposition entitled “The Autobiography of an Original Sutton Lot” permits Carol-Ann Griffin to deal with the dilemma and choice that confront the entire Township as it faces a future without agriculture.

In a prescient study published in 2003 in Héritage Sutton sketchbook No 2, Dennis Cowan, who passed away this winter after a long contribution to Sutton’s history, presented a photographic image of Sutton Town’s Main Street on the eve of its transformation into an uncluttered, pole-free, wireless artery. The question must be asked: What practical effect will this cosmetic surgery have on Sutton’s future?

Wires on Main street in Sutton Photo by Dennis Cowan

A comprehensive history of Sutton may be assembled from these disparate sources. Lessons as to Sutton’s future may be learned from the successive, if not parallel, disappearance of the railway, the dairy cow, operational landowners, original families, wire-laden telephone poles, and fast-melting snow.

The metamorphosis of Sutton from an agricultural, self-supporting community to its indeterminate social image today presents a challenge for its residents, old and new. Thoughts, directions, plans, long-term projects for its long-term future could well emerge from a full study of Sutton’s historical past.