The following tour features fourteen attractions found in the Eastern Townships, each of which is either odd or unique in some way, or else the smallest, largest, longest, shortest, highest, or oldest of its kind. Sites range from a slave burial ground, to the highest village in Quebec, to the largest open-pit asbestos mine in the Western Hemisphere.
The 19th century saw a massive railway boom all across the Eastern Townships. Driven by the need to access raw materials, the desire for rapid transit, the growth of industry, and a mania to build more and more branch lines, literally dozens of companies vied for territory and markets.
Most of the oldest villages in the Eastern Townships owe their start to the presence of a mill. Sherbrooke (Hyatt’s Mills), Cowansville (Ruiter’s Mills), and Rock Island (Kilborn's Mills) are a few that come to mind. Other communities, like Denison's Mills, Way's Mills, and Kinnear’s Mills owe their very names to the original mill owners.
The Eastern Townships were once dotted with rural schoolhouses. One has only to look at early maps of the area to see that virtually every neighbourhood had one. The typical one-room schoolhouse could be found every mile or two, or at nearly every second crossroad.
If you’ve got young kids and would like to offer them a diversion that is stimulating and fun, a good idea would be to take them to the recently renovated Musée des sciences et de la nature de Sherbrooke (Sherbrooke Museum of Science and Nature), on Frontenac Street in old Sherbrook
Missisquoi Bay on Lake Champlain was a haven for refugees during the American Revolution. In the 1770s and 1780s, they came by the thousands into Quebec, mainly from New York’s upper Hudson and Mohawk river valleys.
These migrants reached British soil near a traditional Abenaki Indian village on the mouth of the Missisquoi River, the district then forming a largely unpopulated seigneury called St. Armand.
