Trails

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.

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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 village on the mouth of the Missisquoi River, the district then forming a largely unpopulated seigneury called St. Armand.

Quebec’s upper St. Francis River cuts through dense woodland in mountainous backcountry, far from the treeless north Scottish coast. Yet the lilt of Gaelic once rang out in rock-strewn fields and crofters’ cabins.

Highland streams part ways on the slopes of the Quebec-New England border. Some flow north toward the St. Lawrence. Others join the Connecticut River on its way to the sea. The height of land in between marks one of the oldest pioneer gateways in the Eastern Townships.

The border county of Brome in Quebec’s Eastern Townships overspreads a swath of Appalachian country from the Sutton Mountains to Lake Memphremagog. Renowned for its lakes and mountains, the region also has strong historical ties that reach across the international boundary.

The Megantic County Heritage Trail leads to historic settlements and points of interest in rolling Appalachian country west of Quebec’s Chaudière River.