Why Sudbury and Chelmsford ?

continued from Sophie Laurin Brosseau


When Sophie Laurin Brosseau and Toussaint were in their sixties they were parents and grandparents many times over. They were farmers and understood how to work the land. So why would many of their children soon pack up and relocate to Sudbury and Chelmsford ?

John A. McDonald was pushing for a railway that would cross the continent. His reason for this was that British Columbia was being asked to join the Canadian Confederation of Provinces and one of their demands was that they have a railroad built, and built fast, to link them to the eastern provinces.

Such a railroad would be a hard build as it would have to push through the muskegs of the nearly uninhabited northern Ontario and through the even tougher mountains of the west. But the project went ahead as Canadian Pacific Railway. The chartered contractor for this was the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. ( Now because this blog is about Chelmsford we must mention Elizabeth Kennedy who married Charles Augustus Sanders in 1900 in Petawawa - they were land owners in Chelmsford and worked for their relatives, the Chew brothers who got a major sawmill contract with the government - more on that sometime...) Why mention that ? A person named John Stewart Kennedy, along with James J. Hill and others were the executives behind the CPRco. Hill, Kennedy, J.P Morgan, Rockefeller, Stickney, and other elite capitalists were all members of the same Jekyll Island Club. Likely John Stewart Kennedy was related to Elizabeth Kennedy but then again maybe not. Other research has pointed her ancestors to a Joseph Kennedy who landed in Dalhousie, but that also is very iffy.


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Vermillion Lake was Brosseauville in 1900..
Who sold the farm ??????

In 1885 the CPR was complete and Sainte Anne in the Pines was put on the map as Sudbury by Worthington who followed his railroad engineering career and started his mine engineering career. Flanagan had hit on mineral and soon enough so did Ollier, Stobie, Crean and many others.

I can imagine a few scenarios about how Sophia, Toussaint and the other Brosseau's in St Marthe would have reacted as they sat by the fire with a newspaper and read about such stories.

In one scenario a headline in a paper might have read something like " Opportunity to own land for hardworking sawmill workers and loggers in northern Ontario. All expenses paid on CP Rail ".

In another scenario the influence behind relocating to Sudbury and Chelmsford might have come from the Roman Catholic Parish priest in Quebec who was looking for willing families to relocate north in order to populate an area that the protestant English seemed to be intent on mining and populating. Allowing that to happen might have given them another opportunity to kill the French Canadian and Roman Catholic spirit in Canada.............but then again maybe not ?????

The reason for the Brosseau's to move to northern Ontario is a mystery. One thing isn't a mystery is that the children of Sophie Laurin and Toussaint Brosseau did move away from Quebec and they settled many miles of land along the shores of the lower Vermillion River almost to Stobie Falls and along the shores of Vermillion Lake on the east bank and inland all the way up to the CP Rail line at Larchwood.

I am almost certain that Sophie and Toussaint never set foot on any of that land.

They died in St Marthe in 1897 while a mini gold rush was going on near Stobie Falls.