Inverness Township
The British conquest of 1759 introduced a new way of granting land in Lower Canada: the Township. The land belonging to the Crown was divided into townships of 160 square kilometres each. For each township, two sevenths of its surface area was reserved for the protestant clergy and the Crown. Each township was entrusted to a leader that surveyed and subdivided it into two hundred acre parcels. These parcels were then granted to colonists, who were referred to as “associates”. This system was intended to provide colonists with good quality land for free. In practice however, the members of the government and their friends granted themselves many townships without ever recruiting colonists to clear the land.
In 1796, the British Government conducted a survey of the land located between Quebec City and the American border and created the Eastern Townships. Authorities were hoping for a rapid growth on the territory of British, Irish and Scottish populations loyal to the Crown. Around 1800, the largest part of the Inverness Township is owned in accordance with a system of chiefs and associates by Lieutenant Governor Robert Shore Milnes, a man named Myers, William McGillivray and Colonel Joseph Frobisher. Myers owned a large portion of land on both sides of Joseph Lake. As for Frobisher, he owned land in the south eastern part of the township as well as in parts of the municipality of Ireland. The two main landlords, Frobisher and Myers, were speculators who thought that Joseph Lake would become a centre for commercial activities. A surveyor by the name of Joseph Bouchette described Inverness Township as it was in 1815:
None of this land is being cultivated even though in the southern part, the earth is of superior quality, ready for almost any kind of agriculture. The rest of the land is generally above average in quality with the exception of about 8000 acres to the north, which are covered with spruce, hemlock and cedar. On the dry portions of land, timber wood of excellent quality abounds. The township benefits from Lake William which flows into the Bécancour river, and another unites with Pitt Lake along with many other small streams (Joseph Bouchette, Description topographique de la province du Bas-Canada, London, W . faden, 1815, p. 589-590).
Aerial view of Joseph Lake.
Megantic County
(Gwen Barry, La piste Bécancour: des campements Abenaquis dans l’arrière-pays, Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec, vol. 33, no 2, 2003, p.94).
