Arundel

When looking at the names of places, including roads and schools and even mountains and rivers, we have to look at what was going on in the world and locally to understand the temper of the times during which those names were chosen. What would have caused that choice, the story behind that name? In our current times, does the choice seem odd or inappropriate, or has it stood the test of time?

William Thomson is credited as the first settler in Arundel, but the Weskarinis had been in the region for over 6000 years, and Stephen Jakes Beaven was already resident. Beaven was a hunter, trapper and fur trader who lived more with the Indigenous Peoples than with the Europeans and he had traveled up the Rouge River and set up a fur trade outpost well before the settlers moved in.

Thomson arrived with his wife, Margaret Currie, and their children on a March day in 1857. They spent their first night in a shanty that had been built by the surveyor who had just finished surveying the township. They had acquired 300 acres from the local Member of the Assembly, Sidney Bellingham, and Thomson had abandoned a secure career as a teacher in Belle Rivière in the southern Laurentians to become a homesteader. His son William described tying the horses to a tree on that first night, leaving them standing in three feet of snow with very little to eat. He also reported that it was only his father’s “Scotch pride” that kept him from abandoning the whole project and leaving with the survey team the next day. The family stayed on, though, and eventually cleared 75 acres for fields.

While other settlers soon followed Thomson, the man behind the scenes, the real founder of Arundel, was Sidney Robert Bellingham. He was born in County Louth, Ireland, in 1808. At 16 years of age, he left home by himself and came to Montreal where he found a job as an office clerk. At 19, he opened an office for a lumber merchant and 2 years later, in 1831, he went into partnership in an import-export business. During the uprising in 1837, he served as aide-de-camp for an officer in the Royal Montreal Cavalry. He was not the only man eventually associated with Arundel who served the British authority during the uprising; Coral Cooke and Charles Moore, both early settlers in Arundel, also served. Cooke saw action in St. Eustache, one of the hot spots, and Moore was a volunteer. By contrast, Augustin-Norbert Morin in the eastern Laurentians was more likely to attract Patriotes such as Adolphe Marier who settled in Ste. Agathe in the 1850s. The Patriotes were the rebels that Bellingham and others had a hand in putting down.

Bellingham returned to his studies after the uprising, apprenticing in law, and was called to the Bar in 1840. He was 32 years old. He worked for the legal office of William Walker, the lawyer who defended one of the most famous Patriotes, Robert Nelson. Bellingham subsequently became the editor of the Canada Times and pursued a career in journalism, which took him into politics. He ran for the Reform Party in 1854 and won in Argenteuil in 1856. He became a Conservative member of the Quebec Assembly in 1867 and held the seat until 1878, when he returned to Ireland.

During this period, he actively supported the construction of a railway line that was to run from Montreal to Ottawa, working with two brothers from England named Sikes. One was a mechanical engineer, and, although the project failed, it was through no fault of theirs. They had worked for two years successfully running lines from Carillon to Grenville and were anticipating the arrival of a third brother, a banker from Sikes DeBerg and Company in England, but he never arrived. His ship was lost at sea, and his partner back in England called their loans. Bellingham was among the investors who lost a lot of money, and the only section that was built, the Carillon & Grenville Railway, was sold to the Ottawa River Navigation Company in 1863. Bellingham’s interest in the project was tied to his desire to colonize the northern sector of Argenteuil County and he was successful in this venture despite the loss. He was a respected man who was involved in many aspects of Argenteuil’s development including the creation of the Lachute Academy, the funding for the surveying of Arundel Township and the opening of a post office under the name of Fitzalan, although it was soon changed to Arundel. William Thomson operated it, and once a week a member of the family would walk the 35 miles to Lachute to deliver and pick up the mail and any other supplies that could be carried back. When the train finally arrived in St. Jovite in the 1890s, the mail was routed that way, a distance of only 12 miles.

In many cases, we cannot discover who chose the name of a township, or why the particular name was chosen. In the case of Arundel, we know who, but why is not clear. Bellingham apparently chose the name in honour of the Fitzalan family of Arundel Castle in Sussex, England. Why he chose their name instead of his own, or why he chose an English name might have something to do with Irish solidarity with English Catholics. Fitzalan of Arundel in England was the name of a titled gentleman who refused to convert to Protestantism, but Bellingham, while Irish, was Protestant. This would have meant nothing to the settlers who came, and for the most part there were a lot of Protestants – so many in fact that Bishop Ignace Bourget of Montreal became concerned that French-speaking Protestants might come there as settlers. They would have been of Swiss origin and strongly Calvinist. Their coming appears in retrospect to have been unlikely, but the bishop was alarmed, and when a big Catholic priest arrived at his office to advise the bishop he was moving to New England to follow his congregation, the bishop offered him the parish of St. Jérôme if he would stay, and encouraged him to get the Catholics north of Ste. Agathe to populate the Rouge River before the Protestants got there. The large priest was the legendary Curé François-Xavier Antoine Labelle, known also as Le Roi du Nord, and he encouraged the Catholic settlements from Ste. Agathe to Chute aux Iroquois. The French-speaking Calvinists, though, lived on only in the bishop’s imagination.

A more real non-Protestant and non-Catholic presence were the Weskerinis Algonquin. When Bellingham sought a surveyor to map the township that would become Arundel, he found George A. Allbright, who headed off from St. Andrews, helped in part by the Weskarinis. Allbright’s personal diary shows that these helpers also assumed the role of guardians, one might even see them as hosts. They understood what Allbright was engaged to do, but coming from an ancient culture that had no tradition of property ownership they could not understand that their one request, that he not survey a certain part of Arundel Township, could not be respected. Their own culture, devastated by recurring European diseases and the consequent loss of their elders and children, and by their unfamiliarity with European technology, would not be able to stand against this new system. The early records show that some of them homesteaded the new subdivisions, a desperate attempt to survive this rising tide of change.

In the Laurentians, we pronounce the town aRUNdl, but in Arundel, Sussex, no-one would understand that without listening carefully, because they call it ArunDELL, with the emphasis on the first and last syllables, closer to the French pronunciation locally. One Englishman claimed that its name comes from the French hirondelle, for swallow, and while their pronunciation is closer to the bird, the given-name Arundel, Arndel and Arnold mean “from the eagle’s dell,” perhaps not suggesting a songbird.

Thanks to Andy Horton of Adur Valley, Sussex County, we learn that in fact the town of Arundel, Sussex, sits on the Arun River, but that the river itself took its name from the town. Arundel, he told us, comes from the old English harhune + dell, and derives from the horehound plant (harhune). The town was listed as Harundal in the Domesday Book in 1086, and the plant from which the name is derived is an aromatic herb used in respiratory treatments (Marrubium vulgare), something that, if it had transferred with the English history, may have been helpful to the neighbouring regions in the Laurentians, so strongly influenced by tuberculosis treatment.