Lake Louisa

Places carry names that have their own stories. Once we scratch the surface, wanting to know more, these names forever lose their anonymity.

The Quebec government maintains a website on all the place names in the province. If you check it out and look at how Lake Louisa got its name, you will find two and a half somewhat conflicting stories. In one, they describe a talented musician named Louisa M. Holland who performed for some surveyors in the 1840s and they subsequently named the lake in her honour. In the second, there is the sad story of Louisa who drowned in the lake near the outflow in the early 1800s, and in the half-story, it goes on to say that the lake was called Lac Louise between 1970 and 1984 after Louise Lafleur who often fished off a rock that dominated the lake. It does not say when she lived, or why the lake would have been named for her. It leaves one going back over and checking the date. ‘Did they mean 1970 or 1870?’ But it seems they did indeed mean 1970.

In the book Louisa and her Lake, written by H.C (Herb) Montgomery and published in 2002 (ISBN 0-919302-55-2), the author documents the era of vacation homes and the happy times of regattas and outings that characterized the twentieth century at Lake Louisa. He describes the Hollands, who first visited the area in the 1870′s. Louisa, their daughter, subsequently took a summer job working in the home of the Abbott family. One of the gathering places was the Meikle’s store in Lachute. It was a place where people could exchange stories, whiling away the evenings, sometimes singing and playing the piano.

During the course of one such evening, a group of surveyors, flirting with Louisa and encouraging her to sing one more song to her father’s piano music, promised to name a lake after her.

Montgomery says that this happened in the 1870s, not the 1840s. The Toponymie people probably tied their version of the story to when the first official survey was done. Lake Louisa is in Wentworth Township and the township system displaced the seigneurial system in the 1840s.

It seems improbable that the lake was not already named, and so it is possible that the story is fanciful, but it marks the time when the lake’s vocation was changing from that of farming to a community of ‘campers.’ The local MP, John Abbott referred to in Montgomery’s story, had acquired 73 acres of the Robinson farm sometime between 1867 and 1874. He called his property Liberty Hall. He was not a camper, but he was certainly not directly dependent on the land. He was close to Prime Minister Macdonald and became Prime Minister himself in 1891, making him the first Canadian-born prime minister.

The early settlers among whom Abbott built Liberty Hall were Irish and Scottish immigrants who went through the backbreaking process of clearing the land. As in other areas, they burned the trees and turned the ashes into potash that sold for hard cash. With this money they could buy essentials, including seed stock. In the fields, once the trees and roots were gone, there was little soil left. Lake Louisa is a headwater, higher than neighbouring areas, and as in such areas, the glaciers long ago pushed the soil away. These farmers, George Seale, Zachariah Robinson, Charles Vary and others, discovered soon enough that the soil would never allow a really prosperous farm. The thin soil dried rapidly between summer storms, exposing crops to a regular risk of drought and weathering, while the shimmering lake lying in the fields below mocked their efforts. One can imagine the sad story of a drowned Louisa standing as a cautionary tale to the younger children of the farmers. Their families often numbered 12 to 14 and, and while they could help with the field and farm work, there was little time to watch the younger ones. Stories like the drowned Louisa would have been used to curb the children’s sense of adventure. One can almost hear Zachariah or another farmer telling his daughter while the other children listened round-eyed around them, “Why her name would be Louisa, wouldn’t it? Just like yours, only she didn’t listen and she drowned, didn’t she?”

The story of Louisa Holland was a happier one for the campers who followed. As the farmers aged and their children left for the towns and the city, they sold their properties to the affluent city people, mostly from Lachute, and by the early years of the twentieth century, a vacation community had replaced the farms.

H.C. Montgomery goes on to document how the lake began to appear on maps as Lac Louise in the 1970s and 80s, and says that it was part of the Parti Québécois’s attempt to francize place-names and how it took a concerted effort on the part of local citizens to have the name corrected to Louisa in 1988. Under questioning from the mayor at the time, the Commission de la Toponymie said that they had been given the name Louise from residents of one of the bays on the lake. Perhaps this was the story of Louise Lafleur, a new myth for a new era. It proved to be a myth that served no real purpose and so it almost vanished.

The story of the naming of Lake Louisa and its origins stands itself as a cautionary tale to us today. The naming of things often reflects the wishes of the present rather than the truth of the past. It is up to all of us to find and protect our history and our place names, many of which speak of the Irish and Scottish pioneer influences, particularly in the Lower Laurentians. Today, we live in a healthy, mature society in which we can celebrate our origins together and can show our respect for the influences of our ancestors simply by learning how they named what they named.

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