Out from the north pours the wild Gatineau River, cutting a path through the Granite Laurentian Hills, until it joins the broad Ottawa River within sight of the towers of Canada’s Parliament. Its waters work hard, carrying down a rich crop of timber.

It was the timber that drew the first settlers to the valleys of the Ottawa and Gatineau. Lumbering sustained their economy for a 100 years. First to arrive was an enterprising Yankee from Woburn Massachusetts, Philemon Wright, who came up the frozen Ottawa early in 1800 with 25 families to build his settlement at Hull.

In 1818, an 18-year-old nephew arrived to work for Wright, Caleb Brooks, from Boston. In a few years working as a millwright he earned enough to get married and start farming on his own account. Each winter the lumbermen pushed further north up the Gatineau Valley cutting the virgin pine. By 1836–37, the axemen of Hamilton & Low Co. were logging the area around the Paugan Falls, where the river, trapped between granite crags, raged over a 36-foot drop. He and his wife Anne Maria Dexter, arrived in February 1837 and moved into an abandoned shanty so soon after the lumberjacks moved out that the coals were still alive in the hearth.

Pioneering was in Caleb’s blood. He descended from English Puritans who emigrated from Suffolk to Massachusetts in 1630. They baptized their second son “Caleb” and the name persisted in the family. Caleb III and his brother John were officers of the Minutemen in the War of Independence and were among the first men roused by Paul Revere during his famous midnight ride in 1775. Both fought at Lexington the next day. John served at Valley Forge with George Washington, ended the war as a Major-General and in 1816 was elected Governor of Massachusetts. Caleb III was a Major and served in the Massachusetts Legislature.

His grandson, Caleb Brooks V was the pioneer who settled at Low. He opened an inn for the lumbermen pushing up the valley—the only temperance inn upon [their stretch of] the Gatineau. He and his seven sons kept a store, a smithy, a livery stable, a sawmill and farmed 1,000 acres. They started a stagecoach line from Wakefield to Maniwaki.

Marshall, Caleb’s oldest son, carried the mail on horseback to Maniwaki 70 miles north until a road was built and then he drove the stage. The stage driver was a glamorous figure in that frontier world. He made the speed records and was the first to learn the news along a hundred miles of road. Little wonder that pretty Hannah Chamberlain of Chelsea, just home after education in Boston, took an interest in Marshall. Marshall and Hannah Brooks were married in 1859 and as a wedding gift Caleb built them a house and a barn—as he did for each of his sons when they married. This white farmhouse still stands on its hill overlooking Low and is named Brooks Hill.

Across the road in the graveyard, a tall memorial column marks the grave where Caleb “of Boston” and Anne Maria Brooks lie surrounded by many of their children and grandchildren. Hannah Brooks was 102 before she was laid to rest beside Marshall. Their descendants have spread across Canada as far as the Pacific Coast. But the railway put the stagecoach out of business; cars replaced horses; the inn burned down. Sad days also came to the farmhouse on the hill. By 1966 the building, the oldest in the village, was showing its age.

Hale, Grete and Reg, Excerpt from Up the Gatineau! Vol. 16, 1