Up the Gatineau! Article
This article was first published in Up the Gatineau! Volume 6.
Farmer's Rapids on the Gatineau River
Brigadier G.R.D. Farmer, RCAMC (Ret'd.)
There appears to have been some obscurity about the origin of the name FARMER'S RAPIDS, that fall in the Gatineau River upon which the plant of the Gatineau Power Company (now Hydro-Québec) is located, about four miles from its confluence with the Ottawa. The main facts in this short paper were assembled by one of the Farmer family in the previous generation and presented to the Power Company at the time of its development of that part of the river for its generation of hydroelectric power.
The man who gave his name to this historical site was William Farmer, the author's own great-grandfather, who came from Bridgenorth, Shropshire, in the year 1834.
The family is of considerable antiquity in that part of England and there is in the family archives a record of a will dated 9th of September 1485 and probated on the 8th of November following. The lineage of the family is clearly traced back to that time.
Many interesting details of the family history have been preserved, but the subject of the paper presented here is William Farmer, the sixth generation of that name to occupy Brockton and New House. He was born on February 4th, 1794 and was baptised at Sutton Maddock, England, the next day; he died at Brockton House, Ancaster, Ontario on March 7th, 1880, aged 86 years. He was the father of twelve children, seven sons and five daughters, all of whom lived to a good old age. The last to survive was the youngest daughter who died in British Columbia in June 1934 at the age of 92. Seven of the children, five by his first wife and two by his second, were born in England. The last five of his children were born in Canada, at Farmer's Rapids on the Gatineau River.
William Farmer possessed quite large estates in England, but in the month of March 1834 he sold the greater part of his property and began actual preparations for leaving the home that the Farmer family had been born in, and lived and died in, for over two hundred and fifty years. When these preparations were complete, William Farmer with his wife and seven children left Brockton Court, where his mother was still residing, on the 6th of June 1834. The large stage coach which conveyed the family to Birkenhead, near Liverpool, was drawn by four fine grey horses. It left for Birkenhead at nine o'clock in the morning and arrived at sundown.
The vessel chartered exclusively by Mr. Farmer for his voyage out to Canada was the "Kingston" of Liverpool under the command of a Captain Willis, a Yorkshire man. The ship drew about 430 tons, had nine square sails, and was fitted out very comfortably. She had a cabin with berths, a sitting room, and a dining room on the deck.
Mr. Farmer engaged and brought with him a colony of ten families, a total of forty five souls, in addition to himself and his own family with general house-servant, housemaid, and nurse. The heads of these families included various journeymen and craftsmen as well as a lawyer and a tutor.
Mr. Farmer also brought some valuable livestock. For example, there was the famous dark grey mottled Clydesdale stallion called ‘Briton’ — four years old ~ and Briton's mother, a grey Clydesdale mare bought in Scotland. There were also an iron-grey mare, two Durham bulls, two Hereford bulls, six cows (Durham, Hereford, and Highland Scottish), two Southdown rams, fourteen Southdown ewes, one Leicester ram, thirteen Leicester ewes, one Berkshire boar, one Shropshire boar, nine sows, ten dogs (pointers, bull terriers, and a fox terrier), besides a number of game-cocks and hens. Mr. Farmer provided adequate food and fresh water for all this stock. Moreover, on stormy days the horses were all suspended in strong canvas slings with pulley blocks from the beams of the decks above. Not a single animal was lost on the voyage.
They sailed from Liverpool early in the morning on Waterloo Day, the 18th of June 1834, and arrived at Quebec at sundown on Friday the 8th of August so that the voyage took fifty one days. This whole undertaking by one man must be unique in Canadian annals; it was recorded in the (Quebec newspaper from which it was copied into the Montreal Gazette where it was published on the 26th of August 1834.
The packages which Mr. Farmer brought from Shropshire to Canada would take too much space to enumerate and details of their contents would perhaps set antique collectors’ eyes agog were they to be described. But most of the articles are still in the family, as well as invoices for most of the items specially purchased for furnishing the Canadian home. Besides forty two cases of household effects only, all labelled and numbered, there were coils of rope, tools and implements, barrels, bags of barley, peas and wheat, several barrels of glass of all kinds for table use, and many other articles. Later Mr. Farmer sent to Coalport in Shropshire for additional supplies. There were five or six dozens of champagne glasses besides dozens of wine glasses of various styles and sizes, finger-bowls and decanters. Barrels of china contained no less than six Coalport dinner sets, two dozen meat dishes, vegetable dishes, gravy boats, fruit and fancy dishes, sugar bowls, cream pitchers, cups and saucers, six large beer pitchers, and so on.
As a sample of the contents of some of the forty two cases: case No. 1 contained curtains, sideboard and cellaret, two beds, bolsters, pillows, linen, a clock-case, blankets, waistcoats, clothes, tags, and bed quilts. The clock-case was for an 8-day clock that had been in the family for several generations and is in fact still in their possession. The sideboard and cellaret had been made by the order of Lord Bradford and bought by William Farmer. These are among the items still in the family.
Case No. 11 held bureau, looking glasses, old and new scraps, clothes, pictures, and clock works. The bureau belonged originally to the Yates family of Higford, the first Mrs. Farmer having been a Yates. It came into the possession of the Farmer family in 1827 and is believed to be still there somewhere.
Case No. 12 was labelled "Mrs. Farmer's bureau, and clothing to be used by her on first landing in Canada".
On August the 8th, as mentioned above, the "Kingston" made fast at Quebec and on the following day a complete transfer of passengers, livestock, and cargo was made to the steamer "Canada" — Captain Douglas in command. William Farmer's diary states that she was the largest steamer on the main line running at that time on the St. Lawrence between Montreal and Quebec. She left Quebec late in the evening of the 9th for Sorel and arrived there about noon on Sunday the 10th of August. At Sorel, Mr. Farmer rented a house on the Green for himself and family; the other families were boarded at various farmhouses in the vicinity. William bore the expenses of every individual from the time of leaving England until the year he left the Gatineau.
The livestock was sent to the farm of one Alfred Nelson at a place called Pottenduer, near Sorel. This place does not appear on present day maps of the area, but perhaps vestiges of it still remain. Thus located, all remained until the 23rd of November; but during this period a fire destroyed a great part of Sorel, including the house occupied by Mr. Farmer and his family.
The whole party left Sorel on November 23rd and on the night of the 26th they arrived at "the falls on the Gatineau River in the Township of Hull, Lower Canada, about six miles from Bytown". On that very night, both the Ottawa and Gatineau Rivers froze over and there was an abrupt end to all navigation.
The property to be occupied contained about 2,400 acres of wood and clearing, with a house "of extraordinary size, sufficiently large to hold all the people we brought out from England with us." This house was located about 300 yards from, and directly opposite, the first drop in the Falls.
While Mr. Farmer was at Sorel, Mr. Tiberius Wright, son of Philemon, sent his agent to call. Philemon Wright had come from New England in 1800 and had settled on the north shore of the Ottawa where he founded the town of Hull and began the exploitation of the timber wealth of the district. A cousin of the author, who provided most of the details of this résumé, was of the opinion that it was the influence of Tiberius Wright which persuaded Mr. William Farmer to take up the site on the Gatineau since known as Farmer's Rapids. The author now feels there is every reason to believe, however, that the site had been selected before the party left England and recommended by Mr. Henry Devey; he was a brother of the second Mrs. Farmer and a senior official in the Colonial Office at the time. It hardly seems reasonable to suppose that anyone would make such very elaborate preparations involving so many men, women, and children without any definite idea of where he and they were going.
During 1835 Mr. Farmer erected a large sawmill, and during 1836 he built a flour and grist-mill nearby. At this time he had 100 employees, in addition to all those who had accompanied him from the Old Country. In 1843 he built a dam and completed a new house which he occupied on the 24th of January 1844. Spring floods caused severe damage to the dams, but necessary repairs were finished in time to start log-cutting up the river during the winter of 1844. Deals were sold for 7 pounds 10 ($30 Halifax currency) per standard hundred in the year 1845.
Lucien Brault, the eminent historian, refers to a canal 3 miles long, built presumably to get the logs round the rapids to the sawmill, but this mention occurs in his remarks on the Gilmour Company. The author's relatives have stated that it was Mr. Farmer who built this canal — or that at any rate he did build an extensive canal, and that, incidentally, he lost a good deal of money in doing so. The author owns a fine pencil drawing of the Gilmour sawmill, made by William Farmer's son of the same name.
ln 1846, the whole property — mills, logs, dams, timber limits, and so on — was turned over to Alonzo Wright, Philemon's grandson, who continued operations at the site for a year or two. In 1855 William Farmer moved to Upper Canada and ultimately to the village of Ancaster, near Hamilton in Wentworth County at the head of Lake Ontario.
His eldest son, William Farmer of the next generation became a very prominent consulting engineer and architect in New York city from 1856 to 1881 when he retired to Ancaster where he had built a very fine house, named ‘Brockton’ after the old home in England. Here he died in 1911 at the age of 89. It was here also that his father, who had brought the family from England almost a half-century before, died on March 7th, 1880.
Names of those who came to Canada with William Farmer in 1834
Jemima Rudkins — housekeeper and nurse
William Dukes — a lawyer
Arthur Vickers — tutor, a Cambridge student
Thomas Barnfield — a miller and wheelwright
Mr. Williams — groom and waiter; Mrs. Williams, his wife; George, Joseph and James Williams, his sons, and three daughters
Amos Bonell — a millwright; Mrs. Bonell, his wife; Catharine, George, William, Fanny and Thomas Bonell
William Furnivall — blacksmith (Mrs. Bonell’s brother)
Samuel Langford — gardener,' Mrs. Langford, his wife; Mary, Samuel, William, Richard, Annie and Bessie Langford
Thomas Childs — a general purpose man; Mrs. Childs, his wife; Bessie, Thomas, Richard and James Parton — Mr. Childs’ stepchildren
Peter, Fanny, Mary and Annie Childs — his own children
James Green — a mason; Mrs. Green, his wife
Ellen Smith — a general house-servant; (Green's sister-in-law)
William Adderley — a sawyer; Mrs. Adderley, his wife and three young children
The above is a transcription of a list prepared by the sister of the late Dr, G.R.D. Farmer, great-grandson of William Farmer, and supplied by his widow, Mrs. G.R.D. Farmer.