I have always been a storyteller. Came from a family of storytellers. Stories are what make us who we are.
And yet, when I looked to the world of stories and books, I rarely saw myself reflected in the stories of others. And when I looked back at what a lot of people think of as “the good old days,” I came to the realization that if I was going to tell stories from an era, I had to be true to that era.
The Eastern Townships of my youth, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, contained all of the bucolic beauty you might expect. But it was also a hardscrabble place, filled with political turmoil, racism, dirt and grit.
Welcome to Townships Noir
On this site you’ll see much more than just me trying to sell books. News, author stuff, local history and folklore, maybe even some fresh short fiction. I plan to be experimenting, so please come back often.
The hanging of William Gray was big news in Scotstown – though passed almost unnoticed everywhere else.
It always surprises me how much attitudes on various issues have changed over the years. Like how blasé the wider world was when Scotstown’s William Gray was hanged for murder in 1880. “Hanged today – William Gray, the murderer of Thomas Mulligan at Scotstown, was hanged at Sherbrooke this morning. He was cool and collected to the last, and died protesting his innocence,” wrote the Quebec Daily Mercury on December 10, 1880. That’s it. On page three, next to items about how electric lights were being tried out in New York City for the Christmas season, and the completion of the railway link between Sherbrooke and Lévis. Two pages after an ad for Chamberlain’s Eye Ointment.
But you can be sure it was a hot topic of conversation for the people of Scotstown. Life in the tiny, remote, predominantly Scottish settlement was tough, and everyone knew everyone. So, when Mulligan’s remains were found, people took notice.
Maintained his innocence Here’s what we know from the court’s point of view: Gray, a labourer, went to Mulligan’s house for a drink on December 20, 1879. They probably spoke Gaelic, like many of the 20,000 Scots who lived in that end of the Eastern Townships at the time. Forced off their homeland during the Highland Clearances of the 1830’s and 1840’s, they clung to their language, culture, and each other as they tried to carve out new lives in a harsh environment. While most of those early settlers later moved away, Gaelic could often be heard in that part of the world well into the 20th century. At some point during the booze-fueled visit things turned ugly, and Gray used an axe to murder Mulligan. Upon sobering up Gray feared he would face a murder charge, so he returned to Mulligan’s house the next day and set it on fire. It was only on Christmas Day that neighbour Alexander Scott noticed he hadn’t seen Mulligan around, and decided to go check on him. What he found was the burned out remains of the cabin, and a horribly burned human body, apparently Mulligan’s. Before long the authorities came to suspect Gray. They arrested him and during questioning he let it slip that he knew of Mulligan’s death even before Scott discovered the body. A search of Gray’s house revealed some furniture and personal effects belonging to the victim, total value $34. He couldn’t really explain himself. The authorities (calling them police might be a bit of a stretch) also received a statement from another nearby resident, a Mr. F. H. White, who claimed that Gray confessed the murder to him. Throughout all this Gray protested his innocence. His lawyer, Robert Short, alleged there was no legal proof the body was that of the victim, and that the calcified corpse gave no evidence as to cause of death. Crime scene investigation and forensics being what they were in Victorian rural Canada, the circumstantial evidence pointed to murder. A jury returned a guilty verdict on October 6, 1880, and Judge Marcus Doherty handed down the death penalty. Gray was sent to the Winter Street jail in Sherbrooke to await his fate. He didn’t have long to wait. On December 10, 1880, less than a year after the murder, Gray was led up the stairs of the portable gallows set up at the Winter Street jail for the occasion, and John Robert Radclive, Canada’s first official executioner, carried out the deed. Gray struggled for six minutes, hanging for ten minutes in all, before being declared dead.
Unhappy hangman While the hanging of a murderer was no more than a curiosity for the average newspaper reader, for Radclive it was serious business. He was known for being a conscientious and kind man in dealing with his subject matter, but there were a few botched jobs in there. Like when he would miscalculate how far the prisoner would have to fall for a quick death, resulting in prolonged choking (up to half an hour) or, in at least one case, ripping a woman’s head off.
Photo: The hanging of Stanislas Lacroix, March 21, 1902 in Hull, Quebec. Note people watching from utility poles. People can be a bit sick sometimes. (Image taken from Wikipedia)
It would be easy to write off Radclive as a state sanctioned murderer. But the fact is he suffered greatly for his chosen profession. He claimed to have overseen more than 200 hangings, and expressed deep remorse for his involvement in so many deaths later in life. “I had always thought capital punishment was right, but not now. I believe the Almighty will visit the Christian nations with dire calamity if they don’t stop taking the lives of their fellows, no matter how heinous the crime,” he said. “Murderers should be allowed to live as long as possible and work out their salvation on behalf of the State.” A traumatized Radclive died in Toronto at the age of 55 from alcoholism.
Shifting attitudes By the time of Gray’s hanging, Canadian opinion on capital punishment had already begun to shift. In 1840 the execution of an innocent man in Windsor, Ontario, resulted in the abolition of the death penalty across the river in Michigan. On the Canadian side the laws were revisited after Confederation, with the offences punishable by death reduced to murder, rape and treason. The idea of public executions in Canada dropped away as well, with the last public hanging taking place in Goderich, Ontario in 1869. Once again, the evidence could have, by today’s standards, pointed to any one of several people rather than the man who ended up feeling the bite of the noose. I have never understood the idea of wanting to witness an execution. Yet the appetite remained, and in an archival photo of the execution of Stanislas Lacroix in Hull in March 1902, people can be seen clinging to utility poles, trying to get a view of the event. Human nature is strange sometimes. The hangings continued, and between 1867 and 1976, some 710 people were executed by hanging in Canada. The last two were carried out at Toronto’s Don Jail in 1962, with most murderers receiving life sentences instead. Shortly afterwards a moratorium was placed on the death penalty, and it would take another 13 years to finally make it a thing of the past. Today almost no one remembers William Gray, or any of the half dozen other people who were executed at the Winter Street jail over the next century. It was closed in 1990, but remains as an empty, hollow stone monument to the history of crime and punishment in the Eastern Townships.
A look at one of the lesser known destinations of the Underground Railroad
We all like to think of history, especially more recent history, as something that has been recorded, documented, indexed, and put on a shelf at the local historical society. But sometimes you come across tidbits that point to something more. Like the settlement of escaped slaves known as Jerico in Sutton.
It’s on my route as one of the town garbage truck drivers. Wednesdays are my Glen Sutton run, which puts me in close contact with the US border in several spots. And there, off Scenic and onto Judd Road, you find Jerico Road. It’s a pretty area, with elegant homes separated by acres of forest and rolling hills. The road got its name in 2001, in tribute to the long-vanished settlement that is believed to have existed there.
Image from Hertiage Sutton Historical Society
Practically nothing is known about the settlement or its people. In fact, if it wasn’t a mention of it on a map from 1865, the late local historian Mark Clerk would likely never have even known to look for it. But there it is, spelled Jerico, and not Jericho. The original Jericho is one of the oldest cities in the Middle East, and as the Old Testament says, the Israelite Joshua had his army march around the walled city for six days. On the seventh day they marched around it and, at a precise moment, blew their trumpets and yelled and shouted, and the walls of the city collapsed.
Much raping, pillaging and murdering ensued, but since it was the good guys doing the defiling, it is seen biblically as a good thing. History is written by the victors, I guess.
From this Israelite victory came the hymn Joshua, Fit the Battle of Jericho, an African American spiritual that was popular amongst enslaved Americans in the 1850’s. This was around the time that slaves began trying to escape their bonds and head north, following the series of roads, waterways and safe houses that became known as the Underground Railroad. In all some 30,000 to 40,000 enslaved Americans are believed to have ventured north, most of them to Canada West, today known as Ontario, or to Nova Scotia.
But a few of them came to Canada East. While the existence of a black community in St. Armand is better known, apparently a few came to the border near Richford, Vermont, and then crossed over into Sutton Township.
Beyond that, the information is practically non-existent. His curiosity piqued by the name on the map, Clerk did some digging around and all he could come up with was an article in a Richford newspaper dating from 1980 that referred to Jerico as a black settlement just across the border. Clerk acknowledges that the writer didn’t provide any source material, but he figured they must have had some kind of source for their story.
It’s understandable, I guess. These folks probably weren’t interested in anything other than keeping a low profile. This was an era when escaped slaves were commonly hunted down in the northern US, to be returned to their owners in the south. Slaves were expensive, and rewards for their return generous. And the northern border was little more than a line on a map. And as black slaves were expressly forbidden from learning how to read and write, we don’t have any diaries or letters or documents. Even over in St. Armand, where we know quite a bit more, we don’t really know much about how they lived.
And life in Jerico would have been tough. Cold winters, hilly terrain covered in rocks and virgin forest, not exactly great farming country. Travel was a slow, difficult process. And probably when they did venture south to Richford or north to Sutton Flats (as the village of Sutton was then known), they weren’t treated very well. Racism was a fact of life. If you lived then, you were almost certainly racist.
Clerk said he thought many Jerico residents returned to the US to fight in the Civil War in the 1860’s or returned once the war was over and slavery was abolished. I tend to agree, the natural human tendency being to return to familiar surroundings. Go home, reconnect with family and close friends that had been left behind on the plantations, farms and factories that had previously depended on slave labour.
Back here in Sutton, at a time when tensions between Canada and the US are higher than they have been in many decades, we are left with little to show of long-lost Jerico. No written accounts, no ruins of settler cabins in the hills of Glen Sutton. No graves or markers. Maybe Jerico never existed at all. How much of our history has been lost to the forces of time?
But when I turn off Judd Road onto Jerico every Wednesday morning, it’s nice to think that this remote corner of Sutton was once a place where a few folks experienced freedom for the first time.
Charles Marion spent 82 days chained up in a hole in the ground in Gould
I have long had an interest in the way violence impacts everyone. Not just the victim, but their family, friends, even their community. And the violence of what became known as the Marion Affair, the longest kidnapping in Canadian history, is no exception.
“For many people, the Marion Affair was a simple news item,” Pierre Marion, son of the kidnap victim, told Radio Canada recently. “But for those of us who lived through it, it upended our lives.”
In 1977 Charles Marion was a loan manager at the Caisse Populaire de Sherbrooke Est on King Street East. A longtime employee of the credit union, the 57-year-old lived a fairly typical, quiet life with his wife and kids. And sometimes for a break he would go to his cottage in Stoke, which he named “Mon Repos.”
On August 6, 1977, he was taking it easy at Mon Repos when several masked men broke in and grabbed him. They tied up his companion, a female coworker from the Caisse Pop, and locked her in a shed. Then they bundled Charles Marion into his van and left the scene.
At first no one knew anything was wrong. But Marion’s wife became suspicious when she couldn’t reach him, so she headed out to Stoke. She found his companion, who by this point had been tied up for 18 hours. The awkward conversation would have to wait. The police were called, and the manhunt began.
As for Charles Marion, he was blindfolded and taken to Gould. There his kidnappers had dug a hole in the ground, poured a thin pad of concrete, built some rough wooden walls and a ceiling, and then covered it all with dirt and branches. This would be his home for the next 82 days.
To say the man suffered is an understatement. He was chained to a steel rod set in the concrete, with the chains holding him by his arms, legs and neck. The kidnappers rarely fed him, other than gin and tranquilizers to keep him quiet. Most of the time he sat in the dark, fetid hole, with no idea of what lay ahead. Twice he tried to take his own life rather than continue his living hell.
Meanwhile the family received a ransom note from a group calling themselves “Les Sept Serpents,” demanding a $1 million ransom (the equivalent of about $5 million today). The local media, including Sherbrooke Record reporters Janet Cotton, Robert MacPherson and photographer Perry Beaton, covered the mayhem.
After the initial search involving some 200 Sûreté du Québec officers turned up nothing, the SQ changed tactics. They agreed to pay the ransom but tried to pass off pieced of cardboard for the cash. When two men tried to pick up the ransom at Belvidere Heights in Lennoxville, they were ambushed by game wardens out looking for poachers. Then the police started shooting. In the resulting confusion and gunfire, the men managed to escape. Meanwhile the game wardens went home to change their underwear.
With the Caisse Populaire refusing to pay the $1 million ransom, the family continued to plead with the kidnappers, often through the media. They even got radio station CHLT to broadcast coded messages as a part of the negotiations. Photos of Marion, holding a current issue of the La Tribune newspaper, were released as proof of life.
In the end the family managed to raise $50,000. Far short of the original objective, the kidnappers finally agreed to accept it. On October 26, Pierre Marion, Charles’ son, accompanied by a police officer took the cash to Sand Hill in Cookshire. There, guided by CB radio, they dropped it off. The following evening Charles Marion, emaciated, bearded but alive, was found near the Sherbrooke Airport in East Angus. He had been delivered there on the back of a motorcycle wearing blacked out goggles.
If this was a movie, everything would wind up very neatly from this point. But real life is messy and doesn’t adhere to convenient timelines. In fact, it was eight months before Michel de Varennes, Claude Valence and his wife Jeanne were arrested. The ransom money had been marked with invisible ink, and the men were, naturally, trying to spend it.
Traumatized by the experience, Charles Marion tried to move on. But in the process the SQ had raised the possibility that Marion had been in on the kidnapping all along. Rumours can spread like wildfire, and soon the Marion family felt they could no longer trust their friends and neighbours.
In the end, Varennes was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and Claude Valence to 6 years. Charges against Jeanne Valence were seemingly dropped, and the other people Marion said took part were never caught. Though the trial revealed Charles Marion was truly the victim, the SQ have never apologized. In 2022 Pierre Marion released a book, 82 jours: l’affaire Charles Marion.
“He wanted to turn the page, but deep down he never managed to turn it,” Pierre Marion said. “He lived with public opinion, which always thought that he was partly responsible for this.”
Charles Marion was never able to return to his old job, and struggled to pick up the pieces. Traumatized by his treatment during and after the kidnapping, alienated from his community, 22 years later he took his own life in 1999 at the cottage where it all began.
And a family continues to try to make sense of it all.
Navigating late middle age with one less guardrail.
By Maurice Crossfield
I have a milestone birthday coming up. No, it’s not one of those “new decade” birthdays, or marking a year of something outwardly visible like retirement. No, it’s the rather innocuous looking age of 57. The age my dad was when he died.
And within two months of my birthday, I will venture into the undiscovered land where I am older than my dad ever got to be. Undiscovered country, in terms of my own inner life with one less guidepost. A chance to fine tune my personal mythology, devoid of his influence.
Here’s the thumbnail sketch, to situate you in terms of my inner experience: When I was eight, and my dad was 49, he had a heart attack. Then another. And another. Eight years and another 6 heart attacks later, and I was standing graveside on a bitterly cold January, Friday the 13th, saying farewell to one of the foundational people in my life. He still had a lot on his life To Do list, but fate determined otherwise.
Dear old dad, seen here in his early 50’s.
In the years that followed I drank too much, partied too much, flirted with outlaw bikerdom, and eventually found a sense of purpose in journalism, marriage and parenthood. And as I got older, I often found myself referring to where my dad was at when he was my age. Kind of a “What Would Jesus Do,” but with my dad as the stand in for the saviour. What did he feel, what was he thinking at those times when he, like me, became a dad, bought his first house, lost a loved one? What would he think of the life I had built?
And yes, mortality. When you lose a loved one early in life, death is never far from your thoughts. My worries over dad’s health in my youth resulted in a lifelong battle with anxiety. A few months after I had my own first heart attack at age 42, a combination of genetics and stress, I went into a mental spiral that I almost didn’t come out of. My thoughts of how my dad stoically faced his own mortality helped keep me on my feet, like a boxer getting ready for the next round. Despite his own health problems, and the inner turmoil that he undoubtedly faced (but never expressed), he continued to be there for others.
I have been blessed with several other foundational personalities in my life. My mom, who was forced to navigate the world as a 47-year-old widow. My Aunt Jean and Uncle Stanley, who lived next door. Aunts and uncles. My self-made community of friends and confidants.
Over the decades many of those people have passed on, and new people have filled the void in their own unique ways. It has provided me with a depth of experience that I never knew existed. I continue to learn and evolve as a result.
Last month Bruce Mackenzie passed away. When he was 57, he was well known in Knowlton as the guy who pumped gas at Ding’s Garage. And for a significant number of people in the community he was the guy they talked to when they needed to talk to someone. Smart, funny, kind and genuinely concerned for those around him, Bruce helped a lot of people, myself included, navigate life’s trials. He possessed that essential element of wisdom; knowing when to provide sage advice, even when it was difficult, and when to keep his own counsel. It’s an example I have tried to emulate, though I don’t feel I’ve been nearly as good at it.
My buddy Bruce.
A few months back I was visiting my mom at the Manoir Lac Brome in Knowlton, and there was new resident Bruce. Like me, Bruce had a varied work life, from running the science labs at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) to managing fish farms to driving a garbage truck. I commiserated with him on how my Political Science degree had led me down the road to becoming a trash collector. When I asked him how he was doing he leaned forward over his walker and said, “I’d rather be driving a garbage truck.” A life lesson in seven words.
I saw him a few times after that, always when I was on my way to see my mom. We would talk for a few minutes, and I could see him appearing to get better. The shaking subsided, the walker was replaced by a cane. Bright as ever, as kind as ever. I promised myself one day soon I’d have a good, long visit with him. Regretfully, that never happened. One more of life’s anchors, pulled up and bound for distant shores.
More recently I attended a dance performance at the Brome Lake Theatre by Vicki Tansey. Now 80, she remains able and agile, and most importantly still filled with the creative fire that she has nurtured her entire life. I’m not much of an interpretive dance person, but I found watching her share the stage with some very talented musicians, feeling and acting upon the moment, to be inspiring.
Is there an element of self-mythologizing in all of this? Of course. We all have our own mythologies, where the facts of a situation matter less than how that situation made you feel. Feelings shape narratives more than facts.
So now I move into the unchartered waters of my future with fewer reference points. But still inspired by those who came before, and those that continue to come into my life. People like my wife Sarah, and my sons Julien and Gabe. Less bound to the past, yet still shaped and inspired by it. Knowing there’s still a lot to do, but aware that random elements can wreak havoc at any time.
Think your life is tough? Life on the frontier was far from glamorous, and even farther from easy.
In 1836, young George Stacey was a philandering, irresponsible young man who was running around London and racking up debts he could never repay. His father, an Ordnance Clerk at the Tower of London, and George’s father in-law, decided that the best course of action was to send George to Canada, with his young wife Eliza in tow. The two children, Fred and Louisa, would stay behind.
The couple settled on a vacant piece of land in what is now Ascot Corner. Being city folk in an alien environment, it would have been a bit like going to Mars. George and Eliza would never see their parents again yet maintained in regular and affectionate contact for the remainder of their lives. And amazingly enough, their correspondence survived until it was found by author and editor Jane Vansittart, who sifted through them and created Lifelines: The Stacey Letters 1836-1858.
Before we go further, let’s stop for a second to think of Eliza: She marries this carefree young man who promptly gets in trouble. She then sticks dutifully by him while her own father seems good with sending her to the other end of the world with a man who is, by all appearances, a n’er do well. She’s going to spend the rest of her life giving birth to another six children, and have as many miscarriages, struggling, literally, to survive. Yet in her letters she rarely complains about her lot in life, even when her son Albert, born with severe disabilities, dies at the age of seven.
With little money and surrounded by the boreal forest, city slickers George and Eliza must figure out how to survive, and fast. Pioneer life is hard, and the necessities of life are both hard to come by and expensive. And no one, not even in the nearby settlement of Sherbrooke, has cold hard cash to buy them.
In the following months and years, the couple faces the near constant threat of starvation, winters colder than anything they’ve ever experienced, and summers hotter than the tropics. Their potato crops mirror that of Ireland, where the great famine results in thousands of deaths and thousands more emigrating to Canada. George writes of the sorry state of these Irish refugees, also sent to the colonies because they were seen, as were the Stacey’s, as a problem to be disposed of.
And yet, despite his initial lack of knowledge, greenhorn George gets down to work, and even dams up a brook on his property to build a sawmill. Cutting trees, sawing lumber, farming, and trying to prosper. But the lack of cash is a constant problem, and on occasion George spends time in jail in Sherbrooke due to unpaid debts. Eliza, seemingly always with a child on her hip or in her belly (or both), manages to keep the home fires burning.
In fact, the Stacey’s probably wouldn’t have survived had it not been for dear old dad, who periodically sends what little money he can spare. That and some bits and pieces of inheritances, makes the difference. Bundles of clothes, usually castoffs from family in London, are hydraulically compressed into bales and sent by ship, for a new life in Lower Canada.
Dad’s letters give insight to events of the time, such as the fire in the Tower of London, in which the Crown Jewels are nearly lost. Or the Great London Exhibition of 1851. And at a time when it took weeks or months for letters to arrive, there’s a commentary on the new trans-Atlantic cable, a revolution that accelerated communications on a scale never seen before. Dad is suspicious of this new-fangled technology.
Eventually the children, Fred and Louisa, come to live with their parents at Drighlington, the Stacey property across the St. Francis River from modern day Ascot Corner. There are good years and quite a few bad years, all told in typically stoic fashion: Alfred slices the ends of his fingers off on a circular saw but can work again in a few weeks. George has a gigantic boil that is very painful. Or spent days in bed in agony over his sciatica. Eliza is unable to walk because of lumbago, or the aftereffects of the latest miscarriage. Fred got poison ivy, again, and can’t even put his boots on from the pain. Then George tumbled into the basement, dislocating a shoulder and an elbow, but got back to work after a few weeks. Louisa makes observation that the children were shorter, likely due to a diet that consisted mainly of buckwheat, corn and what few potatoes they managed to harvest.
Eventually, and only after the passing of Eliza, the family begins to do more than survive. George buys more land and builds a grist mill. Louisa takes over as head of the household, raising a few animals and looking after the children. She only marries later, after her father dies in 1862.
Theirs is a far from unique story, preserved only because someone kept those letters and they finally landed in Vansittart’s capable hands. That and community volunteers like Milt Loomis, a family descendent, who with other volunteers erected a monument to the Stacey’s at the Ascot Corner Pioneer Cemetery. There was even a musical play, Louisa, written by former Record staffer Sunil Mahtani and musician Donald Patriquin in 2005.
The Stacey’s: Folks who endured extraordinary hardships but kept going. They were tougher, more resilient, than we can ever imagine. When faced with a situation they put their trust in God and carried on. And from people like the Stacey’s, came people like us.
