Month: March 2025

By Jazmine Aldrich
On Thursday, March 27 at 7pm, the Eastern Townships Resource Centre (ETRC) will welcome Dr. Jessica Van Horssen of McMaster University to speak about Asbestos extraction in the Eastern Townships. The talk will take place in Bishop Williams Hall on the campus of Bishop’s University.
The town presently known as Val-des-Sources was known until December 16, 2020, as the town of Asbestos. With the support of their municipal council, residents of the town voted for a fresh start for their “Valley of the Springs” – its former namesake being indivisible from the negative impact of the asbestosis and cancer-causing minerals.
The town of Asbestos was indeed named for the fibrous minerals that were extracted from its depths for over 130 years; the heat- and corrosion-resistant group of minerals literally made a name for the town.
The discovery of asbestos deposits in Shipton Township dates back to the mid-19th century. At the beginning of the 1870s, there was an observable increase in demand for asbestos from British and American industrialists who were prepared to transform the mineral into commercial products.
Asbestos extraction began in its namesake town along Webb’s Ledge – a long strip of asbestos visible in a hillside on the property of a farmer named Charles Webb, whose family had purchased the property from the British American Land Company in 1849. Webb leased the property to a gentleman farmer from Richmond named William Henry Jeffrey in 1879 and in so doing, facilitated the creation of what would at one time be Canada’s largest asbestos mine and the world’s largest asbestos producer.
As mineral exploitation grew over the course of the 1880s, a community of mine workers grew around the area and constituted the hamlet that would grow into the town. In 1884, a post office opened with the name “ASBESTOS” proudly displayed on its sign – marking the official naming of the town.
The fusion of American asbestos manufacturing companies into the H.W. Johns’ Manufacturing Company at the beginning of the 1890s would prove pivotal to the town of Asbestos. The new Company’s significant investment in Quebec asbestos mines meant that it heavily influenced the price of the raw fiber. Most of the asbestos extracted from the Jeffrey Mine went to H.W. Johns in New York.
In 1892, William Jeffrey decided to purchase the property from Charles Webb that he had leased and exploited for thirteen years; however, Jeffrey declared bankruptcy less than one year later following a drop in the market price of asbestos. In the spring of 1894, James Naismith Greenshields of Danville took possession of the Jeffrey mine and its installations – fusing it with the Danville Slate Company to become the Danville Asbestos Slate Company.
Faced with continually dropping market prices, the mine operators found innovative ways to use shorter fibers of asbestos in construction materials, called asbestic. It was in 1897 that the London-based Asbestos and Asbestic Company invested in the area’s ongoing mining operations. The H.W. Johns Co. was an important client for the new asbestic product. Technological innovations continued to mechanize asbestos extraction and processing over the following decades.
Meanwhile, the H.W. Johns’ Manufacturing Company became the H.W. Johns-Manville Company in 1901 with Thomas Franklyn Manville as its president. Manville and his father, Charles B. Manville, were named to the Board of the Asbestos and Asbestic Company in 1902, with two additional brothers – Hiram Edward Manville and C.R. Manville joining the Board in 1903. The Asbestos and Asbestic Company was undoubtedly under the control of the Manville family and its interests.
By 1916, the Asbestos and Asbestic Co. declared bankruptcy and reorganized under the name Manville Asbestos Company Limited; in 1918, the name was changed to the Canadian Johns-Manville Company, Limited. The Canadian Johns Manville – or C.J.M. – would remain at the heart of asbestos mining in Asbestos through the 1949 Asbestos Strike. The company met its end in in 1982 – declaring bankruptcy on the heels of legal action taken against it by its employees who had developed asbestosis and various cancers from their working conditions. The Jeffrey mine continued to operate under subsequent management until it closed its doors in 2012.
If you are interested in learning more about asbestos extraction in the Townships, please attend Dr. Van Horssen’s free lecture on March 27. You may also contact the ETRC Archives for more information, by email or by telephone.
Much of this historical overview was adapted from research published in the book titled “Asbestos, Filons d’histoire (1899-1999)” written by Réjean Lampron, Marc Cantin, and Élise Grimard (1999).

By Jazmine Aldrich

In the Spring 2006 issue of the Journal of Eastern Townships Studies (JETS), published by the Eastern Townships Resource Centre, historian Dr. Jack Little contextualized the memoirs of James S. Ramage in an article entitled “A Wilderness Boyhood: The Lake Megantic Memories of James S. Ramage, 1868–82” (pp. 5-22). In the article’s opening paragraph, Dr. Little acknowledged that it was uncertain whether the memoirs were complete, for they ended abruptly at the end of page fourteen. What Dr. Little could not have known, however, was that nearly twenty years later, the remaining twenty-four pages of Ramage’s incomplete memoirs would find their way to the ETRC’s archives.

On November 22, 2024, the ETRC received an email from Bernard Boulet of Marston, Quebec. Mr. Boulet explained that at the end of the 1990s, his uncle Georges Martin (son of Ernest Martin – longtime mayor of Marston) gave him a fourteen-page long document written by James S. Ramage, recounting stories of his upbringing around Lake Megantic. Mr. Boulet was likely unaware that a copy of the same document had been deposited into the ETRC archives by Robert Walters of Sherbrooke in 1994.

In the spring of 2024, Mr. Boulet decided to translate Ramage’s memoirs into French. On a whim, he called the municipal library in Marston to ask if they knew about Ramage’s story. Mrs. France Morin told him that the very same day of his call, someone had dropped a copy of Ramage’s memoirs in the book return. To Mr. Boulet’s great surprise, the copy at the Marston library included pages 15 to 38!

Jumping ahead, once more, to November 2024, Mr. Boulet offered to loan the complete document to the ETRC so that we could make a digital copy. Mr. Boulet’s granddaughter, a student of the campus, facilitated the loan. I scanned the document, which is 52 pages in total and includes handwritten notes added by an unnamed grandchild of Ramage, after his death; it also includes a photocopied newspaper clipping, a family roster, and a copy of a map showing Lake Megantic.

The version of the memoirs donated by Mr. Boulet in 2024 is by far the most complete. The original typewritten text is dated February 16, 1951, and a handwritten annotation below indicates “His story to 1951, and after writing that he continued to work and fish for another 5 years” – indicating that Ramage died in Spokane, Washington in December 1956.

As an added layer of intrigue, the handwritten annotations following the memoirs include a note indicating that the unnamed author “met Mr. Walters at Mario Lapoint’s B+B in town – He is from Sherbrooke – Very into history of the area”, so it would appear that Robert Walters, who donated the fourteen pages to the ETRC in 1994, was actually in contact with the descendant of Ramage who annotated the more complete copy.

The note about meeting Mr. Walters is followed by a copy of a letter to the same, which begins as follows: “Recieved [sic.] your letter and will try to give you lots of information – Been looking thru [sic.] old family books ets. [sic.]”; it is in this letter that the author reveals themselves to be the grandchild of James S. Ramage. The plot thickens!

The photocopied clipping seems to originate from an Idaho Springs, Colorado newspaper; it is a biographical write-up and obituary for James D. Ramage – James S. Ramage’s father, who died September 24, 1900.

Rather unexpectedly, our knowledge of James S. Ramage’s life has more than doubled; the remainder of his memoir speaks of life following the Ramage family’s move to the mid-western United States, business ventures, becoming a father, the death of his siblings, and more. We have a more complete picture of Ramage’s life because of Mr. Boulet, who seeks to make this story known. If you are interested in reading James S. Ramage’s memoirs, or if you have archival materials of enduring value, please contact the Eastern Townships Resource Centre’s Archives Department.