Up the Gatineau! Article
This article was first published in Up the Gatineau! Volume 6.
Footnote to History
Trouble in the timber trade
To His Excellency The Right Honourable Sir Charles Bagot G.C. B. Governor and Captain General of British America and Vice Admiral of the same.
The memorial of William Farmer of Gatineau Falls, Township of Hull humbly sheweth.
That your ExceIlency’s memorialist emigrated from Shropshire England in the summer of 1834 with fifty four settlers and fifty six head of farming stock.
That your Excellency 's memorialist has from that period to the present been residing on a property consisting of up wards of two thousand acres on the banks, and opposite the principal obstructions, of the Gatineau River, with a farm and saw mills (the first ever erected on the stream and long before the commencement of any lumbering on it.)
(After this formal preamble Mr. Farmer launched into a long list of complaints about others cutting timber and diverting it from his mill, trespassing on his property, illegally curtailing traffic on the river by putting booms across it, etc., etc.)
From Brigadier Farmer's Scrapbook