 | CANADA - |
| CANADA - |
ROBERVAL
Having abandoned yet another really good rant on the previous page, I move on along the shore of the lake and find myself in the town of Roberval. This was my target for last night so, as you can see, I'm way behind schedule.
If you've travelled much of the journey with me, you won't need to be told for whom the town is named. For the benefit of the newcomers, it's named for our old friend Jean-Francois de la Rocque de Roberval, and if you want to find out more about him, then go to this page
Parking the Dodge on the municipal car park on the edge of town, I go for a walk along the shore of the lake. And believe me, it's one of the nicest waterfront walks that I've ever taken.
The good weather that arrived yesterday late morning is continuing, so it's a beautiful day for a walk and I'm quite lucky in that respect. It's quite true that everywhere looks so much nicer under the sun, but this is the kind of walk that would be quite beautiful in a rainstorm.
With all of this beautiful scenery and marvellous weather, I'm beginning to think that the way into the Lac St Jean via the canyon of the riviere St Marguerite is like the secret tunnel into the Pays de Merveilles or the passage through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia.
It's nice to see that smaller people are being catered for too. It always seems to me, from much first-hand experience, that whenever belts have to be tightened in times of economic difficulty, it's always those less-able to defend themselves such as the very young, the very old and the disabled, who bear the brunt of the cutbacks and not the people actually making the decisions.
So if you have small persons under your charge, then there's plenty of fun that they can have in Roberval.
As for the rest of us, we can continue our walk around the lakeshore and I'll tell you some more about the town.
It was founded in 1855, presumably as a lumber camp, because its first inhabitant of note was an American, Horace Jansen Beemer. He made his money out of wood that was used for building purposes rather than paper pulp.
It was he who was one of the prime movers of bringing the railway, and thus the tourists, to the lake. He commercialised the town and went on to build a big hotel and run a couple of steam pleasure boats on the lake.
The "Hotel Beemer" is no longer here and surely you don't need me to tell you what happened to it. Like almost everywhere else in Quebec, it burtnt down - in 1908 to be precise.
Roberval was also home to Canada's first seaplane base, although I'm not quite sure why it would have been founded here. The lake may well be a fine place to train and would be a beautiful anchorage, but it would have been much more use had it been along the shipping lanes of the St Lawrence.
At the end of July there's an important event that takes place here. It's 32 kilometres across the lake to Peribonka, so we are told, and in July 1955 some woman whose name I forgot swam across and then back again, taking 18 hours to make the round trip.
Since then, this has become an annual event, attracting extreme swimmers from all over the world. All that I can say is "good luck to them!"
I was right, by the way, about my assumption of the origins of the lake. It is indeed a glacial vestige and was formed by the weight of the glacier pressing down in this spot during one of the many ice ages.
10,000 years ago, the lake was much, much bigger than this but as the glaciers melted the land began to slowly uplift in an effort to recover its previous shape.
Not only that, though, the rivers coming from further north slowed down dramatically as they enter the lake. This caused them to deposit their load of silt and so the lake bed and surrounding shore has slowly silted up over all this time. This presumably accounts for the fertility of the soil.
The boulders that have been rolled down the rivers grinding together by the force of the water is what has created the sand, being the debris that has ground off the stones. However, I suspect that a similar action in the glaciers has contributed a great part of that too.
Anyway, that's why there are such nice beaches here, as I suggested earlier.
A large amount of sand leaves the lake in the Saguenay River and as the Saguenay reaches the St Lawrence and its speed slows down dramatically, the sand is deposited at the confluence and this accounts for the sandspits and sandbars that we saw a couple of days ago .
Having dealt with the waterfront, the next plan is to go for a wander around the town. The first thing that caught my eye was the number of empty shops and closed businesses. I'm surprised that they would be having an economic recession around here. Raw materials and forestry products don't usually suffer the same kind of boom-and-bust cycle that most other things go through.
However, there are some quite stylish old buildings here, as befits a town with such a history as Roberval.
This building, built in what is known as the Victorian style and according to the plans of Joseph-Pierre Ouellet, an architect from St Felicien, and dates from 1910. It was originally the Town Hall, but today, however, it's the Palais de Justice and contains the local nick.
We are actually quite lucky to find this building. Ouellet is mainly known for his churches which, as his biographer so eloquently put it, "had the unfortunate habit of falling victim to the flames". I'm surprised that his Town Hall never followed suit.
The green building next to has something of a history. This dates from 1894 and was originally the home of the farmer who tended the lands of the Ursuline Convent back in those days. The accommodation was later used by other employees of the convent.
In 1973 it was sold into private hands, becoming an art studio and gallery until 1991.
Interestingly enough, this is its third site. It was removed once due to road widening and a second time to be nearer the Palais de Justice, so I was told although I wasn't told why it had to be nearer the aforementioned.
I mentioned the Ursuline convent just now, and this is their building just here. In the wing at the far side of it is the Normal School and which was once the Teachers' Training College so it seems.
You'll notice that the wall on the nearside of the building is very roughly-faced. Attached to it at one time was another wing that contained the infirmary, the boarding school and the chapel as well as what was called the "stone house".
No surpise for guessing what became of this wing. Well done that man! It was all destroyed in a conflagration, as recently as 23rd March 2002. Subsequently, the nuns decided not to rebuild the damaged building and donated the land to the city as open space.
This isn't the first time that the convent has suffered a conflagration. The first building here, dating from 1882 was lucky enough to survive until 1894 when it was demolished to make was for a larger building. The new building survived for all of two and a half years, being destroyed by fire in January 1897 with the loss of seven of the nuns (and you will note that I deliberately refrained from making an irreverent remark such as "Holy Smoke!")
Another building was erected to replace the one that was devoured by the flames, and this lasted slightly longer, being burnt down on 21st January 1919. The present building is the replacement, although it was much smaller than it is today, having undergone a series of enlargements until the disastrous fire of 2002.
I did notice a road that went round to the back of the convent that did not seem to be contemporary with the actual convent buildings. I wondered, on the basis of no evidence at all, if maybe the green wooden building had to be moved so that this road could be built over its site.
Perhaps it's appropriate here to mention a little about the Ursulines. This group of nuns had come to Montreal in the very first days of its settlement when slow torture and cruel death at the hands of the Iroquois was a fate that befell a good number of the inhabitants of the city.
One of their tasks ... "the nuns, not the Iroquois" - ed ... was to provide education and we've been frequently encountering traces of their presence in many communities through which we have passed on our journey.
In May 1882 they established a presence here at Roberval, the aim being to prepare young girls for family life. And with a family unit in Quebec quite often being well into double figures, a great deal of preparation was clearly necessary. Roberval had the first Canadian school of Domestic Science, a school that went on to have a national and even international reputation.
The nuns now no longer live here on this site. After the fire of 2002 they moved out and I was told that they are sharing premises with the Augustinians.
This building is the second Town Hall of Roberval. The plans for this building were drawn up by Charles Lafond and it was erected during 1928 and 1929.
It's built from pink granite, like many things that I have noticed in the area and that's no surprise as this stone is apparently quarried locally. It could do with a good smoothing off and a polish, and then the marble would resemble very much the marble used in the Justus Lipsius building of the European Union in Brussels, a building which was my home for several years.
Next to it is the Place de la Mairie, which is "sculpted symbolically to represent the geography of the region", so we are proudly informed. Well, never mind the sym - I think that this kind of thing is ... errr ... something else completely
And when I find five minutes to spare, I can edit out the school sign, can't I?
So that was Roberval. This is the place where it all happens and the place that has everything. And you know what you give the place that has everything, don't you?
That's right. Penicillin.
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