The Friends of Chats Falls and Archéo-Pontiac delivered the results of their 2025 archaeological digs on Friday morning at the Quyon Community Centre. 

The groups have been jointly hosting digs for three years in the Quyon area. After two years digging at Pointe-à-L’Indienne, this year the groups shifted to the old Quyon fairgrounds this year, a site they hoped could yield some clues about the presence of a summer home once used by lumber baron Philemon Wright.

In September, the groups hosted two digs at the fairgrounds, inviting local schools and the community to help uncover layers of Quyon’s history.

Archaeologist Jean-Luc Pilon, who is volunteering with the project, said the findings include fragments of bottles, dishes, oil cans, bones, crockery, as well as pieces of car doors and car batteries, all dating from around the 1920s and 1930s. “It’s domestic trash,” he said. 

The land was donated in the 1910s by the family of Philemon Wright to the Quyon Agricultural Society, and was the site of an annual agricultural fair from 1920 until 2001. But Pilon said the findings from the digs, including the car parts, could suggest the site was once used as some sort of community dump.

“This suggests we could have a garage that contributed. We are asking if it was a dump that had nothing to do with the fair. It’s a layer of garbage. Did they dig a hole, or did they find a hole? These are questions we can maybe once we know more,” he said. 

Pilon said certain artifacts – the heels of four or five clay pipes – could date from the early 1800s. He said the fact that there are several of them could suggest there were homes near the site. One building frame in particular was found near the play structure in the park near the community centre, but more digging is needed to see what the structure was.

Audrey Lapointe, a teacher at Luskville’s École Vallée-des-Voyageurs who organizes the Archéo-Pontiac digs, said she was excited by the findings and is looking forward to seeing what else can be found. 

She said the proximity of the site to local schools was crucial to the level of community engagement the digs have gotten from the Pontiac and beyond. She said the aspect of getting the youth involved in archaeology is something that she wants to continue going forward. 

“We want it to be accessible to the students, because it’s a way to feel the heritage,” she said. 

 Nicolas Guilbeault-Renault, a teacher at École secondaire Grande-Rivière in Gatineau, brought students from his Secondary 3 class to discuss their experiences at the digs. He said he brought students to the interactive activity to learn about the history of both settler and Indigenous peoples, and said the program fit nicely into his curriculum. 

Fourteen-year-old student Thomas Kerr said his favourite part of the dig was getting to run his hands through the soil and dig up the artifacts with his own hands. 

“It was cool to be able to dig ourselves. Yes, there were lots of nails and stuff, but sometimes you found something like a bone or a piece of a shoe, and it’s those moments that are interesting, because you find something that’s out of the ordinary,” he said. 

Student Raphaëlle Chapda Nana said it was an eye-opening experience to hold bits of history that their grandparents could easily have held themselves.  

 “It’s easy to think that it’s so far back in time, they didn’t do the same things we did, but there were everyday things like plates that were well made, and I thought that was wild to hold it in my hands, and that it was from within our grandparents’ lifetimes.” 

Lapointe said the three-year funding for the archeological digs the groups acquired through the MRC des Collines-de-l’Outaouais will expire next year, so the organization will have to find new sources of funding for the upcoming year. 

“We will have to be very creative to find solutions [ . . . ]  We will explore options that are less expensive. The [archaeological] firm we are working with consumes a large part of our budget,” she said.

In the meantime, the Friends and Archéo-Pontiac will await an official report from the archaeological firm they have hired to analyze the results of the digs. 

Lapointe said they are also calling on members of the community to send any old photos of the Quyon fairgrounds they might have, in order to give them a better picture of what it looked like at that time.

She said she is hoping this is not the last time the group will dig in the fairgrounds, as she strongly believes there are more interesting artifacts to be found as they dig deeper and in different locations on the fairgrounds. 

“Jean-Luc [Pilon] and I believe that we have not exhausted all locations on the site, that there are still things to discover,” she said. 

As of now there is no evidence that Philemon Wright’s home is located on the site. While Pilon said the goal of archaeology should not be about finding “holy grails,” he said the jury is still out on whether the home is on the dig site. 

Pilon said his dream for the digs would be to turn up a privy – or outhouse – which he said can contain well-preserved and well-dated clues to what people were eating, their personal items, or where trash items can be found.

“The privy can be a gold mine,” he said.