Dear Editor,
Philemon Wright (1760-1839), one of the Ottawa Valley’s most famous historical figures, has a recently discovered link with Quyon.
Wright arrived in the Township of Hull in 1800 with a colony of family, friends and farm animals, by foot and in the dead of winter. The group walked from Massachusetts and were joined outside of Montreal by an Indigenous guide who accompanied them up the Ottawa River to ensure they didn’t fall through the ice.
Wright later purchased thousands of acres in Onslow Township. Together with his son, Ruggles Wright (1793-1863), he started large scale logging operations on the Ottawa River. In 1814, the manager of Wright’s lumber shanty at ‘the Chats’ (in Pontiac Bay on the Ottawa River) wrote Philemon, desperate for flour and newspapers to be sent up from Hull by canoe.
Philemon also founded a farm in Onslow Township in his later years. While historians mention Wright’s “Onslow farm”, they do not identify where this farm is located. But a detailed search of the tens of thousands of pages in Wright Family papers at the National Archives in Ottawa provides clues to the farm’s location.
The papers contain fascinating details of Philemon Wright’s Onslow farm including an inventory of its household goods, livestock and farm implements. The inventories were drawn up by his estate after he died in 1839. But nowhere was there any mention of the lot number or an indication of the farm’s location.
The collection includes a series of letters that describe the improvements Wright was making on the Onslow farm. The earliest letter is dated 1835. From this source we learn that Wright spent nearly half his summer at the Onslow farm that year and had ten men working for him clearing the land and planting crops, as well as two carpenters building a frame house that measured 40’ x 30’. He also planned to put up a barn and a sawmill as soon as possible. He had 40 acres of land cleared at this point and told his son Ruggles that he had already spent between two and three hundred pounds on the farm in Onslow excluding the cost of his labourers.
The first clues about the farm’s actual location were found in a letter written on Aug. 28, 1835 where Philemon told his son Ruggles: “Not one stone has as yet been found on the clearing – a number of persons have applied for village lots – as the steamboat stops at my door six times a week to put out and take in passengers from Bristol, Onslow, Clarendon and Litchfield.”
The steamboat referred to was the Lady Colbourne. It was launched in the spring of 1833 in Aylmer and stopped three days a week at the wharf in Onslow (which later became the Quyon Ferry terminal). The steamer stopped at Onslow on the way up river and a second time on the way down. Onslow in the early years referred to both the township and the village near the mouth of the Quyon River. The steamboat was operated by Philemon Wright’s son-in-law, Charles Simms. The boat service provided the elderly and frail Philemon relatively easy access to his Onslow farm. At this stage of his life he would not have been able to travel by horseback for any distance. The remarks from this letter make it clear that the steamboat was not making an arbitrary stop somewhere along the river in Onslow Township, but at its regularly scheduled stop at the Onslow wharf in Quyon where “a number of persons have applied for village lots” and where the steamboat put out and took in passengers from Bristol, Onslow and Litchfield. These comments also imply that Philemon’s farm was somewhere close to this wharf (“the steamboat stops at my door”).
The second major clue was found in a letter written from the Onslow farm in 1838 by Jonathan Wright to his grandfather, Philemon which gave a report on conditions at the farm. In it we learn that the Onslow farm had a field next to the Quyon River that flooded: “…the field that lies next to the Queon [sic] that is fenced in is quite covered with water.” The spelling of the word Quyon is unusual. The spelling was standardized after 1874 when the village was incorporated. Before that date, there are many variations in spelling.
This second clue made the task of identifying the location of the Onslow farm easy because there was only one lot in this township that is partly bounded by both the Ottawa and the Quyon Rivers and therefore capable of being: a) close to the steamboat wharf on the Ottawa River, and b) having a field flooded from the Quyon River. This lot is number 11 in Range 3, now the Quyon Fair Grounds. Philemon Wright became its owner back in 1813.
Sometime after the death of Philemon and his son Tiberius, Philemon’s grandson Jonathan Wright came into possession of the Onslow farm at Quyon. When he died, Jonathan’s widow put the farm up for sale and advertised it as having: “two dwelling houses, one of which was formerly occupied by Jonathan Wyman Wright and family, …together with the barns, sheds and other buildings thereon erected.” The farm was purchased by Walton Smith in 1862. Smith was the Quyon manager for John Egan & Co. and mayor of Quyon from 1858 to 1865. When the Agricultural Society secured this site in 1920, it was known to be “a large parcel of former Wright property.” Since the original Wright farmhouse and other buildings were wood framed with no foundation, they left no physical trace on the land.
The third and final clue is in the Wright land ledger listing the lot numbers of all his property. On the page with Onslow Lot number 11 in Range 3, there is a small note in pencil which reads: “Onslow farm” and below that entry it reads: “estate of T. Wright,” indicating that this farm property went to Tiberius Wright, after the death of Philemon in 1839. These entries were likely made by James Taylor, the longtime bookkeeper for the P. Wright and Sons Co.
In light of the evidence that Philemon Wright’s Onslow farm was located on the old Quyon fairgrounds and the current site of Quyon’s community centre (the Lions Hall or Beach Barn), the ongoing rebuilding of this center would be an opportunity to acknowledge Quyon’s illustrious former inhabitant, Philemon Wright, with an historical plaque.
Michael McBane, Ottawa, Ont.
Mr. McBane serves on the board of the Pontiac Historical Society and is Vice-President of Friends of Chats Falls. He can be reached at michael@mcbane.ca
