Indian Lake - The Early Years

By: Louisa Crooks Teron

Lac Notre-Dame was known as Indian Lake until the early 1960’s. An 1897 map, however, shows the official name as Lac Notre Dame.

 My grandparents, Percy and Louisa Crooks, bought our cottage, then a one room cabin, at Indian Lake in 1910.

 My father, Richard (Dick), born in 1912, spent as much time as he could there until his death in 1990. Most of my knowledge about the early years comes from his stories and those of my aunt, Eileen. I have also been helped by my mother, Sue Crooks, and Audrey Martin (Garneys).

The settlement of the area started with the old Settlers’ Road, which is shown on the 1897 map. This road was built as a result of Curé Labelle’s efforts to settle the area. It ran along Jackson Road (my Dad called it Swiss Valley Road after the Swiss families living in the area), along the northeast shore of Lac Wheeler; along the ridges north of Lac Notre-Dame (part is now a cross country ski trail and part has been used recently for the new Sentier des Orphelins), between Lac à la Croix and Lac St. Francois-Xavier, and joined the path of the Montfort Colonization Railway to the northwest of Lac St. F-X. Every mile or so a settler was given land to farm. My father knew of three such farms, although they were abandoned before his time. The first was a barn on the north shore of Lac Diez d’Aux (originally called Kelly Lake after this farmer, then called Lac Bigras) about half way down the lake. It has totally disappeared. The second was a homestead just west of Lac Wheeler. The barn there remained into the 1930’s and the stone foundation can still be seen buried in the underbrush. It was narrowly missed by the new logging road to Lac Thurston. One of its old timbers holds up part of our cottage. The third site is on the west shore of Lac à la Croix. All that remains now is part of a stone cold-storage cache and it is hard to find. (We have the exact location of the second two recorded by GPS.) I have no idea how long these settlers stayed, but as the area is all rock and trees and far from flat, farming must have been a nightmare. It’s no wonder that they didn’t survive as farms.

 The first house on Indian Lake was Camp Sauvage, built around 1906 by Mr. William Fenwick. It was a two-storey log house located on the east bay adjacent the small tree island. An early photo of it can be seen in the 1914 marketing brochure at the end of this article. For a while it was used as a boarding house. It was purchased by Stuart Morrison of the Laurentian Lumber Company in 1928 as a family cottage and belonged to his descendants until recently. It succumbed to age and snow in 1990 and is now, sadly, only a pile of rubble.

Other cottages started in the early 1900’s. City people sought out places to fish and hunt and to avoid the threats of polio and typhoid that occurred in the cities during the summers. Our cottage was built by Mr. MacInnis in 1908 and bought by my grandfather in 1910. Predating our place were cabins belonging to Mr. Goodyear (lot 1159 built by Mills and later owned by Christiansen, Ahern, Pelletier), and William Williamson (lot 1143, later owned by Carter, Stevenson, Cunningham, Barrett, then burned down). Charles and Janet Garneys built in 1921 but the original house has been replaced. Their daughter, Audrey Martin, remembers that in the early 1930’s there were seven cottages. In addition to the previously mentioned ones, there were the Edgars next door to the Garneys and Harold Nash beside the creek at the eastern end of the lake. During the next decade, Jacobsen (later Kay, Craig, Martel), Morrison (Smith), and Hebert (Little Brown Jug) built houses. The Elkin’s (house recently replaced by the Fournier’s) and the Irwin’s (house now moved and owned by the Franklin’s beside the Lukanovitch’s) built during the early 1940’s and the Higgins and Orlicks in the late 1940’s. The Higgins were the first house on the south side. All these original cottages were on the east bay as this was the closest to the road from Montfort.

The road ended at the top of the hill where the mail boxes are located now. The trail was often flooded at the edge of the mud lake. From there a trail wound over Franklin’s creek and followed the current road. Side paths cut down to each of the cottages that fringed the north shore of the east bay.

Bridge over Franklin' Creek (Photo by Percy Crooks)                                        Meeting on the trail to the Lake (Photo provided by Audrey Martin)

Any large items had to be brought in on logging sleds in the spring before the snow melted or on the ox cart belonging to the “Montfort Hermit”, Mr. Dion (or Dionne). They were then carried down to the lake and rafted over to the cottages. This was not always successful - there is a stove belonging to the Garneys sunk somewhere in our bay.

Clearing the lots was no small feat. Our lot was covered with huge cedar trees, some of which had to be removed. The shoreline was littered with logs and brush.

There was a lot of work but a lot of fun too. The young people canoed, rowed double-ended boats and swam. Springboard diving was popular and there was a diving board set up for all to use on the rock island. Camp Sauvage was a lively place with lots of young people. As well, they hiked into Montfort and Newago for regattas and dances in the Clubhouse (beside the Montfort train station). Old photos show these were well attended events. There used to be a trail over the ridges that passed the old homestead, alonside Lac Thurston and ended in Newago.

Although most of the cottages closed up at Labour Day, my father and Charles Guarneys would come in the fall to hunt deer and partridge. Dad loved the woods and knew the area well. In the winter he would ski in from Morin Heights. My mother, a non-skier, remembers trying to keep up with him on the Kicking Horse Trail (from Montfort over Mount Hurtubise to Morin Heights). She spent most of the time on her backside and, as the trail was well used by the lumber horses, the aroma of manure on the train ride home made her quite unpopular.

Our cottage has grown over the years. A second room was added in the 1920’s, and the second storey in the 1930’s. This had to be built twice as the first attempt was too low in which to stand up. By the time I came along in 1957, there were two downstairs rooms and three upstairs bedrooms. There was a lean-to kitchen and a tiny shower room on the back and a huge veranda on the front. As we were the first to have hot running water, neighbours came by for showers.

We would arrive at the lake in early May and stay until November. Dad commuted to Montreal and returned on the weekends. By then you could drive as far as the top of the hill with the current mail boxes (then, it was the sales office for the lake). My earliest memories are of falling asleep to the croaking of bullfrogs so loud that a visitor once asked if they were cows; running barefoot in the first morning frost in October; the Quebec heater with wet woolen mitts hanging on the screen. There were thunder storms and lightning over the lake where no other lights shone. Then there was that wonderful trapdoor in the kitchen floor - it was a metal lined cold storage box, but to small children it was fascinating.

We weren’t totally alone. Charles Garneys, a retired railway employee, was also at the lake. He kept an eye out for us. If Mom didn’t put a lantern on the dock at night, he would come over to make sure all was well. There was no electricity or telephone.

Added notes in 2022:

The Cross at Lac à la Croix - Recently I have heard stories about there being at one time a cross at Lac à la Croix (hence the name). My father never mentioned it so it must have been before his time. He did however show us a stone foundation about 10 ft square on the southwest shore of the lake. An old map shows an X at this spot. Dad always thought this was the remains of an ice house or food storage cache. Maybe this was the cross?!

The forest fire of 1900 that swept the north shore of LND also burned Lac à la Croix (there are remains of burnt stumps). Did it burn the cross?  If there ever was a cross, what was it for? Was it a place of prayer for the lumbermen in the nearby camp? Was it a shrine? A grave? It remains a mystery to us!

Chris and I have spent a lot of time locating and mapping the old settlers’ road.  There is one small section we cannot find between the south-west corner of Lac St Francois Xavier and the north-east corner of Lac à la Croix.  However, we know that a dam was built in 1900 at the Montfort end of Lac St. F-X to raise the water level to power the sawmill downstream. This raised the level of the lake by 6 feet, flooding the end of the lake closest to Lac à la Croix. In our search for the path of the old settler’s road beyond Lac St F-X, we concluded that it had crossed the flooded bay and followed the shoreline in front of the current cottages before turning inland. We found evidence of it where it turned inland. Old maps show a branch road from the end of Lac St. F-X along the west side if Lac à la Croix. We found some evidence of a corduroy road there many years ago.  We are still trying to find the section of the road west of the current Sentier des Orphelins and Laurel Station as it has been heavily damaged by clearing for the hydro lines.