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14. The Destruction of the Rural Hinterland: Industrialization of Landscapes in Beauharnois County
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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245 14 The Destruction of the Rural Hinterland Industrialization of Landscapes in Beauharnois County Louis-Raphaël Pelletier The Beauharnois hydroelectric canal is so immense that words cannot adequately convey the sense of its size. Luckily for us, in the early twenty-first century, we have Google Maps. Before reading this chapter, go to the Google Maps Web site and select the “satellite” picture option. Then, type “canal near Beauharnois, QC” in the search box. You will then get a satellite picture of most of the Island of Montreal and, in the southwest corner of the picture, a strange river section, perfectly geometrical in the shape of an arc. This is our canal. If you are not sure how big that is, or where Montreal is, zoom out gradually. While never losing sight of the canal, you will have a satellite picture big enough to encompass (going clockwise) all of the St. Lawrence River valley in the province of Quebec, a section of the state of Maine, the northern halves of the states of New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, and a portion of the province of Ontario. Not incidentally, the Beauharnois Canal provides energy for all of these territories (except the state of Maine). As such, the Beauharnois power plant is today a major electricity provider for a power grid that covers the entire continent of North America. However, the canal was built in another preexisting geographical reality: Montreal’s agricultural hinterland. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the city of Montreal stimulated the growth of a dynamic agricultural hinterland both on the Island of Montreal and on the larger plain that surrounds the 246 - Louis-Raphaël Pelletier island. Starting in the 1840s and up to this day, the city has expanded exponentially , thus destroying large segments of the agricultural landscape it had helped create and with which it had had rich economic and ecological relations . The construction of the Beauharnois Light, Heat, and Power (BLH&P) hydroelectric and navigation canal was a part of that expansion process. The canal imposed a heavy industrial spatial logic upon the agricultural landscape of Beauharnois County within less than a decade after 1929, even though many farms remained around it and though industrial or residential neighborhoods did not spring up immediately. Building upon the historical geography of Montreal and its surroundings , this chapter demonstrates that social and environmental changes occurring in a given hinterland can be documented simultaneously by focusing on a detailed, specific case study.1 A close analysis of the corporate files of the BLH&P—especially its complaint files—demonstrates that as early as 1932, energy production and intercontinental transportation (by railway or canal) dictated the dynamics of Beauharnois space and society, leaving remaining agricultural producers with diminished productive capacity. Larger Beauharnois agricultural communities were left with significantly depleted control over an increasingly disorganized environment. In sum, a vast and productive region of Montreal’s agricultural hinterland had been seriously diminished and crippled. Beauharnois County before the BLH&P Canal The BLH&P profoundly transformed the rural landscape of Beauharnois County—located 20 miles west of downtown Montreal—and the adjacent stretch of the St. Lawrence River. This landscape was itself the product of a long natural and social history that provides a reference point for measuring the environmental and human impact of the new hydroelectric and transportation infrastructure. To get a bird’s eye view of the county before its transformation, the reader is invited to examine figure 14.1. This county of approximately 150 square miles includes the St. Lawrence River—and its numerous islands—and, to the south, the plateau that stretches down to the small Châteauguay River. This stretch of the St. Lawrence drops by 75 feet and was thus—in its natural state—a section of thunderous rapids. In the 1920s, the St. Lawrence in this region was intact in the sense that its flow was not controlled by human action. During the 1920s, cultivated fields were still the dominant feature of the Beauharnois landscape, as aerial photographs make clear (figs. 14.2 and 14.3). The old hickory and sugar maple forest had been cleared quickly during the decades following the first stages of colonization in Beauharnois (from the [54.162.130.75] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:30 GMT) Fig. 14.1. Map of Beauharnois County, ca. 1915–1925. Courtesy Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. 248 - Louis-Raphaël Pelletier 1810s to the 1850s). The farming households had cut the trees not only for...