Back to my afternoon that began with a visit to the Boréalis Museum, housed in the filtration and pumping plant of the now defunct C.I.PPaper Mill. The mill itself has long been demolished and is currently being redeveloped as Technology Park alongwith some new condominiums that appear to be the most popular form of residential accommodation in Canada. An investment of over 7 million dollars has transformed this plant into an interesting museum paying tribute to Trois-Rivières as the ‘pulp and paper capital of the world’. Short video presentations tell the story of the lumberjacks, raftsman and workers who supplied the mill with logs and transformed them into pulp and eventually paper.
The lumber would be cut in in the winter in harsh, cold and snowy conditions, the trees being easier to cut without rising sap and the logs stacked on the ice by the Saint Maurice River. In the Spring the ice and log stacks would be dynamited sending the vast number of logs on their journey down the river to its mouth and the meetingpoint with the St Lawrence. The lumberjacks would return home in April and as one of our guides ventured this probably explains why so many Canadians have their birthday in December!
The rafters would live in cabins on the log flows undertaking the highly dangerous job of keeping the logs moving and dynamiting logjams. I had seen a demonstration of log rolling on Grouse Mountain above Vancouver back in July and it was interesting to note that one of the reasons the C.I.P Mill closing was because people still crossed the river Saint Maurice on the logs in the Spring – a highly dangerous activity!
The wood used in the C.I.P Mill was produced from Black Spruce, one of the softest woods that only really required to be chipped, crushed and mixed with water to form the pulp from which the water is eventually squeezed to form a continuous stream of paper. This soft pulp was ideal for newsprint and mainly supplied to the USA. Harder woods required heat and chemicals to break down the wood fibres and inevitably this led to high levels of pollution in the rivers. So a combination of environmental awareness and strong competition from papermaking in China led to the closure of the this and 2 other plants in Trois-Rivières in the early 1980s.
I was interested to learn, or perhaps more accurately to be reminded, that wasps create their nests from finely chewed wood – pulp - which explains why I get so many wasps nests in my all wood house walls at home – they have an infinite supply of Western Red Cedar (From British Columbia) shingles on my roof!
The visit ended with a rather spooky visit to the underground reservoirs where the vast quantities of filtered water requiredwere stored.
The next visit was to the Forges du Saint Maurice, a Canadian National Historic site again located on the Saint Maurice River, which provided the power to drive the vast waterwheels (See the photograph of a replica wheel) that in turn drove the bellows for the furnaces and the hammers for forging the iron. Founded in 1730 the forges were in use for over 150 years and formed the basis of one of the most important and largest industrial communities in Canada. The range of industrial and consumer products manufactured at this site was enormous from domestic stoves, to cauldrons, cannon balls to cast iron rails and train wheels that were used to finally create the Confederation of Canada via the Canadian Pacific Railroad and another link with my Rocky Mountaineer train ride earlier in July when I had seen the site where the ‘last spike’ was hammered into the sleepers joining the east and west coasts of Canada.
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