Place:Lachute, Argenteuil, Québec, Canada

Watchers
Larger map
NameLachute
TypeCity
Coordinates45.656°N 74.34°W
Located inArgenteuil, Québec, Canada     (1885 - 1982)
Also located inLaurentides, Québec, Canada     (1982 - )
See alsoArgenteuil RCM, Laurentides, Québec, Canada
source: Family History Library Catalog
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names


the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Lachute is a town in western Québec, Canada, 62 kilometres (39 mi) northwest of Montreal, on the Rivière du Nord, a tributary of the Ottawa River, and west of Mirabel International Airport. It is located on Autoroute 50, at the junctions of Quebec Provincial Highways Route 148, Route 158 and Secondary Highways 327 and 329.

It is the seat of Argenteuil Regional County Municipality, and is served by the Lachute Airport. Its major industries include paper mills and lumber. The population was 12,551 in the Canadian census of 2011.

The city of Lachute was established on 8 May 1885 and from 1885 until 1983 was a city in the historical county of Argenteuil.

Contents

[edit]

Lovell's Gazetteer (1895)

  • "LACHUTE, the county town of Argenteuil co.,Que., formerly formed part of the parish of St. Jerusalem, but was detached therefrom and erected into a town by special act of Parliament in 1885, under the name of "Lachute Town." It is situated on the North River, which here washes the base of the Laurentian range of mountains and runs through the town in a winding and picturesque course. The West River also runs through the north-west corner of the town. It contains the county registry office, is the place where the sessions of the Circuit Court are held, and has also a Commissioners' Court for the trial of small causes and a municipal council, composed of a mayor and nine councillors. The C.P.R. passes through the town, which is 44 miles west of Montreal and about 70 miles east of Ottawa. The St. Andrews branch of the Ottawa Valley Ry. also runs from Lachute to Geneva and St. Andrews. It contains 6 churches, 2 Presbyterian, 1 Methodist, 1 Episcopalian, 1 Baptist and 1 Roman Catholic, a large and flourishing academy, capable of accommodating 300 pupils, 1 French school, 1 very large and extensive paper mill, owned by Mr. J. C. Wilson, of Montreal, 1 pulp mill, 1 cloth factory, 2 carriage factories, 2 iron foundries, furniture, sash and door factory, 1 grist mill, 2 saw mills, 1 bobbin factory, 3 bakeries, 2 post offices, money order office, post office savings bank, 2 telegraph offices, 1 telephone office, 1 electric light station, 1 express office, some 25 stores, 5 livery stables, 1 printing office issuing a weekly newspaper, and possesses a vast amount of water power. Pop. 1751."
[edit]

Research Tips

[edit]

Maps and Gazetteers

[edit]

French names for places

Because French is the one official language of Québec, WeRelate employs the French names for places within the province. Many placenames will be similar to their counterparts in English, with the addition of accents and hyphens between the words. The words "Saint" and "Sainte" should be spelled out in full. Placenames should be made up of four parts: the community (or parish, or township, or canton), the historic county, Québec, Canada. You may find placenames red-linked unless you follow these conventions.

[edit]

Local government structure

The Province of Québec was made up of counties and territories. Counties in Québec were established gradually as the land was settled by Europeans. Each county included communities with some form of local governement (often church-based). Territories referred to the undeveloped sections under the control of the government in charge of the whole province at the time. The communities included townships and/or cantons, depending on the English/French makeup of the county concerned, and also included ecclesiastical parishes with somewhat different boundaries which could overlap with local townships or cantons. Ecclesiastical parish registers have been retained and are available to view (online through Ancestry). Since the 1980s many small townships and parishes are merging into larger "municipalities", often with the same name as one of their components.

Beginning in 1979 the historic counties of Québec were replaced by administrative regions and regional county municipalities (abbreviated as RCM in English and MRC in French). Regional county municipalities are a supra-local type of regional municipality, and act as the local municipality in unorganized territories within their borders. (An unorganized area or unorganized territory is any geographic region in Canada that does not form part of a municipality or Indian reserve. There is a list in Wikipedia.) There are also 18 equivalent territories (TEs) which are not considered to be RCMs. These are mostly large cities with their suburbs, but include 4 very large geographical areas where the population is sparse.

The administrative regions (above the RCMs in the hierarchy) are illustrated on a map in Wikipedia. The regions are used to organize the delivery of provincial government services and there are conferences of elected officers in each region. The regions existed before the change from historic counties to regional county municipalities.

The above description is based on various articles in Wikipedia including one titled Types of municipalities in Quebec

NOTE: WeRelate refers to Québec communities as being within their historic counties because this is the description which will be found in historical documents. FamilySearch and Quebec GenWeb follow the same procedure. However, it is always wise to know the current RCM as well in order to track these documents down in local repositories and also to describe events which have taken place since 1980.

Because the former or historic counties and the modern regional county municipalities can have the same names but may cover a slightly different geographical area, the placenames for Regional County Municipalities or "Territories Equivalent to regional county municipalities" are distinguished by including the abbreviation "RCM" or "TE" following the name.

Historic counties (which were taken out of use in about 1982) were made up of townships or cantons. The two words are equivalent in English and French. Eventually all the Québec cantons in WeRelate will be described as townships. Many townships disappeared before 1980 with the growth of urbanization.

If the word parish is used, this is the local ecclesiastical parish of the Roman Catholic Church. Parish boundaries and township or canton boundaries were not always the same.

The WeRelate standard form for expressing a place in Québec is township/canton/parish, historic county, Québec, Canada,
or local municipality, administrative region, Québec, Canada for places established after the changes of the 1980s.

[edit]

Other Sources


This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Lachute, Quebec. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
Retrieved from "https://www.werelate.org/wiki/Place:Lachute%2C_Argenteuil%2C_Qu%C3%A9bec%2C_Canada"