Pioneers Trail

There’s more than I cover in the video if you scroll down.

One of the more modest trails in Gatineau Park is dedicated to the first European pioneers who settled in the region.

It was 1800 when Philemon Wright brought a small group of families from Massachusetts and set up shop where downtown Gatineau stands today. The next year Samuel Ezra Benedict was tempted up from New York to start farming the 150 acres over which this trail traces a tiny fraction. For the purpose of the trail the Benedicts are a proxy for all the other pioneers who settled here two centuries ago.

The trail starts near P3 and the Welcome Centre (lowest red arrow on the map below) and is laid out to emphasize the fact that although many think of Gatineau Park as a pristine wilderness, the land has been intensively used for decades and some of the wilderness we see is relatively recent growth.

Although one of the interpretive signs claims that some of the oldest trees along the trail were standing when Benedict arrived to found his farmstead, this seems a bit unlikely. Such 210+ year old trees would have begun in a mature pine forest and had to survive not only 150 years of farming but also the great fire of 1870 which devastated the area. Another one of the signs points out that the farmers often cut timber on their land and sold it to make some money.

Still, the point is true that various stages of the walk bring the visitor through various stages of the forest reestablishing itself and gives you a chance to identify various species of trees at close range.

The trail is wheelchair accessible and only 1.3 kilometers long. Nowhere is it steep. It is a little dated though. The signage refers to the city of Hull which changed its name to Gatineau in 2002.

The Benedict farm actually stretched well east of the pioneer trail and into the citified part of the City of Gatineau. The northern edge was where Mont Bleu Boulevard is now (uppermost red arrow). The farmers depicted in the interpretive sign weren’t actually the Benedicts, nor is the house shown behind the plowman their house.

When they first arrived they cleared the land and used some of the logs of the pine forest to build a log cabin. By the 1860s the family was prosperous enough that they built one of the first stone homes in South Hull; it had 10 rooms and nine foot ceilings and is still standing today. Here it is in 1940 and again in the more recent past (click either to enlarge).

But you can’t see it in Gatineau Park. As I said, the farm was 150 acres and the house is actually fairly far away from the Pioneers Trail. It’s in among a bunch of other houses on a shady street north of Saint Raymond and east of Cite-des-Jeunes. The leftmost arrow shows the location.

The farm was a going concern until the 1950s when it was sold in part to make way for houses and in part to make way for the then new Gatineau Parkway.

As the city encroached on the farm it left its mark before houses started popping up. By the 1930s the farm was registered as Town Site Farm.

Getting back to the Pioneers Trail: the trees identified as being along the trail are butternut, linden*, sugar maple*, beech*, ironwood*, rum cherry*, birch*, aspen*, and white ash*. Only those with asterisks have any interpretive information on the signs though.

Linden – Tilia americana (Wikipedia link)