Matthew Elder

Of the hundreds of villages, hamlets and crossroads in the Eastern Townships, Brome County has perhaps the one with the most unusual name. Like many of these places, the passage of time has left many of these places only a shadow of what they were a hundred or more years ago.

But Lost Nation – once home to dozens of families who farmed and lumbered the heights above the west end of Bolton Pass, and now mostly returned to the forest – doesn’t derive its name from its lost community. In fact, the former hamlet earned its moniker in somewhat infamous fashion. Soon after it was settled in the mid-19th century, what had been known as Pleasant Valley was visited by a pair of itinerant preachers, who were permitted to set up shop for prayer meetings in the local schoolhouse. After a week or so, the locals grew tired of the excessively zealous preachings and ran them out of town. As the preachers hastily departed, one was heard to cry out: “O Lord have mercy on these wretched people for they are truly a lost nation!”

Initially, as a joke, residents would refer to themselves as living in Lost Nation – although most preferred Pleasant Valley, the name given to the place by an early resident, Peter Dudley, who acquired land in the 1860s on the Old Magog Road, part of the Stanstead stagecoach route, between what is now Fuller Road and the Bolton Pass highway (Route 243). The area also had been referred to as the Fuller neighbourhood, after one of the original families, now enshrined as Fuller Road, which now runs from what was the hamlet’s centre down to Bolton Pass highway, a kilometre east of the Glen Road. Census records researched by former Lost Nation resident Pearl Grenier and Marion Phelps, Brome Country Historical Society curator, indicate the area was not settled until the late 1850s. The first recorded resident was Adolphus Gardner, who built a log house on the Stagecoach Road hill that descends into Bolton Pass. The early settlers were mostly lumbermen, attracted to the area’s thick forests of pine, spruce, balsam and hemlock. By the turn of the 20th century, two sawmills were operating in Lost Nation. according to Grenier, in an article published in 1976 in Volume Two of the BCHS’s ’Yesterdays of Brome County’, a sawmill operated by Sweat & Comings Co. of Richford, VT, employed 40 men and produced up to one million board feet of lumber a year. A two-man logging team had a daily quota of 60 logs, cut into standard lengths of eight to 16 feet. Later, the Singer Co Ltd. took over several sawmills in Lost Nation, milling wood for its sewing machine cabinets. These operations continued until 1927, when Singer relocated to the Ottawa Valley.

A much less prevalent pastime – but as unique as the area’s name – was bee hunting. Championed by three Dudley brothers, sons of the early settler, the object was to locate trees in which bees had nested and then cut down the tree in late autumn after the bees had sealed themselves in for the winter. While the Dudleys could lay claim to the 50 to 100 pounds of wild honey and beeswax found in a tree, it was proper etiquette to share the produce with the neighbour on whose land a tree stood.

Lost Nation’s first schoolhouse probably opened in the1880s, but the first record of a schoolteacher was of Miss Lizzie Green in 1892. As with most rural schools, it had one room accommodating students of all grades (one through seven), overseen by just one teacher. A new schoolhouse was built in 1938 on a nearby lot. However, within a few years the school board centralized teaching in Knowlton, and Lost Nation children began riding school buses.

The stagecoach route through Lost Nation was a treacherous track that reached an altitude of 1250 feet at the summit of Mailloux Hill. An important stop along the stage route was Prime Tavern, thus named for its proprietor, Thomas Prime. Stage passengers would stop here for a hearty meal, during which time the coach’s horses would be exchanged for a fresh team from the local stable. The site became infamous for a number of murders, the most notorious being the demise in 1951 of Henri Bissonette, many decades after the building had become a private residence. The motive was the theft of a substantial sum of money that Bissonnette was known to keep in the house. Although the murder was never solved, the suspect was a neighbour who committed suicide when police turned up at his door to question him.

Keeping Stagecoach Road passable in winter was a challenge. Eventual improvements allowed for the delivery of mail, first by horsedrawn carriage and then in 1920 by automobile, when William Gardner acquired a Ford Model T to facilitate mail delivery during the summer and fall. Grenier’s article on Lost Nation described the perils of early motorized rural mail delivery: “Frequent stopping… and slowing on steep hills was hard on brakes. More than once, I have seen Mr. Gardner almost reach the top of Mailloux Hill only to have his car stall and quickly gather speed as it travelled in reverse down the hill…as he frantically held the wheel and tried to steer along the centre of the road.”

The decades of intense lumbering left large swaths of Lost Nation clear, and much of the bare land was farmed into the latter 20th century. However, the opening of the Bolton Pass highway, together with the growth of nearby Knowlton, hastened the community’s decline following the First World War.

Today, most of the terrain is again covered by forest, and all but a handful of the original Lost Nation homes remain. However, as Pearl Grenier writes, “whether it is called Lost Nation or Pleasant Valley is of little importance. The natural beauty of the countryside remains for all of us to admire.”

For more on Lost Nation, read Pearl Grenier’s ’The Lost Nation’in Volume Two of the BCHS’s ’Yesterdays of Brome County’ , pp.100-185. (Knowlton: BCHS, 1976).

Watch the video ’Lost Nation, produced earlier this year by the Quebec Anglophone Heritage

Network as part of its Raising Spirits documentary series, and presented by area novelist and historian Maurice Crossfield: