Richmond, Now and Then

If a formal history is a four-lane highway, Nick Fonda says in his introduction to Richmond, Now and Then: an anecdotal history, his book is a meandering country road. The metaphor is apt. The stories in this book focus largely on the small town of Richmond in Quebec's historic Eastern Townships. After offering a speculative overview of lower St. Francis River valley in pre-colonial times, the book takes the equivalent of a quick snapshot of Richmond as it is today. The book then jumps to 1798 and the arrival of the first European settler, an American with a chequered background, and moves forward in roughly chronological order back to the present. In the two dozen chapters that make up the book, the reader is introduced to a many people: Avery Denison, who carved the beginnings of a community out of the wilderness; Father Patrick Quinn, an Irish orphan who becomes the parish priest who oversees a booming railway town; Ralph Andosca, the adolescent boy mysteriously murdered in Melbourne Township; Stanislas-Edmond Desmarais who was simultaneously mayor of Richmond and a member of the Quebec National Assembly; Anita Demers, the nonagenarian who won a forestry award. Beyond personalities, the book also looks at collective struggles: the obstacles overcome to build the Craig Road; the political machinations behind the laying of the first railway; the initiative in the early electrification of rural Quebec; in more recent times, the repeated battles over water fluoridation. Now and Then has the quiet charm of a shady gravel road. It's history on a small scale, history with a human face.