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• Founder of Pembroke, The
  Peter White, born in Edinburgh, was a merchant seaman when he was impressed into the Royal Navy in 1813 and sent to Canada. Following serve on the Great Lakes under Commodore Sir James Yeo, he left the navy and entered the lumber trade in the Ottawa Valley. In May 1828, he first visited the wilderness site of Pembroke and. Attracted by its timber potential, made his headquarters here. One of the area's principal lumber merchants...

• Gillies Bros. Lumbering Firm, The
  This firm was begun in 1873 when James, William, John and David Gillies purchased a steam sawmill here on the Ottawa River at Braeside. Building on the experience acquired by their father, John Gillies, who had begun lumbering in Lanark County in 1842, they had established themselves by the mid 1880s as one of the Ottawa Valley's large lumber producers. This position was maintained partly by the involvement of succeeding generations in the management of...

• Founding of Renfrew, The
  Attracted by the development of the lumbering industry in the Upper Ottawa Valley, a few settlers had located in this region by 1830. Six years later, Xavier Plaunt acquired land here near the second chute of the Bonnechère River and by 1848 was selling village lots and had provided land for the community's first church. In that year a post office, Renfrew, was opened and in 1851, the settlement contained a sawmill, grist-mill, tannery and...

• Black Donald Graphite Mine, The
  The most important producer of graphite in Canada during the first half of the twentieth century, the Black Donald Graphite Mine was located near here. The extensive deposit of high-quality ore it exploited was discovered in 1889, but mining was not begun by the Ontario Graphite Company until 1895. Operated by the Black Donald Graphite Company by 1908, the mine increased output during World War I and in 1927 was producing approximately 90% of Canada's...

• Steamboating on the Upper Ottawa
  The first settlement on the Upper Ottawa River was the 25 horsepower "Lady Colborne," built in 1853 for service between Aylmer and Chats Falls. Gradually, other sections of the river were opened to steam navigation and, in 1854, the "Pontiac" was launched to navigate the 40-mile route between Pembroke and Rapides-des-Joachims. The "Pontiac", the first steamboat to ply in waters above Portage-Du-Fort, was operated by the Union Forwarding Company, which contributed to the rapid development...

• Champlain's Journey of 1613
  The Father of New France, Samuel de Champlain, made the first of two voyages into what is now Ontario in 1613. He travelled up the Ottawa River seeking the northern sea (Hudson Bay) which one of his five companions, Nicolas de Vignau, claimed to have seen. The expedition struck inland above Lac des Chats and followed a chain of small lakes towards present-day Cobden. Here, on June 7th, Champlain visited with the Algonkin chief Nibachis...

• Lieutenant Christopher James Bell, R.N. 1795-1836
  A pioneer of the Ottawa Valley lumber industry, Bell had commanded H.M. gunboat "Murray" at the battle of Plattsburg on Lake Champlain in 1814. Emigrating to Upper Canada about 1817, he was granted 800 acres of land, partly located here at the "first chute" of the Bonnechère River. By 1829, he had built a timber slide and sawmill, in the vicinity of which there grew up the hamlet of "Castleford", named for Bell's birthplace in...

• Flying Frenchmen, The
  Professional hockey was in its infancy in the autumn of 1909 when the promoters behind the National Hockey Association, forerunner of the National Hockey League, created the Montreal Canadiens team to attract French-Canadian spectators. Belleville-born Jean-Baptiste "Jack" Laviolette was hired as the playing-manager and captain. Laviolette signed Cornwall's Édouard "Newsy" Lalonde to play forward and recruited his friend Didier "Cannonball" Pitre from the Renfrew Creamery Kings ('Renfrew Millionaires') as a defenceman. This trio of francophone...

• Nuclear Power Demonstration Reactor
  On June 4, 1962 the Nuclear Power Demonstration (NPD) Reactor 3 km east of Rolphton supplied the Ontario power grid with the first nuclear-generated electricity in Canada. A joint project of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, Ontario Hydro and Canadian General Electric, NPD was the prototype and proving ground for research and development that led to commercial application of the CANDU system for generating electric power from a nuclear plant using natural uranium fuel, heavy...

• Canada's First Polish Settlement
  The first group of Polish immigrants to Canada, some 300 in number, established a settlement in this area in 1864. Adverse social conditions and political unrest in their partitioned homeland had encouraged them to leave. They cleared the land and rapidly established a thriving agricultural community. During the 1880s, the village founded here was called Wilno after the birthplace of the Reverend Ludwik Dembski, one of their spiritual leaders. In 1875, the Parish of Wilno...

• Daniel McLachlin 1810-1872
  One of the Ottawa Valley's most enterprising lumbermen, McLachlin was born in Rigaud Township, Lower Canada, and by 1837 had built a sawmill and grist-mill at Bytown (Ottawa). In 1851, influenced by the timber potential of the Madawaska watershed, he purchased some 400 acres at the deserted hamlet of Arnprior and in 1854 laid out a town plot. The large sawmills which he built here, greatly stimulated the community's growth. In the legislature of the...

• Jeanne Lajoie, 1899-1930
  Jeanne Lajoie, a dedicated teacher and advocate for the establishment of French schools in Ontario, was born in Lefaivre, near Hawkesbury, in 1899. In 1923, Lajoie helped a group of francophone parents to establish the first independent French school in Pembroke. The school ensured that their children were educated in their own language. The creation of L'École Sainte-Jeanne d'Arc was one of the last major events in the Franco-Ontarian struggle against Regulation 17, which from...

• Timber Rafting on the Ottawa
  The rafting of square timber down the Ottawa River, begun in 1806, reached its peak during 1861-91 and ended in 1909. Pine "sticks" from .1 to .2 square metres and 12 to 15 metres long were floated down tributary rivers such as the Petawawa, Madawaska, Bonnechere and Mississippi to rafting points on the Ottawa. There "cribs" were made up, containing 20 to 40 pieces of timber, and as many as 200 cribs, were in turn...

• Rapids of the Upper Ottawa, The
  For over two centuries, the Ottawa River was part of the main canoe route to the West. Some of the river's most spectacular and dangerous rapids were located immediately downriver from here: the Rapide de la Veillée, the Trou and the Rapide des Deux Rivières. Further on lay the legendary Rapide de la Roche Capitain. In 1800, the explorer Daniel Harmon counted fourteen crosses commemorating voyageurs who had drowned in its swirling waters. By 1950, with the construction of the Des Joachims generating station, these rapids and their portages had been submerged in the dam's headpond, Holden Lake.

• Sir Francis Hincks at Renfrew
  Premier of the Province of Canada 1851-1854, Governor of Barbados 1856-1862 and British Guiana 1862-1865, Hincks was born in Cork, Ireland in 1807, settled in Upper Canada in 1832, and was elected to the Assembly in 1841. He was prominent in the Reform campaign for Responsible Government and was a keen advocate of railway building. While Finance Minister, 1860-1873, Hincks framed the Bank Act of 1871, which laid the foundation of Canada's banking system. In...

• Opeongo Road
  This was one of the "colonization roads" authorized by the Province of Canada in an attempt to open up the districts lying inland from the settled townships. Surveyed in 1852 by Robert Bell, P.L.S., 100 miles were completed by January 1854 as a winter road from the Ottawa River at Farrell's Landing to Opeongo Lake. By 1867, some 78 miles of road were open for year-round traffic, but further construction had been abandoned. In 1855...

• Pembroke and Mattawan Road, The
  Constructed primarily as a supply route to the lumber camps in the Upper Ottawa Valley, this Colonization Road was begun in 1853 and opened the following year as a winter road from Pembroke to the mouth of the Mattawa River. The relocating of a portion of the road between Petawawa and Point Alexander in 1863 and improvements on other sections resulted in the opening of some forty miles for year-round traffic in 1867. Eight years...

• Renfrew Millionaires, The
  Local tycoon M.J. O'Brien launched a bid to bring the Stanley Cup to Renfrew in 1910 by offering hockey stars like Lester and Frank Patrick and "Cyclone" Taylor, extravagant salaries to play for the Renfrew Creamery Kings. The team was quickly nicknamed the "Millionaires". That season they played thrilling games against Cobalt, Haileybury, Ottawa and Montreal teams, but Renfrew's hopes were cashed when the Montreal Wanderer's took the cup. After the first world wars, the emergence of the National Hockey League signaled an end to small-town participation in big-league hockey.