Writer: Andrew Hind
Faded Fortunes: The Village of Desaulniers
Desaulnier is a one-time community in Nipissing District, near Sturgeon Falls. It is hushed now, its rail-side buildings, fields dotted with hay crofts, and bustling Main Street having virtually vanished with the passage of time. There was a time, however, when Desaulniers was a bustle of activity.
In the late 19th century, several Francophone communities were established in the relatively fertile soils north of Lake Nipissing. Settlement had been encouraged by Catholic priests, who saw increasing the French-Canadian population in the region as a means of boosting the fortunes of the Catholic Church there.
One of these communities was Desaulniers, named for Father A.L. Desaulniers who encouraged settlement in Gibson Township. It was a difficult life at first, and many must have wondered if the village did indeed have God’s blessing. Homesteaders struggled throughout the summer to clear their land and cultivate enough crops to feed their families, then sought employment in lumber camps during the winter. Nonetheless the people endured.
Desaulniers Mill
While the opening of a post office in 1895 provided a sense that the community had rooted, Desaulniers remained a small, unimportant farming community until the Canadian Northern Railway came through in 1913. The railway spurred the first real growth the community had experienced. A large sawmill was built trackside, a boarding house opened offering overnight accommodation, there were two schools – a public school and a French Separate School – and someone had the bright idea of founding a cheese factory that caused farmers to invest heavily in dairy herds.
Virtually overnight, Desaulniers’ fortunes were reversed, and worn-down homesteaders began to bask in relative prosperity.
Desaulniers School 1929
It wasn’t until 1915 that a church was built in Desaulniers, but it wasn’t without controversy. The bishop of Sault St. Marie Diocese, which encompassed Nipissing District, was an Irish Canadian priest named Monseigneur Scollard. Resentful of French-Canadian inroads in the area, and angry over French-Canadian resistance to World War One (voluntary enlistment in Quebec lagged far, far behind the rest of Canada), Scollard refused to consecrate the new church. He claimed that since he wasn’t personally consulted on the church’s construction it had no official sanction. The people of Desaulniers continued to pester the bishop until finally, in 1916, Scollard relented – sort of. He opened the church but never officially consecrated it.
The next two decades represented the community’s height of fortunes. But then the sawmill closed in the 1940s, and with it the boarding house. Desaulniers went into a precipitous decline thereafter. Farm fields were soon reverting to pasture and the town lots weeded over. The post office closed in 1960, and the store sign was turned to ‘closed’ not long after.
Desaulniers is virtually unrecognizable as a once thriving community. Most of the buildings have gone, the one-time main street looks like nothing more than a country laneway, and even the railway tracks have been lifted, the former rail-bed now a multi-use recreational trail.
All that remains is the boarding house. Its condition reflects that of the community as a whole: faded, ghostly, its best days a century in the past.
Much more on Desaulniers, and other faded communities, can be found in my book Ghost Towns of Ontario’s Cottage Country.
