Furniss Mills or Village Cap Gibraltar

The site favored by Bolton Township pioneer Nicholas Austin did not become a hamlet in his day. Nicholas also lost a large part of his land, when he had to sell in order to pay off his debts.

Starting in 1868, Albert Furniss, a Montreal businessman, assembled a few thousand acres of land at this location, which he acquired from various owners, including 413 acres from William Harvey Austin, grandson of Nicholas. When Furniss died in 1872, there were four houses, seven barns, sheds and a sawmill on this property.

In 1874, a group of Montreal businessmen, Charles Desmarteau, Charles Lamoureux, Joseph W. Crevier, Jerry Moquin of Bolton purchased the the property from the Furniss estate. Moquin resells his share to two Montreal lawyers, Francis A. Quinn and Frédéric Liguori Béique (future senator).

Cap Gibraltar HotelTheir goal is to create a real village of a hundred houses with a 65-room hotel and a furniture factory. They subdivided the land accordingly, built the hotel and about twenty chalets. But they had financial problems so that the hotel did not open and perhaps also because of a tornado in May 1877 which caused a lot of damage. They will be forced to surrender the property to the Dominion Mortgage Loan Company. She sold Damase Amédée and Salem to the Dufresne brothers, Montreal businessmen. Amédée moves into one of the four farmhouses, and Salem settles into the hotel with his family. The Dufresnes will end up dismantling everything to recover the materials. In 1892, they shared the estate, and in 1908, Damase Amédée sold his portion to a certain Jean-Baptiste Lachapelle. It was from the latter that Dom Vanier, the first Benedictine, acquired the land in 1912.

It was Maurice Langlois of the Magog Historical Society who discovered this story, which he recounts in his article Village disappeared from Cap Gibraltar. This article by Maurice Langlois was also published by Le Reflet du Lac. Although everything has disappeared, we still have a photo of the hotel and an abstract of the cadastral plan.

Carte cadastral de Cap Gibraltar 1887

The checkerboard subdivision project was to accommodate in addition to the hotel, the wood mill and the farm buildings, a hundred houses, residences or chalets, on lots of 100 by 300 feet.

It is approximately at this place that the Abbey of Saint-Benoît-du-lac will be built and which will be incorporated into a municipality in 1939.

Grange ronde Damase Amédée Dufresne

Damase Amédée Dufresne would be the man who built, in 1908, the round barn which is now located on the property at 101-105 Fisher Road in Austin. (This barn still exist and would be protected but we have to do more reseaches on this subject to ascertain the location and the history).