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A.C. Buchanan and the Megantic Experiment: Promoting British Colonization in Lower Canada
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| Author/collaborator |
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| Title |
A.C. Buchanan and the Megantic Experiment: Promoting British Colonization in Lower Canada
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| Abstract |
Between 1829 and 1832 a British settler colony was established on the northern fringe of Lower Canada's Eastern Townships, in what became known as Megantic county. The main aim of the chief instigator and manager of the project, "emigrant" agent Alexander Carlisle Buchanan (1808-1868), was to demonstrate the viability of state-assisted "pauper" colonization, as long advocated by British Colonial Under-Secretary Robert Wilmot-Horton. The author points out that Buchanan's project was successful insofar as he convinced over 5,300 immigrants, the majority of whom were Irish Protestants, to follow the Craig and Gosford roads to the uninhabited northern foothills of the Appalachians. But the British government failed to apply this "experiment" elsewhere in Lower or Upper Canada, and the British settler community did not expand far beyond the townships of Leeds, Inverness, and Ireland because of their isolation from external markets. Instead, French-Canadian settlers moved into the surrounding townships, with the result that the British-origin population became a culturally isolated island of interrelated families that slowly disappeared due to out-migration.
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| Publication |
Histoire sociale/Social History
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| Volume |
Vol. 46
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| Issue |
no. 92
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| Pages |
295-319
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| Date |
November 2013
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| Language |
en
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| URL | |
| Citation |
Little, J. I. “A.C. Buchanan and the Megantic Experiment: Promoting British Colonization in Lower Canada.” Histoire sociale/Social History Vol. 46, no. 92 (November 2013): 295–319. https://hssh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/hssh/issue/view/2307.
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