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Archivist Margaret Peyton, August 2003
23 August 2003
Greenwood, Hudson, Quebec

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About Phoebe:

"My earliest memories were when I was a teenager in her plays, and I'm sure that was a lot of influence just learning all the Shakespeare which stood my in good stead in school because we didn't learn Shakespeare until later in school..."

"We took dramatic art lessons from her, where you had to say "how now brown cow" , and things like that, and I didn't like it, and my mother said I had to do it because she was a cousin. We really liked the plays, except to go to play practices in your summer holidays when you're 13, 14, 15 is nowadays asking a bit much, especially when it was Shakespeare, however it was very good for us."

"You just knew, almost automatically, how concerned and interested she was in the family, with Greenwood, and with Greenwood being a family museum, and she told me many, many times that all the things in Greenwood were being left as a family museum for the family. So she was terribly keen on having the family get involved. And in the later years when I used to go to the historical meetings with, and drive her different places and do things like that, I always had the feeling that she felt I was the one who was left, that maybe was going to do a little bit with the family, and with Greenwood. Because most people by that time had moved away, or they didn't have time."

"I think you get to know people by reading their letters, especially if you didn't know them before .... unfortunately there aren't a lot of letters of Phoebe's herself, there are a lot of letters to Phoebe, in fact there's like 2 or 3 thousand letters, not all to Phoebe of course, but a lot of them. The ones from Phoebe are very interesting because some of them are written when she was at school, some of them were written when she was studying in the Royal Academy in London, and some of them were written a little later, there are no later letters from Phoebe, I would say the 1930's are the end. There are a lot of letters to Phoebe, and particularly from her husband, Andrew. His letters of course answer her letters, so you know what she's written about."

"Very, very definitely an organizer, she could organize people, she was a great director of things, I always felt it was like she was directing a play, everybody would fall into place, and she knew exactly what everybody should be doing, and she certainly had a good way of telling them how to get on with it. She was a good director."

"She was terribly active in the Historical Society, and I think that for all that she might have been inclined to take it over, and even when she wasn't actually elected President she would take over the meetings to a great extent, and it would turn some people off, but I told more people than one in Hudson that if it hadn't been for Phoebe, the Historical society at one point would have collapsed. And now it survives and I think that a tremendous amount of credit goes to her. It was very important to her... it wouldn't have gone on, if she hadn't have made an effort, and sometimes it was an effort to get out to those meetings and to make sure that there were people who were interested to come, or interested to talk, and she was the one who got those books on the early settlers organized, she did the phoning and she did the talking and she did the talking into... she got a lot of those done, and they wouldn't have been done if it hadn't been for her."

"She was very involved with the church, she was very interested in the church... partly because our ancestors had built the church... so the family had always been involved and there are a lot of family plaques in the church, and she always made sure they were in good shape."

"She was also in charge of the Chancel Guild for years and years and years, she was the one that got the flowers for Sundays arranged, so that now everybody knows the rules about how to do the flowers on Sunday, because Phoebe did that... She was in church every Sunday and sometimes early Communion..."

"She wanted everybody to have dramatic art lessons, and at one point in time, the minister made a sort of list of who was to read every Sunday, so it was a different person, and I hated it because I hated getting up and reading anything. At one point she was very upset after everybody had done all this, for quite a long time, she mentioned to me, and I guess to others, that she didn't like the way it
was read, it was not in the least bit dramatic and wasn't done well at all. She was going to have lessons for everybody, but at that time the whole routine changed for some reason, and different people were not getting up to read. But when Phoebe got up to read, boy you could tell she had dramatic art lessons!!!...."

"That was Phoebe... you expected her to be dramatic. She was dramatic when she was telling you a story at the dinner table, I mean Phoebe was on the stage a lot of her natural life."

"They were a lot about women in history in Quebec. She was terribly interested in Quebec history she was terribly interested in women in history."

"The ones that I remember... from Shakespeare which she did right after the war, actually during the war when she couldn't go to England. She would go around to the high schools and do scenes from the plays that the grade 11's were studying that year, like Hamlet and MacBeth... l think the first school she ever went to was Hudson High, which is here, then she came to St.Lambert because our family was living there so she had an in... then she began to travel further and further afield so that she was going to Ontario, New Brunswick and so on, and she was absolutely marvellous. She would do scenes form MacBeth, so she would be first of all the three witches, then she would be Lady MacBeth, then she'd be somebody else, and it was always with just the change of a hat, or a cloak or just turning around on the stage. She never left the stage, she didn't really change costumes or anything, and she was really very good. I think although a lot of students in gr.10 and 11 didn't really like Shakespeare, it was really their first chance seeing it on stage, because normally you're just reading it out of a book."

"She had a tremendously wide interest, and it wasn't superficial. When she got interested in something, she studied it, she read up on it, she worked at it, she talked about it with people. And her notebooks are just full of things that she was interested in, and took notes on, and looked up, and did research on."

"She would read up a play before she went to see it, she would write up about the play after she had gone to see it, and do a critique of it, or she would just plain take notes on whatever the characters were involved in the play and what she knew about them... she did that a lot."

"And then she became interested in Indians out in the West, and spent a lot of time with the Indians on the West coast, and there are a lot of notebooks about that, and a lot of talking to the Chiefs out there, and getting their legends, and writing them down... and she used to have Indian groups from Oka, and had big sort of Sunday afternoon parties and have somebody usually as a speaker... "

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Archivist, Margaret Peyton, August 2003
23 August 2003
Greenwood, Hudson, Quebec

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About the Delesderniers family:

"The one that came here, John Mark Crank Delesderniers, was among other things, a trader and a merchant and he set up a store in the field next to his house down the road, and traded with the Indians, and what he traded with among other things, he sold all kinds of things to the settlers, I mean flour and glass and including rum, he traded ginseng. The Indians would bring him ginseng. Apparently it grew all over the place here. And he would give them goods, whatever they needed. What happened to the ginseng was that John Mark Crank Delesderniers processed it in a way so that it became what was known as crystallized ginseng, and it was sent by middle-men to the far east, particularly to China. We have that in his own writing, which is interesting because ginseng these days usually comes from China."

"They were one of the very early, early settlers here, they came here long before the Cumberland settlers. They are always referred to in local history as the early English settlers. We know that John Mark Crank spoke English, French, and several Indian languages. So they came here as English settlers as opposed to French in spite of their name. They were obviously fluently bilingual... that generation anyway. "

"At the time of the Rebellions, John Mark Crank Delesderniers' son, who lived at Greenwood was a justice of the peace and he was with what they called the "Vaudreuil Loyal Volunteers" which were the Loyalists, and his sister had married a Desjardins, who was one of the leaders of the Patriotes and lived here in Como, near Willow Place Inn. He was one of the quite an important leader, and another sister of Peter Francis Christian Delesderniers was married to Whitlock who was also a supporter of the Patriotes with his broadsheets that he printed at the time. So when the Rebellion was over, and the Patriotes did not win, Delesderniers was left with the job of arresting his brothers in law! They were in prison in Montreal for a while... "

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About Robert Ward Shepherd and the Ottawa River Navigation Company:

"One of the stories we were always told about him as children, is that somebody had left some money somewhere, one of the guests or somebody at the inn where he worked and he had given it back to them, and so he had a reputation from then on for being honest, and that of course is a good thing."

"He then decided he was going to get a better job he had read about a job West of Ottawa, keeping the books of a lumber company, and so he set out from Montreal again... he was about 18 years old... on horseback it took him 2 days to get to Ottawa and when he was in Ottawa he stayed in an inn there where he met a couple of men who were interested in somebody working on one of their boats. Obviously the lumber company job went up in smoke and he came back and he tells the story of coming back by stage coach, via Prescott, from Ottawa and sleeping in an inn... with two other men, all three in the same bed and he had all the money in the world with him... 200 dollars and he was absolutely terrified that they were going to steal it from him in the middle of the night, so he didn't get much sleep."

"Came back to Montreal, saw the other people who were involved in the ownership of these boats and was asked to start to work on the boat... He had a little bit of experience, he had a few years been working on a boat on the Ottawa River under a captain Robbins, but not in command and he saw after a couple of seasons that there wasn't any chance of promotion, because captain Robbins was around and there was only this one boat ........ so he was sent by these new owners to Brockville to see that this boat, which was the St. David was finished and fitted out for the season. And he brought that St.David which was a little tiny boat, we have no pictures of it... a paddle-wheel steamer... he brought that down all the rapids of the St. Lawrence, which when you think about it was an incredible feat... and so he was on the St.David for one summer. Then during that summer he found a new channel for the boats at Vaudreuil."

"To get to the Ottawa River from the St.Lawrence you had to go through the white-water if you like, either at St.Anne's or Vaudreuil and one of the rival companies had built a lock at St.Anne's, and they were the only ones who were allowed to use it. So when he brought his barges down, because these were all tow-boats, they would go down the rapids at St.Anne's. That summer the water was so low that they couldn't get down the rapids at St.Anne's and he decided that they would go over to Vaudreuil. If you go down there today you can see under the bridge there, there's a little island... one of the crew got into the water and they made soundings all the way down through the rapids... and put markers, put buoys out, and found that there was just enough, they only needed about three feet of water, they were very shallow draft. So at that point of course all the barges, not just his company's barges, but all the barges who weren't from this rival company could go down without worrying about the locks at St.Anne's. If they'd been stuck up there, all their goods would have been a little late getting to the market in Montreal."

"So the owners of the St.David were so impressed with this feat that they gave him the command of their larger steamer the next summer, which was much more comfortable... the "Oldfield". So he was on the Oldfield for a couple of seasons and the owners decided to move their business over to the St.Lawrence river, and he wanted to stay on the Ottawa River, partly because he knew it, and partly because he had met Mary Cecilia Delesderniers who lived at Greenwood, and it was much more convenient to visit her if he was sailing up and down the Ottawa River. So they said if he could find people to invest, he could buy the Oldfield and start his own company, and that's how the Ottawa River Navigation Company got started..."

"They were able to fit out a couple of cabins... a large cabin for the ladies, and a large cabin for the gentlemen and they would take people, it was the first time there was actually passengers on a steamer. Up until then these steamers had always had barges behind them, and if you wanted to take a trip up the river you could sit in the barge, but it wasn't very comfortable. So they decided they would have a passenger service, and they could go as far as Carillon, and the boat was too big to go through the canal at Carillon and so they got one of their rival companies to take the passengers from Grenville up to Ottawa, and they went between Carillon and Grenville in a stage-coach at that time. This was the first true passenger service from Montreal to Ottawa, about 1847."

"After that they built many, many steamers. Over a period of time they had at least 20 steamers on the river, not all at the same time, they still had market-boats or freight-boats and they still had a few tow-boats because towing barges was still a good business and in the 1860 and 70s that was the height of the travel between Montreal and Ottawa. They had two steamers running every day, they had one during the day to Carillon, one during the day from Grenville to Ottawa and one at night .... because business was so good. In the 1880's they still were building several new steamers. These, by the 1880's, were carrying 700-800 passengers ... the largest boat they ever built was the Peerless and she ran from Grenville to Ottawa in the 1880's, and she was 202 feet long, and she carried 1100 day passengers... The steamers on the lower river, the Montreal to Carillon steamers, after 1875 when they returned from Carillon to Lachine, they'd always shoot the rapids, and you could get off the boat and take the train into Montreal if you wanted to..."

"It was very exciting because the Lachine rapids in those days were completely different from today... there was a very narrow channel it was S shaped so that it was very tricky and there were rocks on either side and you just felt that, an inch here or an inch there, the boat was going to hit the rocks. And so it was a very exciting trip! All of the little pamphlets of the day said that it was very exciting, and perfectly safe... "