page_title: Sherbrooke
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Sherbrooke / History
caption_attribution_description: Dufferin Street, Sherbrooke, carte postale, E.P. Charlton &amp; Co.
context_page_description: Sherbrooke is a city in southern Quebec, Canada. Sherbrooke is situated at the confluence of the Saint-François and Magog rivers in the heart of the Estrie administrative region. Sherbrooke is also the name of a territory equivalent to a regional county municipality and census division of Quebec, coextensive with the city of Sherbrooke. With 161,323 residents at the 2016 census, Sherbrooke was the sixth largest city in the province of Quebec and the thirtieth largest in Canada. The Sherbrooke Census Metropolitan Area had 212,105 inhabitants, making it the fourth largest metropolitan area in Quebec and nineteenth largest in Canada.
  Originally known as Hyatt's Mill, it was renamed after Sir John Coape Sherbrooke, a British general who was Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia, and Governor General of British North America; the family is named after Shirebrook, Derbyshire.
  Sherbrooke is the primary economic, political, cultural and institutional centre of Estrie, and was known as the Queen of the Eastern Townships at the beginning of the 20th century.
context_section_description: The First Nations were the first inhabitants, having originally settled the region between 8,000 and 3,000 years ago. Traces of seasonal camps, characterized by arrowheads, scrapers, and other similar tools have been found. Ceramic objects dating from the Woodland period (3000 to 500 BP) were also found, indicating that the region continued to be occupied by nomadic people during this period.
  Upon the arrival of Samuel de Champlain in Quebec in 1608, this region was under the control of the Mohawks. France created an alliance through its missionaries with the Abenaki, located in Maine and Vermont. The French were driven to the valley of the St. Lawrence River near Trois-Rivières after a Mohawk victory in the war of 1660.The area around present-day Sherbrooke then became a battlefield between the two peoples who had to travel to the region, both of whom sought to obtain control of the territory. For the Abenaki, the confluence of Pskasewantekw (Magog) and Alsigôntekw (the Saint-François), present day Sherbrooke, which they named Shacewanteku ("where one smokes"), was an important resting point during the seasonal passages.
  During the Seven Years' War between France and Britain, the Abenaki, still allied with the French, travelled along the rivers of the Eastern Townships, frequently near present-day Sherbrooke, during raids against British forts.
  The Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, ending the Revolutionary War and recognizing the Independence of the United States. During this time, the Eastern Townships were under Abekani control for a few years, having practised hunting and fishing for centuries. However, the American Revolution attracted British loyalists from America to the region, who began to covet the land and obtain government grants.
  The first European settler to reside in the Sherbrooke region was a French Canadian named Jean-Baptiste Nolin, about whom few details are known, except that he arrived in 1779 to engage in agriculture.
  The first attempts at colonization occurred in 1792 on the banks of the St. Francis River. This settlement was known as Cowan's Clearance. In 1793, loyalist Gilbert Hyatt, a farmer from Schenectady, New York, established his farm not far from the confluence of the Massawippi River and Coaticook River, before the governor of Lower Canada officially awarded the land. Over the next two years, 18 families came to live on the site. The Crown acknowledged Hyatt's ownership of the land in 1801. Hyatt built the first dam on the Magog River, in collaboration with another loyalist named Jonathan Ball, who had bought land on the north bank of the river. Hyatt then built a gristmill in 1802 on the south bank of the river, while Ball built a sawmill on the north shore. By constructing the mill, Hyatt effectively founded the small village that became known as "Hyatt's Mills". The village was named "Hyatt's Mills" until 1818, when the village was renamed after Governor General Sir John Sherbrooke at the time of his retirement and return to Britain.
  In 1832, the village attracted most of the activities of the British American Land Company (BALC) and benefited from the injection of British capital into the region. Manufacturing activities were established that harnessed the Magog River's hydropower. From 1835 Sherbrooke began to seek government support to establish a railway line, but this only became a reality in 1852 through the line connecting the cities of Montreal and Portland.
  From 1867 to 1892, the manufacturing system was based on hydraulic power. The Gorge of the Magog River is considered one of the best industrial sites in Quebec, since the waters never freeze there, allowing year-long production of energy. At that time, BALC invested significant sums in the reconstruction of several dams in the gorge upstream to Magog Lake, in order to regulate the flow of the river, and thus improve its efficiency, to attract new factories.
  The founding of several important factories near the Gorges helped to attract more and more Francophone workers, coming mainly from the Beauce and elsewhere in Quebec
caption: Dufferin Street, Sherbrooke, between 1903–1913
exif: {}