page_title: La Baie
section_title: Industrialization of Port-Alfred and the development from 1900 to 1976
hierarchical_section_title: La Baie / History / Industrialization of Port-Alfred and the development from 1900 to 1976
caption_attribution_description: Ha! Ha! Bay Sulfites (Port-Alfred)
context_page_description: La Baie is one of three boroughs in the city of Saguenay, Quebec, Canada. It was created during Quebec's municipal reorganization in 2002. From 1976 to 2001, it was known as the Town of La Baie, a municipality composed of the Grande-Baie, Bagotville, and Port-Alfred sectors.
  It is located on the bank of the Ha! Ha! Bay at the mouths of the Ha! Ha! River and the Mars River. La Baie was the first colony built in the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region. It was founded by the Société des Vingt et un who settled the area in 1838. The depth of the banks of the Ha! Ha! Bay's waterways facilitated the rapid development of the region's largest harbour facilities after the railways were built in 1910.
  The borough's main sources of socio-economic development have been the logging and the pulp and paper industries since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively. Aluminum production began in the early 1980s. After the Abitibi-Consolidated paper mill, one of the main employers of the borough, shut down in 2004, Saguenay's elected officials decided to invest in La Baie's tourism industry by building and operating a port of call for cruise ships in 2008.
context_section_description: The Saguenay region experienced a new phase of economic development after the arrival of railways in Chicoutimi in 1893. Journalist Joseph-Dominique Guay and banker Julien-Édouard-Alfred Dubuc founded the Compagnie de Pulpe de Chicoutimi in 1898. Because its activities soon became too extensive for Chicoutimi's port facilities, the company's directors decided to build a loading port on the Ha! Ha! Bay to ship pulp. The Ha! Ha! Bay railway was built in 1909 to facilitate transport to the quay in Bagotville. The first train shipment was on December 13, 1910.
  Some sawmills had difficulty staying afloat before the arrival of large industry. Price Sawmills, the largest on both the Ha! Ha! and Mars Rivers, closed their doors in 1904 and 1912 respectively. However, other sectors of the forest industry were booming. From 1902 to 1913, the Battle Island Company operated a pulp debarking factory in Anse-à-Benjamin.
  Several municipal infrastructure projects were built in the 1910s. Bagotville's first water system was completed in 1913. Soon macadam was used to pave the roads around Bagotville's Saint-Alphonse Church. In 1915, the municipal council adopted a by-law that implemented the use of electric lights. Highway 381 was opened that same year.
  Plans for a chemical pulp plant on Ha! Ha! Bay were drawn up by the Compagnie de Pulpe de Chicoutimi in 1914. The company's director, J.-É.-A. Dubuc, travelled to Europe to attract capital. Although he found investors in England, the volatility caused by World War I delayed investment until 1916. Ha! Ha! Bay Sulphite Company Limited was founded that very year to make the chemical pulp plant a reality. Two hydroelectric power stations were built on the Ha! Ha! River to supply the plant. In 1917, the company purchased two lots from Grande-Baie totalling five square kilometres. Construction of the Port-Alfred plant began on June 12, 1916, and was completed August 30, 1917. On December 4 of that same year, the Saint-Édouard Parish was founded in Port-Alfred just prior to a formal request to separate the plant's land from Grande-Baie on December 29.
  The plant began operating on April 18, 1918. Four days later, the village of Port-Alfred was founded. In 1918, Bagotville organized its own police force. Industrialization, urbanization, and the construction of over fifty homes in Port-Alfred officially changed the new village's status and it became Ha! Ha! Bay's first town on September 5, 1919. Bagotville obtained the same status on January 7, 1920.
  Since the beginning of the 1910s, the bay area's population had doubled to 6,600 by 1921. Meanwhile, the pulp and paper industry suffered a crisis of overproduction, leading to the rapid bankruptcy of the Compagnie de Pulpe de Chicoutimi and the disposal of the Ha! Ha! Bay Sulfite Company on June 30, 1922. It was succeeded by the Bay Sulfites Company Limited, which was also disposed in 1923.
  On July 26, 1924, the Port-Alfred Pulp and Paper Corporation acquired the plant and began converting its production from chemical to paper pulp in 1925. Alcan purchased Port-Alfred's port and rail facilities in 1926 after the disposal of the Compagnie de Pulpe de Chicoutimi. The docks were converted so they could load bauxite for the new aluminum smelter in Arvida.
  The community continued to grow despite the economic difficulties of the Canadian pulp and paper industry in 1928. Canada Power and Paper Corporation acquired the Port-Alfred mill and suspended its activities on October 31, 1930. In 1927, the increasing population led to the opening of new schools in Port-Alfred such as the Bagotville Boys' Academy (French: Académie des garçons de Bagotville) and the Saint-Édouard College (French: Collège Saint-Édouard). The newly created Consolidated Paper Corporation bought the Port-Alfred paper mill on August 28, 1930, and reopened it on June 8, 1932. The mill was closed again from 1933 to 1934, which was followed by seventy years of stability. Another forest industry company, the Scieries Saguenay, opened a plant in Bagotville in 1935.
  The Great Depression led to the 
caption: The Compagnie de Pulpe de Chicoutimi's Ha! Ha! Bay Sulphite plant, Port-Alfred, 1918
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