Baie-Comeau, a Company Town

Founded in May 1937, Baie-Comeau was originally a small industrial town built from scratch by Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, a well-known printer and manufacturer from the American Midwest. The town owes its name to Napoléon-Alexandre Comeau, a renowned North Shore hunter and naturalist.

Ancient History

The town was built on the northeastern side of the mouth of the mighty Manicouagan River on land frequented by Aboriginal peoples for 8,000 years, ever since the glaciers had melted, leaving behind the Manicouagan Peninsula.

Manicouagan’s first Aboriginal inhabitants mentioned by the French colonizers of the 17th century were called Papinachois (“those who like to laugh,” a character trait they are renowned for to this day.) They migrated between the game-rich shores of the St. Lawrence in the summer months and the vast inland spaces in the winter, where troops of caribou roamed as kings of the northern forests.

The Aboriginal people of the region—now known as Innu—were the territory’s sole occupants until the mid-19th century, when settlement of the 1,200 km shoreline between the Saguenay River and Labrador slowly began. But the permanent settlement of the Manicouagan area was still some time away. Although fishermen and their families set up home east of Godbout, the first loggers from the St. Lawrence Valley went no further than Sault-au-Mouton (Forestville) to the southwest. Manicouagan was to remain isolated and instead welcomed the area’s first Indian reserve in 1861 as the government tried—in vain—to bring together all the local bands in a single location.

In the early 1900s, a lumberman by the name of Jalbert decided to build a small sawmill at the mouth of the Manicouagan. Unfortunately for him, the sawmill and small village that housed the workers were blighted by accidents: fire ravaged the supply warehouses, and a storm swept to sea all the logs cut in the 1907 season, causing operations in the village to be abandoned.

The Manicouagan area returned to its state of isolation…

A Company Town

It was in January 1923 that the Manicouagan area first felt the effects of industrialization, welcoming a model town that incorporated all the latest advances in urban planning of the day.

This minor miracle was the work of Robert Rutherford McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune. McCormick, who was caught up in a fierce battle with American press magnate William Randolph Hearst, had begun to make his own newspaper at a plant in Ontario in 1911. Attracted by the forests of Québec’s North Shore to supply his new plant, he set up a logging village—Shelter Bay, ancestor to the town of Port-Cartier close to Sept-Îles—and bought another in Franquelin, named after a 17th century French cartographer (not to be confused with Boston’s Benjamin Franklin).

The McCormick Group expanded in the early 1920s on the success of its new tabloid— the New York Daily Mirror—which needed a new paper plant all of its own to keep up with demand. The only available forests left in Québec were in the Manicouagan area, and to get his hands on them Colonel McCormick had to promise the Québec government that he would build a plant there by 1930!

Building a plant in such a remote area meant building a whole town to house its workers—and the infrastructure to go with it. Work began in 1924 with a small hydroelectric dam on Rivière-aux-Outardes and a port at Baie-des-Anglais, but was interrupted by the Depression. The Colonel was even offered the chance to build his plant in Québec City, but the businessman had taken a shine to his baby in the north and in 1930 he hired well-known Montréal urban planner Leonard Schlem to design a pretty town around Mont Sec, a large hill overlooking Baie-des-Anglais. Construction of the plant and the town went smoothly in 1936 and 1937. To the west of the bay, one of the town’s streets—Champlain—was home to all the plant managers (at the time, all English-speaking) while the workers set up home in the streets that looped their way round the mountain. The town’s business center, the community center—with its lovely library, gymnasium, meeting hall, bowling alley, and more—and the plant were built at the head of the bay.

Opened in 1937, the charming little town even went on to become something of a regional capital when Mgr. Napoléon-Alexandre Labrie—himself a native of the neighboring village of Godbout—established the bishopric for the newly formed Côte-Nord diocese there in 1945. Funded by McCormick, the cathedral is a lovely Dom Bellot–style church, decorated with magnificent indoor frescos painted by Montréal artist Guildo Nincheri.

A small model town was born at the mouth of the Manicouagan.

The Postwar Boom

The Western World experienced tremendous growth in the decades following the Second World War. The automobile, household appliances, and radio and television led the way as a new age of mass consumption began, boosting demand for energy and natural resources.

Colonel McCormick predicted the boom and funded construction of a dam and a new hydroelectrical plant on the powerful Manicouagan River. The availability of surplus power attracted a new aluminum smelter, Canadian British Aluminum. With the creation of hundreds of jobs came new neighborhoods to the north and west of the town. Families also settled upstream in the small town of Hauterive created by Mgr. Labrie to house a bishopric, college, and regional hospital. These two small towns coexisted side by side until they finally merged in 1983.

The area experienced sustained growth in the 1960s and 1970s as public corporation Hydro-Québec built the vast Manic-Outardes complex with its dams and seven hydroelectric power stations. Two of the facilities are world famous—Manic 2 with its hollow joint construction and the enormous arches of the Daniel Johnson Dam. They even inspired Salvador Dali, who proposed, in vain as it turned out, creating an immense fresco on the dams that was worthy of his genius.

One of the unintended consequences of these massive projects was the merging of two upstream lakes and the appearance of Lake Manicouagan, an annular reservoir which lies within the remnants of an impact crater formed when an asteroid struck the Earth some 215 million years ago. The crater—or astrobleme—is one of the world’s largest.

Throughout the 60s and 70s, Baie-Comeau expanded its dual port system (with separate wharfs for the paper mill and aluminum smelter) by adding facilities for Canadian multinational the Cargill Grain Company—which made Baie-Comeau its Atlantic terminal—and for a Saint-Lawrence River ferry crossing and train ferry. The town now boasts one of Canada’s best port systems, which is not to say that it has neglected its land communication links. Indeed, with the recent opening of a road that crosses the Québec–Labrador Peninsula from one end to the other, Baie-Comeau has also become the gateway to the Atlantic region and its immense hydroelectric, gas, and mining projects.

A Precious Heritage

After successive expansions at the paper plant and aluminum smelter (now one of the world’s biggest), Baie-Comeau’s population has leveled off at 23,000. A little over 30,000 people live in the entire Manicouagan area.

The past few years have seen the area rediscover its history and cultural heritage.

As early as the 1960s, area residents banded together to save and restore the lighthouse in Pointe-des-Monts, some 100 kilometers east of Baie-Comeau. One of the first inhabited lighthouses to be built in Canada, it is as old as it is unique. A faithful reconstitution of a historic logging forest village was then built in Franquelin, followed by an interpretation center on the history of the Pessamit Innu at the historic site of Papinachois.

In Baie-Comeau itself, promoting the town’s heritage involved restoring the original town center with the 1998 renovation of the old post office. It is now an archive center and home to various summer exhibitions. The municipality has also introduced a number of other initiatives to speed up the preservation of this urban gem designed by Leonard Schlem in 1930.

Two large scale projects are currently under development: a multimedia interpretation center on the area’s geological evolution and a site commemorating Brian Mulroney, the town’s favorite son, who was elected Canadian prime minister in 1984.

Baie-Comeau proudly incarnates the Colonel’s legacy to this day.