Toponymie | Canton de Potton | Place Names

Aubergine is the French name for “eggplant” or the dull violet colour of its fruit!  Although unconfirmed, but no less a possibility, “L'Aubergine” in the present context might also be a light-hearted play on words: “Auberge” + “Inn” = “Aubergine”.  The place we're talking about here is the only brick building in Knowlton Landing!  It is nestled to the left as you descend Chemin du Lac, part of a most spectacular panorama before you. 

It was Levi Knowlton (1768-1842) and his son, Miles E. (1809-1882), who built this landmark building in 1828 as an inn for stagecoach travellers, en route to or from Copp's Ferry (later Georgeville), on what became known as the Montreal-Boston route.^[1]  At the time, Knowlton Landing was known simply as North Potton.

The actual landing for the Copp's Ferry is known to have been a short distance to the south of the present wharf at Knowlton Landing, which was built sometime around 1905, and inaugurated with great ceremony in that year by the Governor General of Canada, Lord Grey.  

Although Miles E. Knowlton built, owned and operated the building now called L'Aubergine, he later built a more modest home across the road from L'Aubergine, where he and his wife, Belinda Ellis, lived with their two children.  Unfortunately fire destroyed it several years ago. 

The construction of the inn in Knowlton Landing was in the day when stage travel was the primary mode of public transportation, and when steamboats plied the waters of Lake Memphremagog.  Rail-lines in this part of Quebec had yet to be built.

Sometime after L'Aubergine was completed, history tells us that Miles E. Knowlton appears to have embarked upon an ambitious business venture with one J.B. Hoyt, from New Hampshire.  Captain George W. Fogg, who was captain of the “Lady of the Lake” steamer, and his brother-in-law, J.B. Hoyt, built the first Mountain House in the bay at the foot of Owl's Head, in 1850.  It burned in 1854.

“Another mountain house much larger was built near the site of the old one in 1855, by J. B. Hoyt and Miles E. Knowlton. (…)  In September 1856 Hoyt left Lake Memphremagog in the night.  His coat and hat, and boat were found floating near the shore the next day.  It was supposed that he was drowned; the lake was dragged three weeks or more for the body, by Capt. Fogg. (…)  Hoyt turned up in Minnesota several years afterward.”^[2]

With his business partner presumed dead, it appears that Miles Knowlton was left to carry on in something of a financial and legal quagmire; and it seems, on the hook for the costs of building of the Mountain House hotel!  This perhaps explains why the Knowlton's Inn was sold to John F. Tuck in 1862, and why, at the time of his death in 1882, Miles Knowlton was somewhat impoverished. 

According to the Knowlton family historical records, neither restitution nor compensation was ever received from the swindler who had removed to Minnesota like a thief in the night!

As noted, John F. Tuck (1835-1928) and wife, Susan Channell, who were from Georgeville, bought the building we call L'Aubergine in 1862.  They operated “one of the most popular summer-resort places around the lake.”^[3] It came to be known as Tuck's Hotel, and welcomed travellers ferried across Lake Memphremagog from Georgeville.  Travellers going on from here would traverse the mountain to South Bolton, part of “the Old Magog Road”, to embark on the stage coach en route to Montreal and Quebec.  “Harper's magazine of 1874 mentions that their journalists paid a visit to Tuck's Hotel as they called it and they dined on trout.  They said Tuck was a very useful member of society, that he was hotelkeeper, storekeeper, postmaster and Her Majesty's Customs Preventative Officer all in one.”^[4]

The Tuck family lived in their “inn” for many years, until May and Dan Jones bought it from the estate of Martha (Mattie) Tuck, John F. Tuck's daughter.  Tuck's Hotel then became known as Pine Lodge.  Mr. & Mrs. Jones operated a popular summer boarding house for many years and eventually sold the building to their son, Ray F. Jones and his wife, Daisy, who continued the tradition.  In 1967, Pine Lodge passed to Leona and Paul Ethier.  They too catered to summer boarders until 1975.  Over many years, Pine Lodge was renowned for its warm hospitality and fine home cooking.  After Mr. & Mrs. Ethier ceased operating an inn, Pine Lodge was rented as a supervised “Extension” home for children from the Butters' Home, an institution once located in Austin that cared for physically and intellectually disabled persons until approximately 1976.

When the Extension Home closed, the property was sold to Michelle and Pierre Geoffrion, who successfully re-established the building's original vocation:  Pine Lodge then became known as L'Aubergine and the hospitality has continued with succeeding owners.

History tells us that the first couple to operate a “public house” in the area of Knowlton Landing was likely Richard Holland and his wife Sarah Ballard, who came to Canada in January 1810, “with two yoke of oxen and a sled”.  It seems that they arrived on the east side of the Lake, where they were known to have kept a “public house on the site of Camperdown.  In 1814 he (Holland) removed to the Coolidge place on the west side of the Lake near Knowlton Landing, so named after Levi Knowlton, an early settler who built the brick house where John Tuck later lived and died.  Here again he kept a public house and operated a ferry between that place and Georgeville. (…)  In 1817 he (Holland) removed to South Bolton on the banks of the Missisquoi River (…)”^[5]

“An interesting feature in the early history of this district was a lake ferry established about 1814 from the site of Georgeville to the site of the “Maple Leaf Lodge”^[6]. The Camperdown was an inn in Georgeville, and was the birthplace of John F. Tuck.^[7]  The “Coolidge place” was also known as “Maple Leaf Lodge”^[8].  That lodge came to be known as “Woodacres” and was situated on the present site of the St. Benoit Yacht Club.  In Nicholas Austin the Quaker, Shufelt writes “While no record has been found of Holland purchasing property in 1814, tradition tells us that he traded his property in Georgeville for what is known as the Coolidge Place and in late years as Woodacres, a summer boarding house near Knowlton Landing, with Abram Channell who had acquired that property on August 18, 1810.”^[9]  

Certainly other summer boarding homes were eventually established around Knowlton Landing:  Glenbrook to the north in Sargent's Bay, and another, further to the south on Memphremagog, called “Orchard Farm” owned by Mr. George Ducharme.

As an aside here, since there are so very few old brick buildings in Potton, I have often wondered where the bricks came from for the venerable L'Aubergine.

In the history of Knowlton Landing, recorded by Ralph F. Knowlton, Sr. (1926-1993), the following is extracted, thereby clearing up the query:  “The bricks were made from clay taken from the swamp near the lakeshore and were baked in an oven across the present road near the brook.  The ovens were fired by trees cut to clear the land and the ashes sold by the bushel to make pearl ash.  This was the only source of money they had to buy other supplies. Lime for mortar to lay the bricks came from the lime ledge on a neighbouring farm owned by Captain Eliot Coolidge, husband of Polly Knowlton, sister of Miles Knowlton.”

In the field beside his childhood home at 600, Chemin du Lac, a stone's throw from L'Aubergine, old bricks are even now turned out of the ground by the blades of the plough, according to Ralph Knowlton, Jr.  A small brook passes nearby.  The swamp “across the road” has been transformed to magnificent gardens and a private home.  Historic Knowlton Landing is still a charmingly picturesque hamlet.