Toponymie | Canton de Potton | Place Names

This ecological reserve is located in the valley of the brook named to honour Colonel Hendrick Ruiter (1739-1819).  Hendrick Ruiter founded the hamlet of Dunkin, first called West Potton.

“Created in 1987, the Ruiter Valley Land Trust (RVLT) is a non-profit, charitable organization whose mission is to conserve and protect wildlife in its natural habitat.  The RVLT acquires and manages land and conservation servitudes in perpetuity.  The land trust owns 290 hectares in the Ruiter Valley, where it manages a network of 28 kilometers of trails for the enjoyment of the local community and the general public.

“In the 1960's, the wilderness of the Ruiter Valley drew Robert Shepherd, a Montreal psychiatrist who loved to camp, canoe and rough it in the woods.  This father of three had bought an old farm in Mansonville on the eastern slope of the valley.  Robert later bought other properties in the valley and constructed log buildings to house a living community for healing schizophrenics.  In 1987, Stansje and Robert gave 162 hectares of land to the land trust, in the hope that the area would one day be covered with old-growth forests.”^[1]

This ecological reserve is located in the heart of the Sutton Mountain range, at approximately 12 kilometers to the west of Lake Memphremagog.  It covers approximately 160 hectares and insures the protection of ecosystems representative of deciduous forests of the Sherbrooke ecological region, a region that covers groves of sugar maples to lindens and yellow birches, in addition to the fauna found there.

The Reserve abuts the Appalachians in the massif of the Sutton Mountains.  Here the hills are broadly oriented south-west/north-east.  From the Ruiter valley to the summit of the hill where the Reserve is located, the altitude rises from 300 to 550 meters.  A massif is the dominant, central mass of a mountain ridge that is more or less defined by longitudinal or transverse valleys.

The rocky substrate here is composed of shale and micas, on which glaciers left different types of superficial deposits of tills, of varying thicknesses depending on the degree of slope.  A till is an unstratified drift, deposited directly by a glacier without reworking by meltwater, and consisting of a mixture of clay, silt, sand, gravel, and boulders ranging widely in size and shape.  The soil types which have developed there are primarily podzol and brunisol.

The principal surface vegetation groupings are groves of sugar maples, to yellow birch and American beech to butternut, sugar maples to Eastern hop hornbeam (ironwood) and American ash (white ash), sugar maples to lindens and red ash.  Among the known flora, six species are considered either threatened or vulnerable in Quebec: wood or wild garlic, considered vulnerable in Quebec and protected by law; Athyrium pycnocarpon, the Glade fern, Carex prasina, drooping sedge; Panicum clandestinum, deertongue grass; carex des Appalaches or Appalachian sedge; and Viola rotundifolia or round leafed violet, all species liable to be designated at risk or threatened in southern Quebec. 

Twenty-one species of birds were observed including the barred owl, pileated woodpecker, cedar waxwing, black-throated blue warbler, yellow-bellied sapsucker, and red-eyed vireo.  Amongst mammals, white tail deer, striped chipmunks are plentiful.  Indicators of the presence of moose, black bear and raccoons have also been noted.  Twenty species of insects were recognized in the territory, among which a significant population of Actias luna, commonly known as the Luna Moth, a species actually considered precarious in Quebec.  Direct observations were made of amphibians and reptiles including the common garter snake, the wood frog, American toad, and the Northern spring salamander (purple salamander), an amphibian likely to be designated as threatened or at risk.

The foregoing was translated from text provided at the website:  mddep.gouv.qc.ca/biodiversite/reserves/vallee_ruiter/reserve_44htm