The Mills, the Bennett, and the Brewery

Industrial history of Chambly, the town i came from

The Mills, the Bennett, and the Brewery

By the time my family had come to Chambly, at the end of the fifties, the textile mills industry that had made the glory of Chambly in the XIXth century and the beginning of the XXth had already left town. The vast flax fields surrounding the villages had been long abandoned to their own. Of one of the water activated mill itself only some meager wall foundation ruins still remained on the banks of the Richelieu River; just below the dam, the ‘’new dam’’ as the locals called it then. The new concrete dam had replaced the old wooden one just before we had moved in. In fact we never moved in; because the Mills had been Fort Chambly institutions and my family were then installed in Chambly Bassin, the next town a more white-collars Montréal suburb dormitory town. But my parents, in 1967, had bought a small grocery store in Fort Chambly which would become the village main beer supplier. By the time we came, the people of Fort Chambly had been working at the Bennett for generations ,This was cardboard fiber company whose main building stood beside the train bridge and the Richelieu Bridge and was flanked by a giant water tower. I worked for the Bennett, for a season or two, when I dropped out of high school in 1973. I worked at the secondary plan called ‘’La petite Bennett’’ and located near Chambly canal, the water way to lake Champlain, then the Hudson River, to New York City. We were making die cut car dash backings and leather imitation for those brown handled schoolbag we carried in school. I always been a stranger at the Bennett, because we were newcomers and we actually lived in Chambly Bassin, even if the two towns had fusion together into the City of Chambly in 1965. But as a local store owner, my family was well known. At my father’s, I had met the Fort Chambly wives, now I was working with their husbands; a rough bunch of French-Canadian redneck whose principal preoccupation then was the customerisation of their cars. During the day, the parking lot sparkled with metal flaked painted muscle cars equipped with shiny chrome Cragar mag wheels. Most of the people there had worked all their life; often had replaced their own father or even grand fathers on the work force. For most, that was the only jobs they would ever have. I met guys that had been working at the Bennett, for more then forty years. Once I brought my camera to work, I took a portrait of one of the old timer smoking a handed roll cigarette during his brake. The picture shows a deep tan craggy face with hollow eyes, it was dark and some thought as sinister. ‘’I look dead!’’ told me the old worker when he saw the photograph, someone, behind him, had said ‘’But you are dead!!!’’

The Break , Chambly, Québec Photo by Richard Guimond ©1973 19730606