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 (French: baie des Ha! Ha!) at the mouths of the Ha! Ha! River (French: rivière Ha! Ha!) and the Mars River (French: rivière à Mars). 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.
Bagotville Airport, the main civilian airport in Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean, is also located in La Baie. The Canadian Forces Base Bagotville, which shares the same airfield, is one of only two Canadian military bases that use the Royal Canadian Air Force's CF-18 fighters. The military base is the borough's largest employer.
While Chicoutimi and Jonquière, the two boroughs that constitute the main urban core of Saguenay, are located close to each other, La Baie is at a moderate distance from the city centre. This has created some unique issues for the borough — for example, while a full-power television or radio station in Saguenay can serve the entire city from a single transmitter without difficulty, La Baie is distant enough from the city's urban core that some low-power broadcasters, such as CKAJ-FM, have had to add separate transmitters to rebroadcast their signals in La Baie.
History
Exploration of Ha! Ha! Bay
The Saguenay's nomadic Innu tribes once inhabited La Baie. The Chicoutimians lived on the banks of the Saguenay River well before European colonization. Unlike important meeting places like Chicoutimi, Ha! Ha! Bay was far from portages to Saint-Jean Lake (French: lac St-Jean) and was not frequented by First Nations or the region's first explorers.Russel Bouchard and Normand Perron, Chicoutimi : la formation d'une métropole régionale, 1988, 78 pages.
Although it was not on eighteenth century fur trade routes, Ha! Ha! Bay was used by the Hudson's Bay Company's commercial fishing boats at the mouths of the Ha! Ha! (Wissuscoué) and Mars (Vasigamenke) Rivers.
In 1828, the Crown mandated land surveyor J.-B. Proulx to explore the bay area; he later reported on its hilly landscapes and logging potential. Colonization was impossible during this period since the Hudson's Bay Company held exclusive rights to natural resources in the region since 1821, a monopoly which would only expire in 1842. It was popular pressure from Charlevoix and especially La Malbaie that led to the tenuous beginnings of colonization in the Saguenay region. After an 1829 report demonstrating the fertility levels of the region's soil, a petition asking for permission to settle the Saguenay region began to circulate in La Malbaie. The government refused it and ordered further explorations of the region between 1829 and 1836, hoping to find a land link between Ha! Ha! Bay and Baie-Saint-Paul. A second petition was launched in 1835, which led to the government and the Hudson's Bay Company to finally cede cutting rights to a company from La Malbaie called the Société des Vingt et un.
The company's schooner sailed from La Malbaie on April 25, 1838, and made several stopovers along the banks of the Saguenay. After setting up temporary camps near Tadoussac, they built their first sawmill at L'Anse St-Jean. Their goal was to reach Ha! Ha! Bay to build a permanent facility.
Bagot Township and the evolution of Grande-Baie and Bagotville
The Société des vingt et un arrived in what is now the Grande-Baie sector on June 11, 1838. After surveying the forest and assessing its potential, the colonists built the first lock on the Ha! Ha! River. In October of that same year, they completed the first sawmill and created the foundation of what would become Grande-Baie. The first families arrived during the fall, and jack pine and Eastern white pine logging operations began in 1839. The hydraulic power of the two main rivers, Ha! Ha! and Mars, and the bay's tributaries was used to run several sawmills. Mars Simard, a resident of Baie-Saint-Paul, opened his own sawmill on the Mars River and founded Bagotville, the bay's second settlement. Colonists from Baie-Saint-Paul moved to the new outpost, while those from La Malbaie preferred Grande-Baie, which had 110 inhabitants in 1839.
The Société des Vingt et un began to struggle after it lost two years worth of cutting when log-booms breached in 1840 and 1841. Their main purchaser, an English wood merchant named William Price, acquired all of the company's shares in 1842. He also bought the Mars Simard sawmill in 1843, making Price the owner of every sawmill in lower Saguenay.
The end of the Hudson's Bay Company's exclusive lease allowed the lawful colonization of the Saguenay region to begin. The territory organized itself independently and Jean-Baptiste Duberg was mandated to survey land for the new Bagot Township (named after Sir Charles Bagot) and divide county seats for the new constituency. Duberg was also responsible for mapping a road to Chicoutimi during the summer of 1842, which would eventually become Saint-Jean-Baptiste Boulevard and Grande-Baie Nord Boulevard.
The Bagot Township was structurally unique since its population was concentrated in two areas: Bagot Village (Grande-Baie) and Bagot Town (Bagotville). John Kane, a land agent originally sent by the government to collect fees for use of Crown lands, became the township's first mayor in 1850. The Province of Canada created the counties of Tadoussac and Chicoutimi in 1844.
The region's first school was built between the Ha! Ha! and Mars Rivers to serve the bay's two population hubs. The clergy began to register the population of Grande-Baie in 1842 and Bagotville in 1845. On October 15, 1844, the Oblates arrived in Grande-Baie to found a mission. A fire destroyed most of the township in 1846. The parishes of Saint-Alexis-de-Grande-Baie and Saint-Alphonse-de-Bagotville were canonically erected in 1857 and 1861 respectively. In 1851, the population around Ha! Ha! Bay reached 2,438; they mostly depended on logging and agriculture for their livelihoods.
Grande-Baie built its first post office in 1855, and was proclaimed a municipality in 1860. Bagotville became incorporated in 1876 and Grande-Baie followed suit in 1908. Agriculture began to develop rapidly during the 1850s and focused mainly on cereal production. The blueberry harvest was also an important activity until the arrival of railways in Chambord near St-Jean Lake in 1888.
An economic downturn occurred during this period and demand decreased for Saguenay timber. In 1856, there were twenty-six small sawmills around the bay, in addition to the main ones on the Ha! Ha! and Mars Rivers. The slowdown during the 1870s led many mills to shut down or convert from pine to spruce. Even though the logging industry experienced difficulties, the dairy industry flourished; by 1894, the number of cheese factories had increased to six.
St-Urbain Road was opened in 1870 and connected Grande-Baie to Baie-Saint-Paul. Telegraphs linked the two towns in 1880. In 1859, the first jetty was built on Ha! Ha! Bay in Bagotville. Three years later its first quay was built, which was later purchased by the Canadian government in 1876. Bagotville's marine facilities, which were mainly used by Canada Steamship Lines, added a shipyard in 1853.
Industrialization of Port-Alfred and the development from 1900 to 1976
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.