Abitibi Canyon Revisited

August 2024

In 2020 my dad and I canoed up a portion of the river searching for what remains of New Post, a Hudson's Bay Company post that closed in the 1920s. Our maps were out of date, the weather (and the bugs) didn't cooperate, and we left empty handed.

This time we were better prepared and, with one trip already under our belt, we found the former post and the cemetery at the site. Buried among the handful of marked graves is Alexander McLeod, the Postmaster and later Clerk of New Post and my fifth great-grandfather. He's also my dad and I's earliest ancestor to come to Canada from Scotland and spent his adult life working for the HBC at Abitibi House and New Post. While the river had changed a bit since he last saw it in 1885, it still feels fantastic to have finally reached the site and to have been able to make the trip with my dad.

Besides hiking through the forests along the bank of the Abibiti we visited the former mining town of Cobalt, stayed in Smooth Rock Falls, popped by a shuttered provincial park, and spent some time in the cemetery.

2020 Abitibi Canyon Trip

July 2020

In mid-July 2020 my dad and I went up to Northern Ontario with a couple of goals in mind. We were going to visit the Ontario Northland Railway flag-stop of Fraserdale, canoe in the Abitibi River, see New Post Falls, and find the grave of our ancestor Alexander McLeod at the former HBC post of New Post.

Along the way there were many opportunities to photograph the ONR, the railway my great-grandfather worked for, and to explore the town of Cochrane.

While we visited Fraserdale and successfully canoed in the Abitibi, a large hydroelectric project that had been completed three years ago radically changed the local rivers and topography. The project didn’t appear on any of our maps, and in the end we played it safe rather than risk overextending ourselves.

With these lessons in mind, we’re already planning our next trip to Abitibi Canyon and New Post!