The History of Boulevard Gréber

[[File:Hull, (Lower Canada), on the Ottawa River; at the Chaudier (sic) Falls, 1830.jpg|thumb|left|Hull (Lower Canada) on the Ottawa River; at the Chaudier [sic] Falls, 1830, by Thomas Burrowes. Prior to European settlement, the Gatineau area was inhabited by the Algonquin people which is part of the larger Anishinaabe. The current city of Gatineau is centred on an area formerly called Hull. It is the oldest European colonial settlement in the National Capital Region, but this area was essentially not developed by Europeans until after the American Revolutionary War, when the Crown granted land through the Leaders and Associates program of the Lower Canada Executive, which brought settlement in the Ottawa Valley. Hull was founded on the north shore of the Ottawa River in 1800 by Philemon Wright at the portage around the Chaudière Falls, just upstream (or west) from the confluence of the Gatineau and Rideau rivers with the Ottawa River. Wright brought his family, four other families, and 25 (or 33, according to Philemon's own conflicting reports) labourers with the hope of establishing an agricultural community. However, by 1806, Wright and his family took advantage of the large forest stands and began the Ottawa River timber trade, floating the first square timber raft down the Ottawa River to Québec City. For a while, the industry was under a monopoly known as the Gatineau Privilege. The original settlement was called Wright's Town, Lower Canada, and was later renamed as Hull, when it was incorporated in 1875. Bytown, founded in 1832, stood across the river from Wright's Town. In 2002, after amalgamation, Hull became part of a larger jurisdiction named the City of Gatineau. In 1820, before immigrants from Ireland and Great Britain arrived in great numbers, Hull Township had a population of 707; these included 365 men, 113 women, and 229 children. The high number of men were related to workers in the lumber trade. In 1824, there were 106 families and 803 persons. During the rest of the 1820s, the population of Hull doubled, with the arrival of Protestant immigrants from Ulster, now Northern Ireland. By 1851, the population of the County of Ottawa was 11,104, of which 2,811 lived in Hull. By comparison, Bytown had a population of 7,760 in 1851. By 1861, Ottawa County had a population of 15,671, of which 3,711 lived in Hull. Gradually, French Canadians also migrated to the township; their proportion of the population increased from 10% in 1850, to 50% in 1870, and 90% in 1920. Industrial development in the mid-19th century attracted large numbers of French-Canadian workers to Hull. The Gatineau River, like the Ottawa River, was a basic transportation resource for the draveurs, timber rafters who transported logs via the rivers from lumber camps to downriver destinations. (The Gatineau River flows south into the Ottawa River, which flows east to the St. Lawrence River near Montreal.) The log-filled Ottawa River, as viewed from Hull, was featured on the back of the Canadian one-dollar bill; the paper money was replaced by a dollar coin (the "loonie") in 1987. The last of the dwindling activity of the draveurs on these rivers ended a few years later. Very little remains of the original 1800 settlement of Hull because the oldest sectors of the town were destroyed by several fires, especially the destructive fire in 1900. The fire also seriously damaged the pont des Chaudières (Chaudière Bridge), but the bridge was rebuilt to join Ottawa to Hull at Victoria Island. In the 1940s, during World War II, Hull, along with various other regions within Canada, such as Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, and Île Sainte-Hélène, was the site of prisoner-of-war camps. Hull's prison was identified only by a number, as were Canada's other war prisons. The prisoners of war (POWs) were organized by nationality and status: civilian or military status. On 11 November 1992, Ghislaine Chénier, Mayor by interim for the city of Hull, unveiled War Never Again, a marble stele monument that commemorates the cost of war for the men, women and children of Hull.

Source: Wikipedia