Magog

The Abenaki travelled the lake they called Memphremagog, "great expanse of water", long before the first settlers, and the name survived. The town began at the lake's outlet, where the Magog River drops towards Sherbrooke, after settlers from New England took up land in the Eastern Townships. Ralph Merry, a Massachusetts man, bought up the land at the outlet and settled there in 1798, and the settlement was known as the Outlet before taking the name Magog, cut from the lake's, in 1855. For decades it was a mill village and a crossing point, with steamboats on the lake linking it to Newport, Vermont.

Cotton transformed it. The railway arrived in 1877, and the Magog Textile and Print Company opened a mill beside the river in 1883, printing the first piece of cotton in Canada the next year; the plant later passed to Dominion Textile. The town grew up around it, French-speaking in a region that had been largely English, and for several generations Magog was a one-industry town, its rhythm set by the mill.

The mill was designated a National Historic Site in 1989 and closed in 2011. Tourism, services and an industrial park had already broadened the economy from the 1960s: the provincial park on Mont Orford dated from 1938, with a ski resort inside it, Autoroute 10 brought Montreal within easy reach, and the waterfront became a park. In 2002 Magog merged with the surrounding Canton de Magog and Omerville, and the enlarged town now lives on visitors, retirees and services for the lake country around it.

Magog belongs to the French-speaking Townships. The region was settled by Loyalists and New Englanders, and English names remain on the lake villages, the summer houses and the cemeteries, but in the second half of the 19th century the mills drew French-Canadian workers, and the town became overwhelmingly francophone. Today the township around Georgeville on the east shore keeps a sizeable English-speaking minority, and the border with Vermont is close enough that Americans are part of the summer crowd.

Music is the town's cultural calling card. The Vieux Clocher, a former church in the centre, has been a performance venue since 1974 and has helped launch many Quebec singers and comedians, and on the mountain the Orford arts centre has run a music academy and summer festival of classical music since 1951. The Benedictine abbey at Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, founded under Dom Joseph Pothier, a restorer of Gregorian chant, adds a monastic note.

Life is outdoors. In summer the lake is for swimming, sailing and cruising, and until 2015 it hosted the Traversée, an international long-distance swim; in winter the town skates on its waterfront trail and skis at Orford and Owl's Head, and the autumn colours bring the biggest crowds of the year. The lake monster Memphré is a cheerful local legend. Manners are relaxed and informal: people greet with bonjour, tutoiement comes quickly, and the terraces of rue Principale are the place to be seen on a summer evening.

About 28,000 people live in Magog, a figure that grew by about 6 per cent between 2016 and 2021. The town is overwhelmingly French-speaking. Most people live in low-rise streets around the centre and in the former village of Omerville, with chalets and larger houses on the lake and the Orford slopes, many of them second homes.

Since the mill closed, the economy has rested on tourism and services: inns, restaurants, the ski resort, the marina and the cruise boats, plus health care, schools, retail along the autoroute and a scatter of light industry. Sherbrooke, half an hour away, supplies university jobs and the larger hospitals. The price of housing, the number of second homes and short-term rentals, and the health of the lake, which is accumulating phosphorus and sediment from runoff, are the issues that fill the local council's agenda.

The day runs on the seasons. Summer mornings start on the beaches and bike paths before the day-trippers arrive; winter afternoons end on the skating trail under the lights. Spring is for the sugar shacks in the hills, and autumn weekends bring traffic jams on the road to the mountain.

Magog eats like the rest of French-speaking Quebec, with poutine, tourtière and sugar-pie staples on the menus, but the Townships add their own produce. The monks of Saint-Benoît-du-Lac have made cheese since 1943 — their Ermite was the first blue cheese made in Quebec — and sell it with their cider and apple products at the abbey shop. Orchards along the west shore and around Dunham supply apples and the region's ice cider, pressed from frozen fruit, a drink first created in Quebec by a Dunham winemaker in 1989; the country around Dunham is the heartland of Quebec wine.

Maple is the spring ritual: sugar shacks in the hills serve ham, beans, omelettes and oreilles de crisse, the fried pork rinds, with syrup over everything, followed by tire d'érable, maple taffy rolled on snow. Summer brings strawberries and later blueberries from the farms and the public market by the beach.

Rue Principale is where the town eats: cafés and bakeries in the morning, casse-croûtes for poutine and hot dogs near the beach, bistros and a microbrewery just off the main street, and pizzerias and creameries busy until late on summer nights. Some restaurants let diners bring their own wine.