Culture pour tous

Social Solidarity in the Heart of the Appalachians

Saint-Venant-de-Paquette’s poetry walk breathes new life into the region

Perched high on the slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, Saint‑Venant‑de‑Paquette, with just over a hundred inhabitants, is one of the tiniest villages in Quebec. Despite its picturesque charm and beautiful scenery, the village is sadly one of Quebec’s 150 or so municipalities officially listed as “economically decayed.”

But Saint-Venant has a population of diehard residents who are resisting the statistical decline of their village. Since 1993, they have organized a great many cultural activities that have breathed new life into a region that desperately needs it. In 2005, the village adopted a motto with a very clear message: “On renonce à renoncer” (never say die).

One of the most iconic initiatives of this rebirth is the poetry walk, which winds from the village to a visitor interpretation centre, called the tree house, and the church-museum, a place of worship that has been converted into a place celebrating cultural heritage and creative expression.

Throughout the summer, a committee of the heritage preservation group Les Amis du patrimoine de Saint‑Venant‑de‑Paquette (APSVP) organizes a variety of indoor or outdoor events, such as popular music, concerts, plays, storytelling and workshops, that help attract tourists to the region.

A community project

The struggle to save Saint‑Venant-‑de‑Paquette dates back to the preparations for its 125^th anniversary, in 1987. Delighted with the results of the celebrations, the members of the organizing committee continued to meet in order to, among other things, discuss what should be done about the village’s historic church, which had been built in 1877 and was badly in need of repair.

The well-known singer-songwriter Richard Séguin has a home in Saint‑Venant‑de‑Paquette and became involved in organizing benefit performances to help fund the church repairs. These early efforts gradually expanded, and they were eventually able to save the building and the religious heritage it contained.

The poetry walk was also the brainchild of Richard Séguin, who talked about it among friends. Despite the uncertainty surrounding its funding, the project progressed. Sculptor Roger Nadeau suggested including sculptures made from local materials that wouldn’t cost anything—wood, old farming equipment and stone, a very abundant local resource recalling the colossal work of the early settlers, who had to clear it from their fields.

When Mayor Roland Lavigne, a dairy farmer who had served as mayor of the village for the past 25 years, gave his consent, the project took off, with more and more people becoming involved. At the socio-economic forum for the Coaticook region in the fall of 1997, the poetry walk was included within the priority of developing a cultural circuit for the region.

Other people joined in, including René Deschênes and Guy Laliberté, two horticulture professors at the Institut de technologie agroalimentaire in Saint‑Hyacinthe. They suggested various landscaping plans and offered their students’ help for creating elements along the walk, such as the gazebo, fences, a bridge, flowerbeds, ornamental plants,  etc.

The villagers, for their part, stockpiled stones for Roger Nadeau to use in creating characters that would be scattered throughout the site as a tribute to the early settlers and to serve as a contemporary theme for the walk. Stone was thus transformed from an implacable enemy into sculpture, an inviting bench or part of a path.

The project benefited from a great deal of volunteer labour during work bees that included horticulturists, artists, farmers, tree growers, architects, poets, etc. “There was a collective fervour, with everyone turning up with their equipment or expertise to prepare the site,” says Richard Séguin.

The poetry walk was inaugurated in 1998, with a visitor welcome area, children’s area and Alfred Desrochers Garden. In 1999, the Musée de la nature et des sciences de Sherbrooke became a partner for designing exhibitions. In 2000, the APSVP officially acquired the church and its 10-acre* churchyard.

The poetry walk celebrated its 10^th anniversary in 2009. It now has some ten thematic areas presenting the flora from the surrounding forest and horticultural environment and associating the different trees, bushes and flowers with sculptures and the works of some forty poets.

A sense of cultural heritage and pride

The village receives almost 5,000 visitors during the tourist season and has three inns to accommodate them. “Some of the impact can certainly be quantified, but much of it is unseen and has to do with the development of a sense of pride,” says Richard Séguin. While the poetry walk was his idea, it was achieved through the region’s inhabitants rallying around a crucial issue—the economic viability of their communities and their survival as administrative and social entities.

Discussing the reasons for its success, Richard Séguin says that “the initiative must be viewed as a collective undertaking that produced a sense of ownership for the project, from its design to its realization. A sense of ownership is not just an economic statistic based on the exploitation of the region’s resources; it’s cultural too.”

 

Richard Séguin deplores the fact that “the importance of cultural investment—often volunteer labour—is not sufficiently taken into account.” He wonders “what could be done to facilitate the work of volunteers and organizations, think of rural and cultural development, and support social cohesion and inter-regional activities in a region like ours, which is disadvantaged by its remoteness, lack of services and a simplistic perception of what the region has to offer in terms of resources.”

“You need people to spark things,” he says, citing the example of Fred Pellerin, the fabulous storyteller from the Mauricie region who has done much to promote his native village of Saint‑Élie‑de‑Caxton, the larger‑than‑life subject of his tales.