Out of the skies of cyberspace has emerged five nifty videos about our forebears here in the Townships. Right in the centre of the fivesome is Gould Station in Bury.

The videos belong to « Raising Spirits, » a series of shorts (14 to 20 minutes) « exploring the cemeteries, crossroads, and vanishing places of rural Quebec, » in the words of the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network, the series’ promoter. They are easily found at youTube.com/@QAHNCanada.

Closest to home is the third film in the series, about Gould Station, featuring family historian, Rebecca MacMillan. This once prosperous hamlet has a sawmill and train station, but today it has almost disappeared.

One of Gould Station’s special features is that it contains the Epps home, where Bernard Epps lived and wrote many of his Eastern Townships books. Among them was The Outlaw of Megantic: One Man’s Fight Against Injustice, and another was The Eastern Townships Adventure, an ambitious work that braids together stories of the generations of Townships explorers and settlers before 1900.

Heads up : A brand new edition of The Eastern Townships Adventure is being published by the Townships Sun in partnership with the Eastern Townships Resource Centre and Shoreline Press. The Bury Historical and Heritage Society is hosting its launch on Sunday, December 1st, at the Bury Armoury.

It’s just a bit ironic that Epps does not tell the intriguing story of Gould Station itself in this book, but we have QAHN’s video to do that. In short, Gould was scammed. The railway promised the village it would have its own station if it paid for the tracks. Gould paid up, but because of the terrain, the company situated its station about 10 kilometres away from the village―in Bury! So in 1875, when the railroad was built, thus was born Gould Station—in the municipality of Bury.

The five films were produced this summer under the leadership of historian Heather Darch. They begin with Episode 1, Malmaison, telling the story of this hamlet in Stanbridge Township, once the seigneury of James McGill.

The second episode, Heathton, is about this crossroads in Barnston Township near Stanstead, located along the Stagecoach Road.

The fourth, Magoon’s Point, shows the ruins of a community near Georgeville on Lake Memphremagog, once renowned for its lime production.

In the final episode, Townships writer Maurice Crossfield tells a story about the Lost Nation, a place that no longer exists except for a tiny overgrown graveyard in the middle of a woods in West Bolton, in Bolton Township.