VENOSTA, Que.
We were inspired to spend a weekend in the municipality of Low when an opinion piece on the importance of saving Quebec’s ghost towns came across my desk. We have gone ghost-town hunting in Pennsylvania and in Texas, but searching in our own back yard had never occurred to us.
Venosta, the ancestral town of the writer, isn’t strictly a ghost town, as many homes are obviously lived in and the lush land is still farmed. Settled primarily by Irish immigrants in the 1800s, this region in the Gatineau Hills about 50 kilometres north of Ottawa is an agricultural and logging area, and so has benefited and suffered from the historic highs and lows of those industries.
We got more than we bargained for with our rented cottage in Low, and a little less than we expected in the ghost town, a collection of picturesque falling-down buildings surrounded by high grass, and fields and trees beyond.
My great grandfather was an irish immigrant there as well.
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Our family comes from there as well
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i was born and raised there
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it so sad to see how everything is going down
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Anyone know of any Maddens? They were stonemasons
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Michael Coyle (married to Bell Cobey) was a Venosta Irish farmer, born near the turn of the century,. and brother to sister Bridget Coyle -married to Richard Murphy in 1865, in Ireland. Michael Coyle was a close relative to President John F. Kennedy through John’s mother’s family Rose Fitzgerald’s in Ireland. Michael Coyle’s farm was on the other side of the lake near the sand hill and Brown’s field.
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