Page Title

Excerpts from Voices From The Lost Villages, The Islands, p 137

Tom had a houseful of cats that sat on his shoulder at mealtime and with whom he shared his dinner bite for bite. Chickens walked freely in and out of his cabin in the summertime. He loved to hunt and fish and pick wild berries and he often did this in the nude. But he was generous, often bringing fresh fish and homemade jam to Canadian families across the River. Tom knew the River up and down and where the fish were plentiful.

"He'd take a little stick of dynamite and go to the side of the boat and he knew where all them wall-eye beds were down around the foot of the island. The other fishermen used to hate that but Tom didn't care. He'd light that little short fuse with his old cigarette there and boom--let her go--and the fish would just roll! If anybody wanted a good feed of fish they'd get Tom to do it."

Lloyd Max Robertson

Tom made homemade brew which packed a wallop.

"I remember goin' down there when we were walkin' around the island. Tom was a bootlegger. Back in them days pretty nearly everybody was, you know. He made dandelion wine and grape wine and every kind of wine you wanted Tom would have. And he drank it. Why it'd pretty near kill ya. Us kids we didn't get any 'cause we were young but the guys who went down there fox huntin'...they'd go down to Tom's and he'd load 'em with that grape wine and they'd be two or three days getting' off the island.

Another thing...Croil's Island was in the township of Louisville so Louisville had to take care of the roads and the gravel pit was right up past the school and every so many summers they'd hire a bunch of guys to fix the roads. Tom was hired too and he would get the guys drunk and we'd be walking home from school, us kids, and those guys'd be lying alongside the ditch just passed right out from Tom's wine."

Lloyd Max Robertson

Voices From

the Lost Villages

By Rosemary Rutley

In the late 1950's one hundred square miles of land was flooded with the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power project. Six villages and 6,000 residents were relocated. This book gives voice to a community and a people that would be changed forever by one of the largest engineering feats of the 20th century. Since its first printing in 1998 this book has sold more than 3000 copies and has been embraced not only by former residents, but a new generation of Canadians, who have been captivated by the voices of these lost communities below the waters of St. Lawrence River.