GuideGatineau

The Lauriault Trail is a benign little hike. Who would suspect that it commemorates a killer?

Actually it wasn’t Jean-Baptist Lauriault who was the killer. It was a hill on the Kingsmere Road that was the killer. Today there is no official trail or road connecting the Kingsmere Road to the Champlain Parkway so it’s hard to realize that the Lauriault Trail parking lot is only a stone’s throw from the south-western tip of Kingsmere Lake.

Before the parkways were built, in a time when farmers were scratching out a living from these rocks, one of the ways they used to travel in to town or to visit their neighbours was down an extension of the Kingsmere Road which dropped more than 200 meters over the face of the escarpment. This was known as Lauriault’s Hill and it was steep enough to kill people.

People and horses too, because when the road was cut there were no cars. The hill was said to require four horses to pull a wagon up it. Imagine trying to go down. Imagine trying to down on ice in winter.

Katherine Fletcher’s book Historical Walks says there was once a sign on the road warning that 13 people had been killed.

Dr. T. B. Davies, coroner of Hull called it “the most dangerous hill in Ottawa district.”

When cars did arrive on the scene they spawned a story that Lauriault’s Hill was so steep that your Model-T Ford could only be driven up by going in reverse. Evidently going front first tilted the engine above the level of the gas tank and since the fuel was gravity fed this stalled the engine.

All that ended in 1957 when the new parkway was put through and Lauriault’s Hill was closed.