![Croche à Jérôme [English]](https://topoesie.com/wp-content/uploads/cache/images/fixe/st_elzear_croche_jerome-1/st_elzear_croche_jerome-1-1826874068.jpg)
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The croche à Jérôme (Jérôme’s Bend) is a bend in the road just before Jérôme Cyr’s farm that has terrified generations of children, especially if they have had to venture there at night. “The winding path led to a [hollow] bordered by marshy ground, overgrown with brush, stunted trees and old stumps. [There were] no houses or lights, just menacing shadows on either side that became bears in our imagination… If you had to go there alone, you would run, heels hitting your backside. And the faster you ran, the more you thought you could hear the sound of a beast’s footsteps following you.1
Jérôme Cyr’s house “was moved to the same road, chemin de la Duval, to be closer to the village. Almost all the houses on the west were [moved] for the same reason.2 When they were moving it, “The house [got stuck right in the middle of] the road because the logs had slipped. They put it back afterwards. It was stuck there for about a day […] in front of Lucien Arsenault’s property.3 Three4 houses as old as the village still stand.4
This anecdote echoes several other stories of family homes being relocated, often using techniques learned in forestry or while clearing land. It symbolizes the end of an era when people cleared rocky land to cultivate stories of life spent between labouring in the forest and an unlikely self-sufficient existence.
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tous les lieux-dits de cette ville
AUDIO
[FRENCH] Interview with Marie-Louis and Monette Bourdages, April 10, 2025.
The houses were moved to make the roads passable in order to get to the village where services were located.
The ingenuity of traditional methods for moving houses (stringers, skids, capstan winches, and animals).
The story of Jean-Guy, also known as Gougou, who moved several houses.
At the croche à Jérôme, “you’d go around a cedar grove […] A bunch of kids have wiped out there.”
“There was a swamp.”
NOTES
1 Rénald Bujold, story collected by Camillia Buenestado-Pilon.
2 Original houses still located on Rang 12 Ouest: “The houses belonging to Amédée Cayouette (his son Évariste inherited it), […] Joseph Arsenault (his son Hector lived there), […] and the one inhabited by Élide Henry and later occupied by her son Yvon Henry […].” Source : Monette Bourdages, story collected by Camillia Buenestado-Pilon, March 2026.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Marie-Louis Bourdages, story collected by Camillia Buenestado-Pilon, March 2026.
IMAGE
Marie-Claude De Souza, 2026.
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