The First Farmer

Louis Hébert was born around 1575 in Paris, at 129 rue Saint-Honoré, in the parish of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. His father, Nicolas Hébert, was an apothecary — a compounder of medicines from plants — who served in the household of the former queen of France, Catherine de’ Medici. His mother, Jacqueline Pajot, died when Louis was a child.

Louis followed his father into the trade. By 1600, he had established himself as a licensed apothecary in Paris, selling medicines and spices from a shop. On February 19, 1601, he married Marie Rollet at the Church of Saint-Sulpice, Paris. They would have three children: Anne, Marie-Guillemette, and Guillaume — all born in Paris.

He might have lived and died as a Parisian shopkeeper. But Louis Hébert had a passion for cultivating plants that would carry him across an ocean, and his descendants across four centuries.

In 1606, Louis joined an expedition to Acadia led by his cousin’s husband, Pierre du Gua de Monts, alongside Samuel de Champlain. He lived at Port Royal — now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia — from 1606 to 1607, and again from 1611 to 1613, practicing medicine and experimenting with farming in the New World soil. He grew hemp and other crops. He studied which European plants could survive the Canadian climate and which native plants had medicinal properties. He was, by all accounts, good at it.

In 1613, the English destroyed Port Royal. Louis returned to Paris and reopened his pharmacy. But Champlain, who had founded a small trading post at Quebec in 1608, remembered the apothecary with the green thumb.

In the winter of 1616–1617, Champlain came to Paris searching for support for his struggling colony. He found Louis and made him an offer: bring your family to Quebec for three years, practice medicine, establish farming. The Compagnie de Canada would pay 600 livres a year and grant ten acres of land. Louis agreed. He sold his practice, his pharmacy, his home — everything.

At the port of Honfleur, the company forced him to sign a new contract. The salary was cut to 300 livres. He would have to give all his produce to the company. Having already sold everything in Paris, with no way back, Louis signed.

On April 11, 1617, Louis, Marie, and their three children — Anne (fourteen), Marie-Guillemette (nine), and Guillaume (three) — boarded the Saint-Étienne and sailed for Quebec.

They arrived at Tadoussac on June 14, 1617, and reached Quebec by mid-July. The settlement was tiny — fewer than sixty people, huddled in a wooden compound called the Habitation on the riverbank. Louis selected his ten acres on the heights above the settlement, on a site that today lies between Rue Sainte-Famille and Rue Couillard, on the grounds of the Séminaire de Québec and the Basilique-Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Québec.

This was the first land grant by the French government in New France.

Louis, his son Guillaume, and one unnamed servant cleared the old-growth forest with an axe, a pick, and a spade. There was no plough — the first plough would not arrive in Canada until after Louis’s death. By hand, they broke the soil and planted corn, winter wheat, beans, and peas. They established an apple orchard and a vineyard. They raised cattle, swine, and fowl.

Champlain himself noted that Louis Hébert was “the first head of a family residing in the country, who lived from the produce of the soil.” In a colony that existed for the fur trade, where the commercial interests actively opposed the clearing of forests because it was bad for trapping, Louis was the only settler besides Champlain who believed the future lay in farming. The fur traders resented him. The land resisted him. The winters tried to kill him. He persisted.

Marie Rollet worked beside him. She was described as the first European woman to cultivate the land in New France. She managed the household, tended the garden, and became a cultural mediator between the French and the Indigenous peoples of the St. Lawrence. She later took in and educated Indigenous girls entrusted to the Jesuits.

By 1620, their household on the heights was the social center of the colony. Louis served as chief magistrate, physician, and surgeon for the settlement — there was no one else. In 1623, he was made the first Seigneur of New France, granted a noble fief of all the land he had cleared, plus a league of frontage on the Saint-Charles River.

In the second half of 1620 — the same year the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts — a child was born in the Quebec settlement. Her parents were Pierre Desportes, the colony’s warehouse keeper, and Françoise Langlois. The baby was named Hélène, after her godmother: Hélène Boullé, the wife of Samuel de Champlain.

Hélène Desportes is considered the first child of European parents born alive in the St. Lawrence settlement. In the year of her birth, the entire population of Quebec was fewer than sixty people.

Fourteen years later, on October 1, 1634, Hélène married Guillaume Hébert — the son of Louis Hébert and Marie Rollet. The apothecary’s boy and the first Canadian-born child. Guillaume had inherited half his father’s farm on the heights. He was in his early twenties.

Guillaume and Hélène had three children: Joseph, born November 3, 1636; Françoise, born about January 23, 1638; and Angélique, born August 2, 1639.

Guillaume Hébert died on September 23, 1639. He was about twenty-five. The settling of his estate showed their home was in poor condition. Hélène, now nineteen years old with three small children, moved into a cottage measuring twenty-four by eighteen feet “near the church of Notre-Dame.” She married Noël Morin on January 9, 1640, and had twelve more children with him. In her later years, she became a midwife — the first recorded sage-femme in Canadian parish records. Two of her daughters, a daughter-in-law, and three granddaughters also became midwives.

Françoise Hébert — Guillaume and Hélène’s second child, born in 1638 — is Carl’s direct ancestor. She is the link.

On January 25, 1627, Louis Hébert died from injuries sustained in a fall on the ice at Quebec. He was about fifty-two. Father Joseph Le Caron was present. Louis received the last rites and settled his affairs. He was buried first in the Récollet cemetery, then later transferred to a vault in the Récollet chapel beside Brother Pacifique Duplessis.

He had lived in Quebec for ten years. He had fed the colony from his garden when supply ships were delayed. He had served as its doctor, its judge, and its farmer. He had cleared forest and planted wheat with hand tools in a place where the temperature dropped to forty below and the river froze solid from November to April.

After his death, the British privateer David Kirke invaded Quebec in 1629. Most of the French settlers were put on ships and sent back to France. Marie Rollet and her family stayed. They were the only family to remain in Quebec during the three-year English occupation. When France reclaimed the colony in 1632, Marie was still there — still farming, still raising the grandchildren, still the anchor of the settlement.

Marie Rollet married Guillaume Hubou in 1629. She died on May 27, 1649, in Quebec, at the age of about sixty-nine. The priest wrote in the register: “veuve du sieur Hébert depuis longtemps” — “widow of Monsieur Hébert for a long time.”

She had been in Quebec for thirty-two years.

Françoise Hébert — the granddaughter of Louis Hébert, the daughter of Guillaume Hébert and Hélène Desportes — was born about January 23, 1638, in Quebec City. She was the third generation of her family to live in Canada, and only the second generation of European children born there.

On November 20, 1651, at Quebec City, Françoise married Guillaume Fournier. Guillaume had been born about 1623 in Coulmer, a village in Normandy. He had arrived in New France and settled on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, in the seigneurie that would become Montmagny.

Among their children was Louis Fournier, born in 1672 at Montmagny. Françoise Hébert died on March 16, 1716, at Montmagny, at the age of about seventy-eight. Guillaume Fournier died in 1699.

With their marriage, the Hébert blood — the blood of the first farmer and the first midwife — moved from Quebec City to the south shore, where it would flow through the Bellechasse corridor and the Richelieu Valley for the next two centuries.

In Parc Montmorency, on the heights of Old Quebec, there is a bronze monument. On top stands Louis Hébert, holding a sheaf of wheat in one hand and a sickle in the other. Below him, Marie Rollet kneels with a child. Below her, their son-in-law Guillaume Couillard drives a plough — the plough that arrived too late for Louis to use.

The monument was erected in 1918, three centuries after Louis arrived. It stands on the same heights where he cleared the forest and broke the soil. The Basilique-Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Québec — the seat of the oldest Catholic parish in North America — was built on his land. The Séminaire de Québec was built on his land. The cobblestone streets of Old Quebec were laid on his land.

In 1776, workers digging near the seminary gate discovered the stone foundation of the original Hébert house. It had been there, buried, for a century and a half.

Louis Hébert did not know he was founding anything. He was an apothecary who loved plants, who got cheated on his contract, who cleared trees with an axe because no one would give him a plough, who fed his neighbors from his garden when the ships from France were late, who slipped on the ice one January morning and never got up. He had been in Canada for ten years. He was fifty-two.

His wife stayed for thirty-two years. His granddaughter Françoise married a Norman farmer and moved to the south shore. The line ran through the Fourniers and the Bélangers and the Goyettes and the LaFlammes, south to the mill towns of New England, to Claire born in Lowell in 1924, to Jolene born in 1954, to the family that exists today.

Fourteen generations. Four hundred and nine years. From a pharmacy on the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris to a farm on the heights above the St. Lawrence to a tenement in Little Canada to the Kansas plains. The first farmer of New France is a direct ancestor of the man reading this page.