Butternut Island on the Bishop’s University campus: A thousand-year-old story
Few people know about Butternut Island located in the Saint-françois River near the mouth of Massawippi River. At the request of the City of Sherbrooke, the island’s name was made official in 2011 by the Commission de toponymie du Québec. The name “Butternut” comes from existence of numerous butternut trees (Juglans cinera L.) on the island.
The name, however, was designated as early as 1870 when Bishop’s College School (BCS) built a footbridge linking the island to the bank of Massawippi River facing Bishop’s College, now Bishop’s University. At the time BCS was located on the campus of Bishop’s College and Butternut Island was then used as a playing field for cricket and football, among other things, most likely until the mid1910s. For a short period, Bishop’s University re-installed a footbridge during the 1970s with the goal of creating a park adjacent to the campus, but the project was eventually abandoned, probably due to the erosion of the island’s shores. In fact, the Saint-françois River has continually eroded the island’s north side since the 1960s and the channel between the island and
the southern banks has been filling with sand since the mid-1970s. The north side suffered serious erosion between 1985 and 1988, then again between 1995 and 1998, so that today only about half of the surface area still remains.
Archeologists refer to the site as Île au Massacre (Massacre Island), a name given by archaeologist father René Levesque in 1962. His justification for the name was based on the legend that Major Robert Rogers was said to have massacred several Abenakis in 1759 on his return from a punitive expedition
against the Village of Odanak. Beyond the legend, René Levesque reported to have discovered fragments of Amerindian pottery in 1962 that date back to the Late Woodland Period, more than a thousand years ago. In 1989, an inventory was carried out on the island and on neighbouring banks of the Saint-françois River by a firm of archeologists at the request of the Town of Lennoxville and the Ministère des affaires culturelles du Québec that also confirmed the findings along with pottery and a number of stone tools.