William Blake and his wife at Cap Blanc (1906).
© Musée de Charlevoix, Roland Gagné coll.
Beginning in 1915, dynamiting along the St. Lawrence for the railroad disfigured the places summer residents frequented. William Hume Blake and many other summer residents wondered if Charlevoix would lose its charm to the inevitable arrival of modernity.
Taken in 1906, this photograph shows William and his wife near Cap Blanc in Pointe-au-Pic (La Malbaie). Their daughter Helen married Philip Mackenzie, and their descendants are still among the Charlevoix’s most loyal visitors.
William Hume Blake died in 1924. His funeral was held at the Protestant church in La Malbaie. Among the pallbearers were some of the guides with whom he had shared so many adventures over the years.