Visitation Island Nature Park

This guide to Visitation Island Nature Park in Montreal follows a riverside mill that changed hands and failed repeatedly for nearly two centuries, from Simon Sicar's original 1720s dam and sawmill through decades as a nail mill, then a combined sawmill and paper mill. It traces businessman J. R. Walker's 1906 purchase of the ruins, the 1915 fire that gutted his paper mill, and the turbines whose blades kept freezing in the river each winter. Listen for the low stone ruins scattered among the trees as you walk the shoreline.