You are standing in front of the old train station in Highwater, a hamlet located at the junction of the Missisquoi River and the border road. Moses Elkins and his family, from Vermont, were the first to settle here in July 1797.
Originally called South Potton, the hamlet was renamed Mansonville Station with the arrival of the railroad in 1873. The arrival of the South Eastern Railway, which provided a link between Montreal and Newport, Vermont, from where the train to Boston departed, transformed the hamlet. A new station was built, as well as a telegraph office and a customs house. The hamlet of 250 inhabitants also had four general stores, a hotel, and a school.
A second railroad was built nearby a few years later. In 1907, the Orford Mountain Railway linked Mansonville to Eastman. Extended in 1910 by the Canadian Pacific Railway to Troy Junction, Vermont, this railroad is known for the small six-car train that ran twice daily. Until 1956, the Peanut, as it was known to the locals, brought vacationers to the area's hotels and transported all kinds of goods, such as lumber, ore, animals and even cream cans.
In 1909, to avoid confusion with the new train station built in Mansonville three years earlier, the residents of Mansonville Station held a contest and renamed their hamlet Highwater, which is not without irony considering the numerous floods that have marked its history.
Highwater got a second wind in the 1920's with the onset of prohibition in the United States. Americans crossed the border to dance and have a drink at the Highwater Inn or the John T. House saloon-hotel, where prostitutes, blackjack players and smugglers, who were very active in Potton at that time, met.
At the beginning of the Second World War, some of the hotels housed workers engaged in the construction of a pipeline linking Portland, Maine, to the Montreal refineries. The work was of the utmost urgency as German submarines in the St. Lawrence threatened the oil tankers that supplied Canada with fuel. Completed in 1941, the pipeline is still in operation today.
Highwater would later enjoy a certain international renown when Gerald Bull, an engineer specializing in ballistics, set up his weapons research center there in 1964. Until 1980, he and his team of 200 workers were busy designing a super-cannon capable of propelling objects into orbit around the earth. His successes aroused the interest of many countries, but also suspicions. Caught in international intrigues involving the CIA, South Africa and Iraq, among others, Gerald Bull was assassinated in Brussels in 1990.