The Sicard lineage into the 20th century

The first sequence of the video shows the scale model of a cofferdam exhibited on the upper floor of the cider mill house. This is a type of structure used to control the water level in order to work in the dry during construction of a mill’s dike or water channels. On the ground floor, historian and cultural animator Stéphane Tessier (ST) tells us about the ingenuity displayed by every generation of Sicards for the construction of various types of mills and machinery. He ends his presentation with Arthur Sicard, renowned descendant of the millers, who used his family’s trademark know-how to invent the first snowblower.

(ST) The Sicards are a family of millers. Their story is very interesting.

Millers in New France at the time of the seigneurial system were in charge of making the flour and building the mills. This was different than in France, where flour workers made the flour, and millers built the mills. These were two separate jobs.

Very few people who came here had both these trades and skills. So millers had to learn to do several things. They had to develop many skills.

A miller had to know how to make flour, how to build a windmill, a watermill, a flour mill, a mill for carding and fulling wool, a sawmill, etc.

Joseph succeeded his father Simon as miller of the Sault-au-Récollet mill in 1768. In fact, he was also captain of the local militia like his father.

So there was an expertise that stayed within the Sicard family for several generations. They, like many other millers, had boundless knowledge about the inner workings of gears and mechanisms.

No surprise then that Arthur Sicard, living in Saint-Léonard, and coming from a long line of millers—people who knew about mechanisms and gears—, was himself a natural tinkerer.

In 1927, he invented something that would greatly help us weather our Canadian winters: he converted a combine harvester into the very first snowblower.

Thank you, Arthur Sicard!