1907-1963
In 1851, the Church Missionary Society in England decided to establish a mission at Moose Factory Island on James Bay. This location was one of the first Hudson’s Bay Company posts in its new territory of Rupert’s Land and was also the oldest English settlement in Ontario, dating from 1671. A Wesleyan Methodist mission had previously operated for seven years at this site but was vacated in 1847. To fill the void, the HBC petitioned the CMS for a new resident missionary.
Most of the students enrolled at the residential school were drawn from the Swampy Cree (Omushkegowuk) settlements along the western James Bay coast and rivers near the Bay. Until the arrival of the railway from the south in 1932, the Moose Factory Mission and School were entirely reliant on the HBC for its major stocks of food and other needed goods. Limited subsistence farming (root vegetables) was carried out at Moose Fort, a practice common at most other Anglican residential schools. HBC supply ships from Montreal or St. John’s called usually once a year and the company’s local coastal steamers were used to transport many of the students to and from their communities on James Bay.
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