East Broughton was a stop on the Quebec Central Railway
Mary Agnes Later and Hollis Thompson
From his later census records, we see that her husband Hollis Thompson’s occupation is given as “engineer,” by which I first took to mean mechanical or civil. But then I saw that Rochester was a railroad town on a branch line of the Boston and Maine Railroad. Portland, Me. was also the U.S. terminus of the Grand Trunk Railway, precursor of the Canadian National Railway.
Now I was on the right track. It turns out that East Broughton, where the Later family lived, was also a railroad stop, but not on the Grand Trunk.
The Quebec Central Railway served the Eastern Townships region south of the St. Lawrence, headquartered in Sherbrooke and connecting to the U.S. rail network in Newport, Vt.
Hollis Thompson was a railroad engineer whose route went through a small town in Quebec where he apparently got a young girl in trouble. George Later was a year older than Agnes, and maybe it was he who helped to arrange for the shotgun wedding. We know they stayed in touch by mail across and the decades and miles.
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