François Poulin de Francheville
Encyclopedia
François Poulin de Francheville, Seigneur de Saint-Maurice (7 October 1692 – November 1733) was a Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...

 merchant who was granted permission by the King of France to mine the iron ore deposits on his seigneury in 1730. In 1733, Francheville founded the Compagnie des Forges de Saint-Maurice, but he died that same year.

The ironworks
Ironworks
An ironworks or iron works is a building or site where iron is smelted and where heavy iron and/or steel products are made. The term is both singular and plural, i.e...

 — Forges du St-Maurice
Forges du Saint-Maurice
Forges du Saint-Maurice , just outside of Trois-Rivières, Quebec, is a National Historic Site of Canada, and birthplace of the country's iron industry....

 — built near the town of Trois-Rivières
Trois-Rivières, Quebec
Trois-Rivières is a city in the Mauricie region of Quebec, Canada, located at the confluence of the Saint-Maurice and Saint Lawrence Rivers. It is situated in the Mauricie administrative region, on the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River across from the city of Bécancour...

 (in present-day Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....

), were the only iron industry enterprise in New France
New France
New France was the area colonized by France in North America during a period beginning with the exploration of the Saint Lawrence River by Jacques Cartier in 1534 and ending with the cession of New France to Spain and Great Britain in 1763...

. In 1736, the ironworks were taken over by a company that went bankrupt in 1741. The ironworks then became the property of the Crown, and began producing artillery
Artillery
Originally applied to any group of infantry primarily armed with projectile weapons, artillery has over time become limited in meaning to refer only to those engines of war that operate by projection of munitions far beyond the range of effect of personal weapons...

 pieces and objects of everyday use, such as pots and stoves.

Francheville was also the owner of the slave Marie-Joseph Angélique
Marie-Joseph Angélique
Marie-Joseph Angélique was the name given by her last owners to a Portuguese-born black slave in New France . She was tried and convicted of setting fire to her owner's home, burning much of what is now referred to as Old Montreal...

, who was convicted for starting the 1734 fire of Montreal.

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