Saint-Léonard is a community in

Madawaska County Madawaska County (2016 population 32,741), also known as the "New Brunswick Panhandle", is located in northwestern New Brunswick, Canada. Over 90% of the county's population speaks French. Its Francophone population are known as "Brayons." Fore ...

New Brunswick New Brunswick (french: Nouveau-Brunswick, , locally ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is one of the three Maritime provinces and one of the four Atlantic provinces. It is the only province with both English and ...

, Canada. It held town status prior to 2023.

History

Saint-Léonard was once a popular town during Prohibition in the United States as it was easy to smuggle alcohol to Van Buren. The town's economy is driven by

potato The potato is a starchy food, a tuber of the plant ''Solanum tuberosum'' and is a root vegetable native to the Americas. The plant is a perennial in the nightshade family Solanaceae. Wild potato species can be found from the southern Unit ...

farming and a J.D. Irving Limited sawmill. Saint-Léonard is officially bilingual but it is predominantly a Francophone community. On June 30, 2008, a truck carrying 12 million bees overturned near Saint-Léonard. This accident was the first of its kind in New Brunswick. On 1 January 2023, Saint-Léonard amalgamated with the village of Sainte-Anne-de-Madawaska and parts of four local service districts to form the new town of Vallée-des-Rivières. The community's name remains in official use.

Geography

It is located on the east bank of the Saint John River opposite

Van Buren, Maine Van Buren is a town on the Saint John River in Aroostook County, Maine, United States; located across from Saint-Leonard, New Brunswick, Canada. The population was 2,038 at the 2020 census. It is named after U.S. President Martin Van Buren. G ...

, to which it is connected via the Saint Leonard–Van Buren Bridge.

Climate

The town has a warm-summer

humid continental climate A humid continental climate is a climatic region defined by Russo-German climatologist Wladimir Köppen in 1900, typified by four distinct seasons and large seasonal temperature differences, with warm to hot (and often humid) summers and freezing ...

(

Köppen Köppen is a German surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Bernd Köppen (born 1951), German pianist and composer * Carl Köppen (1833-1907), German military advisor in Meiji era Japan * Edlef Köppen (1893–1939), German author and ...

: ''Dfb''), even for this type of climate the warm season can be milder for a non-coastal city like Saint John, because the

Great Lakes The Great Lakes, also called the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes in the mid-east region of North America that connect to the Atlantic Ocean via the Saint Lawrence River. There are five lak ...

and

Appalachians The Appalachian Mountains, often called the Appalachians, (french: Appalaches), are a system of mountains in eastern to northeastern North America. The Appalachians first formed roughly 480 million years ago during the Ordovician Period. They ...

hold much of the heat. that come from the

Gulf of Mexico The Gulf of Mexico ( es, Golfo de México) is an ocean basin and a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean, largely surrounded by the North American continent. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United ...

and the interior of the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

. But winters are substantially cold with spring and fall with pleasant temperatures. File:Saint-Léonard, New Brunswick (1918).jpg, Saint-Léonard, 1918 File:Saint-Léonard,NB.jpg, Saint-Leonard railroad station

Demographics

In the

2021 Census of Population The 2021 Canadian census was a detailed enumeration of the Canadian population with a reference date of May 11, 2021. It follows the 2016 Canadian census, which recorded a population of 35,151,728. The overall response rate was 98%, which is sli ...

conducted by Statistics Canada, Saint-Léonard had a population of living in of its total private dwellings, a change of from its 2016 population of . With a land area of , it had a population density of in 2021. Mother tongue language (2006)

Education

It has a single school, École Grande-Rivière.

Notable people

References

External links

Town of Saint-Leonard
{{DEFAULTSORT:Saint-Leonard, New Brunswick Communities in Madawaska County, New Brunswick Former towns in New Brunswick New Brunswick populated places on the Saint John River (Bay of Fundy)