Astride a border.

• Author: Wyels, Joyce Gregory
• Position: !Ojo! - Stanstead, Quebec

ONCE A YEAR, the citizens of Stanstead, Quebec, come together to celebrate "the friendliest border in the world." While clusters of spectators wave from the sidelines, a down-home procession of fire engines, horse-drawn wagons, and assorted civic groups parades down Dufferin Street, past French and English schools, the handsome museum, imposing churches, and other nineteenth-century-buildings.

Like many communities in Quebec's Eastern Townships, this pleasant town on the U.S. border was founded by New Englanders after the American Revolution. Both the architecture and the names of the hamlets--Stanstead, Knowlton, Dunham, Ogden--suggest an oasis of Anglo-Saxon heritage in French Quebec. Today, with Cite Cantons-de-l'Est 90 percent French-speaking, most of Stanstead's residents are comfortably bilingual.

An amalgamation of three smaller villages (Stanstead Plain, Rock Island, and Beebe), Stanstead is a border town, and proud of it. In fact, Stanstead's position astride the U.S.-Canadian border is its defining characteristic. But the very border that prompts celebrations all but disappears along the leafy streets of Stanstead and its American counterpart, Derby Line, Vermont. In lieu of fences, a knee-high marker at the foot of Church Street shows Canada on one side, U.S.A. on the other, while a nearby sign points the way to Customs and Immigration.

Beyond the corner where U.S. Customs and Douane Canadienne face one another across a two-lane street, only a painted yellow stripe marks the boundary between Canada and the United States. The stately homes on the north side of the appropriately named "Rue Canusa" have Canadian addresses; their neighbors to the south reside in the United States.

Nor is Canusa Avenue the only geographical oddity in Stanstead. The community of nearly thirty-two hundred people is famous for its "line houses," or buildings that straddle the international border. Seine of these buildings can be traced to the U.S. era of Prohibition, when crafty, locals took advantage of the town's strategic position on the route between Montreal and Boston to engage in smuggling.

But the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, built directly on the border, began with nobler intentions. Martha Stewart Haskell had the building constructed in 1901 as a memorial to her husband, American businessman Carlos F. Haskell. A historical marker describes the...