Land for sale in United Counties of Prescott and Russell, Ontario

About United Counties of Prescott and Russell

The area

Prescott and Russell is Ontario's easternmost county, about 2,004 km² between the City of Ottawa and the Quebec border, with the Ottawa River along its north side and Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry to the south. It had about 95,600 people in 2021, and French was the only mother tongue of more than half of them. Eight municipalities make it up; the largest are Clarence-Rockland (about 26,500), Russell Township (about 19,600) and the Town of Hawkesbury (about 10,200). Most of the land is farmed, with large woodlands, the Alfred Bog and the South Nation River valley. Larose Forest, owned by the counties, covers more than 10,900 hectares and was built up by planting over 18 million trees.

History

The counties recognize the area as unceded Anishinaabe territory, including the Algonquin Nation, and as traditional and treaty land of the Haudenosaunee, including the Mohawk Nation. L'Orignal traces back to a seigneury granted in 1674; New England settlers arrived after 1796, and Vankleek Hill grew from a roadside inn of the late 1790s. The counties were founded in 1850, and French-speaking settlers have shaped them since; L'Orignal is still the county seat.

Services and access

Hawkesbury and District General Hospital runs a 24-hour emergency department with CT scanning. Highway 417 and County Road 17, a former provincial highway, are the main east-west routes between Ottawa and Montréal. Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, west of the counties, has scheduled flights. Farming is mainly dairy, grains and oilseeds, and poultry and eggs, on about 870 farms covering roughly 128,000 hectares. The counties' 2024 economic strategy found that about two in five workers commute to jobs outside the region.

Land and climate

Some communities draw drinking water from the Ottawa or South Nation rivers. Rural homes need a private septic system; South Nation Conservation issues septic permits and inspections for all eight municipalities.

Before you buy

Each local municipality issues building permits and handles zoning. The counties keep the Official Plan, which also serves as the local plan where a municipality has none, and approve severances and subdivisions (Clarence-Rockland approves its own subdivisions). New residential lots are generally not allowed on land designated Agricultural Resource. New lots along the Ottawa and South Nation rivers need dwellings and septic systems at least 30 m from the high-water mark. Building in or within 15 m of a floodplain needs a conservation authority permit as well as a building permit. Sensitive Leda clay is a known hazard: about 20 km of the South Nation River between Casselman and the former hamlet of Lemieux is a mapped potential landslide area, and building elsewhere on sensitive marine clay can require a geotechnical study. The counties' À la Carte map shows zoning, and South Nation Conservation maps hazards.

Sources

• United Counties of Prescott and Russell, Official Plan (2023)
• United Counties of Prescott and Russell, planning and forestry
• United Counties of Prescott and Russell, vision and mission
• United Counties of Prescott and Russell, First Nations land acknowledgement
• Prescott and Russell 2024-2029 Economic Development Strategy.pdf)
• Township of Champlain, history and heritage
• Statistics Canada, 2021 Census Profile data (census division 3502; municipalities via DF_CSD)
• Hawkesbury and District General Hospital, emergency department
• Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport
• Ontario Federation of Agriculture, Prescott and Russell agriculture snapshot (OMAFA 2024 county profile)
• South Nation Conservation, septic program
• South Nation Conservation, potential retrogressive landslides

Written by AcreScout from the sources listed; facts checked October 1, 2026. Rules change: confirm anything that matters with the municipality.