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s you drive along Chemin Lac des Sables in Ste. Agathe, you will notice a little road turning up a hill, away from the lake, called Rue Sir Mortimer B. Davis. The short street climbs past some recently built homes that look somewhat similar and ends at an imposing four-storey stone mansion with a copper roof. Even from the small street, you can see that it has a commanding view of the lake. You might rightly assume that this house belonged to the man for whom the street is named, but that won't tell you much about the man himself. If you resort to Toponymie Quebec to learn more, you will learn that he was born on February 6, 1866 and died on March 22, 1928, was the founder and president of the Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada, that he helped set up Mount Sinai Hospital, and that he built the mansion, calling it Chateau Belvoir. The Imperial Tobacco Company's archives will tell you more.

Mortimer Davis was born in Montreal and attended Montreal High School. After he graduated, he went to work for his father in the family business: S. Davis & Sons, Cigars. He was the third of seven children in a modern Jewish family and these influences encouraged him to make a difference in the world. By twenty-one, he had some significant success experimenting with growing tobacco. He never lost interest in this aspect of cigarette production, and is credited with having established commercial cultivation of tobacco in Canada. He also headed Ritchie Cigarettes, and negotiated with the Imperial Tobacco Company of England to create the Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada. He was offered directorships in many companies and his influence grew, but he never lost sight of his roots. Following the example of his parents, he gave to many charities, including Notre Dame, Montreal General and Mount Sinai hospitals. He was not a religious man, and, while he remained a member of Temple Emanu-El, which his father had helped found, he also gave to other charities in the Jewish community, becoming its largest single benefactor.

In 1898, he married Henrietta Meyer of San Francisco, and among his closest friends was another American, Thomas George Shaughnessy. Lord Shaughnessy, whose name is associated with CP Rail, did not grow up in the Montreal English establishment, but in the more modern civil tradition of the United States. He is rumoured to have quit a prestigious private club upon learning that it had refused membership to Davis on ethnic grounds. Shaughnessy owned a lovely property overlooking Lac des Sables in Ste. Agathe, and he was the one who encouraged Davis to buy the property next door.

Château Belvoir was built around 1909, around the same time that Davis discovered that one of his benevolent investments was not working out as planned. He had put money forward on a loan basis, most likely interest- free, to help establish Eastern European Jewish immigrants and refugees. One group had secured a loan and established a commune, also in Ste-Agathe. They sought to make a community based on their Eastern European communist ideals. The original farmer, Calixte Laframboise, was only too happy to sell the place. Once the trees had been removed, the thin soil and the short season proved too harsh to support a family, let alone a community. When the last commune member left, Davis was obliged to take over the title. This was the furthest thing from his desires, and so he immediately turned it over to a doctor who began receiving tuberculosis patients. By 1913, Davis and a few other businessmen had supplied the doctor with a new building on the site, and they called it Mount Sinai Hospital, the first Jewish-community funded public hospital in the Montreal sphere of influence.

When war broke out a year later, Davis set about financing a Jewish battalion to fight for the British. It was for this action that he received a knighthood, but over the next ten years he would finance Jewish religious schools, donate a fully equipped new building to the YM-YWHA, remain a major contributor to two Montreal hospitals, as well as Mount Sinai, and endow a law chair at Laval University. He maintained an active role on many boards and of course guided the growth of the Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada.

In the 1920's Davis's marriage broke down. Both he and his wife Henrietta, Lady Davis, had taken to spending long periods of the year in France, and they continued to go there separately. Davis wished to marry his manicurist, Eleanor Curran, originally of New Orleans. Since it would be unbecoming for a knighted gentleman to wed someone of such a background, the story is told of how the Italian Count Moroni, down on his luck, married and quickly divorced the American woman. He managed to be much more 'comfortable' after the divorce, and Sir Mortimer proceeded to marry the jilted Lady Moroni.

Sir Mortimer Davis had one dream left to fulfill, and that was to see to the creation of a major Jewish-community hospital in Montreal, one that would facilitate internship for Jewish medical graduates, and would carry Davis's name. To accomplish this, he stipulated in his will that 75% of his estate go to the creation of such a hospital fifty years after his death. While his will also provided large donations to both the Montreal General and the Notre Dame hospitals, Davis believed that it could take 50 years for his estate to grow large enough to build a whole hospital.

Lady Davis, on a crossing to France, met someone who was looking for investors. She had been awarded one million dollars in her divorce settlement, and she was attracted by this man's ideas. In this way, her divorce settlement provided the seed money for the company we know today as IBM, and Lady Davis became very wealthy in her own right.

When her ex-husband died, she felt that his estate was not being properly managed and she took the executors to task, forcing a change that would ensure that his wishes would be respected. When World War Two began, Lady Davis fled her home in France in advance of the Germans, and, returning to Canada, she financed two air force houses for Canadian pilots and donated the first Spitfires to the war effort. At the conclusion of the war, she was honoured as a Dame Commander of the British Empire. Subsequently she founded the Lady Davis Institute, dedicated to helping educated European refugees re-establish in Canada. It was located not far from the Jewish General Hospital, which became the Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital upon receipt of his bequest.

References: Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada (Imasco) archives; Allan Raymond, historian, Richard Davine (from an address to the Shaare Zedek Men's Club); a special thanks to Sheila Eskenazi

Joseph Graham has written a book that features a select number of stories of Laurentian places and how they got their names. To learn more, click here.

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This material may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the author. © Joseph Graham