Regional History
St. Adolphe d’Howard
Mont Laurier
L’Estérel and Lac Masson
St. Sauveur
St. Faustin
Augustin-Norbert Morin
The Davids of Val David
Trout Lake Inn and Sun Valley Lodge
The Sugar King of Canada
John Molson, Entrepreneur and Visionary
Viscount Raoul Ogier d'Ivry
Mont Laurier
L’Estérel and Lac Masson
St. Sauveur
St. Faustin
Augustin-Norbert Morin
The Davids of Val David
Trout Lake Inn and Sun Valley Lodge
The Sugar King of Canada
John Molson, Entrepreneur and Visionary
Viscount Raoul Ogier d'Ivry
St. Adolphe d’Howard
According to the Commission de toponymie, Quebec’s official naming agency, the township of Howard, created in 1871, was named to honour Sir Frederick Howard, fifth Earl of Carlisle. Howard was Commissioner of the Colonies during the very difficult period of the American War of Independence and was sent to the colonies in the 1770′s to try to pacify the Americans. Despite the resulting war and the creation of the United States, his mission demonstrated that he was a very capable man. He succeeded in getting an audience and in commencing dialogue.
Howard lived in Castle Howard at Henderskelfe in Yorkshire. He inherited the title Earl of Carlisle at 10 years of age and held it during a period of political peace in England. Howard spent a good part of his life in the company of his childhood friend Charles James Fox, an incurable gambler. Howard was known for his extravagance and was criticized for his generosity in supporting his friend’s gambling habit, a support that drained the estate’s coffers. He went into public life and eventually became Treasurer of the Royal Household, an unlikely responsibility for a spendthrift.
Nevertheless he went from success to success and finished his career as a Knight of the Garter. The Order of the Garter, whose motto is “Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense” was founded in 1348 by King Edward III and is the oldest and highest British order of chivalry. According to Spink and Sons Ltd, the earliest records of how the symbol came to be have been lost, but there are two theories: The first suggests that Joan, Countess of Salisbury, dropped her garter and King Edward seeing her embarrassment picked it up and bound it about his own leg saying in French, “Evil, (or shamed) be he that thinks evil of it”. Spink and Sons feels that this is “almost certainly a later fiction. This fable appears to have originated in France and was, perhaps, invented to try and bring discredit on the Order. There is a natural unwillingness to believe that the world’s foremost Order of Chivalry had so frivolous a beginning.”
The other theory is that the garter was a small strap used as a device to attach pieces of armour and that the garter is used as a symbol of binding together in common brotherhood and that the motto refers to the leading political topic of the 1340′s, Edward’s claim to the throne of France. Castle Howard is still in the control of the Howard descendants and was opened for public viewing in 1952.
In light of the conversion of the Lac St. Denis military base’s mountain- top radar installation into a replica of a medieval fort, it might be worth looking back at the Howard family and the role it played, not just in the Colonies, but throughout English history.
Perhaps the most significant achievement of the Howards of Norfolk was the longevity of their line. The Dukedom of Norfolk, created in 1397, devolved to the Howard line in 1483, but Edward William Fitzalan-Howard, 18th ‘Howard’ Duke of Norfolk, lives today in Arundel Castle, Sussex. The first Howard of record before that, John Howard, acceded to Wiggenhall, St Peter, in 1267. Two hundred and sixteen years later, in 1483, his descendant became Sir John, 1st Duke of Norfolk. Sir John died on the battlefield at age 65.
About one hundred years later, Catherine Howard, cousin of Anne Boleyn, became Queen of England through marriage to Henry VIII. She was subsequently accused of having had relations with her music teacher before she was married and she was executed. (This same music teacher, Francis Dereham, is thought to have had similar relations with the King.) Her cousin, Thomas Howard, the 4th Duke of Norfolk, having learned nothing from this lesson, aspired to become the husband of Mary Queen of Scots in a bid to become the king, and was beheaded in 1572. The dukedom was forfeit and returned to the Howards again only in 1660.
It was the 4th Duke’s youngest son, William Howard, who fathered the Howard of Carlisle line and acquired the property that would become Castle Howard in Yorkshire. His great-grandson Charles, described as a skilled opportunist, received the first title granted by Oliver Cromwell and succeeded in having the title Earl of Carlisle bestowed by King Charles II after Cromwell was ousted, an impressive bit of political turn-coating. This Howard line continued until the 10th Earl died in 1911. Sir Frederick Howard, the 5th Earl, was the one for whom St. Adolphe d’Howard is named.
It would be interesting to find who actually chose the name for the township of Howard, because the Howard family is also associated with the earldom of Arundel. It would suggest that the names were chosen to win favour with powerful and influential families in England, families that may have had little or nothing to do with Canada. Today one imagines that the French Canadian farmers who came to settle in the Township of Howard may have resented the choice of such a name, but the assumption is likely wrong. As demonstrated by the arguments over the origin of the slogan Je me souviens on our licence plates, the saying “Je me souviens que né sous le lys, je croîs sous la rose” was a sentiment that existed in the 19th century. We forget today that the Canadiens of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were royalists. Better the King of England than no king at all. Royalty and titles carried status even if they were English ones and the concept of a country without a king was still experimental. Canadians, whether English or French, would have identified with a monarchical system more naturally than with a republican one.
In 1879, the mission of St. Adlophe d’Howard was established and it would grow in time to become the municipality. The name Adolphe comes from a tradition of naming a new mission after the curé of the sponsoring parish, in this case Adolphe Jodoin, Curé of St-Sauveur-des-Montagnes. As was the case in many other towns, the post office adopted the parish name when it was opened in 1882, and the municipality, set up as Municipalité du canton de Howard in 1883 changed it’s name to St. Adolphe d’Howard in 1939.
Special thanks to Jorge H. Castelli at www.tudorplace.com.ar
Howard lived in Castle Howard at Henderskelfe in Yorkshire. He inherited the title Earl of Carlisle at 10 years of age and held it during a period of political peace in England. Howard spent a good part of his life in the company of his childhood friend Charles James Fox, an incurable gambler. Howard was known for his extravagance and was criticized for his generosity in supporting his friend’s gambling habit, a support that drained the estate’s coffers. He went into public life and eventually became Treasurer of the Royal Household, an unlikely responsibility for a spendthrift.
Nevertheless he went from success to success and finished his career as a Knight of the Garter. The Order of the Garter, whose motto is “Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense” was founded in 1348 by King Edward III and is the oldest and highest British order of chivalry. According to Spink and Sons Ltd, the earliest records of how the symbol came to be have been lost, but there are two theories: The first suggests that Joan, Countess of Salisbury, dropped her garter and King Edward seeing her embarrassment picked it up and bound it about his own leg saying in French, “Evil, (or shamed) be he that thinks evil of it”. Spink and Sons feels that this is “almost certainly a later fiction. This fable appears to have originated in France and was, perhaps, invented to try and bring discredit on the Order. There is a natural unwillingness to believe that the world’s foremost Order of Chivalry had so frivolous a beginning.”
The other theory is that the garter was a small strap used as a device to attach pieces of armour and that the garter is used as a symbol of binding together in common brotherhood and that the motto refers to the leading political topic of the 1340′s, Edward’s claim to the throne of France. Castle Howard is still in the control of the Howard descendants and was opened for public viewing in 1952.
In light of the conversion of the Lac St. Denis military base’s mountain- top radar installation into a replica of a medieval fort, it might be worth looking back at the Howard family and the role it played, not just in the Colonies, but throughout English history.
Perhaps the most significant achievement of the Howards of Norfolk was the longevity of their line. The Dukedom of Norfolk, created in 1397, devolved to the Howard line in 1483, but Edward William Fitzalan-Howard, 18th ‘Howard’ Duke of Norfolk, lives today in Arundel Castle, Sussex. The first Howard of record before that, John Howard, acceded to Wiggenhall, St Peter, in 1267. Two hundred and sixteen years later, in 1483, his descendant became Sir John, 1st Duke of Norfolk. Sir John died on the battlefield at age 65.
About one hundred years later, Catherine Howard, cousin of Anne Boleyn, became Queen of England through marriage to Henry VIII. She was subsequently accused of having had relations with her music teacher before she was married and she was executed. (This same music teacher, Francis Dereham, is thought to have had similar relations with the King.) Her cousin, Thomas Howard, the 4th Duke of Norfolk, having learned nothing from this lesson, aspired to become the husband of Mary Queen of Scots in a bid to become the king, and was beheaded in 1572. The dukedom was forfeit and returned to the Howards again only in 1660.
It was the 4th Duke’s youngest son, William Howard, who fathered the Howard of Carlisle line and acquired the property that would become Castle Howard in Yorkshire. His great-grandson Charles, described as a skilled opportunist, received the first title granted by Oliver Cromwell and succeeded in having the title Earl of Carlisle bestowed by King Charles II after Cromwell was ousted, an impressive bit of political turn-coating. This Howard line continued until the 10th Earl died in 1911. Sir Frederick Howard, the 5th Earl, was the one for whom St. Adolphe d’Howard is named.
It would be interesting to find who actually chose the name for the township of Howard, because the Howard family is also associated with the earldom of Arundel. It would suggest that the names were chosen to win favour with powerful and influential families in England, families that may have had little or nothing to do with Canada. Today one imagines that the French Canadian farmers who came to settle in the Township of Howard may have resented the choice of such a name, but the assumption is likely wrong. As demonstrated by the arguments over the origin of the slogan Je me souviens on our licence plates, the saying “Je me souviens que né sous le lys, je croîs sous la rose” was a sentiment that existed in the 19th century. We forget today that the Canadiens of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were royalists. Better the King of England than no king at all. Royalty and titles carried status even if they were English ones and the concept of a country without a king was still experimental. Canadians, whether English or French, would have identified with a monarchical system more naturally than with a republican one.
In 1879, the mission of St. Adlophe d’Howard was established and it would grow in time to become the municipality. The name Adolphe comes from a tradition of naming a new mission after the curé of the sponsoring parish, in this case Adolphe Jodoin, Curé of St-Sauveur-des-Montagnes. As was the case in many other towns, the post office adopted the parish name when it was opened in 1882, and the municipality, set up as Municipalité du canton de Howard in 1883 changed it’s name to St. Adolphe d’Howard in 1939.
Special thanks to Jorge H. Castelli at www.tudorplace.com.ar
Mont Laurier
Curé Antoine Labelle could not have developed the upper Laurentians if he had not been empowered and supported by Ignace Bourget, Bishop of Montreal. Bourget was one of the most powerful clerics in Quebec during the 19th century. From his inauguration in 1840 to his death in 1885, he led the Quebec clergy in filling a leadership vacuum in French Canada. The Laurentian colonisation and the creation of the towns north of Ste. Agathe were among the many accomplishments of the clergy, but they could not tolerate criticism. Among the critics were Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the other members of the Institut Canadien, men denounced from the pulpit as heretics.
On the morning of September 2, 1875, the funeral procession of Joseph Guilbord found itself blocked from entry to the Côte des Neiges Cemetery by a large, unruly and armed crowd. Forced to withdraw, the procession honouring this excommunicated printer returned with 1000 troops and 100 police on November 16th. Joseph Guilbord’s crime was to refuse, on his deathbed six years earlier, to renounce his membership in the Institut Canadien. After six years in court, the civic authorities ruled that the Church must permit the burial. His remains were entombed in a large block of concrete, but quickly afterwards, Bishop Bourget came by and officially de-sanctified the ground.
The Institut Canadien was formed in 1844 and, while it did not automatically support Confederation, it was dedicated to defending and promoting democratic principles such as universal suffrage, separation of Church and State, non-denominational public schools, abolition of the seigniorial system and various constitutional and judicial reforms. It promoted literacy and founded libraries. In short, it stood for the values that we take for granted today, but in the 1870′s it was still a revolutionary force.
Wilfrid Laurier was opposed to confederation in 1871 when he was first elected to the Legislative Assembly of Quebec. He may have been following the lead of powerful contemporary thinkers of the Institut Canadien, such as Louis-Antoine Dessaulles, the nephew and spiritual heir of Louis-Joseph Papineau, but Laurier was more a pragmatist and politician than a philosopher. While Dessaulles, Papineau and Morin were all strongly influenced by the movement that had come to be called liberalism and they fought for such things as non-denominational schools, they had to contend with the ultramontane perspective of the clergy. The ultramontanes maintained extreme views supporting the supremacy of the Pope, and Pius IX, who was Pope during most of Bourget’s career, was a staunch and effective opponent of liberalism.
It was in this atmosphere that Laurier entered politics. Unlike our day, nationalism was not so much a factor as was this new liberalism first argued by John Locke in the 1600′s. The term ‘liberal’ traces back to a middle-class Spanish movement called the Liberales, which opposed the powers of the nobles and clergy in the early 1800′s. British Tories subsequently taunted and berated the more progressive Whigs by calling them liberals, and the term stuck. Locke proposed that every individual had an innate right to life, liberty and property, and that a consensus of individuals should form the basic social contract.
In a landmark speech presented before the Institut Canadien in 1877, Laurier proclaimed his support for the reformist liberalism of English Canada rather than the revolutionary liberalism that influenced his contemporaries in the institute in Quebec. This was a significant departure for him and for the other members. In coming to this position, he was certainly influenced by the Guilbord affair and felt that his associates in the institute had to move away from graveyard confrontations with the Catholic Church and look to the British model of slow change. He condemned the Church for trying to control a political party by threatening its opponents from the pulpit, but encouraged his listeners to work around the clergy. Like many Canadians since, he reached for that middle ground. Having resigned his provincial seat in 1874, he experienced a federal election defeat when the Church condemned him from the pulpit and threatened anyone who voted for him with eternal hellfire. Throughout the 1800′s the Catholic clergy in Quebec had made common cause with the Conservatives in Ottawa and had thereby assured them support in Quebec. Laurier won in a by-election in a safe seat and became Minister of Inland Revenue in the federal Liberal government of Alexander Mackenzie.
In 1887 when the Liberals lost an election, Edward Blake, the leader who had succeeded Mackenzie, resigned and encouraged the caucus to choose Laurier in his place. While it was not obvious that a Catholic French- Canadian could lead the federal party in Ontario, the charismatic Laurier won the hearts of its members. It would be another nine years before he would become Prime Minister.
In 1896, when the election was called, the country was divided over issues ranging from the execution of Louis Riel, the Manitoba government’s passage of a law closing Catholic public schools and evidence of corruption in the governing Conservatives. Laurier encouraged Clifford Sifton, his western lieutenant, to back the Manitoba decision to close Catholic public schools while assigning Israël Tarte the job of handling Quebec. He argued for respect of provincial powers and the rights of the Manitoba government on issues of provincial jurisdiction such as education, and argued in Quebec that a Catholic prime minister would have more success in negotiating with the Manitoba government regarding Catholic education. In the meantime, the Conservatives were still identified with Louis Riel’s execution and the powerful Protestant lobby of Orangemen in Ontario and Manitoba. Coupled with that, Tarte played aggressively on a corruption scandal in Conservative ranks. While the Catholic Church raged against Laurier, Catholics were faced with choosing between a Catholic prime minister who backed provincial rights and the admonitions coming from the pulpits that they should support the Conservative government that had hanged Louis Riel and allowed the Manitoba crisis to materialise in the first place. Quebec chose Laurier, and elsewhere they heard Sifton’s message that Laurier would respect Manitoba’s jurisdiction over education. Inasmuch as the Conservative Party was democratic, it had depended for its support on the ultramontane, antidemocratic authority of the Catholic Church. The crisis of the time was Church versus State and the contest was ultimately between the Protestant-Catholic alliance represented by the Conservatives, and the Catholic-led anti-sectarian Liberals. While the Liberals won the election, the final victory had to be fought in Rome.
With a firm power base established in Ottawa, Laurier immediately sent two emissaries to Rome. Arriving there, they were confronted by “half of ecclesiastical Canada”, but Laurier persisted. Bourget had been dead 11 years and Pope Leo XIII had succeeded Pope Pius IX. A new order of conciliation reigned in the Vatican. That same year an emissary was sent to study the situation in Catholic Canada, and subsequently the Pope issued an encyclical to be read from every pulpit in Canada urging moderation, meekness and brotherly charity. Laurier had succeeded in curbing the power of the clergy, however temporarily, and had firmly established liberalism in Canada.
It must have been a sweet moment for Sir Wilfrid and a sign of Bourget’s lessening influence in Heaven when Rapide-de-l’Orignal, this jewel in the crown of the Church, was renamed in honour of one of the heretics of the Institut Canadien in 1909.
References: Fifteen Men -Gordon Donaldson, Doubleday; Catholic Encyclopedia; Jean- Paul de Lagrave discourse before the tomb of Joseph Guilbord, June 19, 1999; L’encyclopedie L’Agora; Commission de toponymie de Quebec
On the morning of September 2, 1875, the funeral procession of Joseph Guilbord found itself blocked from entry to the Côte des Neiges Cemetery by a large, unruly and armed crowd. Forced to withdraw, the procession honouring this excommunicated printer returned with 1000 troops and 100 police on November 16th. Joseph Guilbord’s crime was to refuse, on his deathbed six years earlier, to renounce his membership in the Institut Canadien. After six years in court, the civic authorities ruled that the Church must permit the burial. His remains were entombed in a large block of concrete, but quickly afterwards, Bishop Bourget came by and officially de-sanctified the ground.
The Institut Canadien was formed in 1844 and, while it did not automatically support Confederation, it was dedicated to defending and promoting democratic principles such as universal suffrage, separation of Church and State, non-denominational public schools, abolition of the seigniorial system and various constitutional and judicial reforms. It promoted literacy and founded libraries. In short, it stood for the values that we take for granted today, but in the 1870′s it was still a revolutionary force.
Wilfrid Laurier was opposed to confederation in 1871 when he was first elected to the Legislative Assembly of Quebec. He may have been following the lead of powerful contemporary thinkers of the Institut Canadien, such as Louis-Antoine Dessaulles, the nephew and spiritual heir of Louis-Joseph Papineau, but Laurier was more a pragmatist and politician than a philosopher. While Dessaulles, Papineau and Morin were all strongly influenced by the movement that had come to be called liberalism and they fought for such things as non-denominational schools, they had to contend with the ultramontane perspective of the clergy. The ultramontanes maintained extreme views supporting the supremacy of the Pope, and Pius IX, who was Pope during most of Bourget’s career, was a staunch and effective opponent of liberalism.
It was in this atmosphere that Laurier entered politics. Unlike our day, nationalism was not so much a factor as was this new liberalism first argued by John Locke in the 1600′s. The term ‘liberal’ traces back to a middle-class Spanish movement called the Liberales, which opposed the powers of the nobles and clergy in the early 1800′s. British Tories subsequently taunted and berated the more progressive Whigs by calling them liberals, and the term stuck. Locke proposed that every individual had an innate right to life, liberty and property, and that a consensus of individuals should form the basic social contract.
In a landmark speech presented before the Institut Canadien in 1877, Laurier proclaimed his support for the reformist liberalism of English Canada rather than the revolutionary liberalism that influenced his contemporaries in the institute in Quebec. This was a significant departure for him and for the other members. In coming to this position, he was certainly influenced by the Guilbord affair and felt that his associates in the institute had to move away from graveyard confrontations with the Catholic Church and look to the British model of slow change. He condemned the Church for trying to control a political party by threatening its opponents from the pulpit, but encouraged his listeners to work around the clergy. Like many Canadians since, he reached for that middle ground. Having resigned his provincial seat in 1874, he experienced a federal election defeat when the Church condemned him from the pulpit and threatened anyone who voted for him with eternal hellfire. Throughout the 1800′s the Catholic clergy in Quebec had made common cause with the Conservatives in Ottawa and had thereby assured them support in Quebec. Laurier won in a by-election in a safe seat and became Minister of Inland Revenue in the federal Liberal government of Alexander Mackenzie.
In 1887 when the Liberals lost an election, Edward Blake, the leader who had succeeded Mackenzie, resigned and encouraged the caucus to choose Laurier in his place. While it was not obvious that a Catholic French- Canadian could lead the federal party in Ontario, the charismatic Laurier won the hearts of its members. It would be another nine years before he would become Prime Minister.
In 1896, when the election was called, the country was divided over issues ranging from the execution of Louis Riel, the Manitoba government’s passage of a law closing Catholic public schools and evidence of corruption in the governing Conservatives. Laurier encouraged Clifford Sifton, his western lieutenant, to back the Manitoba decision to close Catholic public schools while assigning Israël Tarte the job of handling Quebec. He argued for respect of provincial powers and the rights of the Manitoba government on issues of provincial jurisdiction such as education, and argued in Quebec that a Catholic prime minister would have more success in negotiating with the Manitoba government regarding Catholic education. In the meantime, the Conservatives were still identified with Louis Riel’s execution and the powerful Protestant lobby of Orangemen in Ontario and Manitoba. Coupled with that, Tarte played aggressively on a corruption scandal in Conservative ranks. While the Catholic Church raged against Laurier, Catholics were faced with choosing between a Catholic prime minister who backed provincial rights and the admonitions coming from the pulpits that they should support the Conservative government that had hanged Louis Riel and allowed the Manitoba crisis to materialise in the first place. Quebec chose Laurier, and elsewhere they heard Sifton’s message that Laurier would respect Manitoba’s jurisdiction over education. Inasmuch as the Conservative Party was democratic, it had depended for its support on the ultramontane, antidemocratic authority of the Catholic Church. The crisis of the time was Church versus State and the contest was ultimately between the Protestant-Catholic alliance represented by the Conservatives, and the Catholic-led anti-sectarian Liberals. While the Liberals won the election, the final victory had to be fought in Rome.
With a firm power base established in Ottawa, Laurier immediately sent two emissaries to Rome. Arriving there, they were confronted by “half of ecclesiastical Canada”, but Laurier persisted. Bourget had been dead 11 years and Pope Leo XIII had succeeded Pope Pius IX. A new order of conciliation reigned in the Vatican. That same year an emissary was sent to study the situation in Catholic Canada, and subsequently the Pope issued an encyclical to be read from every pulpit in Canada urging moderation, meekness and brotherly charity. Laurier had succeeded in curbing the power of the clergy, however temporarily, and had firmly established liberalism in Canada.
It must have been a sweet moment for Sir Wilfrid and a sign of Bourget’s lessening influence in Heaven when Rapide-de-l’Orignal, this jewel in the crown of the Church, was renamed in honour of one of the heretics of the Institut Canadien in 1909.
References: Fifteen Men -Gordon Donaldson, Doubleday; Catholic Encyclopedia; Jean- Paul de Lagrave discourse before the tomb of Joseph Guilbord, June 19, 1999; L’encyclopedie L’Agora; Commission de toponymie de Quebec
L’Estérel and Lac Masson
Trains and railways fascinated Edouard-Louis-Joseph Empain. Born in Belœil, Belgium, in 1852, he worked his way through university, but by the time he was 29 years old, he had founded the Empain Bank and he began to indulge his obsession with public transport. Empain built train tracks across France, Belgium and Holland. He also experimented with electric trams, supplying a long list of cities with their first public transit systems. He built Le Paris Métropolitain, (the Parisian subway system, known locally as Le Métro) the Cairo transit system and a railway through China. He built a railway in the Belgian Congo and was involved in hydroelectric projects and many other initiatives. For his pleasure, he founded the town of Heliopolis outside Cairo and built a Hindu palace there. His great accomplishments, particularly in the Congo, led King Leopold II of Belgium to recognise him with the title of Baron in 1907.
When he passed away in 1929, he left an estate estimated to be worth six billion French francs to his two sons Jean-Louis Lain Empain and Louis-Jean Lain Empain. Whereas their father was the first Baron Empain, by Belgian rules, they both inherited the title.
Baron Jean-Louis Empain, the elder brother, took over the management of their father’s holdings, while Baron Louis-Jean took his inheritance in money and began anew, setting up La Banque Belge pour l’Industrie, and looked for projects. Starting in the Middle East, he sought a totally new environment, one where he could distinguish himself from his brother, and this notion brought him eventually to Canada.
Both brothers also inherited good business practices from their father, and so, when Baron Louis-Jean came to Canada for the first time in 1934, he was already well prepared, and acquainted with the business and power elite. Only 26 years old, he had at his disposal the means to hire the best advisors and to meet the most influential people. He retained the services of a lawyer named Leon-Mercier Gouin, son of the ex-premier Lomer Gouin, and grandson of Honoré Mercier, a legendary Quebec nationalist who had also been premier. L-M Gouin, who would one day be named to the Senate, was also closely linked with the newly formed Union Nationale. The Baron immediately set upon the task he had in mind, creating investment companies and establishing a Belgian-Canadian spirit of cooperation, even going so far as to create l’Association Belgique-Canada.
Empain seems to have been guided by a vision of idealism and was called by some the capitalist of the left. In 1935 he created La Belgo-Canadienne de Crédit Ltée, acquiring forestry and mining concerns, and backing philanthropies. He also acquired some 5000 acres of land in Ste. Marguerite du Lac Masson, calling it L’Estérel, after the Massif de l’Estérel in the south of France, and began an ambitious development there.
Around that time, the Sulpician Order of Oka, having seriously overextended themselves in the creation of Université de Montréal, appealed to the provincial government to save them from their creditors. Under the guidance of Athanase David, at the time the Provincial Secretary for Education, the government passed a bill through which the university property was merged with the large Sulpician holdings in Oka, and subsequently the merged enterprise sold 3,700 acres of cultivated land and 1,600 acres of forestland in Oka to Baron Louis-Jean Empain. The university was saved and what was once the Sulpician seigneury became the property of the ambitious Belgian. Without displaying bitterness, one of the senior members of the Sulpician Order remarked that the Baron would have some unfinished business to settle with the Mohawks. Soon the Sulpician land was being marketed to Belgian immigrants who wished to establish farms in Oka, and the Baron created support systems to help them.
The remarkable growth and rate of acquisition hit a wall with the beginning of the war. Baron Empain and his new bride, Geneviève Hone of Montreal, were in Belgium when the German army occupied the country. Rumours swirled around the couple in Canada, and he was accused of being a German spy, was said to have been detained and held prisoner by the Canadian authorities and was generally pilloried in the press. The Canadian government went so far as to sequester all of the Baron’s Canadian holdings, justifying its actions because, as principal shareholder, he resided in a country under enemy occupation.
Meanwhile, in Belgium, the Baron and his wife organized a charity called Pro Juventute, created to feed and care for needy children. Faced with the risk of imminent invasion, the Belgian government called up all available men, creating an army of 700,000, and the Baron reported for duty. He participated in the heroic “Campaign of 18 Days,” a series of battles that slowed the German advance and is considered to have given surprised Allied troops precious extra time to evacuate Dunkirk. He was captured and became a German prisoner, but was soon released, probably because the Germans needed to cultivate good relations with the powerful industrial family. He spent the balance of the war in charitable activities, following his youthful charges and creating Collège de la Hulle to make sure that they got a good start in life.
When the war ended, the Baron could not bring himself to forgive the Canadian government for the hardships and the insult of having treated him so badly. Married to a Canadian, volunteering for duty against the enemy, enduring prison and assisting the needy before and during the war period, he felt that the Canadian government would act as his ally. He instructed his managers to sell his Canadian holdings and concentrated on his philanthropy for the balance of his career. He is still fondly remembered by graduates of Collège de la Hulle, but his Canadian dreams were left to be fulfilled by others.
***
On a fateful summer day in 1958, Fridolin Simard was flying over the Laurentians headed from his home in Alma to Montreal. From the window of his small floatplane, the rolling hills of the Laurentians unfolded, their jewel-like lakes twinkling in the sun, but off ahead of him, to the southwest, he was heading into dark thunderclouds piled above the horizon. His radio crackled with a message from the control tower at Dorval warning him and all small planes to change flight plans because the storm was playing havoc with the airport.
Below him, Simard could see a good-sized lake, easy to land on, and his charts told him it was called Lac Masson. The charts could not tell him that, like him, Joseph Masson had moved from the Quebec countryside to Montreal and gone into business there. When Masson arrived in Montreal in 1812, he had no money, but he had apprenticed as a shop clerk in St. Eustache, and he soon proved his worth to Hugh Robertson. With no capital to invest, he nevertheless grew to become a junior partner, and eventually a full partner, in the Robertson brothers’ firm. A visionary and risk-taker, he became the purchaser and a partner in the Robertsons’ concerns in Glasgow, Scotland, as well. Trading principally in potash and woollens, Masson encouraged the firm to buy ships, and he was also a co-founder of the Company of Proprietors of the Champlain and St Lawrence Railroad in 1846.
Masson, like Simard, did not know that French-Canadians were handicapped in business, and during the difficult period of the 1830s, he was one of the most important businessmen in Lower Canada. He was a member of the Legislative Council, the ruling elite known as the Chateau Clique, in the stormy 1830s, and while he was sympathetic to the objectives of the Patriotes, his loyalty was to the mercantile class. He eventually became the sole owner of the import-export companies in both Scotland and Montreal when the Robertson brothers retired, and he brought his sons into the business. Joseph Masson, Sons and Company had offices in Montreal, Quebec City and Glasgow with marketing and buying offices in Three Rivers, Liverpool and Toronto. Eventually he acquired the Seigneurie of Terrebonne, and it was his son, Edouard Masson, who undertook to colonise the area around Lac Masson in the 1860s.
Simard landed safely before the storm and found his way to a dock where he could secure the plane. His business expertise was in asphalt and concrete blocks, pier, bridge and tunnel construction, and his family concern, Simard-Beaudry, had grown out of their hometown offices in Alma to spread across Quebec and Ontario. Taking shelter in a building near the dock on Lac Masson, Simard discovered that he was in an elaborate, abandoned complex. On one wall, he found a map describing the whole lake with projections for a development. He explored further.
In 1864, Edouard Masson had been accorded 1600 acres to establish his colony, and even though it was not a seigneury, he invested heavily to develop it, building both a saw and flour mill. Most of the colonists came from further south in the old Seigneury of Terrebonne. The first post office, called Lac Masson, opened in 1868. Its naming served the dual purpose of honouring Edouard Masson and confirming the name of the lake. By 1880, the municipality took its name from the parish mission and the post office and became Ste. Marguerite du Lac Masson. Like many of these Laurentian projects, Masson’s small colony experienced difficulties when the bulk of the wood was gone and the farmers had to rely on the thin mountain soil. While the railroad brought some improvement, it would take Baron Empain to identify the lake’s real potential in the 1930s. He envisioned a tourist centre on the lake and he engaged the best people he could find to plan and build it. To complement his hotel, cinema and shopping centre and give it a fresh identity, he established a post office in 1939, calling it L’Estérel after the Massif de l’Estérel in the south of France.
Among the properties Empain left behind when he returned to Europe at the beginning of World War Two, was this large art deco recreation and tourism complex which sat abandoned for years until Simard stood in it examining the map posted on the wall. Empain’s plans, Simard discovered, involved the construction of 300 houses, a hotel and a cultural centre, but no provision was made for Empain’s absence.
As though the spirit of the place had conspired to grab him out of the sky, Simard soon discovered that the property was for sale. Piqued by the ruins of Empain’s vision sitting on the pristine lake named for Masson, Simard determined to complete the dreams of both of his predecessors. Acquiring the remaining Empain-Masson holdings, he built a large hotel and golf course and developed the lakefront with expensive country homes. In order to better manage his project, he obtained a separate municipal status, and inspired again by Empain’s name for the post office, he called it L’Estérel.
Sources: Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Website of L’Estérel, Toponymie Québec and others.
When he passed away in 1929, he left an estate estimated to be worth six billion French francs to his two sons Jean-Louis Lain Empain and Louis-Jean Lain Empain. Whereas their father was the first Baron Empain, by Belgian rules, they both inherited the title.
Baron Jean-Louis Empain, the elder brother, took over the management of their father’s holdings, while Baron Louis-Jean took his inheritance in money and began anew, setting up La Banque Belge pour l’Industrie, and looked for projects. Starting in the Middle East, he sought a totally new environment, one where he could distinguish himself from his brother, and this notion brought him eventually to Canada.
Both brothers also inherited good business practices from their father, and so, when Baron Louis-Jean came to Canada for the first time in 1934, he was already well prepared, and acquainted with the business and power elite. Only 26 years old, he had at his disposal the means to hire the best advisors and to meet the most influential people. He retained the services of a lawyer named Leon-Mercier Gouin, son of the ex-premier Lomer Gouin, and grandson of Honoré Mercier, a legendary Quebec nationalist who had also been premier. L-M Gouin, who would one day be named to the Senate, was also closely linked with the newly formed Union Nationale. The Baron immediately set upon the task he had in mind, creating investment companies and establishing a Belgian-Canadian spirit of cooperation, even going so far as to create l’Association Belgique-Canada.
Empain seems to have been guided by a vision of idealism and was called by some the capitalist of the left. In 1935 he created La Belgo-Canadienne de Crédit Ltée, acquiring forestry and mining concerns, and backing philanthropies. He also acquired some 5000 acres of land in Ste. Marguerite du Lac Masson, calling it L’Estérel, after the Massif de l’Estérel in the south of France, and began an ambitious development there.
Around that time, the Sulpician Order of Oka, having seriously overextended themselves in the creation of Université de Montréal, appealed to the provincial government to save them from their creditors. Under the guidance of Athanase David, at the time the Provincial Secretary for Education, the government passed a bill through which the university property was merged with the large Sulpician holdings in Oka, and subsequently the merged enterprise sold 3,700 acres of cultivated land and 1,600 acres of forestland in Oka to Baron Louis-Jean Empain. The university was saved and what was once the Sulpician seigneury became the property of the ambitious Belgian. Without displaying bitterness, one of the senior members of the Sulpician Order remarked that the Baron would have some unfinished business to settle with the Mohawks. Soon the Sulpician land was being marketed to Belgian immigrants who wished to establish farms in Oka, and the Baron created support systems to help them.
The remarkable growth and rate of acquisition hit a wall with the beginning of the war. Baron Empain and his new bride, Geneviève Hone of Montreal, were in Belgium when the German army occupied the country. Rumours swirled around the couple in Canada, and he was accused of being a German spy, was said to have been detained and held prisoner by the Canadian authorities and was generally pilloried in the press. The Canadian government went so far as to sequester all of the Baron’s Canadian holdings, justifying its actions because, as principal shareholder, he resided in a country under enemy occupation.
Meanwhile, in Belgium, the Baron and his wife organized a charity called Pro Juventute, created to feed and care for needy children. Faced with the risk of imminent invasion, the Belgian government called up all available men, creating an army of 700,000, and the Baron reported for duty. He participated in the heroic “Campaign of 18 Days,” a series of battles that slowed the German advance and is considered to have given surprised Allied troops precious extra time to evacuate Dunkirk. He was captured and became a German prisoner, but was soon released, probably because the Germans needed to cultivate good relations with the powerful industrial family. He spent the balance of the war in charitable activities, following his youthful charges and creating Collège de la Hulle to make sure that they got a good start in life.
When the war ended, the Baron could not bring himself to forgive the Canadian government for the hardships and the insult of having treated him so badly. Married to a Canadian, volunteering for duty against the enemy, enduring prison and assisting the needy before and during the war period, he felt that the Canadian government would act as his ally. He instructed his managers to sell his Canadian holdings and concentrated on his philanthropy for the balance of his career. He is still fondly remembered by graduates of Collège de la Hulle, but his Canadian dreams were left to be fulfilled by others.
***
On a fateful summer day in 1958, Fridolin Simard was flying over the Laurentians headed from his home in Alma to Montreal. From the window of his small floatplane, the rolling hills of the Laurentians unfolded, their jewel-like lakes twinkling in the sun, but off ahead of him, to the southwest, he was heading into dark thunderclouds piled above the horizon. His radio crackled with a message from the control tower at Dorval warning him and all small planes to change flight plans because the storm was playing havoc with the airport.
Below him, Simard could see a good-sized lake, easy to land on, and his charts told him it was called Lac Masson. The charts could not tell him that, like him, Joseph Masson had moved from the Quebec countryside to Montreal and gone into business there. When Masson arrived in Montreal in 1812, he had no money, but he had apprenticed as a shop clerk in St. Eustache, and he soon proved his worth to Hugh Robertson. With no capital to invest, he nevertheless grew to become a junior partner, and eventually a full partner, in the Robertson brothers’ firm. A visionary and risk-taker, he became the purchaser and a partner in the Robertsons’ concerns in Glasgow, Scotland, as well. Trading principally in potash and woollens, Masson encouraged the firm to buy ships, and he was also a co-founder of the Company of Proprietors of the Champlain and St Lawrence Railroad in 1846.
Masson, like Simard, did not know that French-Canadians were handicapped in business, and during the difficult period of the 1830s, he was one of the most important businessmen in Lower Canada. He was a member of the Legislative Council, the ruling elite known as the Chateau Clique, in the stormy 1830s, and while he was sympathetic to the objectives of the Patriotes, his loyalty was to the mercantile class. He eventually became the sole owner of the import-export companies in both Scotland and Montreal when the Robertson brothers retired, and he brought his sons into the business. Joseph Masson, Sons and Company had offices in Montreal, Quebec City and Glasgow with marketing and buying offices in Three Rivers, Liverpool and Toronto. Eventually he acquired the Seigneurie of Terrebonne, and it was his son, Edouard Masson, who undertook to colonise the area around Lac Masson in the 1860s.
Simard landed safely before the storm and found his way to a dock where he could secure the plane. His business expertise was in asphalt and concrete blocks, pier, bridge and tunnel construction, and his family concern, Simard-Beaudry, had grown out of their hometown offices in Alma to spread across Quebec and Ontario. Taking shelter in a building near the dock on Lac Masson, Simard discovered that he was in an elaborate, abandoned complex. On one wall, he found a map describing the whole lake with projections for a development. He explored further.
In 1864, Edouard Masson had been accorded 1600 acres to establish his colony, and even though it was not a seigneury, he invested heavily to develop it, building both a saw and flour mill. Most of the colonists came from further south in the old Seigneury of Terrebonne. The first post office, called Lac Masson, opened in 1868. Its naming served the dual purpose of honouring Edouard Masson and confirming the name of the lake. By 1880, the municipality took its name from the parish mission and the post office and became Ste. Marguerite du Lac Masson. Like many of these Laurentian projects, Masson’s small colony experienced difficulties when the bulk of the wood was gone and the farmers had to rely on the thin mountain soil. While the railroad brought some improvement, it would take Baron Empain to identify the lake’s real potential in the 1930s. He envisioned a tourist centre on the lake and he engaged the best people he could find to plan and build it. To complement his hotel, cinema and shopping centre and give it a fresh identity, he established a post office in 1939, calling it L’Estérel after the Massif de l’Estérel in the south of France.
Among the properties Empain left behind when he returned to Europe at the beginning of World War Two, was this large art deco recreation and tourism complex which sat abandoned for years until Simard stood in it examining the map posted on the wall. Empain’s plans, Simard discovered, involved the construction of 300 houses, a hotel and a cultural centre, but no provision was made for Empain’s absence.
As though the spirit of the place had conspired to grab him out of the sky, Simard soon discovered that the property was for sale. Piqued by the ruins of Empain’s vision sitting on the pristine lake named for Masson, Simard determined to complete the dreams of both of his predecessors. Acquiring the remaining Empain-Masson holdings, he built a large hotel and golf course and developed the lakefront with expensive country homes. In order to better manage his project, he obtained a separate municipal status, and inspired again by Empain’s name for the post office, he called it L’Estérel.
Sources: Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Website of L’Estérel, Toponymie Québec and others.
St. Sauveur
In the summer of 2005, St. Sauveur, Ste. Adele and Morin Heights celebrated their 150th anniversaries. We have looked at the naming of Ste. Adele and Morin Heights in previous articles, but St. Sauveur’s founding was different. Established as a parish in 1855, it was the first of many villages that expanded beyond the seigneuries into the Pays d’en Haut. Saint Sauveur means holy saviour, and Ignace Bourget, Bishop of Montreal, chose the name for the parish in the 1850′s. Bourget, who succeeded Bishop Lartigue in 1840, dedicated his office to creating a veritable army of religious men and women. He became bishop after the failed Rebellion of 1837-38, a time of great change in French Canada and, as though recognizing that a political vacuum had formed, solicited every conceivable Catholic religious order in France to fill the void. He also organized the creation of a number of new home-grown ones. There were at least fourteen significant orders and institutions that he had a hand in establishing. These include the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary and the Sisters of Sainte Anne, the first he inspired and second he founded. Both of these institutions have spread across the continent. Bourget succeeded in consolidating power and turned Quebec into a religious society. When he became bishop only 40% of Quebec Catholics attended mass regularly, but forty years later, when he retired, Catholics who did not regularly attend mass were a shunned exception.
Bourget was confronted with the challenge of maintaining a growing flock in the frontier environment of Les Pay d’en Haut. The good farmland in the seigneuries of the St. Lawrence Valley could no longer support its population and farmers had begun to expand into the ‘upper country,’ a vast forest with no large rivers or roads for transport. These new areas would need to be developed into parishes. One of the first new parishes was St. Sauveur, partly in the seigneurie of Mille Iles and partly in the newly formed Abercrombie Township. The Church established a mission to serve a small number of colonists, and as more people arrived it grew into the parish. St. Sauveur is one of a group of parishes whose names express a theme, but Ste. Adele and Morin Heights, to the north, are the odd ones out. They did not begin as a parish or mission, but as an experimental farm, the initiative of A.-N. Morin. The centre was named for Morin’s wife, Adèle Raymond, and two outlying areas, Morin Heights and Val Morin, for Morin himself. The parish missions of the style of St. Sauveur can be found again in the upper regions of Ste. Adele’s original territory and beyond it to the north. These parishes were named in the latter part of the 1800′s and many return to the theme of the life of Jesus, the Saviour. Some of the communities were established before the Church could get to them, and their original names suggest a non-religious beginning. L’Annonciation’s name was changed from Ferme du Milieu (Middle Farm) in 1885, while L’Ascension was first called Ferme d’en Haut and La Conception was La Municipalité du canton de Clyde. In each one, the Church set up a mission. Labelle, once called Chute aux Iroquois and Ferme d’en Bas, was the mission, and then the parish, of La Nativité, while Brébeuf was the mission of Présentation de la Sainte Vierge. Most of these parishes developed under the guiding eye of Bourget’s first lieutenant, Curé Antoine Labelle of St. Jerome.
The naming of these communities reflects the growing influence of the Church, and sometimes links with our history were lost in the renaming. Chute aux Iroquois describes a scene from another time, as does Grand Brûlé, the original name for St. Jovite, and the three farms, Ferme du Milieu, Ferme d’en Haut and Ferme d’en Bas describe a period of colonization that is not evident in the religious names that replaced them.
The names, secular and religious, reflect two different power bases that had been competing for the hearts and minds of French Canada from the time of the American War of Independence. On the one hand, there were the secular, educated forces represented by the Institut Canadien espousing a republican model of government and separation of Church and state, and on the other, there was the Church. Thanks to the formidable resources of Bourget and his strategic alliance with, and support of, the Conservative Party, the Church virtually destroyed the Institut Canadien. Watching the names appear on the map as colonisation progressed north across the Laurentians, one can witness this battle unfolding. The tables eventually turned in favour of the secular, and the naming of Mont Laurier reflects this, but it would take until the 1960′s for the people to express their desire for a secular society, and some of the ideas and goals of the Institut Canadien are still being implemented.
Almost every town has changed its name over time, and St. Sauveur is no exception. When Bourget chose the name St. Sauveur, he probably did so less to honour the saviour than to protect His honour. When the mission was first established in 1850, it was called La Circoncision, and while the name fits with some of the parishes further north, it may have been a bit much for a lot of the residents to accept.
In 1875, the post office in St. Sauveur was called St. Sauveur des Montagnes, even though at that time there could have been no knowledge of St. Sauveur’s eventual vocation. The name was modified to St. Sauveur des Monts in 1957 and in 2002, after amalgamation with surrounding municipalities, was shortened back to St. Sauveur.
References: Les Noms Geographiques de la Province de Québec, P-.G. Roy, Toponymie Québec and Toponymie Ville de Québec.
Bourget was confronted with the challenge of maintaining a growing flock in the frontier environment of Les Pay d’en Haut. The good farmland in the seigneuries of the St. Lawrence Valley could no longer support its population and farmers had begun to expand into the ‘upper country,’ a vast forest with no large rivers or roads for transport. These new areas would need to be developed into parishes. One of the first new parishes was St. Sauveur, partly in the seigneurie of Mille Iles and partly in the newly formed Abercrombie Township. The Church established a mission to serve a small number of colonists, and as more people arrived it grew into the parish. St. Sauveur is one of a group of parishes whose names express a theme, but Ste. Adele and Morin Heights, to the north, are the odd ones out. They did not begin as a parish or mission, but as an experimental farm, the initiative of A.-N. Morin. The centre was named for Morin’s wife, Adèle Raymond, and two outlying areas, Morin Heights and Val Morin, for Morin himself. The parish missions of the style of St. Sauveur can be found again in the upper regions of Ste. Adele’s original territory and beyond it to the north. These parishes were named in the latter part of the 1800′s and many return to the theme of the life of Jesus, the Saviour. Some of the communities were established before the Church could get to them, and their original names suggest a non-religious beginning. L’Annonciation’s name was changed from Ferme du Milieu (Middle Farm) in 1885, while L’Ascension was first called Ferme d’en Haut and La Conception was La Municipalité du canton de Clyde. In each one, the Church set up a mission. Labelle, once called Chute aux Iroquois and Ferme d’en Bas, was the mission, and then the parish, of La Nativité, while Brébeuf was the mission of Présentation de la Sainte Vierge. Most of these parishes developed under the guiding eye of Bourget’s first lieutenant, Curé Antoine Labelle of St. Jerome.
The naming of these communities reflects the growing influence of the Church, and sometimes links with our history were lost in the renaming. Chute aux Iroquois describes a scene from another time, as does Grand Brûlé, the original name for St. Jovite, and the three farms, Ferme du Milieu, Ferme d’en Haut and Ferme d’en Bas describe a period of colonization that is not evident in the religious names that replaced them.
The names, secular and religious, reflect two different power bases that had been competing for the hearts and minds of French Canada from the time of the American War of Independence. On the one hand, there were the secular, educated forces represented by the Institut Canadien espousing a republican model of government and separation of Church and state, and on the other, there was the Church. Thanks to the formidable resources of Bourget and his strategic alliance with, and support of, the Conservative Party, the Church virtually destroyed the Institut Canadien. Watching the names appear on the map as colonisation progressed north across the Laurentians, one can witness this battle unfolding. The tables eventually turned in favour of the secular, and the naming of Mont Laurier reflects this, but it would take until the 1960′s for the people to express their desire for a secular society, and some of the ideas and goals of the Institut Canadien are still being implemented.
Almost every town has changed its name over time, and St. Sauveur is no exception. When Bourget chose the name St. Sauveur, he probably did so less to honour the saviour than to protect His honour. When the mission was first established in 1850, it was called La Circoncision, and while the name fits with some of the parishes further north, it may have been a bit much for a lot of the residents to accept.
In 1875, the post office in St. Sauveur was called St. Sauveur des Montagnes, even though at that time there could have been no knowledge of St. Sauveur’s eventual vocation. The name was modified to St. Sauveur des Monts in 1957 and in 2002, after amalgamation with surrounding municipalities, was shortened back to St. Sauveur.
References: Les Noms Geographiques de la Province de Québec, P-.G. Roy, Toponymie Québec and Toponymie Ville de Québec.
St. Faustin
In the 1840s, when A.N.Morin began his experimental farm in the area we know as Ste. Adele, he hoped to keep discouraged farmers from abandoning their traditions and their country and believed that, given the opportunity to own their property and to control their own destinies, they would demand the freedoms that their American neighbours had fought for. While many habitants were leaving for New England where they could work in mills and factories, those who followed Morins lead and moved to the Laurentian mountains were among the toughest, shyest, and most determined to continue to farm.
In the 1890′s when the railway came through, the new station was named Belisle’s Mill in honour of Joseph Belisle, who owned a mill for grinding grain, sawing wood and carding wool. He was not the only miller in this progressive little corner of Ste. Agathe. When the parish broke away in 1917, it became known as Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-Belisle in honour of the mill as well as of the priest in the mother parish of Ste. Agathe, Curé Jean-Baptiste Bazinet. The town was incorporated in 1921 using the same name, mostly out of habit, but in 1923, the post office was renamed Val David in honour of L.O. David. It fell to the large institutions, Canadian Pacific, the church and the Post Office to name their properties, and the name of the Post Office soon became the colloquial name for the region.
Also in 1840, as Upper and Lower Canada were forced to merge and the seigniorial system was in rapid decline, Ignace Bourget became the second bishop of the Diocese of Montreal, a territory that ran from the American border to James Bay.
While Morin encouraged farmers to colonise the northern wilderness, Bourget went to Europe to solicit well-organized religious orders to locate missions in his diocese. He saw a power vacuum created by the defeat of the progressive elements in society in the failed rebellion of 1837. Among the institutions that he convinced to establish themselves here or that he had a hand in creating were the Christian Brothers, the Oblate Brothers, the Congregation of the Holy Cross, the Sisters of Providence, the Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and Mary, the Sisters of Misericorde, the Sisters of Ste. Anne, the Viatorians and a new group of Jesuits. He fought continuously against the Institut Canadien, influenced by republican thinkers and leaders like Louis-Joseph Papineau. The Institut differed with the Church on many issues. It proposed non-denominational schools and separation of Church and State. It was formed in the early 1840s and was a forum for the progressive influences that had been active during the preceding decades. It steadily lost ground to Bourget and the Church who organised at the parish level and led the faithful to believe in the infallibility of the pope.
Morin espoused the ideals of the Institut Canadien, but was a pragmatist. His communities were Catholic, and he encouraged that because the Church could organise all the social infrastructure such as schools and medical care. The small parishes that he encouraged included Ste. Adele, Ste. Margeurite and Ste. Agathe. His colonists pushed still further north, but beyond Ste. Agathe, the land rises rapidly and the small trail that served as a northward road in the 1860s had to rise over a mountain that became known as La Repousse, because it pushed them back, drove them off. By 1871 they had finally established a mission that they fittingly called La Repousse. This little settlement was located in the highest plateau of the Laurentians, 300 feet higher above sea level than Ste. Agathe and 900 feet higher than Ste. Adele. Beyond it, the hills dropped away again into the Diable and Rouge river valleys, losing all 900 feet in the process.
In the meantime the David family continued to make its mark.
Two years after Morin died in 1866, Bourget appointed Antoine Labelle to the parish of St. Jerome. Thus the Church inherited the mission that Morin had started and Curé Labelle became the assistant to the Minister of Colonisation. While he was driven by the passion to keep his congregants from moving to New England, he did not share the ideals of the progressives. Labelle wished to get past La Repousse and populate the Rouge river valley before the Protestants from Arundel got there. He had a handicap because the Protestants were moving slowly up the fertile river valley, but his handicap was tempered by his large number of Catholic settlers and by the fact that the Protestants, indifferent to any contest, were more interested in moving west. Soon a mission was established in the valley under the name Grand Brûlé.
The names La Repousse and Grand Brûlé reflected and described the experience of the settlers. Many of Morins colonists had fought in the uprisings in 1837 and 1838. Those who were aware of the ideals of the Patriotes knew that it had nothing to do with the Church. Whether they understood it as an attempt to throw off the yoke of the monarchy and establish an American-style republic or whether it was simply an opportunity to hit back at the huge influx of English-speaking newcomers, the Church was just a part of their background noise. They, like Morin, could not see how the social development was being determined from the pulpit. It was an insidious process of extending influence. Ste. Adele had been named for Morins wife, but Ste. Agathe was named for an early martyr and Ste. Lucie was named for another martyr who had been inspired by Ste. Agathe. These ancient mythological figures, who endured great pain and suffering for their beliefs, were held up as inspirational examples to the young and impressionable. Thus the messages and priorities of the Church took hold in the minds of the children.
When Samuel Ouimet was named curé of the missions of Grand Brûlé and La Repousse on February 15, 1879, almost 40 years after Borget had been named bishop, he celebrated the occasion by re-naming the two missions after two brothers whose shared Saints Day was February 15th. These brothers, St. Faustin and St. Jovite, were also martyrs. They were among those early Christians who were fed to lions as part of public entertainment in Roman times. The lions refused to eat them, and while the masses attributed this to their holiness, the authorities responded by beheading them. La Repousse, the older mission, became St. Faustin and Grand Brûlé became St. Jovite. The influence of the Church had become so strong that the erasing of local identity resulting from the naming of these two communities after mythological heroes was celebrated as a blessing. The Catholic Church ruled and the progressive ideals of Papineau, Morin and the Institut Canadien were forgotten.
References: Gérard Parizeau, La Société canadienne-francaise au XIXe siecle; municipalité Saint-Faustin-Lac-Carré; www.catholic-forum.com; writings of the bishops Ignace Bourget and Paul Bruchési
In the 1890′s when the railway came through, the new station was named Belisle’s Mill in honour of Joseph Belisle, who owned a mill for grinding grain, sawing wood and carding wool. He was not the only miller in this progressive little corner of Ste. Agathe. When the parish broke away in 1917, it became known as Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-Belisle in honour of the mill as well as of the priest in the mother parish of Ste. Agathe, Curé Jean-Baptiste Bazinet. The town was incorporated in 1921 using the same name, mostly out of habit, but in 1923, the post office was renamed Val David in honour of L.O. David. It fell to the large institutions, Canadian Pacific, the church and the Post Office to name their properties, and the name of the Post Office soon became the colloquial name for the region.
Also in 1840, as Upper and Lower Canada were forced to merge and the seigniorial system was in rapid decline, Ignace Bourget became the second bishop of the Diocese of Montreal, a territory that ran from the American border to James Bay.
While Morin encouraged farmers to colonise the northern wilderness, Bourget went to Europe to solicit well-organized religious orders to locate missions in his diocese. He saw a power vacuum created by the defeat of the progressive elements in society in the failed rebellion of 1837. Among the institutions that he convinced to establish themselves here or that he had a hand in creating were the Christian Brothers, the Oblate Brothers, the Congregation of the Holy Cross, the Sisters of Providence, the Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and Mary, the Sisters of Misericorde, the Sisters of Ste. Anne, the Viatorians and a new group of Jesuits. He fought continuously against the Institut Canadien, influenced by republican thinkers and leaders like Louis-Joseph Papineau. The Institut differed with the Church on many issues. It proposed non-denominational schools and separation of Church and State. It was formed in the early 1840s and was a forum for the progressive influences that had been active during the preceding decades. It steadily lost ground to Bourget and the Church who organised at the parish level and led the faithful to believe in the infallibility of the pope.
Morin espoused the ideals of the Institut Canadien, but was a pragmatist. His communities were Catholic, and he encouraged that because the Church could organise all the social infrastructure such as schools and medical care. The small parishes that he encouraged included Ste. Adele, Ste. Margeurite and Ste. Agathe. His colonists pushed still further north, but beyond Ste. Agathe, the land rises rapidly and the small trail that served as a northward road in the 1860s had to rise over a mountain that became known as La Repousse, because it pushed them back, drove them off. By 1871 they had finally established a mission that they fittingly called La Repousse. This little settlement was located in the highest plateau of the Laurentians, 300 feet higher above sea level than Ste. Agathe and 900 feet higher than Ste. Adele. Beyond it, the hills dropped away again into the Diable and Rouge river valleys, losing all 900 feet in the process.
In the meantime the David family continued to make its mark.
Two years after Morin died in 1866, Bourget appointed Antoine Labelle to the parish of St. Jerome. Thus the Church inherited the mission that Morin had started and Curé Labelle became the assistant to the Minister of Colonisation. While he was driven by the passion to keep his congregants from moving to New England, he did not share the ideals of the progressives. Labelle wished to get past La Repousse and populate the Rouge river valley before the Protestants from Arundel got there. He had a handicap because the Protestants were moving slowly up the fertile river valley, but his handicap was tempered by his large number of Catholic settlers and by the fact that the Protestants, indifferent to any contest, were more interested in moving west. Soon a mission was established in the valley under the name Grand Brûlé.
The names La Repousse and Grand Brûlé reflected and described the experience of the settlers. Many of Morins colonists had fought in the uprisings in 1837 and 1838. Those who were aware of the ideals of the Patriotes knew that it had nothing to do with the Church. Whether they understood it as an attempt to throw off the yoke of the monarchy and establish an American-style republic or whether it was simply an opportunity to hit back at the huge influx of English-speaking newcomers, the Church was just a part of their background noise. They, like Morin, could not see how the social development was being determined from the pulpit. It was an insidious process of extending influence. Ste. Adele had been named for Morins wife, but Ste. Agathe was named for an early martyr and Ste. Lucie was named for another martyr who had been inspired by Ste. Agathe. These ancient mythological figures, who endured great pain and suffering for their beliefs, were held up as inspirational examples to the young and impressionable. Thus the messages and priorities of the Church took hold in the minds of the children.
When Samuel Ouimet was named curé of the missions of Grand Brûlé and La Repousse on February 15, 1879, almost 40 years after Borget had been named bishop, he celebrated the occasion by re-naming the two missions after two brothers whose shared Saints Day was February 15th. These brothers, St. Faustin and St. Jovite, were also martyrs. They were among those early Christians who were fed to lions as part of public entertainment in Roman times. The lions refused to eat them, and while the masses attributed this to their holiness, the authorities responded by beheading them. La Repousse, the older mission, became St. Faustin and Grand Brûlé became St. Jovite. The influence of the Church had become so strong that the erasing of local identity resulting from the naming of these two communities after mythological heroes was celebrated as a blessing. The Catholic Church ruled and the progressive ideals of Papineau, Morin and the Institut Canadien were forgotten.
References: Gérard Parizeau, La Société canadienne-francaise au XIXe siecle; municipalité Saint-Faustin-Lac-Carré; www.catholic-forum.com; writings of the bishops Ignace Bourget and Paul Bruchési
Augustin-Norbert Morin
A Grandfather of Confederation
The story behind the naming of Ste Adele, Morin Heights and Val Morin is a pivotal one in the history of Canada.
The colony of New France developed as though it was a part of the rural French countryside, while the English colonists saw themselves as having escaped from Europe looking for a new continent filled with dreams and freedom. When the British took over the French holdings, they found they had acquired a little piece of Europe — set in its ways and carrying a lot of European baggage and preconceptions. Like their First Nation neighbours, the French-Canadians witnessed a gigantic influx of newcomers, all competing for resources the locals had always taken to be their own. In the first generation after the Proclamation of Quebec, in 1763, English-speaking non-Catholics rapidly populated the western portion of the colony and the French risked becoming a minority in their own home, as had the First Nations. Exactly 28 years later, the colony was divided into two, and the French majority was reconfirmed, albeit in a smaller colony now called Lower Canada.
Coupled with this change, the educated French learned about the American republic to the south and how it worked, and also began to absorb the ideas and ideals of the French Republic. In the next generation, young intellectuals were imagining it could happen here and were soon making common cause with republican-minded English colonists. By the 1820s the city of Montreal was growing under the weight of displaced farmers and immigrants from war-torn Europe. The European and colonial structures were being challenged by the new industrial era and the New World beckoned to the poor, the desperate and the ambitious. There were no proper accommodations for the newcomers, and the ports were full. French-Canadians, experiencing the same kinds of shortages, were arriving in these competitive centres, often disadvantaged by their language.
The government consisted of a governor appointed by the British parliament, who in turn was advised by appointed Executive and Legislative Councils, both dominated by favoured British businessmen. The voice of the people was the elected Assembly, but its power was also largely advisory. This made the Assembly weaker than a modern trade union, with the Councils forming management. It was not a democracy in our modern sense.
The Assembly was composed of parties, much as it is today, and the Parti des Patriotes, originally called the Parti Canadien, tried to unite the educated French and other republican-minded people. In 1826 the newspaper La Minerve, the voice of the party, was launched in Montreal.
This was not a confrontation of Quebec against the federal government. The rebels were sharing tactics in both colonies, with William Lyon Mackenzie leading the Reform movement in Upper Canada. Even Joseph Howe, in Nova Scotia, was testing the correctness of the colonial authority there.
Keeping the different factions of the Parti des Patriotes united fell to the charismatic leader Louis-Joseph Papineau. Seignieur of Petite Nation, situated in present-day Montebello, Papineau was an unusual man. His grandfather had been a hard-working farmer, but his father became a successful surveyor and notary who bought the seigneury from the Catholic Church. Papineau knew both sides of French society, but he had also benefited from the prosperity that allowed his family to so drastically change its status. He was a man who could present himself as a republican, a seignieur, a lawyer, a politician, the grandchild of a farmer, or whatever the occasion demanded. He was so popular that songs were written about him. Even the original ditty that Bowser and Blue, the Montreal musical comedy duo, made famous in recent times C’est la faute du fédérale had a precursor in the 1830s that went C’est la faute de Papineau.
Today, when people talk about that period, Papineau’s name dominates our memory, but one of the real workhorses of the movement was another lawyer, Augustin-Norbert Morin. He came from a poorer family, and probably would have lived the life of a God-fearing farmer if his health had permitted it, but instead became the founder and editor of the newspaper La Minerve. He was also the author of the 92 Resolutions, a series of demands made of the British Parliament and often associated with this period as strongly as is Papineau himself.
In 1832, while Papineau was struggling to get the Assembly to speak with one voice, a cholera pandemic, which had broken out in Bengal in 1826 and spread across the world, arrived with boatloads of Irish immigrants. Having killed 32,000 people in Britain and another 25,000 in Ireland, it would take 6,000 souls in the small port of Montreal.
Some radicals blamed the British for the disease and xenophobia took hold among the French. In this atmosphere, Papineau received his wish, and by 1834, the Assembly voted on the 92 Resolutions. Governor Lord Matthew Whitworth-Aylmer, sympathetic to the Patriotes, offered serious concessions, but the party, insisting on even more concessions, split into a radical core and a small, disunited opposition.
In this tinderbox atmosphere, the business climate became unstable when the American government under President Jackson refused to renew the mandate of its central bank, forcing the American currency to find its own level. This was the first time the world economy would feel the impact of actions taken by an American president. Many institutions had invested in United States ventures based upon the guarantees of the central bank, and without it, confidence rapidly seeped away. The whole banking system began to unravel, causing a collapse of confidence in banks and currency in the United States and the northern colonies, and leaving British investors with red ledgers.
In Montreal, the crisis added to the daily problems of an already stressed populace as prices began to jump around. Market confidence was limited to personal feelings about whomever you were dealing with. In an attempt to stabilize daily exchange, two well respected businesses, Molson’s of Montreal and Hart’s of Three Rivers, each issued company dollars engraved with their names and emblems.
It is amusing to imagine the whole colony suddenly converting to a brewer’s standard, bottles of beer as a measure of the worth
of everything else. “Okay, 2 brew for the loaf of bread, but you’ll have to throw in the cucumber.” In fact, these two families were involved in other businesses including banking and transportation. Their dollars could be traded easily for products and services they supplied, and from there, confidence in them radiated out until other businesses began to accept them.
While the currencies were accepted, tensions remained high. The flashpoint came in 1837 at a meeting in St. Charles that the leaders of the Parti des Patriotes could not contain. The first skirmish was in Longueuil, and battles followed in St. Denis, St. Eustache and St. Charles. Morin, trying to cool tempers, arrived at one battle too late to do more than be captured. By the time the dust had settled, over 350 people had lost their lives in Lower Canada while battles in Upper Canada fared no better. Papineau fled to the United States, accompanied, according to some accounts, by a large, boisterous lumberman, who became the Paul Bunyan of American mythology.
The uprisings came to be known as the Rebellion of 1837-38, and did not end there. The Patriotes had made common cause with William Lyon MacKenzie and the Reform Party of Upper Canada throughout this period, and subsequent uprisings were coordinated between the two groups. In Upper Canada, the fighting was handled mercilessly. In one pitched battle near Fort Wellington in 1838, 220 people lost their lives before the Patriots were captured. Nine more of them were hanged for their convictions and a large number were shipped off to Australia, never to return.
In Lower Canada, an army led by Dr. Robert Nelson, one of the most radical Patriotes, marshalled in the United States before invading. Declaring himself President of the Republic of Lower Canada, Nelson watched as thousands of well-armed rebels melted away to hundreds. Their last battle, at Odelltown near Rouses Point, was a rout.
Augustin-Norbert Morin was a reticent hero of this epoch. An idealist and sometime poet, he pops up like a cork in a rushing stream. He arrived with Papineau at St. Charles in the middle of the battle to try to talk their rural followers out of taking up arms. He was arrested in the confusion and then released, but soon learned that a warrant for high treason had been issued against him. While he was encouraged to leave the colony, he stayed in hiding, but eventually surrendered. He was held for ten days and then released.
Morin, who had clerked for the important lawyer Denis-Benjamin Viger, was admitted to the Bar in 1828. During that time he worked with Papineau, Viger, Duvernay, and the other core members of the Parti des Patriotes. He sold La Minerve to Ludger Duvernay almost as soon as he established it, as he did not have the business head to run it, but he stayed on as editor. In that capacity, he followed and participated in the actions of the Parti des Patriotes and of the Assembly, even becoming an elected representative. He joined Papineau, who espoused a fully elected government with non-denominational schooling –demands that were radical at the time, but seem obvious today.
The violence of the uprisings and the departure of Papineau encouraged him towards the side of compromise. He eventually made common cause with Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin, supporting the new government that was created. The two Canadas were now subject to one administration and, with greater powers accorded to the elected Assembly, French Canada had found a powerful seat at the table of government.
At different times Morin was Speaker and Commissioner of Crown Lands in the new government. This gave him the opportunity to begin a colonization project on the North River, conceived in an effort to stem the flow of rural French-Canadians to New England factory towns. He began an experimental potato farm and built mills and roads. Never a good business manager, he invested in early railway projects that came to nothing, but all of his actions were aimed at promoting his settlement in the Pays d’en Haut.
Morin showed his greatest strength as Speaker of the Assembly from 1848 to 1851. He demonstrated a calm fairness and maintained the confidence and respect of his adversaries. He was Speaker during the burning of Parliament in Montreal in 1849, when angry English protesters set fire to the building because they felt the government was catering to the French. With the curtains burning and the chamber filling with smoke, Morin insisted on a motion of adjournment before he would allow an evacuation. The fire ultimately forced the removal of Parliament to Kingston, and then to Ottawa.
He was not a charismatic man and he had many detractors. At a time when a man’s influence was measured in part by the size of his library, Morin’s contained such a preponderance of books on the natural sciences and agriculture that his credibility as a lawyer was put in question. Even so, he became the first Dean of Law of Laval University, a minister in the united Canadian government of Lafontaine-Baldwin from 1851 to 1854, and eventually co-prime-min-ister in the Hincks-Morin and McNab-Morin governments. In 1855, he was made a judge, and it was in that capacity that he and the other judges of the Cour Spécial dismantled the seigneurial system. He was also a co-author of the Code Civil du Bas-Canada, one of the great accomplishments of his times.
From his student days onwards, it was said of Morin that he would give to anyone in need, even to his own detriment. He had no children and had managed his personal estate poorly, as if to demonstrate his commitment to the common good through his own poverty. Colonists newly arrived in the Laurentians, thanks to his efforts, eventually wanted to name their new town for him. They suggested Morinville, but he demurred. They responded by naming it Ste. Adele for his wife, Adèle Raymond. His own name lives on in the Township of Morin, Val Morin, Morin Heights (originally called Morin Flats), the St. Norbert Parish in Val Morin, Rue Morin in Ste. Adele and Boulevard Morin in Ste. Agathe. His wife may well have been honoured again in the naming of Lac Raymond, also in Val Morin.
Morin was plagued with rheumatism from childhood and soldiered on despite great pain throughout his life. He drove the co-au-thors to finish the civil code as though to meet his personal deadline and it was completed before his death. He passed away in 1865 in Ste. Adele in his 62nd year. He is remembered as one of the great intellectuals of Lower Canada and a major player in the most formative period of our country’s history.
Excerpted from Naming the Laurentians
The story behind the naming of Ste Adele, Morin Heights and Val Morin is a pivotal one in the history of Canada.
The colony of New France developed as though it was a part of the rural French countryside, while the English colonists saw themselves as having escaped from Europe looking for a new continent filled with dreams and freedom. When the British took over the French holdings, they found they had acquired a little piece of Europe — set in its ways and carrying a lot of European baggage and preconceptions. Like their First Nation neighbours, the French-Canadians witnessed a gigantic influx of newcomers, all competing for resources the locals had always taken to be their own. In the first generation after the Proclamation of Quebec, in 1763, English-speaking non-Catholics rapidly populated the western portion of the colony and the French risked becoming a minority in their own home, as had the First Nations. Exactly 28 years later, the colony was divided into two, and the French majority was reconfirmed, albeit in a smaller colony now called Lower Canada.
Coupled with this change, the educated French learned about the American republic to the south and how it worked, and also began to absorb the ideas and ideals of the French Republic. In the next generation, young intellectuals were imagining it could happen here and were soon making common cause with republican-minded English colonists. By the 1820s the city of Montreal was growing under the weight of displaced farmers and immigrants from war-torn Europe. The European and colonial structures were being challenged by the new industrial era and the New World beckoned to the poor, the desperate and the ambitious. There were no proper accommodations for the newcomers, and the ports were full. French-Canadians, experiencing the same kinds of shortages, were arriving in these competitive centres, often disadvantaged by their language.
The government consisted of a governor appointed by the British parliament, who in turn was advised by appointed Executive and Legislative Councils, both dominated by favoured British businessmen. The voice of the people was the elected Assembly, but its power was also largely advisory. This made the Assembly weaker than a modern trade union, with the Councils forming management. It was not a democracy in our modern sense.
The Assembly was composed of parties, much as it is today, and the Parti des Patriotes, originally called the Parti Canadien, tried to unite the educated French and other republican-minded people. In 1826 the newspaper La Minerve, the voice of the party, was launched in Montreal.
This was not a confrontation of Quebec against the federal government. The rebels were sharing tactics in both colonies, with William Lyon Mackenzie leading the Reform movement in Upper Canada. Even Joseph Howe, in Nova Scotia, was testing the correctness of the colonial authority there.
Keeping the different factions of the Parti des Patriotes united fell to the charismatic leader Louis-Joseph Papineau. Seignieur of Petite Nation, situated in present-day Montebello, Papineau was an unusual man. His grandfather had been a hard-working farmer, but his father became a successful surveyor and notary who bought the seigneury from the Catholic Church. Papineau knew both sides of French society, but he had also benefited from the prosperity that allowed his family to so drastically change its status. He was a man who could present himself as a republican, a seignieur, a lawyer, a politician, the grandchild of a farmer, or whatever the occasion demanded. He was so popular that songs were written about him. Even the original ditty that Bowser and Blue, the Montreal musical comedy duo, made famous in recent times C’est la faute du fédérale had a precursor in the 1830s that went C’est la faute de Papineau.
Today, when people talk about that period, Papineau’s name dominates our memory, but one of the real workhorses of the movement was another lawyer, Augustin-Norbert Morin. He came from a poorer family, and probably would have lived the life of a God-fearing farmer if his health had permitted it, but instead became the founder and editor of the newspaper La Minerve. He was also the author of the 92 Resolutions, a series of demands made of the British Parliament and often associated with this period as strongly as is Papineau himself.
In 1832, while Papineau was struggling to get the Assembly to speak with one voice, a cholera pandemic, which had broken out in Bengal in 1826 and spread across the world, arrived with boatloads of Irish immigrants. Having killed 32,000 people in Britain and another 25,000 in Ireland, it would take 6,000 souls in the small port of Montreal.
Some radicals blamed the British for the disease and xenophobia took hold among the French. In this atmosphere, Papineau received his wish, and by 1834, the Assembly voted on the 92 Resolutions. Governor Lord Matthew Whitworth-Aylmer, sympathetic to the Patriotes, offered serious concessions, but the party, insisting on even more concessions, split into a radical core and a small, disunited opposition.
In this tinderbox atmosphere, the business climate became unstable when the American government under President Jackson refused to renew the mandate of its central bank, forcing the American currency to find its own level. This was the first time the world economy would feel the impact of actions taken by an American president. Many institutions had invested in United States ventures based upon the guarantees of the central bank, and without it, confidence rapidly seeped away. The whole banking system began to unravel, causing a collapse of confidence in banks and currency in the United States and the northern colonies, and leaving British investors with red ledgers.
In Montreal, the crisis added to the daily problems of an already stressed populace as prices began to jump around. Market confidence was limited to personal feelings about whomever you were dealing with. In an attempt to stabilize daily exchange, two well respected businesses, Molson’s of Montreal and Hart’s of Three Rivers, each issued company dollars engraved with their names and emblems.
It is amusing to imagine the whole colony suddenly converting to a brewer’s standard, bottles of beer as a measure of the worth
of everything else. “Okay, 2 brew for the loaf of bread, but you’ll have to throw in the cucumber.” In fact, these two families were involved in other businesses including banking and transportation. Their dollars could be traded easily for products and services they supplied, and from there, confidence in them radiated out until other businesses began to accept them.
While the currencies were accepted, tensions remained high. The flashpoint came in 1837 at a meeting in St. Charles that the leaders of the Parti des Patriotes could not contain. The first skirmish was in Longueuil, and battles followed in St. Denis, St. Eustache and St. Charles. Morin, trying to cool tempers, arrived at one battle too late to do more than be captured. By the time the dust had settled, over 350 people had lost their lives in Lower Canada while battles in Upper Canada fared no better. Papineau fled to the United States, accompanied, according to some accounts, by a large, boisterous lumberman, who became the Paul Bunyan of American mythology.
The uprisings came to be known as the Rebellion of 1837-38, and did not end there. The Patriotes had made common cause with William Lyon MacKenzie and the Reform Party of Upper Canada throughout this period, and subsequent uprisings were coordinated between the two groups. In Upper Canada, the fighting was handled mercilessly. In one pitched battle near Fort Wellington in 1838, 220 people lost their lives before the Patriots were captured. Nine more of them were hanged for their convictions and a large number were shipped off to Australia, never to return.
In Lower Canada, an army led by Dr. Robert Nelson, one of the most radical Patriotes, marshalled in the United States before invading. Declaring himself President of the Republic of Lower Canada, Nelson watched as thousands of well-armed rebels melted away to hundreds. Their last battle, at Odelltown near Rouses Point, was a rout.
Augustin-Norbert Morin was a reticent hero of this epoch. An idealist and sometime poet, he pops up like a cork in a rushing stream. He arrived with Papineau at St. Charles in the middle of the battle to try to talk their rural followers out of taking up arms. He was arrested in the confusion and then released, but soon learned that a warrant for high treason had been issued against him. While he was encouraged to leave the colony, he stayed in hiding, but eventually surrendered. He was held for ten days and then released.
Morin, who had clerked for the important lawyer Denis-Benjamin Viger, was admitted to the Bar in 1828. During that time he worked with Papineau, Viger, Duvernay, and the other core members of the Parti des Patriotes. He sold La Minerve to Ludger Duvernay almost as soon as he established it, as he did not have the business head to run it, but he stayed on as editor. In that capacity, he followed and participated in the actions of the Parti des Patriotes and of the Assembly, even becoming an elected representative. He joined Papineau, who espoused a fully elected government with non-denominational schooling –demands that were radical at the time, but seem obvious today.
The violence of the uprisings and the departure of Papineau encouraged him towards the side of compromise. He eventually made common cause with Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin, supporting the new government that was created. The two Canadas were now subject to one administration and, with greater powers accorded to the elected Assembly, French Canada had found a powerful seat at the table of government.
At different times Morin was Speaker and Commissioner of Crown Lands in the new government. This gave him the opportunity to begin a colonization project on the North River, conceived in an effort to stem the flow of rural French-Canadians to New England factory towns. He began an experimental potato farm and built mills and roads. Never a good business manager, he invested in early railway projects that came to nothing, but all of his actions were aimed at promoting his settlement in the Pays d’en Haut.
Morin showed his greatest strength as Speaker of the Assembly from 1848 to 1851. He demonstrated a calm fairness and maintained the confidence and respect of his adversaries. He was Speaker during the burning of Parliament in Montreal in 1849, when angry English protesters set fire to the building because they felt the government was catering to the French. With the curtains burning and the chamber filling with smoke, Morin insisted on a motion of adjournment before he would allow an evacuation. The fire ultimately forced the removal of Parliament to Kingston, and then to Ottawa.
He was not a charismatic man and he had many detractors. At a time when a man’s influence was measured in part by the size of his library, Morin’s contained such a preponderance of books on the natural sciences and agriculture that his credibility as a lawyer was put in question. Even so, he became the first Dean of Law of Laval University, a minister in the united Canadian government of Lafontaine-Baldwin from 1851 to 1854, and eventually co-prime-min-ister in the Hincks-Morin and McNab-Morin governments. In 1855, he was made a judge, and it was in that capacity that he and the other judges of the Cour Spécial dismantled the seigneurial system. He was also a co-author of the Code Civil du Bas-Canada, one of the great accomplishments of his times.
From his student days onwards, it was said of Morin that he would give to anyone in need, even to his own detriment. He had no children and had managed his personal estate poorly, as if to demonstrate his commitment to the common good through his own poverty. Colonists newly arrived in the Laurentians, thanks to his efforts, eventually wanted to name their new town for him. They suggested Morinville, but he demurred. They responded by naming it Ste. Adele for his wife, Adèle Raymond. His own name lives on in the Township of Morin, Val Morin, Morin Heights (originally called Morin Flats), the St. Norbert Parish in Val Morin, Rue Morin in Ste. Adele and Boulevard Morin in Ste. Agathe. His wife may well have been honoured again in the naming of Lac Raymond, also in Val Morin.
Morin was plagued with rheumatism from childhood and soldiered on despite great pain throughout his life. He drove the co-au-thors to finish the civil code as though to meet his personal deadline and it was completed before his death. He passed away in 1865 in Ste. Adele in his 62nd year. He is remembered as one of the great intellectuals of Lower Canada and a major player in the most formative period of our country’s history.
Excerpted from Naming the Laurentians
The Davids of Val David
The town of Val David, the first settlement north of Ste. Adele, had its post office named Mont Morin in 1873, in honour of A.N. Morin. The first few families, the Ménards and Dufresnes, were larger than life, both figuratively and physically. Two Ménard brothers married Dufresne sisters and the Dufresne brother did right by a Ménard sister. It is no surprise that the Ménards’ mother became known far and wide as La Mère Ménard. Though smaller than her sons, she was about six feet tall and was a woman to be reckoned with. One story is told about her private trout lake: It was completely off-limits to anyone without her say-so and a poor would-be poacher discovered the penalty one morning when he was spotted fishing on the shore. La Mère Ménard lumbered out to the pond in her nightgown, picked him up, put him over her knee and spanked him. These early settlers, Morin’s colonists, were colourful and industrious. They were the men and women who came north to establish Les Pays d’en Haut, a phrase that resonated in French like “Out West” once did in English. They established mills, farms, hotels and stores.
In the 1890′s when the railway came through, the new station was named Belisle’s Mill in honour of Joseph Belisle, who owned a mill for grinding grain, sawing wood and carding wool. When the parish broke away in 1917, it became known as Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-Belisle in honour of the mill as well as of the priest in the mother parish of Ste. Agathe, Curé Jean- Baptiste Bazinet. The town was incorporated in 1921 using the same name, mostly out of habit, but in 1923, the post office was renamed Val David in honour of L.O. David. It fell to the large institutions, Canadian Pacific and the church to name their properties, and the name of the post office was often adopted colloquially by a village.
Laurent Olivier David was born in Sault-au-Récollet in 1840. At 24 years of age he began his practice as a lawyer in Montreal and within one year was co-owner of the publication le Colonisateur. He went from there to becoming editor of L’Union Nationale and by 1880 owned La Tribune. During that time and for the balance of his life he was a loyal member of the Liberal party, having run and lost in five out of six elections, and was eventually recognised for his statesmanship and accomplishments with a seat in the Canadian Senate in 1903. During his career he wrote and published 16 books including studies of the Patriots, of Papineau and later, of Laurier. Laurent Olivier was one of the eminent men of his time, but his success was not limited to his public life, as his progeny would demonstrate. Although not their only child, he and his wife Albina Chenet could take pride in their son, Louis Athanase David.
Louis Athanase, born in Montreal in 1882, began his law career in 1905. While he did not follow his father’s career into journalism, he succeeded where his father had failed in politics. He won Terrebonne for the Liberals in 1919 and continued to represent the area with wins in six successive elections. He was a minister in the cabinets of both Gouin and Taschereau. It was early in his term as minister that he created the literary prize Le Prix David. In 1940 he followed his father to the Senate. While he is acknowledged for his long service to our region, he is best remembered for creating the literary prize. Athanase David had good reason to create a prize for writing since both his father and his father-in-law, G.A. Nantel were leaders in the fields of literature, journalism and history. Today, the Prix du Québec recognises achievement in many cultural disciplines including literature, cinema, music, architecture and design. Louis Athanase David died in January 1953 and is buried at the Catholic cemetery in Ste. Agathe des Monts, where his family had a country home from 1925.
In 1944, St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Belisle changed its name officially to Val David in recognition of both father and son. In the years that followed, Val David grew into its name by becoming a centre for arts, music and crafts. The legendary La Butte à Mathieu was one among many boîtes à chansons that sprang into life, and soon other artisans found Val David and an artist’s colony flourished, as though in gratitude to Athanase David for having done so much for Quebec culture.
In the meantime the David family continued to make its mark.
Dr. Paul David was born in Montreal in 1919. He studied medicine in Paris and in Montreal. He specialized in cardiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Hôpital Lareboisière in Paris. On his return to Montreal he founded the Montreal Heart Institute in 1954, the year after his father died. The institute went on to have a world-class reputation and was the first in Canada to perform heart transplants. It continues to be a leader in cardiology. Dr. David authored 170 publications in his discipline, was involved in many American cardiology institutions and societies and was a co-founder of both the Canadian and Quebec Cardiology Foundations. The list of awards and recognition that he received in his lifetime includes Companion of the Ordre Nationale du Québec, the same organisation that awards the Prix David, named for his father. In 1985 he, too, was named to the Canadian Senate, in recognition of his contributions to society. Like his father, he cherished his connection with our region. He owned a country home on Trout Lake in Ste. Agathe for many years. He died in Montreal in 1999.
Val David continues to maintain its strong identity as a centre for the arts and culture. The backbone of its economy is still dependant on the descendants of the Dufresnes and the Ménards, but the David family will always be remembered for their strong presence here.
In the 1890′s when the railway came through, the new station was named Belisle’s Mill in honour of Joseph Belisle, who owned a mill for grinding grain, sawing wood and carding wool. When the parish broke away in 1917, it became known as Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-Belisle in honour of the mill as well as of the priest in the mother parish of Ste. Agathe, Curé Jean- Baptiste Bazinet. The town was incorporated in 1921 using the same name, mostly out of habit, but in 1923, the post office was renamed Val David in honour of L.O. David. It fell to the large institutions, Canadian Pacific and the church to name their properties, and the name of the post office was often adopted colloquially by a village.
Laurent Olivier David was born in Sault-au-Récollet in 1840. At 24 years of age he began his practice as a lawyer in Montreal and within one year was co-owner of the publication le Colonisateur. He went from there to becoming editor of L’Union Nationale and by 1880 owned La Tribune. During that time and for the balance of his life he was a loyal member of the Liberal party, having run and lost in five out of six elections, and was eventually recognised for his statesmanship and accomplishments with a seat in the Canadian Senate in 1903. During his career he wrote and published 16 books including studies of the Patriots, of Papineau and later, of Laurier. Laurent Olivier was one of the eminent men of his time, but his success was not limited to his public life, as his progeny would demonstrate. Although not their only child, he and his wife Albina Chenet could take pride in their son, Louis Athanase David.
Louis Athanase, born in Montreal in 1882, began his law career in 1905. While he did not follow his father’s career into journalism, he succeeded where his father had failed in politics. He won Terrebonne for the Liberals in 1919 and continued to represent the area with wins in six successive elections. He was a minister in the cabinets of both Gouin and Taschereau. It was early in his term as minister that he created the literary prize Le Prix David. In 1940 he followed his father to the Senate. While he is acknowledged for his long service to our region, he is best remembered for creating the literary prize. Athanase David had good reason to create a prize for writing since both his father and his father-in-law, G.A. Nantel were leaders in the fields of literature, journalism and history. Today, the Prix du Québec recognises achievement in many cultural disciplines including literature, cinema, music, architecture and design. Louis Athanase David died in January 1953 and is buried at the Catholic cemetery in Ste. Agathe des Monts, where his family had a country home from 1925.
In 1944, St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Belisle changed its name officially to Val David in recognition of both father and son. In the years that followed, Val David grew into its name by becoming a centre for arts, music and crafts. The legendary La Butte à Mathieu was one among many boîtes à chansons that sprang into life, and soon other artisans found Val David and an artist’s colony flourished, as though in gratitude to Athanase David for having done so much for Quebec culture.
In the meantime the David family continued to make its mark.
Dr. Paul David was born in Montreal in 1919. He studied medicine in Paris and in Montreal. He specialized in cardiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Hôpital Lareboisière in Paris. On his return to Montreal he founded the Montreal Heart Institute in 1954, the year after his father died. The institute went on to have a world-class reputation and was the first in Canada to perform heart transplants. It continues to be a leader in cardiology. Dr. David authored 170 publications in his discipline, was involved in many American cardiology institutions and societies and was a co-founder of both the Canadian and Quebec Cardiology Foundations. The list of awards and recognition that he received in his lifetime includes Companion of the Ordre Nationale du Québec, the same organisation that awards the Prix David, named for his father. In 1985 he, too, was named to the Canadian Senate, in recognition of his contributions to society. Like his father, he cherished his connection with our region. He owned a country home on Trout Lake in Ste. Agathe for many years. He died in Montreal in 1999.
Val David continues to maintain its strong identity as a centre for the arts and culture. The backbone of its economy is still dependant on the descendants of the Dufresnes and the Ménards, but the David family will always be remembered for their strong presence here.
Trout Lake Inn and Sun Valley Lodge
Alter and Sima Levine arrived in Montreal in 1903 along with their seven children. They met others here who, like them, had fled the pogroms in Russia. Their new country was full of hope and freedom. There was no dark authoritarian presence watching their moves, no pogroms, and the immigrants could freely share their stories, hopes and fears. Almost drunk with a sense of freedom, a number of these new Canadians decided to establish a commune off in the countryside where they could farm and reorganise their world. What could challenge their vision in this new land where only hard work stood between them and their dreams? No society had yet experimented with the ideas of Karl Marx and intellectuals everywhere believed that we could achieve utopia with a social system.
The family names of these social pioneers are still with us today: Ofner, Gillitz, Corn, Shuldiner, Smith, Levine. They believed that they could create a commune in the Pays d’en Haut, the great north, where functioning farms with open, grazed fields could be purchased reasonably. The purchase prices should have been warning enough that their project was ill starred. Unlike the French Canadians, who, a generation earlier, hacked down and burned the forest, believing that they could recreate the rich farms of the St. Lawrence Valley, the new pioneers arrived by train and beheld rolling, green fields, fenced pastures and roads.
However, life on Laurentian farms was never easy. The soil is generally nutrient-poor and thin, leaving crops vulnerable to drought, and the frost- free season is short: It is unlikely to freeze between the 12th of June and the 1st of September, a period of only 80 days, but of course we have seen snow in August and frost-free periods can run to mid September, so there is always hope. On the other hand, while the farmer could not rely on the weather in summer, he could count on being stranded for days at a time in the heavy snows of mid to late winter. The commune lasted less than five years.
Mortimer Davis, who had extended credit, ended up with one of the farms, and it ultimately became the site of Mount Sinai Hospital. Alter Levine, who was older than the others, ended up with his own farm fronting on a part of Trout Lake. His family of 8 children, their youngest daughter having been born here, must have practically formed a commune in itself, but Alter fell into a deep depression after the failure of the original project. Sima assigned her sixteen-year-old son Leo the task of checking up on his father to make sure that, in his depressed state, he did himself no harm. Once, Leo cut his father down from the rafters of the barn where the elder Levine had tried to hang himself. Another time he found his father bleeding to death in the woods and dragged him home, helping his mother nurse him back to health. Leo always remembered what his father told him when his body was fully healed: “Next time you won’t find me.”
Sophie Levine Gross, the youngest and only child born in Canada, remembers the hardships of those early days. She has no memory of her father. He had made good on his promise and his body was never found. Her mother Sima Levine was left with 8 children ranging in age from 25 to 2 who, with her, were learning the local languages, on the 278-acre farm, with fifteen acres of fields under cultivation, a barn, a horse, a small herd of cattle and 50 chickens. Sophie’s earliest memories include receiving a new birth certificate because the farmhouse burned down and all their papers were lost.
Her mother began to take in boarders in their new building, people who were visiting family at Mount Sinai Hospital, or others who had come to Ste. Agathe for ‘the cure’ and could not find room at the hospital. Over time, their home evolved into the Trout Lake Inn and her brothers ran it together with their mother. The inn was on the north side of the lake and became a popular destination, finally bringing the family some prosperity.
Fire was a constant danger in those days. There was no safe heating source, and the structures were made from wood that dried thoroughly in walls that let the wind through during the long, cold winters. Everyone had experience with fires. Chimneys, stoves and fuels were not standardised and daily chores occupied all of people’s time. At the Trout Lake Inn Leo had been responsible for the fire insurance and so it was Leo who was blamed when fire destroyed the inn and they discovered that the premium had never been paid.
Even so, the family managed to rebuild, but Leo did not join them. Never fully forgiven for the fire, he managed to buy a parcel of the Larivière farm to the south. In time, the Trout Lake Inn closed and the others moved on to other careers, but Leo, who had secretly married Sophie Eidlow, persisted and eventually built a new hotel that he called Sun Valley Lodge.
Leo and Sophie, both of small stature, made up in determination what they lacked in size. Sun Valley Lodge became a popular hotel and soon they found other opportunities to make money. When Sir Mortimer Davis died in 1927 his estate was liquidated and Leo purchased a number of the outbuildings and dragged them behind a team of horses around Lac des Sables and over the hill to set them on foundations on his farm. These houses were rented to his guests for longer periods and in time were purchased as summer cottages. Because the road ran along the lakeshore, they were placed up the hill, overlooking the lake, and the Levines kept a very deep setback of land between the road and the cottages. Rumours were rife that the government was going to widen the road and they wanted to receive the expropriation money. Thwarting their plans, a new road was built behind the mountain, eventually becoming the Route 117 that we know today.
Unfortunately for the Levines the fields could no longer produce, being filled with cottages, and with most of their customers preferring the idea of renting or buying a small cottage, the hotel became redundant. Undaunted, the Levines set up a summer camp for the many children. They themselves had one son whom Sophie home-schooled telling everyone that her ‘Sonny’ would one day become a doctor.
Over time, the Levine farms grew into the small Jewish country community that still exists around Trout Lake. While all of the other Levines moved away and established careers elsewhere, Leo and Sophie persisted. Eventually Leo sold the balance of the mountain to the Gentemens who created the Chanteclair development, providing some additional funds for retirement. Sophie predeceased Leo who passed away in 1989 at age 99 at the Mount Sinai Hospital. The late Dr. Mark (Sonny) Levine, neurologist, their son, helped me with this research. He is survived by his wife, three children and nine grandchildren who all live in California.
The family names of these social pioneers are still with us today: Ofner, Gillitz, Corn, Shuldiner, Smith, Levine. They believed that they could create a commune in the Pays d’en Haut, the great north, where functioning farms with open, grazed fields could be purchased reasonably. The purchase prices should have been warning enough that their project was ill starred. Unlike the French Canadians, who, a generation earlier, hacked down and burned the forest, believing that they could recreate the rich farms of the St. Lawrence Valley, the new pioneers arrived by train and beheld rolling, green fields, fenced pastures and roads.
However, life on Laurentian farms was never easy. The soil is generally nutrient-poor and thin, leaving crops vulnerable to drought, and the frost- free season is short: It is unlikely to freeze between the 12th of June and the 1st of September, a period of only 80 days, but of course we have seen snow in August and frost-free periods can run to mid September, so there is always hope. On the other hand, while the farmer could not rely on the weather in summer, he could count on being stranded for days at a time in the heavy snows of mid to late winter. The commune lasted less than five years.
Mortimer Davis, who had extended credit, ended up with one of the farms, and it ultimately became the site of Mount Sinai Hospital. Alter Levine, who was older than the others, ended up with his own farm fronting on a part of Trout Lake. His family of 8 children, their youngest daughter having been born here, must have practically formed a commune in itself, but Alter fell into a deep depression after the failure of the original project. Sima assigned her sixteen-year-old son Leo the task of checking up on his father to make sure that, in his depressed state, he did himself no harm. Once, Leo cut his father down from the rafters of the barn where the elder Levine had tried to hang himself. Another time he found his father bleeding to death in the woods and dragged him home, helping his mother nurse him back to health. Leo always remembered what his father told him when his body was fully healed: “Next time you won’t find me.”
Sophie Levine Gross, the youngest and only child born in Canada, remembers the hardships of those early days. She has no memory of her father. He had made good on his promise and his body was never found. Her mother Sima Levine was left with 8 children ranging in age from 25 to 2 who, with her, were learning the local languages, on the 278-acre farm, with fifteen acres of fields under cultivation, a barn, a horse, a small herd of cattle and 50 chickens. Sophie’s earliest memories include receiving a new birth certificate because the farmhouse burned down and all their papers were lost.
Her mother began to take in boarders in their new building, people who were visiting family at Mount Sinai Hospital, or others who had come to Ste. Agathe for ‘the cure’ and could not find room at the hospital. Over time, their home evolved into the Trout Lake Inn and her brothers ran it together with their mother. The inn was on the north side of the lake and became a popular destination, finally bringing the family some prosperity.
Fire was a constant danger in those days. There was no safe heating source, and the structures were made from wood that dried thoroughly in walls that let the wind through during the long, cold winters. Everyone had experience with fires. Chimneys, stoves and fuels were not standardised and daily chores occupied all of people’s time. At the Trout Lake Inn Leo had been responsible for the fire insurance and so it was Leo who was blamed when fire destroyed the inn and they discovered that the premium had never been paid.
Even so, the family managed to rebuild, but Leo did not join them. Never fully forgiven for the fire, he managed to buy a parcel of the Larivière farm to the south. In time, the Trout Lake Inn closed and the others moved on to other careers, but Leo, who had secretly married Sophie Eidlow, persisted and eventually built a new hotel that he called Sun Valley Lodge.
Leo and Sophie, both of small stature, made up in determination what they lacked in size. Sun Valley Lodge became a popular hotel and soon they found other opportunities to make money. When Sir Mortimer Davis died in 1927 his estate was liquidated and Leo purchased a number of the outbuildings and dragged them behind a team of horses around Lac des Sables and over the hill to set them on foundations on his farm. These houses were rented to his guests for longer periods and in time were purchased as summer cottages. Because the road ran along the lakeshore, they were placed up the hill, overlooking the lake, and the Levines kept a very deep setback of land between the road and the cottages. Rumours were rife that the government was going to widen the road and they wanted to receive the expropriation money. Thwarting their plans, a new road was built behind the mountain, eventually becoming the Route 117 that we know today.
Unfortunately for the Levines the fields could no longer produce, being filled with cottages, and with most of their customers preferring the idea of renting or buying a small cottage, the hotel became redundant. Undaunted, the Levines set up a summer camp for the many children. They themselves had one son whom Sophie home-schooled telling everyone that her ‘Sonny’ would one day become a doctor.
Over time, the Levine farms grew into the small Jewish country community that still exists around Trout Lake. While all of the other Levines moved away and established careers elsewhere, Leo and Sophie persisted. Eventually Leo sold the balance of the mountain to the Gentemens who created the Chanteclair development, providing some additional funds for retirement. Sophie predeceased Leo who passed away in 1989 at age 99 at the Mount Sinai Hospital. The late Dr. Mark (Sonny) Levine, neurologist, their son, helped me with this research. He is survived by his wife, three children and nine grandchildren who all live in California.
The Sugar King of Canada
In 1895 Alfred Baumgarten acquired the St. Aubin farm on the Tour du Lac. This was the property from which the small village received its first public water supply through wooden pipes, 17 years earlier, the property that Dr. Lallier, Curé Thibodeau and Edouard St. Aubin exploited through La Compagnie de l’aquaduc de Ste. Agathe des Monts.
According to Donald MacKay in “The Square Mile”, Alfred Baumgarten was born in Germany in 1842, the son of the King of Saxony’s personal physician. He studied chemistry and graduated with a PhD in Göttingen. From there he made his way first to the United States and then to Canada, manufacturing sugar from sugar beets. He became president of the St. Lawrence Sugar Refinery and was known as the Sugar King of Canada.
He adapted well to the British-influenced life of the wealthy of Montreal through his love of the hunt and he built the magnificent building that served as their clubhouse in the 1890’s. It seems much of his life was oriented around the hunt, and, while it is difficult to imagine a British-style fox-hunt over the fields of Ste. Agathe today, it is likely that his large stables above the road were built to serve that purpose.
He was famous for his parties, and, again according to Mr. MacKay, we learn that he had three marriageable daughters and spared no expense in getting the job done: “…An immense ballroom, dripping with chandeliers, was equipped with a floor built on springs to give an extra lift to the waltzing couples. There was a Gothic gallery built on top of the ballroom and extending two storeys to a sky-light set with panes whose colours ranged from deepest gold to palest yellow. With its dark carved wood, white walls and fireplace, the Gothic Gallery resembled a Hollywood dream of a royal hunting lodge in the Black Forest.” One wonders if it worked.
By contrast, his home in Ste. Agathe was a log cabin. He built a large, round-log house that shows some of the influences of the Maxwell brothers. It eventually had stables and galleries and dominated the hillside overlooking the lake. The house stands today, ringed by condos at 154 chemin Tour du Lac, while his city house has become the McGill University Faculty Club. His large stables still exist today, having evolved through being a recreational centre with an indoor skating rink to being further converted into apartments. The balance of the land north of the road became the Manor House, now La Calèche, and the fields became a ski-hill. Today, the hill is built up with houses.
Alfred Baumgarten retired in 1912 at the age of seventy, but his last years were not easy. During the war that began in 1914, he was shunned by a lot of his old friends because of his German origins, and aspersions were cast that he was a sympathiser. Even in Ste. Agathe, there are stories that his house was used by the spy Joachim Von Ribbentrop. He died in 1919.
In the deed confirming payment of his succession duties, his property is described as “…(running) from the King’s Highway to the said Lac des Sables, to about eighteen feet from the line of division between lot number fifteen of the fourth range of the township of Beresford …and lot number 14 … to a certain wild cherry tree standing on the shore of the Lac des Sables, which serves as a boundary between the land presently described…” The King’s Highway is what is now Tour du Lac but was then a road that wound its way around the lake and up along the shore of Lake Manitou, past the original holdings of the Vicomte d’Ivry and eventually up past St. Faustin to the valleys of the Red and Devil’s Rivers.
-“The Square Mile” by Donald MacKay is published by Douglas & MacIntyre.
According to Donald MacKay in “The Square Mile”, Alfred Baumgarten was born in Germany in 1842, the son of the King of Saxony’s personal physician. He studied chemistry and graduated with a PhD in Göttingen. From there he made his way first to the United States and then to Canada, manufacturing sugar from sugar beets. He became president of the St. Lawrence Sugar Refinery and was known as the Sugar King of Canada.
He adapted well to the British-influenced life of the wealthy of Montreal through his love of the hunt and he built the magnificent building that served as their clubhouse in the 1890’s. It seems much of his life was oriented around the hunt, and, while it is difficult to imagine a British-style fox-hunt over the fields of Ste. Agathe today, it is likely that his large stables above the road were built to serve that purpose.
He was famous for his parties, and, again according to Mr. MacKay, we learn that he had three marriageable daughters and spared no expense in getting the job done: “…An immense ballroom, dripping with chandeliers, was equipped with a floor built on springs to give an extra lift to the waltzing couples. There was a Gothic gallery built on top of the ballroom and extending two storeys to a sky-light set with panes whose colours ranged from deepest gold to palest yellow. With its dark carved wood, white walls and fireplace, the Gothic Gallery resembled a Hollywood dream of a royal hunting lodge in the Black Forest.” One wonders if it worked.
By contrast, his home in Ste. Agathe was a log cabin. He built a large, round-log house that shows some of the influences of the Maxwell brothers. It eventually had stables and galleries and dominated the hillside overlooking the lake. The house stands today, ringed by condos at 154 chemin Tour du Lac, while his city house has become the McGill University Faculty Club. His large stables still exist today, having evolved through being a recreational centre with an indoor skating rink to being further converted into apartments. The balance of the land north of the road became the Manor House, now La Calèche, and the fields became a ski-hill. Today, the hill is built up with houses.
Alfred Baumgarten retired in 1912 at the age of seventy, but his last years were not easy. During the war that began in 1914, he was shunned by a lot of his old friends because of his German origins, and aspersions were cast that he was a sympathiser. Even in Ste. Agathe, there are stories that his house was used by the spy Joachim Von Ribbentrop. He died in 1919.
In the deed confirming payment of his succession duties, his property is described as “…(running) from the King’s Highway to the said Lac des Sables, to about eighteen feet from the line of division between lot number fifteen of the fourth range of the township of Beresford …and lot number 14 … to a certain wild cherry tree standing on the shore of the Lac des Sables, which serves as a boundary between the land presently described…” The King’s Highway is what is now Tour du Lac but was then a road that wound its way around the lake and up along the shore of Lake Manitou, past the original holdings of the Vicomte d’Ivry and eventually up past St. Faustin to the valleys of the Red and Devil’s Rivers.
-“The Square Mile” by Donald MacKay is published by Douglas & MacIntyre.
John Molson, Entrepreneur and Visionary
Laurentian development did not all take place around the big lakes like Lac des Sables and Lake Manitou. Many people came here for the wilderness pleasures available on some of the smaller lakes, surrounded by many acres of what was once farmland, but which has now grown back into extensive forest holdings. It began with the arrival of the train in 1892, and among the families that chose that route were several of the descendents of John Molson and Sarah Inslay Vaughan.
John Molson, born in Lincolnshire, England in 1763, first came to Montreal in 1782, only nineteen years after the famous battle on the Plains of Abraham. During his first years in Montreal he was involved in a brewery owned by Thomas Loid, who helped the young Molson get established. Orphaned at eight years old, Molson had been raised by his maternal grandparents. This allowed him to be educated and provided him with an inheritance, a piece of real estate in England called Snake Hall. For four years leading up to the depression known as “Les Années de la faim” in 1786, John Molson was surrounded by a small coterie of new friends struggling to eke out a living in this colonial French-speaking town. To the south, the American states had recently broken away from the Empire sending Loyalists into the colony, while across the ocean France was reeling under the stress that would lead to the storming of the Bastille. In need of capital to improve the brewery, John Molson returned to England, an eight-week voyage across the Atlantic, to mortgage Snake Hall. While there, he discovered a book called Theoretical Hints on an Improved Practise of Brewing by John Richardson. Risking all, he brought English barley seed back to Montreal and distributed it to farmers, aggressively applying the new techniques.
By the turn of the century, Molson’s brewery grew more than tenfold. Molson decided to use the profits to develop areas of what was then the new technology. He was convinced that Montreal should have steam-driven boats like Fulton had built on the Hudson and within a few years of Fulton’s first steamship, he launched the Accommodation on the St.Lawrence River. Undaunted by the scale of the undertaking, he engaged the Forges Saint- Maurice, an ironworks originally established under the French regime, to build him a steam engine. Unlike Fulton’s ship, which had its steam engine built in England, the Accommodation was built entirely in North America.
Subsequently Molson went on to use steam technology in the development of a new distillery and in 1832 he backed the Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad that became Canada’s first public railway. It ran between Dorchester (now St-Jean-sur-Richelieu) and La Prairie, effectively joining the Hudson River and the St. Lawrence. The first locomotive, the Dorchester, pulled its load in 1836, the year Molson died. That year the Molson steamship line comprised 22 vessels.
John Molson was also president of the Bank of Montreal as well as Vice- President of the Montreal General Hospital. He was a member of the Assembly for Lower Canada and eventually became a member of its legislative council. He founded the Royal Theatre at the current location of Bonsecours Market, and backed Montreal’s first luxury hotel.
History places him in the Chateau Clique, the English establishment that opposed the 1837 uprisings led by Louis-Joseph Papineau and A.N. Morin. An examination of the times paints a romantic picture of each side. Molson, the champion of industrialisation, objected to the seigneurial system and had a vision of Montreal as one of the two or three greatest industrial- commercial centres in North America. This was the reality and the expectation of the Chateau Clique; the British administration was fair and magnanimous and industrial growth would be the order of the day. Montreal was the most important colonial city in the largest empire in the world. Papineau’s vision, by contrast, was of more power for the seigneuries through greater representation in the Assembly, while Morin’s was to bring democracy to French Canada.
The year 1837 saw major collapses of both British and American banks. John Molson was gone and his three sons were at the helm. British and American economic stability was challenged; the North American ports were flooded with immigrants. Cholera epidemics were running rampant in Montreal and New York, and both Lower and Upper Canada were besieged by uprisings by the Parti des Patriotes here and the Reform Party in Upper Canada. In this atmosphere of martial law, trials for treason, sickness and economic instability, William Molson, the third son of John, issued a currency engraved with the Molson emblem in an attempt to stabilize the market of Lower Canada. The torch, lighted by the father during the ‘years of hunger’ had been passed on to the sons and they had risen to the challenge.
Molson’s Bank, in effect created to deal with this crisis, introduced Canada’s first currency designated as a ‘dollar’ and received its charter in 1855. In 1925 when it merged with the Bank of Montreal, it had 125 branches. The Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad eventually became a part of the Grand Trunk railway and from there became a part of Canadian National Railways. Molson’s Brewery, one of Canada’s first companies, is the oldest brewery in North America. (What did the steamships evolve into?)
The Molson family continues to grow and flourish in Canada. There are 18 different entries with the heading Molson in the Canadian Encyclopaedia and forty descendants of John and Sarah Molson served in the First World War. It has spread its roots deeply and broadly in the Ste-Agathe area where members continue to contribute to the growth and well being of the community.
Ref: The Railways of Canada Archives; John Molson: Strength through Diversity -J.M.S. Careless; Canadian Genealogy Index; Maud Dufort, Cam Veng Ly and Frédéric Jodoin “L’historien et les ressources documentaires dans les archives et les musées”, presented at the Winter Session, 2000 at UQAM;
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec; Les forges du St-Maurice, Roch Samson; McCord Museum
John Molson, born in Lincolnshire, England in 1763, first came to Montreal in 1782, only nineteen years after the famous battle on the Plains of Abraham. During his first years in Montreal he was involved in a brewery owned by Thomas Loid, who helped the young Molson get established. Orphaned at eight years old, Molson had been raised by his maternal grandparents. This allowed him to be educated and provided him with an inheritance, a piece of real estate in England called Snake Hall. For four years leading up to the depression known as “Les Années de la faim” in 1786, John Molson was surrounded by a small coterie of new friends struggling to eke out a living in this colonial French-speaking town. To the south, the American states had recently broken away from the Empire sending Loyalists into the colony, while across the ocean France was reeling under the stress that would lead to the storming of the Bastille. In need of capital to improve the brewery, John Molson returned to England, an eight-week voyage across the Atlantic, to mortgage Snake Hall. While there, he discovered a book called Theoretical Hints on an Improved Practise of Brewing by John Richardson. Risking all, he brought English barley seed back to Montreal and distributed it to farmers, aggressively applying the new techniques.
By the turn of the century, Molson’s brewery grew more than tenfold. Molson decided to use the profits to develop areas of what was then the new technology. He was convinced that Montreal should have steam-driven boats like Fulton had built on the Hudson and within a few years of Fulton’s first steamship, he launched the Accommodation on the St.Lawrence River. Undaunted by the scale of the undertaking, he engaged the Forges Saint- Maurice, an ironworks originally established under the French regime, to build him a steam engine. Unlike Fulton’s ship, which had its steam engine built in England, the Accommodation was built entirely in North America.
Subsequently Molson went on to use steam technology in the development of a new distillery and in 1832 he backed the Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad that became Canada’s first public railway. It ran between Dorchester (now St-Jean-sur-Richelieu) and La Prairie, effectively joining the Hudson River and the St. Lawrence. The first locomotive, the Dorchester, pulled its load in 1836, the year Molson died. That year the Molson steamship line comprised 22 vessels.
John Molson was also president of the Bank of Montreal as well as Vice- President of the Montreal General Hospital. He was a member of the Assembly for Lower Canada and eventually became a member of its legislative council. He founded the Royal Theatre at the current location of Bonsecours Market, and backed Montreal’s first luxury hotel.
History places him in the Chateau Clique, the English establishment that opposed the 1837 uprisings led by Louis-Joseph Papineau and A.N. Morin. An examination of the times paints a romantic picture of each side. Molson, the champion of industrialisation, objected to the seigneurial system and had a vision of Montreal as one of the two or three greatest industrial- commercial centres in North America. This was the reality and the expectation of the Chateau Clique; the British administration was fair and magnanimous and industrial growth would be the order of the day. Montreal was the most important colonial city in the largest empire in the world. Papineau’s vision, by contrast, was of more power for the seigneuries through greater representation in the Assembly, while Morin’s was to bring democracy to French Canada.
The year 1837 saw major collapses of both British and American banks. John Molson was gone and his three sons were at the helm. British and American economic stability was challenged; the North American ports were flooded with immigrants. Cholera epidemics were running rampant in Montreal and New York, and both Lower and Upper Canada were besieged by uprisings by the Parti des Patriotes here and the Reform Party in Upper Canada. In this atmosphere of martial law, trials for treason, sickness and economic instability, William Molson, the third son of John, issued a currency engraved with the Molson emblem in an attempt to stabilize the market of Lower Canada. The torch, lighted by the father during the ‘years of hunger’ had been passed on to the sons and they had risen to the challenge.
Molson’s Bank, in effect created to deal with this crisis, introduced Canada’s first currency designated as a ‘dollar’ and received its charter in 1855. In 1925 when it merged with the Bank of Montreal, it had 125 branches. The Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad eventually became a part of the Grand Trunk railway and from there became a part of Canadian National Railways. Molson’s Brewery, one of Canada’s first companies, is the oldest brewery in North America. (What did the steamships evolve into?)
The Molson family continues to grow and flourish in Canada. There are 18 different entries with the heading Molson in the Canadian Encyclopaedia and forty descendants of John and Sarah Molson served in the First World War. It has spread its roots deeply and broadly in the Ste-Agathe area where members continue to contribute to the growth and well being of the community.
Ref: The Railways of Canada Archives; John Molson: Strength through Diversity -J.M.S. Careless; Canadian Genealogy Index; Maud Dufort, Cam Veng Ly and Frédéric Jodoin “L’historien et les ressources documentaires dans les archives et les musées”, presented at the Winter Session, 2000 at UQAM;
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec; Les forges du St-Maurice, Roch Samson; McCord Museum
Viscount Raoul Ogier d'Ivry
Ivry-sur-le-Lac
The Ogier family of Chêne-de-Cœur, Sarthe, France, are the descendants of Philippe Ogier, secretary to King Charles V (1338-1380) of France. Ogier’s role was one of influence and there are many official notations in the Paris Parliament and the administrative records of the realm that confirm the noble status of the family. In respect of their long tenure of office, during his reign, Louis XVI awarded the title of Count to the head of the family. In this way the Ogier family, which had holdings in Ivry, not far from Paris, obtained the title Comte Ogier d’Ivry. The current Count Philippe Ogier d’Ivry demurely suggests that the King wished simply to introduce his loyal servant and friend with a flourish at State ceremonies. The title Viscount is held by the next oldest male member of the family, the man who would become the Count should there be no male heir to the title in his brother’s family. The title of Count did eventually devolve in this way to Viscount Raoul Ogier d’Ivry in 1940.
In 1891, Viscount Émile Ogier d’Ivry passed away in Chêne-de-Cœur, France, leaving behind his wife Angèle and their three children. Angèle’s biggest challenge as the dowager of an important family was to make sure the children established themselves appropriately. Raoul, her eldest son and the new Viscount had suffered from cerebral meningitis as a teenager and his intellectual ability had remained that of a 14-year-old. He was in his late twenties, and with his handicap he was not the ideal head of the family. Thankfully, he was an adorable, charming, active young man and he already had a devoted spouse, Elza. Angèle undertook to relocate this fine young couple to Canada telling them that their mission would be to establish the Ogier d’Ivry name in the New World. They travelled across the Atlantic, up the St. Lawrence and to the frontier of French Canada of the time, a town just beyond the reach of the railroad called Ste. Agathe. One imagines that from Ste. Adèle north, they must have travelled with a retinue and made quite an impression. There Angèle met the writer and journalist B.A.T. de Montigny who had recently, and perhaps reluctantly, acquired his uncle Pierre Casimir Bohémier’s farm. This family, also descended from gentry, was just the ticket for Angèle. She purchased their farm for her son and returned to France, where sadly she discovered that her only other son Jean was terminally ill with tuberculosis.
Raoul began his ambitious project of establishing a new Ogier dIvry dynasty in this pioneer French outpost in Canada. He built a large country house and barns on the lake and he never missed an opportunity to display his family’s illustrious emblem and title. He was generally well received and over time he always managed to pay his bills upon receipt of a remittance from his mother. With the security of this money he tried his hand at farming, but soon tired of it and sold the property to a group from Montreal who began a cross-country ski lodge, the Manitou Club, forerunner of the Laurentian Lodge Club, or the Shawbridge Club. Ogier d’Ivry also acquired an additional property where he was told he could mine iron and titanium, but it never produced any viable ore and today is a water-filled cave entry in the woods. During the prewar period, Ogier d’Ivry ran a tour boat on Lake Manitou and had one of the nicest boats on the lake, although not everyone appreciated it. Steam-driven, it relied on wood for its fuel and sparks flew from its stack, at one point igniting and burning Oliver’s Point (today the Manitou Valley Road).
In the years after the arrival of the train, the lake became a recreational destination and many Montreal families established homes on the shores. Shortly before the First World War, Ste. Agathe experienced a tax revolt that degenerated into a bitter power struggle between the priorities of the local town and those of these new residents. The town’s power base consisted of its local member of the legislature in Québec and whatever influence he could muster, while the second residence owners, generally influential businessmen in Montreal, could resort to various and generally more influential politicians from their urban ridings. On top of that, the rural riding in question was in the process of being divided, a much-needed redistribution but poorly timed for Ste. Agathe. The issue was settled in 1912 when the provincial legislature passed a bill creating the municipality of Ivry-sur le-Lac. Viscount Raoul Ogier d’Ivry was the region’s best-known and most colourful citizen, and when his name was adopted for the new town, he must have felt that the universe was unfolding as it should. In the 1912 Album historique de la paroisse de Ste-Agathe a page is set aside to announce the creation of Ivry, with a picture of the Manitou Club, the “ancien château du Vicomte”. To one side is a picture of a surprised looking M. A. L’Allier, postmaster for Ivry and disenfranchised councillor, and on the other side, a dashing looking man in a fur hat described as Vicomte R.O. d’Ivry.
When the Great War began, Gaétan, the Viscount’s only son, went overseas and enlisted with the British to fight for the liberation of France. The Viscount put his boat up in dry-dock and declared he would not float it again until his son returned, but after the war, Gaétan discovered his many cousins in Chêne-de-Cœur. His aunt, Raoul’s younger sister, was the mother of 13 healthy children.
In 1930, Raoul’s mother passed away and his circumstances deteriorated dramatically. He and Elza moved into lesser accommodations and even began to depend upon a small garden with the stoic perspective of the impoverished noble. His daughters married and moved away. Elza died in 1950 and the Count followed shortly after in 1952. Gaétan went into business in New York after the war and his company eventually transferred to their division in France.His aunt, impoverished with the care of 13 children, encouraged him to take over the family manse, and thus the Ogier d’Ivry line was returned to Chêne-de-Cœur. Today Raoul’s grandson Phillippe, residing in the family property in France is the current Comte Ogier d’Ivry .
Special thanks to Comte Philippe Ogier d’Ivry for help in preparing the foregoing; Skiing Legends and the Laurentian Lodge Club- Neil and Catharine McKenty.
Special thanks to Comte Philippe Ogier d’Ivry for help in preparing the foregoing.
In 1891, Viscount Émile Ogier d’Ivry passed away in Chêne-de-Cœur, France, leaving behind his wife Angèle and their three children. Angèle’s biggest challenge as the dowager of an important family was to make sure the children established themselves appropriately. Raoul, her eldest son and the new Viscount had suffered from cerebral meningitis as a teenager and his intellectual ability had remained that of a 14-year-old. He was in his late twenties, and with his handicap he was not the ideal head of the family. Thankfully, he was an adorable, charming, active young man and he already had a devoted spouse, Elza. Angèle undertook to relocate this fine young couple to Canada telling them that their mission would be to establish the Ogier d’Ivry name in the New World. They travelled across the Atlantic, up the St. Lawrence and to the frontier of French Canada of the time, a town just beyond the reach of the railroad called Ste. Agathe. One imagines that from Ste. Adèle north, they must have travelled with a retinue and made quite an impression. There Angèle met the writer and journalist B.A.T. de Montigny who had recently, and perhaps reluctantly, acquired his uncle Pierre Casimir Bohémier’s farm. This family, also descended from gentry, was just the ticket for Angèle. She purchased their farm for her son and returned to France, where sadly she discovered that her only other son Jean was terminally ill with tuberculosis.
Raoul began his ambitious project of establishing a new Ogier dIvry dynasty in this pioneer French outpost in Canada. He built a large country house and barns on the lake and he never missed an opportunity to display his family’s illustrious emblem and title. He was generally well received and over time he always managed to pay his bills upon receipt of a remittance from his mother. With the security of this money he tried his hand at farming, but soon tired of it and sold the property to a group from Montreal who began a cross-country ski lodge, the Manitou Club, forerunner of the Laurentian Lodge Club, or the Shawbridge Club. Ogier d’Ivry also acquired an additional property where he was told he could mine iron and titanium, but it never produced any viable ore and today is a water-filled cave entry in the woods. During the prewar period, Ogier d’Ivry ran a tour boat on Lake Manitou and had one of the nicest boats on the lake, although not everyone appreciated it. Steam-driven, it relied on wood for its fuel and sparks flew from its stack, at one point igniting and burning Oliver’s Point (today the Manitou Valley Road).
In the years after the arrival of the train, the lake became a recreational destination and many Montreal families established homes on the shores. Shortly before the First World War, Ste. Agathe experienced a tax revolt that degenerated into a bitter power struggle between the priorities of the local town and those of these new residents. The town’s power base consisted of its local member of the legislature in Québec and whatever influence he could muster, while the second residence owners, generally influential businessmen in Montreal, could resort to various and generally more influential politicians from their urban ridings. On top of that, the rural riding in question was in the process of being divided, a much-needed redistribution but poorly timed for Ste. Agathe. The issue was settled in 1912 when the provincial legislature passed a bill creating the municipality of Ivry-sur le-Lac. Viscount Raoul Ogier d’Ivry was the region’s best-known and most colourful citizen, and when his name was adopted for the new town, he must have felt that the universe was unfolding as it should. In the 1912 Album historique de la paroisse de Ste-Agathe a page is set aside to announce the creation of Ivry, with a picture of the Manitou Club, the “ancien château du Vicomte”. To one side is a picture of a surprised looking M. A. L’Allier, postmaster for Ivry and disenfranchised councillor, and on the other side, a dashing looking man in a fur hat described as Vicomte R.O. d’Ivry.
When the Great War began, Gaétan, the Viscount’s only son, went overseas and enlisted with the British to fight for the liberation of France. The Viscount put his boat up in dry-dock and declared he would not float it again until his son returned, but after the war, Gaétan discovered his many cousins in Chêne-de-Cœur. His aunt, Raoul’s younger sister, was the mother of 13 healthy children.
In 1930, Raoul’s mother passed away and his circumstances deteriorated dramatically. He and Elza moved into lesser accommodations and even began to depend upon a small garden with the stoic perspective of the impoverished noble. His daughters married and moved away. Elza died in 1950 and the Count followed shortly after in 1952. Gaétan went into business in New York after the war and his company eventually transferred to their division in France.His aunt, impoverished with the care of 13 children, encouraged him to take over the family manse, and thus the Ogier d’Ivry line was returned to Chêne-de-Cœur. Today Raoul’s grandson Phillippe, residing in the family property in France is the current Comte Ogier d’Ivry .
Special thanks to Comte Philippe Ogier d’Ivry for help in preparing the foregoing; Skiing Legends and the Laurentian Lodge Club- Neil and Catharine McKenty.
Special thanks to Comte Philippe Ogier d’Ivry for help in preparing the foregoing.