Ste-Agathe Recreation and Health
Ste. Agathe boasts a long history of medical care. Starting back on the last decade of the 1800s, there were already people finding their way to the area for what was called the “Rest Cure.” At the same time, the mid-size lakes and easy access by train were bringing Montrealers and others. They saw it as a holiday resort and began to buy the farms for recreational uses.
Ste. Agathe’s Rest Cure
Rue Sir Mortimer B. Davis, Ste. Agathe des Monts
Rue Préfontaine, Ste. Agathe des Monts
Palomino Road, Ste-Agathe
Mont Tremblant Park
Ivry-sur-le-Lac
Greenshields’ Point
Chemin Renaud, Ste. Agathe des Monts
Baumgarten’s Ski Hill, Ste. Agathe
Beresford Township
Rue Sir Mortimer B. Davis, Ste. Agathe des Monts
Rue Préfontaine, Ste. Agathe des Monts
Palomino Road, Ste-Agathe
Mont Tremblant Park
Ivry-sur-le-Lac
Greenshields’ Point
Chemin Renaud, Ste. Agathe des Monts
Baumgarten’s Ski Hill, Ste. Agathe
Beresford Township
Ste. Agathe’s Rest Cure
One of the greatest influences shaping society is among the least recognised: disease. Plagues have washed over us many times throughout our history, often becoming a catalyst for social change. The cholera epidemic that came to Montreal with the huge influx of immigrants after the Napoleonic wars added to the tensions during the Patriot movement and the uprisings in the 1830s. The smallpox plague of 1885 highlighted and exacerbated differences between the Catholic and Protestant communities, and the influenza epidemic of the First World War was a deadly enemy. But one disease whose constant presence has shaped us is tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis, or TB, was not a plague that came and went, leaving devastation in its wake, but was such a common, ever-present disease that it could well be the candidate for the greatest single enemy that our species has ever confronted. According to F. Ryan, author of Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told, an estimated one billion people died of TB between 1700 and 1900. Considering that the world population did not reach two billion until 1930, the gravity of the disease can be better understood. Worse still, it cut people down in the prime of life, disrupting families and weakening communities. It was – and still is – a highly airborne pathogen.
For most of the eighteen-hundreds, there was no conception of bacteria, and people believed that disease itself lived in a miasma that floated in the air in low, damp areas, and that the night mists and fog were the carriers. This idea was so prevalent that it was among the reasons that the wealthy chose to build their homes high up on hills in airy, open locations. Even the original meaning of the word sanatorium reflected this: According to the Webster’s New International Dictionary, copyright 1913, a sanatorium is a resort with a salubrious climate, more specifically a high-altitude summer station in a tropical country [ideally suited] for European troops, officials or residents [such] as Darjiling in India. It should not be surprising, then, that Ste. Agathe in the Laurentians was identified as a sanatorium as early as the 1890s, and that many people came to Ste-Agathe for the cure. Local records and family histories show that people arrived for the good air even before the region could boast a tuberculosis sanitarium. This phenomenon caused such problems locally that laws were passed fining people for not spitting into spittoons.
In 1899 Dr. Arthur Richer of the Ottawa Tuberculosis League, who had recognised the cure potential of Ste. Agathe, organised the construction of a TB hospital and, according to the local history (Album historique de la paroisse de Ste-Agathe-des-Monts, 1849-1912), 200 doctors came on a special train for the grand opening. The hospital burned to the ground in 1902, but Dr. Richer continued his work with a ‘preventorium’ named Brehmer’s Rest after the German doctor who first pioneered the rest cure.
Hermann Brehmer, a German botanist, was diagnosed with tuberculosis in the 1840′s and, resigned to his fate, he travelled to the Himalayas to die studying the flora he loved. To his surprise, he healed. He returned to Germany to study medicine and, as a medical doctor, he proposed rest as a cure for tuberculosis. In 1854 he opened up the first sanitarium dedicated to the ‘rest cure’. This cure involved rest in a cool dry climate and obliged the candidate for cure to abandon his responsibilities. The rest cure proved more successful than any other treatment for the dreaded disease and in time his concept spread through Europe and North America.
In New York, Dr. Edward Trudeau underwent a similar revelation, retiring to Saranac Lake in 1873, terminally ill with TB. When he arrived at Paul Smith’s Hotel, the owner’s brother-in-law carried him up two flights of stairs, two steps at a time, and remarked that the doctor weighed no more than a dried lambskin.
Ste. Agathe’s Dr. Richer and his successors would need the legacy of both of these men as they struggled to establish the rest cure in the Laurentians.
After the fire that destroyed Dr. Richer’s tuberculosis hospital in 1902, the local population was opposed to encouraging TB victims to come to Ste. Agathe, and no new sanitarium was contemplated. In fact, new by-laws were enacted with the intention of discouraging the treatment in Ste. Agathe. Fear of the disease was so great that people could be fined for not spitting into the appropriate spittoons placed strategically around the village.
Lorne McGibbon, a Montreal businessman, contracted the disease and was sent to Saranac Lake and the care of Dr. Trudeau for ‘the cure’. There he met a doctor from Sherbrooke named Roddick Byers, also a TB patient, and the two of them befriended a third man, Dr. Hugh Kinghorn. McGibbon lamented to Kinghorn, a doctor who had been cured himself, that he would have preferred to have been treated in Canada. McGibbon owned a property in Ste. Agathe, and determined that the region would be as good as Saranac Lake for the cure. Later, when Byers was released, he travelled to Ste. Agathe with McGibbon’s instructions to find and purchase a large property in order to build a sanitarium.
Ste. Agathe councillors, however, held a dim view of the idea and ultimately McGibbon himself met with the town fathers and offered the whole council a fully paid trip to Saranac Lake to see for themselves how well that town handled the treatment of the highly contagious disease. Upon their return, the project was endorsed unanimously, and, by 1911, the Laurentian San was completed.
A second santiarium was built around the same time, an initiative of the Jewish community. It came as the serendipitous result of a failed commune and a benevolent industrialist. A group of Eastern European immigrants, self-styled early communists, bought a farm in Ste. Agathe and proceeded to establish a commune. Within a few years, their project fell into disarray and the members retreated to Montreal. Sir Mortimer Davis, the founder and president of the Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada, found himself in possession of the property, having financed some aspect of the earlier acquisition. He turned it over to a group who set up Mount Sinai Hospital, a not-for-profit tuberculosis sanitarium, in the Prefontaine area of Ste. Agathe.
Once these were established and the concept had gained acceptance, the Hilltop Sanitarium was opened and soon the Sœurs de la Miséricorde also opened a TB sanitarium. In the late twenties, when Mr. McGibbon’s estate was liquidated, the Oblate Brothers converted his country home in Ste. Agathe to the same use and Ste. Agathe became one of the most important TB treatment centres in Canada.
There are many people in Ste. Agathe who can trace their arrival or that of their parents to the rest cure. Many of these people came to die, but recovered and contributed to the town, while others came to work. One survivor was Notary Jean Baron Lafrenière, who came to Ste. Agathe in the 1930s and took the cure with the Oblates. When healed, he went on to become the mayor of Ste. Agathe and was a central player in its growth and development over many years. On Albert Street, leading up to the Laurentian San created by McGibbon, Byers and Kinghorn, the old employees’ houses are more reminiscent of Knowlton than of other parts of Ste. Agathe. In Trout Lake a Jewish farmer began offering rooms to visitors coming to see family members at Mount Sinai Hospital and subsequently built cottages for sale to these same clients, leaving us a thriving vacation community.
Ste. Agathe still shows many signs of its tuberculosis treatment period. The Laurentian San has become the main hospital for the central Laurentians, and the Jewish and English communities are still very much present, although their homes tend to be vacation spots. If you walk through the village you can also see the remnants of impractical looking sun-porches on many of the houses. Once used as rest porches for convalescing patients and installed on many houses in order to add to the family income through paying ‘guests’, they lend a particular character to Ste. Agathe architecture. Lac des Sables, in the heart of town, is still ringed with impressive villas located higher on the hillsides than is desirable today, protecting their current residents from the night mists and fog, the miasma that forms on the shores at night.
Today, the world population is somewhere between six and seven billion and tuberculosis is a curiosity, an unlikely enemy for whom new generations lost fear. Ste. Agathe is a sleepy commercial town and building inspectors are likely to wonder at the inefficiency of those old sun-porches when properties change hands. While an antibiotic cure was introduced in 1954, the tuberculosis bacteria strain is not sleeping. It is mutating and adapting, waiting for its opportunity to strike again.
References include The Laurentian Chest Hospital Story 1908-1968 published in Ste Agathe, Quebec as well as other sources available upon request.
Tuberculosis, or TB, was not a plague that came and went, leaving devastation in its wake, but was such a common, ever-present disease that it could well be the candidate for the greatest single enemy that our species has ever confronted. According to F. Ryan, author of Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told, an estimated one billion people died of TB between 1700 and 1900. Considering that the world population did not reach two billion until 1930, the gravity of the disease can be better understood. Worse still, it cut people down in the prime of life, disrupting families and weakening communities. It was – and still is – a highly airborne pathogen.
For most of the eighteen-hundreds, there was no conception of bacteria, and people believed that disease itself lived in a miasma that floated in the air in low, damp areas, and that the night mists and fog were the carriers. This idea was so prevalent that it was among the reasons that the wealthy chose to build their homes high up on hills in airy, open locations. Even the original meaning of the word sanatorium reflected this: According to the Webster’s New International Dictionary, copyright 1913, a sanatorium is a resort with a salubrious climate, more specifically a high-altitude summer station in a tropical country [ideally suited] for European troops, officials or residents [such] as Darjiling in India. It should not be surprising, then, that Ste. Agathe in the Laurentians was identified as a sanatorium as early as the 1890s, and that many people came to Ste-Agathe for the cure. Local records and family histories show that people arrived for the good air even before the region could boast a tuberculosis sanitarium. This phenomenon caused such problems locally that laws were passed fining people for not spitting into spittoons.
In 1899 Dr. Arthur Richer of the Ottawa Tuberculosis League, who had recognised the cure potential of Ste. Agathe, organised the construction of a TB hospital and, according to the local history (Album historique de la paroisse de Ste-Agathe-des-Monts, 1849-1912), 200 doctors came on a special train for the grand opening. The hospital burned to the ground in 1902, but Dr. Richer continued his work with a ‘preventorium’ named Brehmer’s Rest after the German doctor who first pioneered the rest cure.
Hermann Brehmer, a German botanist, was diagnosed with tuberculosis in the 1840′s and, resigned to his fate, he travelled to the Himalayas to die studying the flora he loved. To his surprise, he healed. He returned to Germany to study medicine and, as a medical doctor, he proposed rest as a cure for tuberculosis. In 1854 he opened up the first sanitarium dedicated to the ‘rest cure’. This cure involved rest in a cool dry climate and obliged the candidate for cure to abandon his responsibilities. The rest cure proved more successful than any other treatment for the dreaded disease and in time his concept spread through Europe and North America.
In New York, Dr. Edward Trudeau underwent a similar revelation, retiring to Saranac Lake in 1873, terminally ill with TB. When he arrived at Paul Smith’s Hotel, the owner’s brother-in-law carried him up two flights of stairs, two steps at a time, and remarked that the doctor weighed no more than a dried lambskin.
Ste. Agathe’s Dr. Richer and his successors would need the legacy of both of these men as they struggled to establish the rest cure in the Laurentians.
After the fire that destroyed Dr. Richer’s tuberculosis hospital in 1902, the local population was opposed to encouraging TB victims to come to Ste. Agathe, and no new sanitarium was contemplated. In fact, new by-laws were enacted with the intention of discouraging the treatment in Ste. Agathe. Fear of the disease was so great that people could be fined for not spitting into the appropriate spittoons placed strategically around the village.
Lorne McGibbon, a Montreal businessman, contracted the disease and was sent to Saranac Lake and the care of Dr. Trudeau for ‘the cure’. There he met a doctor from Sherbrooke named Roddick Byers, also a TB patient, and the two of them befriended a third man, Dr. Hugh Kinghorn. McGibbon lamented to Kinghorn, a doctor who had been cured himself, that he would have preferred to have been treated in Canada. McGibbon owned a property in Ste. Agathe, and determined that the region would be as good as Saranac Lake for the cure. Later, when Byers was released, he travelled to Ste. Agathe with McGibbon’s instructions to find and purchase a large property in order to build a sanitarium.
Ste. Agathe councillors, however, held a dim view of the idea and ultimately McGibbon himself met with the town fathers and offered the whole council a fully paid trip to Saranac Lake to see for themselves how well that town handled the treatment of the highly contagious disease. Upon their return, the project was endorsed unanimously, and, by 1911, the Laurentian San was completed.
A second santiarium was built around the same time, an initiative of the Jewish community. It came as the serendipitous result of a failed commune and a benevolent industrialist. A group of Eastern European immigrants, self-styled early communists, bought a farm in Ste. Agathe and proceeded to establish a commune. Within a few years, their project fell into disarray and the members retreated to Montreal. Sir Mortimer Davis, the founder and president of the Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada, found himself in possession of the property, having financed some aspect of the earlier acquisition. He turned it over to a group who set up Mount Sinai Hospital, a not-for-profit tuberculosis sanitarium, in the Prefontaine area of Ste. Agathe.
Once these were established and the concept had gained acceptance, the Hilltop Sanitarium was opened and soon the Sœurs de la Miséricorde also opened a TB sanitarium. In the late twenties, when Mr. McGibbon’s estate was liquidated, the Oblate Brothers converted his country home in Ste. Agathe to the same use and Ste. Agathe became one of the most important TB treatment centres in Canada.
There are many people in Ste. Agathe who can trace their arrival or that of their parents to the rest cure. Many of these people came to die, but recovered and contributed to the town, while others came to work. One survivor was Notary Jean Baron Lafrenière, who came to Ste. Agathe in the 1930s and took the cure with the Oblates. When healed, he went on to become the mayor of Ste. Agathe and was a central player in its growth and development over many years. On Albert Street, leading up to the Laurentian San created by McGibbon, Byers and Kinghorn, the old employees’ houses are more reminiscent of Knowlton than of other parts of Ste. Agathe. In Trout Lake a Jewish farmer began offering rooms to visitors coming to see family members at Mount Sinai Hospital and subsequently built cottages for sale to these same clients, leaving us a thriving vacation community.
Ste. Agathe still shows many signs of its tuberculosis treatment period. The Laurentian San has become the main hospital for the central Laurentians, and the Jewish and English communities are still very much present, although their homes tend to be vacation spots. If you walk through the village you can also see the remnants of impractical looking sun-porches on many of the houses. Once used as rest porches for convalescing patients and installed on many houses in order to add to the family income through paying ‘guests’, they lend a particular character to Ste. Agathe architecture. Lac des Sables, in the heart of town, is still ringed with impressive villas located higher on the hillsides than is desirable today, protecting their current residents from the night mists and fog, the miasma that forms on the shores at night.
Today, the world population is somewhere between six and seven billion and tuberculosis is a curiosity, an unlikely enemy for whom new generations lost fear. Ste. Agathe is a sleepy commercial town and building inspectors are likely to wonder at the inefficiency of those old sun-porches when properties change hands. While an antibiotic cure was introduced in 1954, the tuberculosis bacteria strain is not sleeping. It is mutating and adapting, waiting for its opportunity to strike again.
References include The Laurentian Chest Hospital Story 1908-1968 published in Ste Agathe, Quebec as well as other sources available upon request.
Rue Sir Mortimer B. Davis, Ste. Agathe des Monts
As you drive along Chemin Lac des Sables in Ste. Agathe, you will notice a little road turning up a hill, away from the lake, called Rue Sir Mortimer B. Davis. The short street climbs past some recently built homes that look somewhat similar and ends at an imposing four-storey stone mansion with a copper roof. Even from the small street, you can see that it has a commanding view of the lake. You might rightly assume that this house belonged to the man for whom the street is named, but that won’t tell you much about the man himself. If you resort to Toponymie Quebec to learn more, you will learn that he was born on February 6, 1866 and died on March 22, 1928, was the founder and president of the Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada, that he helped set up Mount Sinai Hospital, and that he built the mansion, calling it Chateau Belvoir. The Imperial Tobacco Company’s archives will tell you more.
Mortimer Davis was born in Montreal and attended Montreal High School. After he graduated, he went to work for his father in the family business: S. Davis & Sons, Cigars. He was the third of seven children in a modern Jewish family and these influences encouraged him to make a difference in the world. By twenty-one, he had some significant success experimenting with growing tobacco. He never lost interest in this aspect of cigarette production, and is credited with having established commercial cultivation of tobacco in Canada. He also headed Ritchie Cigarettes, and negotiated with the Imperial Tobacco Company of England to create the Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada. He was offered directorships in many companies and his influence grew, but he never lost sight of his roots. Following the example of his parents, he gave to many charities, including Notre Dame, Montreal General and Mount Sinai hospitals. He was not a religious man, and, while he remained a member of Temple Emanu-El, which his father had helped found, he also gave to other charities in the Jewish community, becoming its largest single benefactor.
In 1898, he married Henrietta Meyer of San Francisco, and among his closest friends was another American, Thomas George Shaughnessy. Lord Shaughnessy, whose name is associated with CP Rail, did not grow up in the Montreal English establishment, but in the more modern civil tradition of the United States. He is rumoured to have quit a prestigious private club upon learning that it had refused membership to Davis on ethnic grounds. Shaughnessy owned a lovely property overlooking Lac des Sables in Ste. Agathe, and he was the one who encouraged Davis to buy the property next door.
Château Belvoir was built around 1909, around the same time that Davis discovered that one of his benevolent investments was not working out as planned. He had put money forward on a loan basis, most likely interest- free, to help establish Eastern European Jewish immigrants and refugees. One group had secured a loan and established a commune, also in Ste-Agathe. They sought to make a community based on their Eastern European communist ideals. The original farmer, Calixte Laframboise, was only too happy to sell the place. Once the trees had been removed, the thin soil and the short season proved too harsh to support a family, let alone a community. When the last commune member left, Davis was obliged to take over the title. This was the furthest thing from his desires, and so he immediately turned it over to a doctor who began receiving tuberculosis patients. By 1913, Davis and a few other businessmen had supplied the doctor with a new building on the site, and they called it Mount Sinai Hospital, the first Jewish-community funded public hospital in the Montreal sphere of influence.
When war broke out a year later, Davis set about financing a Jewish battalion to fight for the British. It was for this action that he received a knighthood, but over the next ten years he would finance Jewish religious schools, donate a fully equipped new building to the YM-YWHA, remain a major contributor to two Montreal hospitals, as well as Mount Sinai, and endow a law chair at Laval University. He maintained an active role on many boards and of course guided the growth of the Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada.
In the 1920′s Davis’s marriage broke down. Both he and his wife Henrietta, Lady Davis, had taken to spending long periods of the year in France, and they continued to go there separately. Davis wished to marry his manicurist, Eleanor Curran, originally of New Orleans. Since it would be unbecoming for a knighted gentleman to wed someone of such a background, the story is told of how the Italian Count Moroni, down on his luck, married and quickly divorced the American woman. He managed to be much more ‘comfortable’ after the divorce, and Sir Mortimer proceeded to marry the jilted Lady Moroni.
Sir Mortimer Davis had one dream left to fulfill, and that was to see to the creation of a major Jewish-community hospital in Montreal, one that would facilitate internship for Jewish medical graduates, and would carry Davis’s name. To accomplish this, he stipulated in his will that 75% of his estate go to the creation of such a hospital fifty years after his death. While his will also provided large donations to both the Montreal General and the Notre Dame hospitals, Davis believed that it could take 50 years for his estate to grow large enough to build a whole hospital.
Lady Davis, on a crossing to France, met someone who was looking for investors. She had been awarded one million dollars in her divorce settlement, and she was attracted by this man’s ideas. In this way, her divorce settlement provided the seed money for the company we know today as IBM, and Lady Davis became very wealthy in her own right.
When her ex-husband died, she felt that his estate was not being properly managed and she took the executors to task, forcing a change that would ensure that his wishes would be respected. When World War Two began, Lady Davis fled her home in France in advance of the Germans, and, returning to Canada, she financed two air force houses for Canadian pilots and donated the first Spitfires to the war effort. At the conclusion of the war, she was honoured as a Dame Commander of the British Empire. Subsequently she founded the Lady Davis Institute, dedicated to helping educated European refugees re-establish in Canada. It was located not far from the Jewish General Hospital, which became the Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital upon receipt of his bequest.
References: Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada (Imasco) archives; Allan Raymond, historian, Richard Davine (from an address to the Shaare Zedek Men’s Club); a special thanks to Sheila Eskenazi
Mortimer Davis was born in Montreal and attended Montreal High School. After he graduated, he went to work for his father in the family business: S. Davis & Sons, Cigars. He was the third of seven children in a modern Jewish family and these influences encouraged him to make a difference in the world. By twenty-one, he had some significant success experimenting with growing tobacco. He never lost interest in this aspect of cigarette production, and is credited with having established commercial cultivation of tobacco in Canada. He also headed Ritchie Cigarettes, and negotiated with the Imperial Tobacco Company of England to create the Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada. He was offered directorships in many companies and his influence grew, but he never lost sight of his roots. Following the example of his parents, he gave to many charities, including Notre Dame, Montreal General and Mount Sinai hospitals. He was not a religious man, and, while he remained a member of Temple Emanu-El, which his father had helped found, he also gave to other charities in the Jewish community, becoming its largest single benefactor.
In 1898, he married Henrietta Meyer of San Francisco, and among his closest friends was another American, Thomas George Shaughnessy. Lord Shaughnessy, whose name is associated with CP Rail, did not grow up in the Montreal English establishment, but in the more modern civil tradition of the United States. He is rumoured to have quit a prestigious private club upon learning that it had refused membership to Davis on ethnic grounds. Shaughnessy owned a lovely property overlooking Lac des Sables in Ste. Agathe, and he was the one who encouraged Davis to buy the property next door.
Château Belvoir was built around 1909, around the same time that Davis discovered that one of his benevolent investments was not working out as planned. He had put money forward on a loan basis, most likely interest- free, to help establish Eastern European Jewish immigrants and refugees. One group had secured a loan and established a commune, also in Ste-Agathe. They sought to make a community based on their Eastern European communist ideals. The original farmer, Calixte Laframboise, was only too happy to sell the place. Once the trees had been removed, the thin soil and the short season proved too harsh to support a family, let alone a community. When the last commune member left, Davis was obliged to take over the title. This was the furthest thing from his desires, and so he immediately turned it over to a doctor who began receiving tuberculosis patients. By 1913, Davis and a few other businessmen had supplied the doctor with a new building on the site, and they called it Mount Sinai Hospital, the first Jewish-community funded public hospital in the Montreal sphere of influence.
When war broke out a year later, Davis set about financing a Jewish battalion to fight for the British. It was for this action that he received a knighthood, but over the next ten years he would finance Jewish religious schools, donate a fully equipped new building to the YM-YWHA, remain a major contributor to two Montreal hospitals, as well as Mount Sinai, and endow a law chair at Laval University. He maintained an active role on many boards and of course guided the growth of the Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada.
In the 1920′s Davis’s marriage broke down. Both he and his wife Henrietta, Lady Davis, had taken to spending long periods of the year in France, and they continued to go there separately. Davis wished to marry his manicurist, Eleanor Curran, originally of New Orleans. Since it would be unbecoming for a knighted gentleman to wed someone of such a background, the story is told of how the Italian Count Moroni, down on his luck, married and quickly divorced the American woman. He managed to be much more ‘comfortable’ after the divorce, and Sir Mortimer proceeded to marry the jilted Lady Moroni.
Sir Mortimer Davis had one dream left to fulfill, and that was to see to the creation of a major Jewish-community hospital in Montreal, one that would facilitate internship for Jewish medical graduates, and would carry Davis’s name. To accomplish this, he stipulated in his will that 75% of his estate go to the creation of such a hospital fifty years after his death. While his will also provided large donations to both the Montreal General and the Notre Dame hospitals, Davis believed that it could take 50 years for his estate to grow large enough to build a whole hospital.
Lady Davis, on a crossing to France, met someone who was looking for investors. She had been awarded one million dollars in her divorce settlement, and she was attracted by this man’s ideas. In this way, her divorce settlement provided the seed money for the company we know today as IBM, and Lady Davis became very wealthy in her own right.
When her ex-husband died, she felt that his estate was not being properly managed and she took the executors to task, forcing a change that would ensure that his wishes would be respected. When World War Two began, Lady Davis fled her home in France in advance of the Germans, and, returning to Canada, she financed two air force houses for Canadian pilots and donated the first Spitfires to the war effort. At the conclusion of the war, she was honoured as a Dame Commander of the British Empire. Subsequently she founded the Lady Davis Institute, dedicated to helping educated European refugees re-establish in Canada. It was located not far from the Jewish General Hospital, which became the Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital upon receipt of his bequest.
References: Imperial Tobacco Company of Canada (Imasco) archives; Allan Raymond, historian, Richard Davine (from an address to the Shaare Zedek Men’s Club); a special thanks to Sheila Eskenazi
Rue Préfontaine, Ste Agathe des Monts
The name Préfontaine has long been associated with Ste. Agathe, not just with the street, but also the area where Mount Sinai Hospital once stood. Like many others in our region, the Préfontaines were Montrealers who chose to vacation in Ste. Agathe and in the process became involved in the community.
Joseph Raymond Fournier Préfontaine was born into a farming family in Lower Canada, or Canada East, in 1850. He attended Collège Ste-Marie and later studied law at McGill College. At 23, he was elected Mayor of Hochelaga, and two years later, in 1875, he ran and won a seat in the provincial Legislative Assembly for Chambly. Ambitious and active in many different areas, it is hard to imagine that he could adapt to the slow pace of the countryside.
Préfontaine married Hermantine Rolland in 1876, and they suffered the loss of several children at birth. Only three of their children survived into adulthood. Driven by hard work, perhaps in part by these tragedies, he won a seat in the House of Commons in 1886 while maintaining an active law practice and serving the town of Hochelaga. Once Hochelaga was annexed, he served on the Montreal municipal council, and subsequently became Mayor of Montreal in 1898. He also maintained seats in each federal election until 1905. He was a very popular federal politician and one of the favoured sons of French Canada.
From 1900 to 1902, Raymond Préfontaine, the Mayor of Montreal, was also the Member of Parliament for both Terrebonne and Maisonneuve ridings. He simultaneously held three political posts, any one of which would be perceived as a full-time responsibility today. Running for two or more seats in the House of Commons was not illegal until 1919. There was a House rule that said if a member won more than one seat, he should resign the extra seat or seats. But there was also a law that stated if your seat was being contested after the election, you could not resign until the challenge was resolved. In this way, MPs sometimes found themselves forbidden from resigning the seat that they did not want to keep. For the Party leader, running in more than one riding made sense, but any candidate could do it.
In 1893, the year after the train first arrived in Ste. Agathe, Préfontaine’s brother-in-law, Octavien Rolland, purchased the property known for the next 25 years as Rolland’s Point but now as Greenshields Point. Rolland, whose father founded Rolland Paper, and for whom Mont Rolland was named, must have received his sister and brother-in-law as houseguests many times. By 1899, Mr. Préfontaine had acquired a parcel of the Chalifoux farm and built a lovely summer house on Lac des Sables. It featured a tower and eyebrow dormers and was accessed through an ornate gate sporting the words ‘Les Sapins’ in a light arch of woven sticks above the entry. Located at 182 Tour du Lac, it has been renovated and restored many times and has always been the home of influential Montrealers. It evoked ease and relaxation, belying the lives of its occupants.
It did not take long for the Préfontaine family to get involved in the life of their adopted town. A year after the house was built, Rolland Prefontaine, an engineering student and the eldest son of Raymond and Hermantine, helped the Compagnie d’Aqueduc et de la force motrice des Laurentides build a hydroelectric facility on the North River. A year after that, around the time Préfontaine became the MP for Terrebonne, the village council decided to name various streets and install proper road signs. For the main entrance to the village, the road that ran from the railroad station up to the Tour du Lac, they chose the name Rue Préfontaine. Virtually everyone coming to Ste. Agathe had to arrive by train, and their action served to remind all visitors of their affection for the honourable J.R.F. Préfontaine.
Aside from his legal practice and political responsibilities, Préfontaine sat on both the Catholic School Commission and the Harbour Commission of Montreal, was a director of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, the St. James Club and the Canadian Club of Montreal.
In 1902, he resigned both Terrebonne and Maisonneuve seats, as well as his post as Mayor of Montreal, and assumed the role of Minister of Marine and Fisheries. He was subsequently re-elected in Maisonneuve in a by-election and named to the Privy Council. In his role as minister, he travelled to France to negotiate a marine agreement. He also undertook the delicate mission of acquiring a wedding ring for his eldest son, Rolland, to bestow upon his future bride. Sadly, he suffered a heart attack in early December and died in Paris on Christmas Day, 1905. He was fifty-five. His funeral, held in Montreal late in January after his remains were returned on Queen Victoria’s private yacht, was one of the largest funerals Montreal had seen.
References include both the federal and provincial government websites and Edmond Grignon’s 1912 historic album of Ste. Agathe. With special thanks to Monique Préfontaine DeSerres and her family.
Joseph Raymond Fournier Préfontaine was born into a farming family in Lower Canada, or Canada East, in 1850. He attended Collège Ste-Marie and later studied law at McGill College. At 23, he was elected Mayor of Hochelaga, and two years later, in 1875, he ran and won a seat in the provincial Legislative Assembly for Chambly. Ambitious and active in many different areas, it is hard to imagine that he could adapt to the slow pace of the countryside.
Préfontaine married Hermantine Rolland in 1876, and they suffered the loss of several children at birth. Only three of their children survived into adulthood. Driven by hard work, perhaps in part by these tragedies, he won a seat in the House of Commons in 1886 while maintaining an active law practice and serving the town of Hochelaga. Once Hochelaga was annexed, he served on the Montreal municipal council, and subsequently became Mayor of Montreal in 1898. He also maintained seats in each federal election until 1905. He was a very popular federal politician and one of the favoured sons of French Canada.
From 1900 to 1902, Raymond Préfontaine, the Mayor of Montreal, was also the Member of Parliament for both Terrebonne and Maisonneuve ridings. He simultaneously held three political posts, any one of which would be perceived as a full-time responsibility today. Running for two or more seats in the House of Commons was not illegal until 1919. There was a House rule that said if a member won more than one seat, he should resign the extra seat or seats. But there was also a law that stated if your seat was being contested after the election, you could not resign until the challenge was resolved. In this way, MPs sometimes found themselves forbidden from resigning the seat that they did not want to keep. For the Party leader, running in more than one riding made sense, but any candidate could do it.
In 1893, the year after the train first arrived in Ste. Agathe, Préfontaine’s brother-in-law, Octavien Rolland, purchased the property known for the next 25 years as Rolland’s Point but now as Greenshields Point. Rolland, whose father founded Rolland Paper, and for whom Mont Rolland was named, must have received his sister and brother-in-law as houseguests many times. By 1899, Mr. Préfontaine had acquired a parcel of the Chalifoux farm and built a lovely summer house on Lac des Sables. It featured a tower and eyebrow dormers and was accessed through an ornate gate sporting the words ‘Les Sapins’ in a light arch of woven sticks above the entry. Located at 182 Tour du Lac, it has been renovated and restored many times and has always been the home of influential Montrealers. It evoked ease and relaxation, belying the lives of its occupants.
It did not take long for the Préfontaine family to get involved in the life of their adopted town. A year after the house was built, Rolland Prefontaine, an engineering student and the eldest son of Raymond and Hermantine, helped the Compagnie d’Aqueduc et de la force motrice des Laurentides build a hydroelectric facility on the North River. A year after that, around the time Préfontaine became the MP for Terrebonne, the village council decided to name various streets and install proper road signs. For the main entrance to the village, the road that ran from the railroad station up to the Tour du Lac, they chose the name Rue Préfontaine. Virtually everyone coming to Ste. Agathe had to arrive by train, and their action served to remind all visitors of their affection for the honourable J.R.F. Préfontaine.
Aside from his legal practice and political responsibilities, Préfontaine sat on both the Catholic School Commission and the Harbour Commission of Montreal, was a director of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, the St. James Club and the Canadian Club of Montreal.
In 1902, he resigned both Terrebonne and Maisonneuve seats, as well as his post as Mayor of Montreal, and assumed the role of Minister of Marine and Fisheries. He was subsequently re-elected in Maisonneuve in a by-election and named to the Privy Council. In his role as minister, he travelled to France to negotiate a marine agreement. He also undertook the delicate mission of acquiring a wedding ring for his eldest son, Rolland, to bestow upon his future bride. Sadly, he suffered a heart attack in early December and died in Paris on Christmas Day, 1905. He was fifty-five. His funeral, held in Montreal late in January after his remains were returned on Queen Victoria’s private yacht, was one of the largest funerals Montreal had seen.
References include both the federal and provincial government websites and Edmond Grignon’s 1912 historic album of Ste. Agathe. With special thanks to Monique Préfontaine DeSerres and her family.
Palomino Road, Ste-Agathe
Palomino Road runs between Route 329 and Route 117, joining Lac Brûlé to Lake Manitou in Ste-Agathe. It is a long gravel road fenced for some distance, and there is a lovely old farmhouse at one of its curves. The Commission de toponymie has no information on its naming, but many people remember the Lodge. For forty years it was a busy hotel with riding and skiing and it was instrumental in bringing a lot of families to the Laurentians.
The property once belonged to Melasippe Giroux, a farmer among the many who eked out a living in the hills between the two big lakes. His farm bordered a smaller lake that bears his name today. The Giroux family hung on until 1908, fully 16 years into the real estate boom that began with the railroad and saw almost every farm in the area change hands. Giroux sold to Morris Ryan, the owner of a Montreal dry cleaning business. Ryan had no reason to believe that the land would ever be farmed viably. With open, stony fields rising from the shore of tiny Lac Giroux to treed hilltops, the farm had never been able to provide more than subsistence. The frost-free season is short, only reliable for about 80 days and the evenings are generally cool. Ryan bought the property just to have a country retreat, a gentleman’s farm. Over the next twenty years, he would sell off and buy back pieces, wanting to share his bucolic getaway but not quite sure how to do it. Little could he foresee the day his son-in-law Henry would come looking for a new start in life on this run-down rocky farm.
Henry Kaufmann was a driven man who worked his way to a tidy fortune during his twenties and early thirties. One of nine children, he would not apply himself academically and so was apprenticed to learn carpentry. Having received payment in some shares, he soon discovered that trading in them could be much more lucrative than carpentry, and he took to his new career with the determination of a skilled labourer. Despite his hard work, he was not prepared for what happened on that fateful Friday in October 1929 when his wealth simply ceased to exist. Henry was 34 years old and had to start over.
His father-in-law received him at the farm and assigned him the challenge of using his carpentry skills to build a log house. He disappeared into the bush and built one. Ryan was probably thinking that they could sell the house, and that Kaufmann could build another. They were trying to figure out some way to create a livelihood on the barren farm that Giroux had abandoned. All that they had used it for until then was riding horses. The Depression was not a good time for real estate, though. Instead, Kaufmann built a lodge, and Ryan and he arranged with the Rabiners of Montreal to run it for them.
In those days, Montrealers came to small lodges in the country for their holidays and they had the choice of many hotels and inns, each with a special feature. The ones on the shores of large lakes could offer boating, canoeing and swimming. Lac Giroux was not really large enough to do much boating, but the Ryans had horses and miles of trails.
When Rabiner left to set up his own hotel, Kaufmann, undaunted, built an even larger lodge and a huge stable. He depended on hardworking employees, and he drove them hard. One who stood by him for many years was Arnold, a World War One British cavalryman. Arnold looked after the stables, and guests remember him as a character. He knew the horses and he loved Dalmatians. These he raised on his own, letting them breed with no more than the detached interest that a farmer might take in his farm dogs.
In the early part of the century, riding was a major recreational activity in the Laurentians, predating skiing and water sports, and it only grudgingly gave way to skiing through the 1930′s and 40′s. During that period, Arnold’s stables had over a dozen horses and the trails to go with them. Kaufmann had a particular love for palominos and so he named the hotel Palomino Lodge. Palomino horses are not a breed, but simply a distinct golden colour. Breeding two palominos will give you a white horse; a palomino and a sorrel will produce the palomino colt with the 14 carat gold colouring and the white mane and tail.
Among the many guests received at the Lodge was Lorne Greene, who later became famous as the father in the television series Bonanza. The Lodge also housed Princess Elizabeth’s retinue in the early ’50′s when she visited Canada prior to her ascension to the throne.
Henry Kaufmann and Berenice Ryan ran the lodge until they sold it to one of their regular guests, Sam Steinberg, in 1956, and while the Kaufmanns never had children, in a sense the Lodge stayed in the family, as Henry’s nephew had married the daughter of the new owner. Henry, though, went back to the stock market. He and Berenice moved back to Montreal where they were involved in many charities and they left their estate to a foundation established in their names.
Palomino Lodge became a retreat for Steinberg’s employees until the 1980′s, at which time it was acquired by the Apostles of Infinite Love. The new owners let the property run down and over the years the fields and roads were abandoned to the woods. The building achieved some notoriety again in the 1990′s when kids accidentally set fire to the old lodge, and with the road gone, local residents watched as water bombers skimmed the surface of nearby Lac Brûlé and doused the flames. It has changed hands several times and the buildings are now gone and the farm and horses are only fading memories. Today it is a vacant parcel of land fronting on Palomino Road.
Thanks to Elliott Kaufmann and Robert Levine for sharing their memories.
The property once belonged to Melasippe Giroux, a farmer among the many who eked out a living in the hills between the two big lakes. His farm bordered a smaller lake that bears his name today. The Giroux family hung on until 1908, fully 16 years into the real estate boom that began with the railroad and saw almost every farm in the area change hands. Giroux sold to Morris Ryan, the owner of a Montreal dry cleaning business. Ryan had no reason to believe that the land would ever be farmed viably. With open, stony fields rising from the shore of tiny Lac Giroux to treed hilltops, the farm had never been able to provide more than subsistence. The frost-free season is short, only reliable for about 80 days and the evenings are generally cool. Ryan bought the property just to have a country retreat, a gentleman’s farm. Over the next twenty years, he would sell off and buy back pieces, wanting to share his bucolic getaway but not quite sure how to do it. Little could he foresee the day his son-in-law Henry would come looking for a new start in life on this run-down rocky farm.
Henry Kaufmann was a driven man who worked his way to a tidy fortune during his twenties and early thirties. One of nine children, he would not apply himself academically and so was apprenticed to learn carpentry. Having received payment in some shares, he soon discovered that trading in them could be much more lucrative than carpentry, and he took to his new career with the determination of a skilled labourer. Despite his hard work, he was not prepared for what happened on that fateful Friday in October 1929 when his wealth simply ceased to exist. Henry was 34 years old and had to start over.
His father-in-law received him at the farm and assigned him the challenge of using his carpentry skills to build a log house. He disappeared into the bush and built one. Ryan was probably thinking that they could sell the house, and that Kaufmann could build another. They were trying to figure out some way to create a livelihood on the barren farm that Giroux had abandoned. All that they had used it for until then was riding horses. The Depression was not a good time for real estate, though. Instead, Kaufmann built a lodge, and Ryan and he arranged with the Rabiners of Montreal to run it for them.
In those days, Montrealers came to small lodges in the country for their holidays and they had the choice of many hotels and inns, each with a special feature. The ones on the shores of large lakes could offer boating, canoeing and swimming. Lac Giroux was not really large enough to do much boating, but the Ryans had horses and miles of trails.
When Rabiner left to set up his own hotel, Kaufmann, undaunted, built an even larger lodge and a huge stable. He depended on hardworking employees, and he drove them hard. One who stood by him for many years was Arnold, a World War One British cavalryman. Arnold looked after the stables, and guests remember him as a character. He knew the horses and he loved Dalmatians. These he raised on his own, letting them breed with no more than the detached interest that a farmer might take in his farm dogs.
In the early part of the century, riding was a major recreational activity in the Laurentians, predating skiing and water sports, and it only grudgingly gave way to skiing through the 1930′s and 40′s. During that period, Arnold’s stables had over a dozen horses and the trails to go with them. Kaufmann had a particular love for palominos and so he named the hotel Palomino Lodge. Palomino horses are not a breed, but simply a distinct golden colour. Breeding two palominos will give you a white horse; a palomino and a sorrel will produce the palomino colt with the 14 carat gold colouring and the white mane and tail.
Among the many guests received at the Lodge was Lorne Greene, who later became famous as the father in the television series Bonanza. The Lodge also housed Princess Elizabeth’s retinue in the early ’50′s when she visited Canada prior to her ascension to the throne.
Henry Kaufmann and Berenice Ryan ran the lodge until they sold it to one of their regular guests, Sam Steinberg, in 1956, and while the Kaufmanns never had children, in a sense the Lodge stayed in the family, as Henry’s nephew had married the daughter of the new owner. Henry, though, went back to the stock market. He and Berenice moved back to Montreal where they were involved in many charities and they left their estate to a foundation established in their names.
Palomino Lodge became a retreat for Steinberg’s employees until the 1980′s, at which time it was acquired by the Apostles of Infinite Love. The new owners let the property run down and over the years the fields and roads were abandoned to the woods. The building achieved some notoriety again in the 1990′s when kids accidentally set fire to the old lodge, and with the road gone, local residents watched as water bombers skimmed the surface of nearby Lac Brûlé and doused the flames. It has changed hands several times and the buildings are now gone and the farm and horses are only fading memories. Today it is a vacant parcel of land fronting on Palomino Road.
Thanks to Elliott Kaufmann and Robert Levine for sharing their memories.
Mont Tremblant Park
In 1894, Dr. Camille Laviolette of Laval University convinced the Quebec provincial government to set aside a large parcel of Laurentian property for the creation of a forestry reserve. His plan was to build a tuberculosis sanatorium in a completely protected environment. The proposal, originally drafted in 1893, was accepted in July 1894. Dr. Laviolette had studied in Paris, London and Berlin. He was a member of la Société Française d’Otologie et de Laryngologie de Paris, a specialist at l’Institution des Sourdes et Muettes, and was a medical doctor at the University of Laval. He planned the Sanatorium d’Altitude pour la tuberculose which was to be situated only four miles from the St. Jovite railroad station on the south-east face of La Montagne Tremblante (Trembling Mountain). The “Act to establish the Trembling Mountain Park” was voted into law on January 12, 1895. It set aside 14,750 acres for the forest reserve and an additional 400 acres for the treatment complex, and the property was to be available “to any persons or corporations who furnish sufficient sureties that they will erect and maintain such sanatorium…” While the land was reserved, the sanatorium was never built.
According to F. Ryan, author of Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told, an estimated one billion people died of tuberculosis between 1700 and 1900. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that the world population did not reach two billion until 1930. Today, we talk of pandemics such as the flu that struck during World War One and the risks of avian flu. In the 18th and 19th centuries, our cities were hit by plagues of cholera and smallpox. All of these come and go. Tuberculosis, or consumption as it was also called, just sat there and took its toll year after year, cutting people down in the prime of life, disrupting families and weakening communities. It was, and still is, highly contagious through airborne bacteria.
For most of the 1800s, there was no conception of bacteria, and people believed that the disease itself lived in a miasma that floated in the air in low, damp areas, and that the night mists and fog could carry disease. People believed this viscerally. Mothers would fear night chills as though they were ghosts. The wealthy would build high up the hill, not just for the view, but also to distance themselves from the miasma. Fogs hanging in the valleys were sinister.
Forty-five years ago, students were still x-rayed for TB in the schools. Everyone was involved in fund-raisings, selling stamps showing the cross with the double horizontal bar, the symbol of the International Union Against Tuberculosis. Fear of tuberculosis pervaded society and almost everyone knew someone who had gone to a sanatorium for the rest cure.
The rest cure was discovered serendipitously in the 1850s when Hermann Brehmner, a German botany student, moved to the Himalayas to die. He was consumptive, that is to say he had tuberculosis, and the odds were that it would simply progress until he withered away. Removed from his urban environment, with all its pressures, he began to recover, and in time he had completely regained his health. Leaving botany, he went back to school and studied medicine, proposing in his doctoral thesis that tuberculosis could be cured. He went on to pioneer the rest cure, building a large sanatorium in the mountains where patients would be fed a well-balanced diet and forced to rest, spending the days on balconies in the clean, cool mountain air, wrapped against the cold.
Dr. Edward Trudeau, the grandfather of the cartoonist Gary Trudeau, lived an almost parallel experience, leaving New York City and moving to Saranac Lake to die. When he first arrived, he was so close to death that a man had to carry him to his room, remarking that he weighed no more than a light bag. He began a sanatorium there, in the 1880s.
Dr. Laviolette’s project was never used in the treatment of tuberculosis. Given the credentials of Dr. Arthur Richer, founder of the first tuberculosis sanatorium to open up in Ste. Agathe, and Dr. Laviolette’s less appropriate, albeit impressive, credentials, one might wonder if there ever was a sincere intention of building a sanatorium on the location that the government set aside for Dr. Laviolette’s dream. If the intentions were sincere, it is curious that Dr. Richer did not take advantage of the reserve of 400 acres that was set aside for that purpose. His hospital was open by 1899. Surely the planning started a few years before that. Surely he would have been told.
The act creating the park contained a curious stipulation. Clause 4 read “This act shall not affect any rights acquired under any license to cut timber or any lease to any person or to any fish and game club.” A short article some years later (1902) in the St. Jerome paper L’Avenir du Nord deplored the monopolisation and misuse of public lands for maintaining an exclusive fish and game club effectively protected by the reserve land. The article suggested that the club members had friends in high places and that the $50 per year cost was a gift; it was worth twice that amount, the article claimed. Listed among the activities that Dr. Laviolette envisioned for his patients were fishing, hunting, bathing and canoeing in summer; music, parlour games, snow-shoeing, tobogganing, skating, hunting and ice fishing in winter. It is hard to imagine these terminally ill patients taking advantage of such elaborate facilities.
By 1954, a cure had been found for tuberculosis and today, few people are aware of the shadow that the disease once cast. It no longer seems important whether the intentions of the politicians were sincere or self-serving. We all live with a half-conscious faith that the politicians will be there for us again the next time we are confronted with a real enemy.
Ref: the National Archives in Ottawa.
According to F. Ryan, author of Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told, an estimated one billion people died of tuberculosis between 1700 and 1900. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that the world population did not reach two billion until 1930. Today, we talk of pandemics such as the flu that struck during World War One and the risks of avian flu. In the 18th and 19th centuries, our cities were hit by plagues of cholera and smallpox. All of these come and go. Tuberculosis, or consumption as it was also called, just sat there and took its toll year after year, cutting people down in the prime of life, disrupting families and weakening communities. It was, and still is, highly contagious through airborne bacteria.
For most of the 1800s, there was no conception of bacteria, and people believed that the disease itself lived in a miasma that floated in the air in low, damp areas, and that the night mists and fog could carry disease. People believed this viscerally. Mothers would fear night chills as though they were ghosts. The wealthy would build high up the hill, not just for the view, but also to distance themselves from the miasma. Fogs hanging in the valleys were sinister.
Forty-five years ago, students were still x-rayed for TB in the schools. Everyone was involved in fund-raisings, selling stamps showing the cross with the double horizontal bar, the symbol of the International Union Against Tuberculosis. Fear of tuberculosis pervaded society and almost everyone knew someone who had gone to a sanatorium for the rest cure.
The rest cure was discovered serendipitously in the 1850s when Hermann Brehmner, a German botany student, moved to the Himalayas to die. He was consumptive, that is to say he had tuberculosis, and the odds were that it would simply progress until he withered away. Removed from his urban environment, with all its pressures, he began to recover, and in time he had completely regained his health. Leaving botany, he went back to school and studied medicine, proposing in his doctoral thesis that tuberculosis could be cured. He went on to pioneer the rest cure, building a large sanatorium in the mountains where patients would be fed a well-balanced diet and forced to rest, spending the days on balconies in the clean, cool mountain air, wrapped against the cold.
Dr. Edward Trudeau, the grandfather of the cartoonist Gary Trudeau, lived an almost parallel experience, leaving New York City and moving to Saranac Lake to die. When he first arrived, he was so close to death that a man had to carry him to his room, remarking that he weighed no more than a light bag. He began a sanatorium there, in the 1880s.
Dr. Laviolette’s project was never used in the treatment of tuberculosis. Given the credentials of Dr. Arthur Richer, founder of the first tuberculosis sanatorium to open up in Ste. Agathe, and Dr. Laviolette’s less appropriate, albeit impressive, credentials, one might wonder if there ever was a sincere intention of building a sanatorium on the location that the government set aside for Dr. Laviolette’s dream. If the intentions were sincere, it is curious that Dr. Richer did not take advantage of the reserve of 400 acres that was set aside for that purpose. His hospital was open by 1899. Surely the planning started a few years before that. Surely he would have been told.
The act creating the park contained a curious stipulation. Clause 4 read “This act shall not affect any rights acquired under any license to cut timber or any lease to any person or to any fish and game club.” A short article some years later (1902) in the St. Jerome paper L’Avenir du Nord deplored the monopolisation and misuse of public lands for maintaining an exclusive fish and game club effectively protected by the reserve land. The article suggested that the club members had friends in high places and that the $50 per year cost was a gift; it was worth twice that amount, the article claimed. Listed among the activities that Dr. Laviolette envisioned for his patients were fishing, hunting, bathing and canoeing in summer; music, parlour games, snow-shoeing, tobogganing, skating, hunting and ice fishing in winter. It is hard to imagine these terminally ill patients taking advantage of such elaborate facilities.
By 1954, a cure had been found for tuberculosis and today, few people are aware of the shadow that the disease once cast. It no longer seems important whether the intentions of the politicians were sincere or self-serving. We all live with a half-conscious faith that the politicians will be there for us again the next time we are confronted with a real enemy.
Ref: the National Archives in Ottawa.
Ivry-sur-le-Lac
In 1891, Viscount Émile Ogier d’Ivry passed away in Chêne-de-C?ur, 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 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. Pictures of the house can be seen in Neil and Catharine McKenty’s recent book Skiing Legends and the Laurentian Lodge 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 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 members 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-C?ur. His aunt, who lived to 99, had 13 healthy children. Gaétan ultimately re-established himself in France, acquiring the family manse from his aunt, and today Raoul’s grandson Phillippe, Comte Ogier d’Ivry resides in Chêne-de-C?ur.
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; the Viscount followed shortly after in 1952, but just before his death learned that the last male in the line of the Comte Ogier d’Ivry had passed away, causing the title of Count to devolve to him.
Special thanks to Comte Philippe Ogier d’Ivry for help in preparing the foregoing.
Raoul began his ambitious project of establishing a new Ogier 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. Pictures of the house can be seen in Neil and Catharine McKenty’s recent book Skiing Legends and the Laurentian Lodge 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 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 members 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-C?ur. His aunt, who lived to 99, had 13 healthy children. Gaétan ultimately re-established himself in France, acquiring the family manse from his aunt, and today Raoul’s grandson Phillippe, Comte Ogier d’Ivry resides in Chêne-de-C?ur.
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; the Viscount followed shortly after in 1952, but just before his death learned that the last male in the line of the Comte Ogier d’Ivry had passed away, causing the title of Count to devolve to him.
Special thanks to Comte Philippe Ogier d’Ivry for help in preparing the foregoing.
Greenshields’ Point
Reverend Théophile Thibodeau was not a typical priest. He assumed responsibility for the parish of Ste-Agathe-des-Monts in 1878 and, while he was loved and respected in his parish and is credited with the colonisation of Archambault township and the construction of a chapel, his real passion was his homestead. It consisted of a large portion of a peninsula in Ste- Agathe’s Lac des Sables known today as Greenshields’ Point. As a result, four years after assuming his parish responsibilities, he managed to resign and return home.
His parishioners were not ready to let him off that easily, however, and two years later he succumbed and accepted the responsibility of Curé. He assumed the mantle of spiritual leader on the eve of Ste-Agathe’s bleakest period. A man who appreciated his comforts, he raised enough money to have a more suitable presbytery built, and it was from this new building that he guided his flock through a year of a plague of smallpox, probably the worst plague that our province had experienced in the past 125 years. Michael Bliss describes the horrors of the plague in his book “Plague: A Story of Smallpox in Montreal”. While a vaccine had been developed and even administered years before, the Catholic community of Montreal feared that the vaccine was a plot to destroy the French and discouraged vaccinations. The result was a plague that ran rampant through the city and outlying communities forcing the whole region to be quarantined. In the small village of Ste-Agathe, fifty people would die from it that winter. Following hard on the plague, the region experienced three years of drought so severe that by the end, farmers’ seed stocks were gone and many farmers simply left. Finally on April 9th, 1888, the new presbytery caught fire and the good Curé lost his life trying to save the building. Some residents of the Point still remember being told the old story of how the wind whistling through the trees on the Point is the song of the departed Curé.
In 1893, Octavien Rolland, son of Jean-Baptiste Rolland, founder of Rolland Paper, acquired the point from the estate of the Curé and it soon became known as Rolland’s Point. The Rollands held the property for 20 years and sold it on to James Naismith Greenshields in 1913.
The peninsula consisted of 80 to 100 acres of land with over 12,000 feet of lake frontage and was without a doubt a very prestigious property. At the time many wealthy, influential people acquired property on Lac des Sables and built large impressive country villas. There is no remaining evidence of any such building being undertaken by Greenshields. In fact, one reason given for his acquisition was for his son to have something to do while he cured from tuberculosis at the Laurentian Sanitarium. Despite the family’s apparent casual interest in the peninsula, it became known as Greenshields’ Point. The Greenshields family held the property for 19 years until 1932 and it eventually sold to developers under the name of the Mitawanga Company.
No one will ever really know if Ste-Agathe’s Lac des Sables took its name from the Algonquin word Mitanhwang, meaning “on the sand”. The lake was once commonly known in English as Sandy Lake, and it is possible that the two engineers who acquired Greenshields’ Point in the 1930s were playing on the Algonquin roots of the lake’s name. It is also possible that some Algonquin terms were familiar at that time, but there are no records of an Algonquin community in the region.
Once the redevelopment was completed, the Mitawanga Association of property owners replaced the Mitawanga Company but sixty-six years later people still refer to it as Greenshields’ Point.
James Naismith Greenshields was born in Danville, Quebec on August 7, 1852. He studied law and was called to the bar in 1877. He was hired as the third lawyer in the defence of Louis Riel in 1885. According to George Goulet, author of The Trial of Louis Riel, the defence team of Fitzpatrick, Lemieux and Greenshields began by vigorously challenging the authority of Magistrate Richardson and when their challenge was summarily dismissed, they proposed a plea of insanity, a decision that was opposed by their client. They attributed their decision to information obtained from certain undisclosed parties and most likely were referring to Riel’s period of confinement in two insane asylums in Quebec from 1876 to 1878. Perhaps because of his involvement in this high-profile case, Greenshields’ later interests turned to commercial and corporate matters. He was involved in Shawinigan Water and Power and Wabasso Cottons. He encouraged two of his sons in the creation of Greenshields & Company, later Greenshields Incorporated, and subsequently Richardson Greenshields. While the Richardson name relates to a Winnipeg entrepreneur, he seems to have been unconnected to the magistrate in the Riel trial. One of Greenshields’ sons died during the First World War and a second died later, presumably of tuberculosis. The third became the owner of Greenshields’ Point who sold it in 1932.
So few people know the history of the Greenshields family that it does not seem to serve as an explanation of how the name survived. Another explanation might be that it is just an exotic, important sounding name that seems to reflect the verdant grandeur of the Point. In either case, its survival might suggest recognition of the contributions of the English community to the Laurentians.
Special thanks to Erik Wang, President, Mittawanga Association
His parishioners were not ready to let him off that easily, however, and two years later he succumbed and accepted the responsibility of Curé. He assumed the mantle of spiritual leader on the eve of Ste-Agathe’s bleakest period. A man who appreciated his comforts, he raised enough money to have a more suitable presbytery built, and it was from this new building that he guided his flock through a year of a plague of smallpox, probably the worst plague that our province had experienced in the past 125 years. Michael Bliss describes the horrors of the plague in his book “Plague: A Story of Smallpox in Montreal”. While a vaccine had been developed and even administered years before, the Catholic community of Montreal feared that the vaccine was a plot to destroy the French and discouraged vaccinations. The result was a plague that ran rampant through the city and outlying communities forcing the whole region to be quarantined. In the small village of Ste-Agathe, fifty people would die from it that winter. Following hard on the plague, the region experienced three years of drought so severe that by the end, farmers’ seed stocks were gone and many farmers simply left. Finally on April 9th, 1888, the new presbytery caught fire and the good Curé lost his life trying to save the building. Some residents of the Point still remember being told the old story of how the wind whistling through the trees on the Point is the song of the departed Curé.
In 1893, Octavien Rolland, son of Jean-Baptiste Rolland, founder of Rolland Paper, acquired the point from the estate of the Curé and it soon became known as Rolland’s Point. The Rollands held the property for 20 years and sold it on to James Naismith Greenshields in 1913.
The peninsula consisted of 80 to 100 acres of land with over 12,000 feet of lake frontage and was without a doubt a very prestigious property. At the time many wealthy, influential people acquired property on Lac des Sables and built large impressive country villas. There is no remaining evidence of any such building being undertaken by Greenshields. In fact, one reason given for his acquisition was for his son to have something to do while he cured from tuberculosis at the Laurentian Sanitarium. Despite the family’s apparent casual interest in the peninsula, it became known as Greenshields’ Point. The Greenshields family held the property for 19 years until 1932 and it eventually sold to developers under the name of the Mitawanga Company.
No one will ever really know if Ste-Agathe’s Lac des Sables took its name from the Algonquin word Mitanhwang, meaning “on the sand”. The lake was once commonly known in English as Sandy Lake, and it is possible that the two engineers who acquired Greenshields’ Point in the 1930s were playing on the Algonquin roots of the lake’s name. It is also possible that some Algonquin terms were familiar at that time, but there are no records of an Algonquin community in the region.
Once the redevelopment was completed, the Mitawanga Association of property owners replaced the Mitawanga Company but sixty-six years later people still refer to it as Greenshields’ Point.
James Naismith Greenshields was born in Danville, Quebec on August 7, 1852. He studied law and was called to the bar in 1877. He was hired as the third lawyer in the defence of Louis Riel in 1885. According to George Goulet, author of The Trial of Louis Riel, the defence team of Fitzpatrick, Lemieux and Greenshields began by vigorously challenging the authority of Magistrate Richardson and when their challenge was summarily dismissed, they proposed a plea of insanity, a decision that was opposed by their client. They attributed their decision to information obtained from certain undisclosed parties and most likely were referring to Riel’s period of confinement in two insane asylums in Quebec from 1876 to 1878. Perhaps because of his involvement in this high-profile case, Greenshields’ later interests turned to commercial and corporate matters. He was involved in Shawinigan Water and Power and Wabasso Cottons. He encouraged two of his sons in the creation of Greenshields & Company, later Greenshields Incorporated, and subsequently Richardson Greenshields. While the Richardson name relates to a Winnipeg entrepreneur, he seems to have been unconnected to the magistrate in the Riel trial. One of Greenshields’ sons died during the First World War and a second died later, presumably of tuberculosis. The third became the owner of Greenshields’ Point who sold it in 1932.
So few people know the history of the Greenshields family that it does not seem to serve as an explanation of how the name survived. Another explanation might be that it is just an exotic, important sounding name that seems to reflect the verdant grandeur of the Point. In either case, its survival might suggest recognition of the contributions of the English community to the Laurentians.
Special thanks to Erik Wang, President, Mittawanga Association
Chemin Renaud, Ste. Agathe des Monts
From sixteen years of age, in 1905, Osias Renaud worked at the sawmill built by Anaclat Marier on the Tour du Lac in Ste. Agathe. The water flowing out of Lac des Sables drove the mill. It is hard to imagine today that the outflow of the lake could keep 12 men working; twelve families fed. The Parent brothers, who had acquired the mill, installed a new 40 horsepower turbine around that time, and milled flour as well as wood. The Parents also maintained a full general store selling animal feed, hay, flour, groceries, metal work, piping and even dry goods. In the winter, the men would log. Altogether, they kept 55 men working year-round. Eventually, their mill even drove the first electric generator in Ste. Agathe. Today we watch the water run bucolically under the bridge and can only imagine the busy scene that took place 100 years ago.
When Osias Renaud started working he was paid 50¢ per 10-hour day, but within a few years his salary doubled to one dollar per day. He started off as a clerk but soon progressed to the machines. While working there, he milled the wood that would become the benches in the new stone church that was being built on Rue Principale.
By 1910 Ste. Agathe already had a railroad station, hotels, vacation homes, a multitude of businesses, schools and churches, and two tuberculosis hospitals were being built. It was a full, real town, almost a city and it swarmed with vacationers coming to all the hotels. In the winter there were bobsleigh and dog sled races, and people were even skiing over the farms. There were 6 men’s clothing stores, 4 barbershops, 6 butchers, 3 shoe stores as well as 2 separate shoemakers and 6 milliners. This was in sharp contrast to the town of Renaud’s recent childhood. As he recalled in his memoirs, only a dozen years before he would go off to school in shoes fashioned from the treated hides of his own family’s cattle. The youngsters would skate on these same cowhide shoes with reject blades from the blacksmith tied underneath.
By the time he was twenty, he had saved up a little money and, encouraged by his brother-in-law, he went to Montreal to study photography. When he returned he continued to practice it with friends. Around 1910, he took over a small building on St. Vincent Street, and, living upstairs, he set up a photographic studio on the main floor. The tiny building still stands and is a pet shop today.
The photographic technique that he had mastered involved preparing his own collodion-coated glass plates one by one prior to each shot. By this time George Eastman’s Kodak was a popular camera for amateurs, but professional studios used a much larger camera, and these individually prepared glass plates allowed the photographer a lot more control. Renaud mastered these techniques and over the next ten years his subjects included Senator David, Edouard Montpetit, Henri Bourassa and Sir Wilfrid Laurier.
During the Great War, the Laurentian Sanitarium became a sprawling military complex housing both TB and gas victims, and business was good for local entrepreneurs, but Osias Renaud closed his business in 1921. Renaud was 32 years old, in the prime of life and owner of a successful business, but in April his second child, Yvette, was born and his little studio and upstairs apartment may have begun to feel a bit small. He decided to leave photography behind, and a month after his daughter was born, he acquired the Lee farm on the road to Ivry for $4500. Years later, when queried by his children about why he had chosen the life of a farmer, he simply responded that man was made to earn his living by the sweat of his brow.
Whatever the reasons he left photography, within a few years the Renaud farm would become Ste. Agathe’s Model Farm, designated a ferme de demonstration by the Ministry of Agriculture and Osias Renaud would go on to win other honours in his new profession. In a farm produce contest, his farm came in second place behind the farm of Senator Raymond, owner of the Montreal Canadians, and one can imagine that, if the Senator’s farm was in the contest, there were many other wealthy gentleman’s farms vying for the honours. In 1935, his milk cows were producing at almost four times the average rate for Quebec cows, and he kept 150 pigs and 350 chickens as well as producing potatoes, cabbage, carrots, hay and oats. He was a member and one-time president of the Coopérative agricole de Ste-Agathe, something that is hard to imagine ever existed when we look at Ste. Agathe now.
Osias Renaud lived to 93 and his many children and grandchildren still live in the Laurentians. A part of his photo collection is stored in the Musée du Québec à Montréal, and a part is in a private collection. Chemin Renaud, the road that cut through his farm to join Ste. Agathe to Lake Manitou, is also a lasting memorial to him.
References: Les Mémoires de Osias Rénaud with special thanks to Yvette Rénaud Lortie and Normand Lortie; A History of Photography by Dr. Robert Leggat
When Osias Renaud started working he was paid 50¢ per 10-hour day, but within a few years his salary doubled to one dollar per day. He started off as a clerk but soon progressed to the machines. While working there, he milled the wood that would become the benches in the new stone church that was being built on Rue Principale.
By 1910 Ste. Agathe already had a railroad station, hotels, vacation homes, a multitude of businesses, schools and churches, and two tuberculosis hospitals were being built. It was a full, real town, almost a city and it swarmed with vacationers coming to all the hotels. In the winter there were bobsleigh and dog sled races, and people were even skiing over the farms. There were 6 men’s clothing stores, 4 barbershops, 6 butchers, 3 shoe stores as well as 2 separate shoemakers and 6 milliners. This was in sharp contrast to the town of Renaud’s recent childhood. As he recalled in his memoirs, only a dozen years before he would go off to school in shoes fashioned from the treated hides of his own family’s cattle. The youngsters would skate on these same cowhide shoes with reject blades from the blacksmith tied underneath.
By the time he was twenty, he had saved up a little money and, encouraged by his brother-in-law, he went to Montreal to study photography. When he returned he continued to practice it with friends. Around 1910, he took over a small building on St. Vincent Street, and, living upstairs, he set up a photographic studio on the main floor. The tiny building still stands and is a pet shop today.
The photographic technique that he had mastered involved preparing his own collodion-coated glass plates one by one prior to each shot. By this time George Eastman’s Kodak was a popular camera for amateurs, but professional studios used a much larger camera, and these individually prepared glass plates allowed the photographer a lot more control. Renaud mastered these techniques and over the next ten years his subjects included Senator David, Edouard Montpetit, Henri Bourassa and Sir Wilfrid Laurier.
During the Great War, the Laurentian Sanitarium became a sprawling military complex housing both TB and gas victims, and business was good for local entrepreneurs, but Osias Renaud closed his business in 1921. Renaud was 32 years old, in the prime of life and owner of a successful business, but in April his second child, Yvette, was born and his little studio and upstairs apartment may have begun to feel a bit small. He decided to leave photography behind, and a month after his daughter was born, he acquired the Lee farm on the road to Ivry for $4500. Years later, when queried by his children about why he had chosen the life of a farmer, he simply responded that man was made to earn his living by the sweat of his brow.
Whatever the reasons he left photography, within a few years the Renaud farm would become Ste. Agathe’s Model Farm, designated a ferme de demonstration by the Ministry of Agriculture and Osias Renaud would go on to win other honours in his new profession. In a farm produce contest, his farm came in second place behind the farm of Senator Raymond, owner of the Montreal Canadians, and one can imagine that, if the Senator’s farm was in the contest, there were many other wealthy gentleman’s farms vying for the honours. In 1935, his milk cows were producing at almost four times the average rate for Quebec cows, and he kept 150 pigs and 350 chickens as well as producing potatoes, cabbage, carrots, hay and oats. He was a member and one-time president of the Coopérative agricole de Ste-Agathe, something that is hard to imagine ever existed when we look at Ste. Agathe now.
Osias Renaud lived to 93 and his many children and grandchildren still live in the Laurentians. A part of his photo collection is stored in the Musée du Québec à Montréal, and a part is in a private collection. Chemin Renaud, the road that cut through his farm to join Ste. Agathe to Lake Manitou, is also a lasting memorial to him.
References: Les Mémoires de Osias Rénaud with special thanks to Yvette Rénaud Lortie and Normand Lortie; A History of Photography by Dr. Robert Leggat
Baumgarten’s Ski hill, Ste. Agathe
One problem with history is that there are a lot of living people who want to decide what happened before they came along, making recent history rife with competition and chauvinism. There is no truth in history beyond what we believe happened, and the most honest historian rewrites the past. That is how Baumgarten’s ski hill in Ste. Agathe may have lost its status as the first rope tow in Canada.
Don’t look for Baumgarten’s on the map. Go to the town of Ste. Agathe and look for someone older, or at least middle-aged, and ask where Baumgarten’s was. She will tell you to take Tour du Lac up where those new condos are, you know, the apartment ones right on the water blocking everyone else’s view, and go along to Dazé Street. Turn right, and you will see a hill up above, on the left. She might add that it’s gone, that all you will see is houses, and wonder how long you’ve been looking. She won’t think to tell you what Baumgarten’s was – unless you happen to buy her a coffee or take a long walk together. She won’t likely have a bunch of photos with her, but she might tell you about all the people who skied there, and she might mention Moise Paquette and his rope tow. But that was a long time ago.
Moise Paquette, a genuine ‘patenteur,’ built a rope tow from an old car. In the early days this could have consisted of attaching a good stretch of rope to a modified car, lifting one of its wheels like a dog marking its territory, and pulling skiers up to the top of a hill. Paquette managed to put a few more pulleys in there, to guide the rope, eventually patenting the technique and started installing them lots of other places. He built one on Baumgarten’s, but if she tells you categorically that Baumgarten’s was the first rope tow, she might look nervously around first, to see who else is listening. Be ready to hear about Alex Foster’s rope tow, called Foster’s Folly, in Shawbridge. Which one came first? Anyone can remember that the rope tows worked, but no one bothered writing down the dates. One historian managed to diplomatically suggest that Foster could have hired Paquette to help modify the local taxi that pulled people up the Big Hill in Shawbridge. Your hostess in Ste. Agathe might boldly tell you that it happened in 1930, or 1931. Even if she’s old, she likely doesn’t really know.
Foster was a daredevil, a ski jumper from the big city who was training for the ’32 Olympics, when he had an accident that wrecked his knee. It might have been the injury that motivated him to find a mechanical solution for getting ‘up’ the hill. Moise Paquette, a blacksmith who was born in the 1880s, could not keep his hands off any mechanical device. Around ’25 or ‘26 he acquired parts of a plane because he wanted its 9-cylinder rotary engine. He modified a fuselage, eliminating the wings and offered skiers a rope to hang on to behind the body of the craft as it tore its way across Lac des Sables. The motor had no throttle. It was either ‘off’ or ‘on’, so it could reach remarkable speeds. He handcrafted the propeller and the skis himself, laminating wood for his specific needs. He called it the Aero-Ski – she might tell you about it, but if you want the details, you will have to find one of Moise’s descendants – like the mayor.
After Moise passed away in ‘65, his family found a lot of legal notices filed against him complaining about the noise. Early ski joring was a quiet ride behind a horse, but Paquette had no shortage of takers for his exciting, noisy alternative. People were looking for a rush, and the Aero-Ski provided it, even if it woke the dead.
At the hill in nineteen thirty whatever, Paquette’s son, Maurice, home from school, sat at the controls of the stationary engine that pulled people up – well at least the people who paid and hung on. He applied gas as needed for the load of people clinging to the rope and had been told to get anyone off who didn’t pay. Shoving the old truck engine into reverse, he could watch from below as they fell over backwards. If a friend asked, though, he would speed things up to help them get to the top faster. Why this is important is it helps us figure out what year it was, or at least that’s the theory. Since Maurice was born in ’13 and was home from school, it must have been around 1930.
Paquette became the foremost expert on early tows and Baumgarten’s hill continued to operate even after he died. He owned the Ford Motors concession, was the British American Oil distributor and contracted with the army during World War II to test engines for their winter-worthiness. Foster used a slightly different technique that did not conflict with Paquette’s patent, although it was more prone to tangling. If stories make it true, maybe once they are told, someone will be able to decide which of the two rope tows came first, Baumgarten or the Big Hill. If someone else is listening in over coffee, you will hear the whole debate. It would be too bad if we actually found out and the debate was settled. We’d have to look for other stories – like discovering who Baumgarten was.
***
Everyone used to know exactly where to go if you offered to get together at Baumgarten’s. In fact, a lot of people learned to ski there. Places, spaces, destinations can be lost and forgotten, like a pair of gloves when they stop being used. Baumgarten has been dead for longer than he was alive. His house, once a majestic round-log home with a commanding view of the lake, now sits at 154 Tour du Lac in Ste. Agathe looking at a bank of condos on his huge beach. The ski hill that bore his name has grown into a copse of prefab houses. Nothing is really left but the memory.
Alfred Baumgarten was born in Germany in 1842, the son of the King of Saxony’s personal physician. A chemist, he made his way first to the United States and then to Canada, manufacturing sugar from sugar beets. He founded the St. Lawrence Sugar Refinery and was known as the Sugar King of Canada. Having grown up in a king’s court, he felt most comfortable with the wealthy and powerful, so he joined the Montreal Hunt Club.
You can’t tell the story of Baumgarten without talking about the Hunt, another subject that is fading from our common memory. We have all heard of the British aristocracy who chase foxes on horseback watching their packs of dogs track and corner them. People have strong opinions about the propriety of things like that today; it fits in the same category as wearing furs. In Montreal, though, and to some extent in the Laurentians, fox hunting was very proper in the late 1800s and even up to the First World War. It was an expensive hobby, and that by itself set the standard.
The fox hunt, called the Hunt, was the sport of the well-to-do, with large outings taking place in swamplands and on farms on the island of Montreal and in parts of the Laurentians. Like the early skiers, the organisers had to take pains to keep the farmers happy, settling any differences promptly and generously. They even organised a huge farmers’ fair, called a farmers’ frolic, on the Exhibition Grounds at the corner of Cote St. Catherine Road and Park Avenue in Montreal. They would bring in entertainment as involved as the Royal Japanese Troupe of Acrobats, and ply the men with beer and the women with sugar, roasting a full ox on an open spit. Their budget for promotion and goodwill ran around $60,000 a year (equivalent to several millions today).
As successful as Baumgarten was with St. Lawrence Sugar, he seemed more interested in the Hunt. It defined a man. Officers were men, and he lived in the shadow of the age of chivalry (a word that comes from horse). Even as late as World War One, the officer class was still on horseback. It was a caste society in which the rich and powerful rode horses and the rest used them at best to pull a sleigh or carriage. It wasn’t solely the horseless carriage that ended this paradigm. It had a lot of help from the World War One trenches, from gas attacks and from new military equipment like tanks. Baumgarten, who died at the end of the age of the horse, could fit into the right society on horseback. That was probably why he built a substantial property for the Hunt Club on Delorimier Avenue in Montreal in 1882. It included a large banquet room, a dance hall whose floor sat on springs to put spring in the steps of the dancers, a swimming pool described as “an oriental plunge bathroom all inlaid with white tiles” and a steam cleaner in the kennels for the hounds. He became the 18th Master of the Hunt from 1882 to 1887, and of the 35 masters, his name rates the most entries in the index of the Club’s history.
Baumgarten was famous for his parties, and, when the Hunt Club moved to Cote. Ste. Catherine Road, he took the ballroom springs and installed them in the ballroom of his home on McTavish Street (now the McGill Faculty Club), where he spared no expense in the care of his three marriageable daughters.
Compared to McTavish Street and the Clubhouse, his luxurious home in Ste. Agathe was a log cabin. On the lakeside of the Tour du Lac Road, 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 townhouse condos. His large brick stables still exist, 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 going up the mountain became the ski hill. Early photos show people skiing behind horses – ski-joring – a sport that he most likely witnessed with no idea how the skiing part of it would displace his horses from his fields and trails.
Alfred Baumgarten retired in 1912 at the age of seventy, but his last years were not easy. Despite his support of three Montreal hospitals and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, when the First World War began, he was shunned by a lot of his old friends. People cast aspersions that he was a German sympathiser, and later there were even allegations that he had offered succour to German spies. He died in 1919, and while there is no official memorial to him, he still lives in the memory of the people of Ste. Agathe.
Ref- The Square Mile, – Donald MacKay , Douglas & MacIntyre; The History of the Montreal Hunt, -John Irwin Cooper, Montreal Hunt as well as Laurent Paquette and Michel Paquette, grandchildren of Moise Paquette.
Don’t look for Baumgarten’s on the map. Go to the town of Ste. Agathe and look for someone older, or at least middle-aged, and ask where Baumgarten’s was. She will tell you to take Tour du Lac up where those new condos are, you know, the apartment ones right on the water blocking everyone else’s view, and go along to Dazé Street. Turn right, and you will see a hill up above, on the left. She might add that it’s gone, that all you will see is houses, and wonder how long you’ve been looking. She won’t think to tell you what Baumgarten’s was – unless you happen to buy her a coffee or take a long walk together. She won’t likely have a bunch of photos with her, but she might tell you about all the people who skied there, and she might mention Moise Paquette and his rope tow. But that was a long time ago.
Moise Paquette, a genuine ‘patenteur,’ built a rope tow from an old car. In the early days this could have consisted of attaching a good stretch of rope to a modified car, lifting one of its wheels like a dog marking its territory, and pulling skiers up to the top of a hill. Paquette managed to put a few more pulleys in there, to guide the rope, eventually patenting the technique and started installing them lots of other places. He built one on Baumgarten’s, but if she tells you categorically that Baumgarten’s was the first rope tow, she might look nervously around first, to see who else is listening. Be ready to hear about Alex Foster’s rope tow, called Foster’s Folly, in Shawbridge. Which one came first? Anyone can remember that the rope tows worked, but no one bothered writing down the dates. One historian managed to diplomatically suggest that Foster could have hired Paquette to help modify the local taxi that pulled people up the Big Hill in Shawbridge. Your hostess in Ste. Agathe might boldly tell you that it happened in 1930, or 1931. Even if she’s old, she likely doesn’t really know.
Foster was a daredevil, a ski jumper from the big city who was training for the ’32 Olympics, when he had an accident that wrecked his knee. It might have been the injury that motivated him to find a mechanical solution for getting ‘up’ the hill. Moise Paquette, a blacksmith who was born in the 1880s, could not keep his hands off any mechanical device. Around ’25 or ‘26 he acquired parts of a plane because he wanted its 9-cylinder rotary engine. He modified a fuselage, eliminating the wings and offered skiers a rope to hang on to behind the body of the craft as it tore its way across Lac des Sables. The motor had no throttle. It was either ‘off’ or ‘on’, so it could reach remarkable speeds. He handcrafted the propeller and the skis himself, laminating wood for his specific needs. He called it the Aero-Ski – she might tell you about it, but if you want the details, you will have to find one of Moise’s descendants – like the mayor.
After Moise passed away in ‘65, his family found a lot of legal notices filed against him complaining about the noise. Early ski joring was a quiet ride behind a horse, but Paquette had no shortage of takers for his exciting, noisy alternative. People were looking for a rush, and the Aero-Ski provided it, even if it woke the dead.
At the hill in nineteen thirty whatever, Paquette’s son, Maurice, home from school, sat at the controls of the stationary engine that pulled people up – well at least the people who paid and hung on. He applied gas as needed for the load of people clinging to the rope and had been told to get anyone off who didn’t pay. Shoving the old truck engine into reverse, he could watch from below as they fell over backwards. If a friend asked, though, he would speed things up to help them get to the top faster. Why this is important is it helps us figure out what year it was, or at least that’s the theory. Since Maurice was born in ’13 and was home from school, it must have been around 1930.
Paquette became the foremost expert on early tows and Baumgarten’s hill continued to operate even after he died. He owned the Ford Motors concession, was the British American Oil distributor and contracted with the army during World War II to test engines for their winter-worthiness. Foster used a slightly different technique that did not conflict with Paquette’s patent, although it was more prone to tangling. If stories make it true, maybe once they are told, someone will be able to decide which of the two rope tows came first, Baumgarten or the Big Hill. If someone else is listening in over coffee, you will hear the whole debate. It would be too bad if we actually found out and the debate was settled. We’d have to look for other stories – like discovering who Baumgarten was.
***
Everyone used to know exactly where to go if you offered to get together at Baumgarten’s. In fact, a lot of people learned to ski there. Places, spaces, destinations can be lost and forgotten, like a pair of gloves when they stop being used. Baumgarten has been dead for longer than he was alive. His house, once a majestic round-log home with a commanding view of the lake, now sits at 154 Tour du Lac in Ste. Agathe looking at a bank of condos on his huge beach. The ski hill that bore his name has grown into a copse of prefab houses. Nothing is really left but the memory.
Alfred Baumgarten was born in Germany in 1842, the son of the King of Saxony’s personal physician. A chemist, he made his way first to the United States and then to Canada, manufacturing sugar from sugar beets. He founded the St. Lawrence Sugar Refinery and was known as the Sugar King of Canada. Having grown up in a king’s court, he felt most comfortable with the wealthy and powerful, so he joined the Montreal Hunt Club.
You can’t tell the story of Baumgarten without talking about the Hunt, another subject that is fading from our common memory. We have all heard of the British aristocracy who chase foxes on horseback watching their packs of dogs track and corner them. People have strong opinions about the propriety of things like that today; it fits in the same category as wearing furs. In Montreal, though, and to some extent in the Laurentians, fox hunting was very proper in the late 1800s and even up to the First World War. It was an expensive hobby, and that by itself set the standard.
The fox hunt, called the Hunt, was the sport of the well-to-do, with large outings taking place in swamplands and on farms on the island of Montreal and in parts of the Laurentians. Like the early skiers, the organisers had to take pains to keep the farmers happy, settling any differences promptly and generously. They even organised a huge farmers’ fair, called a farmers’ frolic, on the Exhibition Grounds at the corner of Cote St. Catherine Road and Park Avenue in Montreal. They would bring in entertainment as involved as the Royal Japanese Troupe of Acrobats, and ply the men with beer and the women with sugar, roasting a full ox on an open spit. Their budget for promotion and goodwill ran around $60,000 a year (equivalent to several millions today).
As successful as Baumgarten was with St. Lawrence Sugar, he seemed more interested in the Hunt. It defined a man. Officers were men, and he lived in the shadow of the age of chivalry (a word that comes from horse). Even as late as World War One, the officer class was still on horseback. It was a caste society in which the rich and powerful rode horses and the rest used them at best to pull a sleigh or carriage. It wasn’t solely the horseless carriage that ended this paradigm. It had a lot of help from the World War One trenches, from gas attacks and from new military equipment like tanks. Baumgarten, who died at the end of the age of the horse, could fit into the right society on horseback. That was probably why he built a substantial property for the Hunt Club on Delorimier Avenue in Montreal in 1882. It included a large banquet room, a dance hall whose floor sat on springs to put spring in the steps of the dancers, a swimming pool described as “an oriental plunge bathroom all inlaid with white tiles” and a steam cleaner in the kennels for the hounds. He became the 18th Master of the Hunt from 1882 to 1887, and of the 35 masters, his name rates the most entries in the index of the Club’s history.
Baumgarten was famous for his parties, and, when the Hunt Club moved to Cote. Ste. Catherine Road, he took the ballroom springs and installed them in the ballroom of his home on McTavish Street (now the McGill Faculty Club), where he spared no expense in the care of his three marriageable daughters.
Compared to McTavish Street and the Clubhouse, his luxurious home in Ste. Agathe was a log cabin. On the lakeside of the Tour du Lac Road, 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 townhouse condos. His large brick stables still exist, 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 going up the mountain became the ski hill. Early photos show people skiing behind horses – ski-joring – a sport that he most likely witnessed with no idea how the skiing part of it would displace his horses from his fields and trails.
Alfred Baumgarten retired in 1912 at the age of seventy, but his last years were not easy. Despite his support of three Montreal hospitals and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, when the First World War began, he was shunned by a lot of his old friends. People cast aspersions that he was a German sympathiser, and later there were even allegations that he had offered succour to German spies. He died in 1919, and while there is no official memorial to him, he still lives in the memory of the people of Ste. Agathe.
Ref- The Square Mile, – Donald MacKay , Douglas & MacIntyre; The History of the Montreal Hunt, -John Irwin Cooper, Montreal Hunt as well as Laurent Paquette and Michel Paquette, grandchildren of Moise Paquette.
Beresford Township
Beresford Township, originally settled by peaceful French-Canadian farmers, was named for a British war hero, a major general who fought Napoleon throughout his career and never set foot in the Canadas.
Encompassing Ste. Agathe, it sits on a high plateau south of the St. Narcisse Moraine and includes a part of the headwaters of the North River. Although the Weskerini Algonquin hunted in the area, there is little to no evidence of permanent settlement in this small territory from the last ice age until Augustin-Norbert Morin’s first pioneers began arriving in the 1850s. Coupled with the lack of navigable rivers and the very thin layer of soil that remained after the passage of the glaciers, it has a higher elevation than its neighbours to the west and south, and the frost-free season is much shorter than in those other areas.
The first settlers found an undisturbed forest rich in pine and maple and discovered clean, clear lakes teeming with trout. They brought with them a farming culture that was ill suited to the thin soil and short seasons. However, they doggedly perceived themselves as farmers and stripped the forest away, burning it and selling the residue as
potash for a few cents a hundredweight until all that was left was the barren soil and the fishing season. Since these hardy, independent people were Catholics, their own name for their settlement owed more to the parish and the priests than to the distant bureaucratic authority that had called it Beresford, and it became known as the Paroisse de Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts. Rarely would they have thought of the man for whom the township had been named, or of his legacy, even as the fields were abandoned and the forests began their slow return.
Major General William Carr of Beresford was 84 years old when Beresford Township was named in his honour in 1852. He died two years later, never having seen the ill-fated forest. The illegitimate son of Lord George De La Poer Beresford, 1st Marquess of Waterford, in Ireland, and of an unrecorded woman, William joined the British Army at 17 years of age. Lord George fathered two children by different women prior to marrying and fathering seven legitimate children.
It was customary for less advantaged members of titled families to be given a commission in the army, where they were basically on their own. These commissions were not merit based, but were purchased by those who could afford them, and it is possible that it was the Marquess who paid for William Carr’s commission. The evidence in favour of this conclusion is that William Carr’s elder half-brother, born in the same circumstances, also obtained a title in his lifetime after having proven himself as an officer in the navy.
Beresford first showed his capabilities in a battle in Toulon in
1793, a battle that saw Napoleon rise from captain to general in his victory over the British. As Napoleon rose to power, the British sought ever further afield for the trees that would maintain their navy, beginning the long process that would eventually contribute to the demise of the forests of Beresford Township.
Beresford was among those determined career soldiers who, despite injuries (he had lost an eye) and setbacks, would dog Napoleon to the end of his career. He served in Nova Scotia, India, Egypt, and Cape Town, South Africa. He rose to the rank of general, captured Buenos Aires, was forced to surrender it, escaped from prison there and returned to England. His major military contribution was during the Peninsular War against Napoleon, in Spain and Portugal. He earned the title of Marquis de Campo Maior from the King of Portugal for his services and was an intimate of Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Viscount Wellington. He is also credited with retraining the Portuguese army while in Wellington’s service.
Despite his vital contributions to the defeat of Napoleon, the early bureaucrats of the Canadas who chose his name may have had a different reason to commemorate this great general, a reason that would seem to tie him more closely to the township. Beresford is best remembered for the work that he began during his retirement. On his property called Bedgebury in Goudhurst, Kent, England, he began a conservatory of pine tree species that has grown into the largest coniferous preserve in the world with “over 10,000 tree specimens growing in 320 acres, including rare, historically important and endangered trees and is home to some 91 vulnerable or critically endangered species….” (from The Friends of Bedgebury Pinetum web site).
Our ancient woodlands were lost during 150 years of peaceful history, but we can celebrate the legacy of General Beresford while witnessing the occasional crown of a white pine breaking through the canopy of our young second-growth forest. Had our earliest farmers known him, perhaps they could have set aside a small portion of our virgin pine forest in his honour. Perhaps we can still do something. The residents of Lac Brûlé in Ste. Agathe have been protecting their forest for almost 100 years, and the white pines are now standing head-and-shoulders over the forest canopy.
Excerpted from Naming the Laurentians
Encompassing Ste. Agathe, it sits on a high plateau south of the St. Narcisse Moraine and includes a part of the headwaters of the North River. Although the Weskerini Algonquin hunted in the area, there is little to no evidence of permanent settlement in this small territory from the last ice age until Augustin-Norbert Morin’s first pioneers began arriving in the 1850s. Coupled with the lack of navigable rivers and the very thin layer of soil that remained after the passage of the glaciers, it has a higher elevation than its neighbours to the west and south, and the frost-free season is much shorter than in those other areas.
The first settlers found an undisturbed forest rich in pine and maple and discovered clean, clear lakes teeming with trout. They brought with them a farming culture that was ill suited to the thin soil and short seasons. However, they doggedly perceived themselves as farmers and stripped the forest away, burning it and selling the residue as
potash for a few cents a hundredweight until all that was left was the barren soil and the fishing season. Since these hardy, independent people were Catholics, their own name for their settlement owed more to the parish and the priests than to the distant bureaucratic authority that had called it Beresford, and it became known as the Paroisse de Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts. Rarely would they have thought of the man for whom the township had been named, or of his legacy, even as the fields were abandoned and the forests began their slow return.
Major General William Carr of Beresford was 84 years old when Beresford Township was named in his honour in 1852. He died two years later, never having seen the ill-fated forest. The illegitimate son of Lord George De La Poer Beresford, 1st Marquess of Waterford, in Ireland, and of an unrecorded woman, William joined the British Army at 17 years of age. Lord George fathered two children by different women prior to marrying and fathering seven legitimate children.
It was customary for less advantaged members of titled families to be given a commission in the army, where they were basically on their own. These commissions were not merit based, but were purchased by those who could afford them, and it is possible that it was the Marquess who paid for William Carr’s commission. The evidence in favour of this conclusion is that William Carr’s elder half-brother, born in the same circumstances, also obtained a title in his lifetime after having proven himself as an officer in the navy.
Beresford first showed his capabilities in a battle in Toulon in
1793, a battle that saw Napoleon rise from captain to general in his victory over the British. As Napoleon rose to power, the British sought ever further afield for the trees that would maintain their navy, beginning the long process that would eventually contribute to the demise of the forests of Beresford Township.
Beresford was among those determined career soldiers who, despite injuries (he had lost an eye) and setbacks, would dog Napoleon to the end of his career. He served in Nova Scotia, India, Egypt, and Cape Town, South Africa. He rose to the rank of general, captured Buenos Aires, was forced to surrender it, escaped from prison there and returned to England. His major military contribution was during the Peninsular War against Napoleon, in Spain and Portugal. He earned the title of Marquis de Campo Maior from the King of Portugal for his services and was an intimate of Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Viscount Wellington. He is also credited with retraining the Portuguese army while in Wellington’s service.
Despite his vital contributions to the defeat of Napoleon, the early bureaucrats of the Canadas who chose his name may have had a different reason to commemorate this great general, a reason that would seem to tie him more closely to the township. Beresford is best remembered for the work that he began during his retirement. On his property called Bedgebury in Goudhurst, Kent, England, he began a conservatory of pine tree species that has grown into the largest coniferous preserve in the world with “over 10,000 tree specimens growing in 320 acres, including rare, historically important and endangered trees and is home to some 91 vulnerable or critically endangered species….” (from The Friends of Bedgebury Pinetum web site).
Our ancient woodlands were lost during 150 years of peaceful history, but we can celebrate the legacy of General Beresford while witnessing the occasional crown of a white pine breaking through the canopy of our young second-growth forest. Had our earliest farmers known him, perhaps they could have set aside a small portion of our virgin pine forest in his honour. Perhaps we can still do something. The residents of Lac Brûlé in Ste. Agathe have been protecting their forest for almost 100 years, and the white pines are now standing head-and-shoulders over the forest canopy.
Excerpted from Naming the Laurentians