Montreal Cemeteries

 

Genealogists tend to visit a lot of cemeteries, so if those are beautiful places, the experience can be a pleasure. Anyone with Montreal ancestors in either Notre-Dame-des-Neiges (Catholic) Cemetery or in the non-denominational Mount Royal Cemetery can consider themselves lucky: both cemeteries are located on the slopes of Mount Royal, both are filled with trees and wildlife, and both have services to assist genealogists find their relatives.

These cemeteries were opened in the middle of the 19^th century after the city’s population expanded, putting earlier burial grounds too close to residential areas. Hygienic concerns became particularly important when cholera epidemics swept the continent.

In fact, because of epidemics, poor sanitation and a lack of clean drinking water, many of the city’s dead were children…more

 

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Mile End – Saint Louis

 

The second growth spurt of Mile End coincided with the introduction of electric tramway service in 1893; the area can be considered an example of a streetcar suburb. The agricultural and industrial exhibition grounds at the southwest of the village, near Mount Royal, were subdivided in 1899 for housing. The village became a town in 1895 and changed its name to simply Saint-Louis. Apart from a tiny street located just outside the town's northwestern limit, and (for its remaining years) the railway station, the name Mile End passed out of the official toponymy for close to a century, coming back into use as a municipal electoral district only in 1982.

The town of Saint-Louis built in 1905 a magnificent town hall on the northwest corner of Saint-Laurent and what is now Laurier Avenue; the building still serves as a fire hall and firefighters' museum. The town was annexed by the expanding city of Montreal on 29 May 1909, taking effect as of 1 January 1910, and became Laurier Ward (quartier Laurier). Population growth had been explosive: in 1891, the village had 3537 residents; in 1911, after annexation, the ward's population was about 37,000.

Perhaps the most recognizable architectural symbol of Mile End is the Church of St. Michael the Archangel of 1914-5, on Saint-Viateur Street at the corner of Saint-Urbain. The church, designed by Aristide Beaugrand-Champagne, was built for an Irish Catholic community, as expressed by omnipresent shamrock motifs; yet the overall style of the building is based on Byzantine rather than Western architectural traditions. Even more striking, the church has a slender tower that resembles a minaret. The building has been shared since 1964 with the Polish Catholic mission of St. Anthony of Padua, which officially merged with the parish of St. Michael in 1969 to form the current parish of St. Michael's and St. Anthony's; masses are celebrated in Polish and in English.

 

©2017 Linda Sullivan – Simpson
The Past Whispers
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Mile End – Montreal

 

 

Nineteenth-century maps and other documents show the name Mile End as the crossroads at Saint-Laurent Road (now Boulevard) and what is now Mont-Royal Avenue. Originally, this road was Côte Sainte-Catherine Road (heading west) and Tanneries Road (heading east). It is probable that the name Mile End was inspired by the East London suburb of the same name.

Contrary to popular belief, the place is not precisely a mile away from any official marker. It is, however, a mile north along Saint-Laurent from Sherbrooke Street, which in the early 19th century marked the boundary between the urban area and open countryside. (Several decades later, the Mile End train station near Bernard Street was situated coincidentally one more mile north along Saint-Laurent from the original crossroads.)

Mile End was also the first important crossroads north of the tollgate set up in 1841 at the city limits of 1792. From the crossroads to the city limits the distance was 0.4 miles (0.64 km). The city limits were located 100 chains (1.25 miles or about 2 km) north of the fortification wall, and intersected Saint-Laurent just south of the current Duluth Avenue.

As early as 1810, there was a Mile End Hotel and tavern, operated by Stanley Bagg, an American-born entrepreneur and father of the wealthy landowner Stanley Clark Bagg. The earliest known published references to Mile End are advertisements placed by Stanley Bagg, in both English and French, in The Gazette during the summer of 1815. He announced in July: "Farm for sale at St. Catherine [i.e., Outremont], near Mile End Tavern, about two miles from town...". On 7 August, he inserted the following:

STRAYED or STOLEN from the Pasture of Stanley Bagg, Mile End Tavern, on or about the end of June last, a Bay HORSE about ten years old, white face, and some white about the feet. Any person who will give information where the Thief or Horse may be found shall receive a reward of TEN DOLLARS and all reasonable charges paid. STANLEY BAGG. Montreal, Mile End, August 4, 1815.

 

The road variously known as Chemin des Tanneries (Tannery Road), Chemin des Carrières (Quarry Road), or Chemin de la Côte-Saint-Louis led to a tannery and to limestone quarries used for the construction of much of Montreal's architecture. The village of Côte Saint-Louis (incorporated 1846) sprung up near the quarries, its houses clustered east of the Mile End district around the present-day intersection of Berri Street and Laurier Avenue. It was to serve this village that a chapel of the Infant Jesus was established in 1848 near Saint Lawrence Road, on land donated by Pierre Beaubien. In 1857-8, the chapel was replaced by the church of Saint Enfant Jésus du Mile End. The church, made even more impressive by a new façade in 1901-3, was the first important building in what would become Mile End.

-Wikipedia

 

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The Past Whispers
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Retirement of the Tramways

 

Faced with the criticism of the MTC’s private monopoly, the City of Montreal created the Montreal Transportation Commission (MTC) in August 1950. The Commission appropriated the assets of the Montreal Tramways Company on June 16, 1951, including a large number of old tramways at the end of their useful life. The tramways needed to be replaced quickly, but with what type of vehicle? Although powered by electricity, tramways were no longer very popular in the early 1950s. They were not as flexible as buses and many motorists accused them of blocking downtown traffic. So the decision was made to replace them all with buses over a period of some ten years.

 

Mount Royal

In the end, it took eight years to retire the tramways, with the CTM purchasing some 1,300 buses to replace its 939 tramway cars. And that was how “the trams” gradually disappeared from the city’s streets, such as Sainte-Catherine Street, where a parade was organized in 1956 for the event. On August 30, 1959, another parade marked the retirement of the last tramways in Montreal, on Papineau Avenue and Rosemont Boulevard. It was the end of an era—nearly 100 years of tramways in Montreal.

 

1959

 

courtesy – Archives of Montreal

©2017 Linda Sullivan – Simpson
The Past Whispers
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Burnside House

 

No house in Montreal's history has been the object of so much struggle and the subject of so many unfulfilled aspirations as Burnside house, which once stood on McGill College Avenue just up from Maisonneuve.

Like many fur traders who had made their fortunes and wished to settle down, James McGill purchased a farm on the side of Mount Royal. He called it Burnside after the stream ("burn" in Scots) running through it. The property was about 46 acres, and featured orchards and fields, as well as a "very commodious country house…with a most excellent garden." McGill's diary accounts of growing hay, apples, melons, cucumbers, peaches and grapes all reinforce the image of a comfortably retired gentleman. Having no children of his own, and knowing his wife's sons from a former marriage were well taken care of, McGill willed the Burnside estate to the newly-formed Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning in hopes that this paragovernmental body would establish a college on the estate - what eventually became McGill University.

James McGill died in 1813. While the Royal Institution was getting its act together, McGill's stepson decided he had rights to Burnside, and a legal battle ensued. In was only in 1829 that the Royal Institution was able to occupy the estate, and the first principal, the Reverend George Mountain, could preside over the college's official opening at Burnside house. But after the court case there were no funds left to hire professors, so the house and estate were leased to farmers for several years. Mountain, moreover, lived in Quebec City, so a local man to replace him as principal was found in 1835: the Reverend John Bethune. Bethune decided that Burnside house should be the principal's official residence, and moved in - quite against the wishes of the Royal Institution. Bethune promoted the construction of what became known as the Arts Building higher up the hill on another part of the estate. When it opened, in 1843, teaching could at last begin - although in the first year there were only three students.

Having decided that it would fund the running of the new college by renting the lower part of the estate, the Royal Institution asked Bethune to vacate the house, which he did only after a great deal of protest. He also took the entirely inappropriate step of personally engaging a real estate agent, Joshua Pelton, to subdivide the lower part of McGill's estate as building lots, with rent money going directly into the principal's hands. Furthermore, this arrangement was made in such a way that Pelton was able to claim he was now the owner of the land. Pelton leased the house and gardens to a market gardener, Neil McIntosh, who at one point had the Royal Institution, Pelton, and the college bursar, Joseph Abbott (father of the future prime minister), all asking him for rent. McIntosh eventually left in confusion, but it was not until 1847 that the Royal Institution was able to force Pelton out and reassert its ownership. By that time the economy was sluggish, so the Royal Institution secretary, William Burrage, was allowed to occupy the house for four years, while local farmers used the grounds for pasture. On occasion, the Montreal Cricket Club was allowed to practice in the Burnside fields.

Attempts to sell bits of the estate to raise money were not very successful even after the economy began to revive, but in 1852 the Royal Institution decided it could profitably generate income by leasing the house. The new occupants were the Birks family, whose son Henry would later found a famous jewellery store. The gardens, as well as part of the basement and one of the outdoor privies, were leased to market gardener William Riley. Within a few years, lot sales did pick up, and a new street was laid out running straight up to the college: appropriately, it was called McGill College Avenue. By 1857 lots along this new street were purchased by builders who put up elegant terraced houses. Burnside house, which straddled lots 74 and 75, soon looked rather drab in the midst of this new fashionable neighbourhood. Nevertheless, the enterprising Riley bought both lots and moved in for several years.

In 1863 Riley rented the house (but stayed on as the gardener, apparently living in part of the basement) to Isabella and Annabella McIntosh (daughters of former Burnside tenant Neil McIntosh), who operated a ladies academy there. A few years later, the McIntosh academy (renamed Bute House School) moved up to the corner of Sherbrooke Street and other private schools occupied Burnside house until it was in such need of repair that Riley sold it and it was torn down. Once fought over, James McGill's old home was now an embarrassment next to the mansions around it and the shining university thriving just above it.

 

©2016 Linda Sullivan – Simpson
The Past Whispers
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Hochelaga School Fire

Sarah Maxwell received her Elementary diploma from the McGill Normal School in 1892 and her Model diploma the following year. That was enough to get a good position in one of Montreal's larger Protestant schools, but not normally sufficient to be eligible to become a school principal, at least for a woman. Nevertheless, by the time she was 25, Miss Maxwell found herself the head teacher of the multi-grade, three-storey school in Hochelaga. Built in 1890, it was relatively new, having replaced a one-room school that the Montreal Protestant board had inherited when the city annexed the village of Hochelaga. Much thinking had gone into the design of schools in recent years, but Hochelaga's contained one inconsistent feature: the Kindergarten was on the top floor, making it hard for those with little legs to get to class.






On 26 February 1907, a fire broke out in the school and quickly spread, forcing an evacuation. Having seen the classes on the lower floors safely out, Sarah Maxwell suddenly realized that the kindergarten class was trapped in the attic. "Miss Maxwell could have escaped," an eyewitness recounted, "but she went to the top floor to rescue the little ones. She did rescue about thirty of them, and died while attempting to save more." She "handed the children to workmen who had put ladders up to the windows. The firemen only rescued two children." The remaining sixteen "suffocated" in the smoke alongside their principal.



Public appreciation of this act of courage was matched only by the horror of the tragedy itself, which newspapers described in grim detail. Pictures of the dead children were printed, accompanied by headlines such as "Heart-Breaking Scenes at the Montreal Morgue" and "Scenes of Sorrow at the Bereaved Homes." Newspapers also pointed accusing fingers at the firemen, who arrived too late to control the fire and to stop Miss Maxwell from plunging back into the smoke, and at the school authorities for their carelessness in placing the youngest children in the least accessible rooms.





The city mourned Sarah Maxwell in a style that was elaborate, but entirely appropriate. Her funeral was held two days later - not in St Mary's Church in Hochelaga, where a service for many of the victims took place at the same time, but in Christ Church downtown. The cathedral was "packed" with mourners, who then followed the cortege up to Mount Royal Cemetery where she was buried in a lot donated by the trustees. A call went out for a fitting monument to the heroine, and was answered by the Montreal Star which set up a fund to create a "children's testimonial." Children across the city sent donations of ten cents or more: "I send you 25 cents for 'Sarah Maxwell Memorial," one little girl wrote. "Mamma cried when she read about her in the Star." The fund eventually paid for a touching monument on the site which overlooks the section of the cemetery with children's graves. It is dedicated "in loving memory" to the lady herself and to "the little ones who perished with her."





When the Hochelaga school was rebuilt the following year it was renamed "Sarah Maxwell Memorial," and when that school was closed after the Second World War a new building in the northern part of the city took the name. Now, even that school is long gone, but the Professional Library of the English Montreal School Board has been officially named the Sarah Maxwell Library. It features a portrait of Miss Maxwell near the door, along with a framed copy of a letter describing the incident (quoted above) written by a boy, Orrin Rexford, to friend who had moved away. "It will be a long time before we forget her heroism," he concluded.


courtesy: qahn (March 18, 2013)

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Tobogganing on Mount Royal Park Montreal, QC, 1885

 

This photo shows the members of the Club de la Tuque Bleue practicing their favourite winter sport on the slopes of Mount Royal.

-courtesy McCord Museum

Opened in 1876, Mount Royal Park was then considered by the English-speaking elite of the "Golden Square Mile" to be the "natural" extension of their neighbourhood, and they had difficulty conceiving that the park should be accessible to everyone. As a result, an imaginary boundary divided Mount Royal into two parts in the 1880s. For winter sports enthusiasts, this division meant that "proper people" tobogganed in the western part, while the youth of the working-class districts went down the slopes on the east side.

However, tobogganing, that "new craze," did not appeal to everyone. In 1885, the bishop of Montreal, Bishop Fabre (1827-1896), warned Catholics against the opportunities for sin associated with this activity, which was practiced by both men and women.

 

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved