Griffintown Horse Palace

 

 

 

The Griffintown Horse Palace is a stable in the Griffintown district in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which dates back to around 1860.

For three decades, the stables were run by former Goose Village resident, iceman and calèche driver Leo Leonard, also known locally as Clawhammer Jack.

Leonard, who was reported to be the last Irish Quebecer left in Griffintown, retired and moved to Nun's Island in 2011. The sale of his land around his Ottawa Street residence has cast the future of the stables in doubt. Montreal landscape architect Juliette Patterson has formed a foundation in an attempt to save the Horse Palace, which has also drawn support from the area's historic Irish community.

Though the stables are considered to have cultural heritage value by the City of Montreal, they are not a protected heritage site by the Province of Quebec.

Patterson and her foundation would like to preserve the Horse Palace as a working stable for caleche horses serving nearby Old Montreal as well as a museum of 19th-century Montreal history. But the foundation has been unable as of December 2011 to raise enough money to purchase Leonard's land and buildings, which are now valued at over $1 million. The horse palace site includes the stables, a vacant 3,500-square foot lot, the Leonards' brick triplex and an aging former auberge, and is being sold in three separate lots.

 

Horse Palace Video

 

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

Joe Beef

Charles McKiernan (1835 County Cavan, Ireland – 15 January 1889, Montreal, Canada) was a well-known Irish-Canadian Montreal tavern owner, innkeeper and philanthropist.
Charles McKiernan earned the sobriquet "Joe Beef" from his time as a Quartermaster with the British Army during the Crimean War. It's said that whenever his regiment was running low on food, McKiernan had an almost spooky knack of somehow finding meat and provisions, hence the name "Joe Beef".

The man, who would become famous in Montreal as a gruff philanthropist, came to the city around 1864 with his artillery regiment and he was put in charge of the main military canteen on Saint Helen's Island. Discharged in 1868, he opened "Joe Beef's Tavern," an inn and tavern soon known throughout North America, located at 201–207 rue de la Commune in what is now Old Montreal.
Beef refused service to no one, telling a reporter, "no matter who he is, whether English, French, Irish, Negro, Indian, or what religion he belongs to". Every day at noontime, hundreds of longshoremen, beggars, odd-job men and outcasts from Montréal society showed up at his door. 

The clientele of the tavern was mostly working class. Canal labourers, longshoremen, sailors, and ex-army men like McKiernan himself were mainstays of the business. For working class Montreal, McKiernan's tavern functioned as the centre of social life in Griffintown. At the time, the neighbourhood had no public parks, and gatherings and public celebrations were only occasionally held by national societies and church groups. Thus, daily recreational activities were centered around Joe Beef's Canteen.

An atheist, Beef had the following manifesto printed on handbills and advertisements:

He cares not for Pope, Priest, Parson, or King William of the Boyne; all Joe wants is the Coin. He trusts in God in summer time to keep him from all harm; when he sees the first frost and snow poor old Joe trusts to the Almighty Dollar and good old maple wood to keep his belly warm, for Churches, Chapels, Ranters, Preachers, Beechers and such stuff Montreal has already got enough.

The New York Times was not impressed, however, calling Joe Beef's Canteen "a den of filth" and writing that:

The proprietor is evidently an educated man, and speaks and writes well. But he is a little nearer a devil and his place near what the revised version calls Hades than anything I ever saw.

Beef was known for keeping a menagerie of animals in his tavern, including four black bears, ten monkeys, three wild cats, a porcupine and an alligator. The bears were usually kept in the tavern's cellar and viewed by customers through a trap door in the barroom floor. He sometimes brought a bear up from the basement to restore order in his tavern, to fight with his dogs or play a game of billiards with the proprietor. One of his bears, Tom, had a daily consumption of twenty pints of beer and would sit on his hindquarters and hold a glass between his paws without spilling a drop. On one occasion, McKiernan was mauled by a buffalo on exhibit and was sent to hospital for a number of days. Another time, a Deputy Clerk of the Peace was inspecting the tavern in order to renew the license and was bitten by one of McKiernan's dogs.

He ran his tavern from 1870 until his death from a heart attack in 1889, at the age of 54.
 
At his funeral, every office in the business district closed. Fifty labour organizations walked off the job while Joe Beef's casket was drawn through the city by an ornate four-horse hearse, in a procession several blocks long. The newspaper La Minerve reported:

The crowd consisted of Knights of Labour, workers and manual labourers of all classes. All the luckless outcasts to whom the innkeeper-philanthropist had so often extended a helping hand had come forward, eager to pay a last tribute to his memory".

 
Despite a lack of formal education, McKiernan considered himself an intellectual and was an avid reader. He engaged in heated debates on the topics of the day and was a champion for the rights of the common man. He entertained the crowds with poetry and humorous stories which lampooned the figures of authority in the workingman's life, such as the employer, the landlord, or the local church minister.

He acted as an advocate for the working class population of Griffintown and played an important role in the Lachine Canal workers strike of 1877. He provided them with 3,000 loaves of bread and 500 gallons of stew, and paying the travel expenses of their delegation to Ottawa. As they set off, he addressed a crowd of 2,000 in front of his tavern with a rousing speech "delivered in rhymed endings which was heartily applauded." He also assisted strikers at the east-end Hudon textile factory in 1882.

As the focal point of social life in Griffintown at the time, Joe Beef's Canteen provided early social services such as housing, food, and casual employment for the poor and downtrodden.
He was a central character in a play by David Fennario, entitled Joe Beef.
McKiernan was the inspiration behind Joe Beef Restaurant, which opened in 2005 on Notre Dame Street West in the neighbourhood of Little Burgundy.

courtesy – Wikipedia

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

Redpath Sugar

 

 

Redpath Sugar was established as the Canada Sugar Refining Company in 1854 in Montreal, Quebec by Scots-Quebecer entrepreneur, John Redpath (1796-1869).

Located on the bank of the Lachine Canal, the giant complex was the first of its kind in Canada, using sugar cane imported from the British West Indies. Its construction was part of the economic boom that, during the 19th century, turned Montreal from a small town to (then) the largest city in Canada and the country’s economic engine.

In 1857, John's son Peter Redpath (1821-1894) became a partner; his brother-in-law, George Alexander Drummond (1829-1910) joined the firm in 1861. Unable to compete with the giant low-cost producers in the United States, for the three years between 1876 and 1878 the company ceased operations.

Following the tariff protections implemented under the National Policy by the government of Sir John A. Macdonald, the company reopened in 1879, as did St. Lawrence Sugar, a new competitor established in Montreal. George Drummond took over when Peter Redpath retired in 1888. Under his guidance, the company's success allowed for construction of a new six-storey plant built on the existing site, doubling production capacity.

In 1930, the company merged with Canada Sugar Refining Company Limited of Chatham, Ontario. In 1959, Redpath Industries Ltd. was acquired by the British company Tate & Lyle plc. The Redpath Sugar Refinery was built on the Toronto waterfront in the late 1950s, at the time of the completion of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and is still in operation.

David Davis, later a senior Conservative politician, was sent from Britain to restructure its Canadian subsidiary. In 1980, the Montreal plant was closed and production was shifted to Toronto. In 2007, the company was taken over by American Sugar Refining.

Redpath Sugar

 

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

St. Gabriel’s Church (1895)

St. Gabriel’s was the second Irish Catholic church built in Point St. Charles, erected on the site of an older church dating to 1875. As is almost always the case in Montreal, Irish and French-Canadian Catholics, despite their geographic and social proximity, have separate parishes. In 1875, the Irish outnumbered French Canadians in Point St. Charles and for a short time St. Gabriel’s served both linguistic groups.


Destroyed by fire – 1956




St. Gabriel’s today, the steeple was never rebuilt

Over the years the number of English-speaking Catholics in the Point decreased, but many former residents, and in fact many others from the greater Montreal area adopted St Gabriel's as their own. 
The Irish in particular are very fond of the parish. For many years, two Sundays before St Patrick's day, a popular mass of anticipation has been celebrated in the church. And on the last Sunday of May, after Sunday mass, there is a walk from the church to the Stone at the foot of Victoria bridge. It is there that so many Irish, and many French Canadians who cared for them, died of typhus.

Photographs of the fire courtesy - Perry Barton and Carlo Pielroniro



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

The Rescued Film Project

This came across my news feed this morning, I thought it was worth sharing.

The Rescued Film Project

They have a Facebook page

Website is here

How many rolls of undeveloped film do you have sitting around?

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

Maple Stars and Stripes

I'm a French-Canadian residing in the United States, I no longer speak French because after coming to the States I wanted to fit in, I didn't want to speak French any longer. Was that a positive decision, probably not, but for a little girl going to school in rural Indiana it made perfect sense. I never regretted my decision to only speak 'American' until I started researching my family tree, half of my tree is French-Canadian and I don't speak or read the language. Oh my!

Actually with a lot of research and help from my French speaking Mother I've done very well, but sometimes wondered if there were other like me, researching French-Canadian ancestors from the United States.

I'm an avid researcher, and one day I stumbled upon Maple Stars and Stripes Your French-Canadian Genealogy Podcast, I was hooked! Authored by Sandra Goodwin, her podcasts took the mystery out of much of my French-Canadian genealogy. The first podcast I listened to was 'The Dreaded 'dit' Name',  Sandra's second podcast, I've not missed a podcast since.

If you want to understand more of your French-Canadian ancestry please have a listen to Sandra Goodwin's Maple Stars and Stripes.


(c)2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Victoriatown Goose Village Aux Oies Montreal