QHN Winter 2020 Final
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QAHN’S DIVERSITY AND ACHIEVEMENT PROJECT: BOOKS, PANELS, TOURS $10 Quebec HeritageVOL 13, NO. 1 WINTER 2020 News Write Here, Write Now Selection of Memoirs from Townships Project Bluebirds of Happiness The Great War’s Unsung Nurses Significant Objects, Local Heroes QAHN’s Heritage Photo and Heritage Essay Contests QUEBEC HERITAGE NEWS CONTENTS Quebec HeritageNews Editor’s desk 3 EDITOR Restoring Faith Rod MacLeod RODERICK MACLEOD Letters 8 PRODUCTION DAN PINESE; MATTHEW FARFAN No Balance, No Bomb Sam Allison, Jon Bradley Gray Matter Olga Llewellyn PUBLISHER Donors and Dreamers 9 QUEBEC ANGLOPHONE The Perfect Fit: Heather Darch HERITAGE NETWORK Finding the Right Foundation for Your Organization 400257 QUEEN STREET SHERBROOKE, QUEBEC J1M 1K7 Heritage in Brief 11 PHONE New Carlisle: Our Community, Our Heritage Carolyn Taylor 18779640409 (819) 5649595 QAHN News 12 FAX Matthew Farfan (819) 5646872 CORRESPONDENCE 2019 QAHN Heritage Photo Contest Winners 16 [email protected] WEBSITES 2019 QAHN Heritage Essay Contest Winners 17 QAHN.ORG QUEBECHERITAGEWEB.COM Write Here, Write Now: Memoirs 19 100OBJECTS.QAHN.ORG You Left Her WHERE!!??? John LeBaron Meeting Bullwinkle Tom Standish PRESIDENT Stones Sandra Vago GRANT MYERS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Bluebirds 24 MATTHEW FARFAN Quebec’s Nurses in World War I Sam Allison, Jon Bradley PROJECT DIRECTORS DWANE WILKIN Montreal & Southern Counties Railway 26 HEATHER DARCH Transit Service to the South Shore Kevin ErskineHenry CHRISTINA ADAMKO BOOKKEEPER A Canadian Heroine 28 MARION GREENLAY The Determination of Maria Smith Wait Joseph Graham Quebec Heritage News is published quarterly by QAHN with the support of the Department of Canadian Heritage. QAHN is a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization whose mission is to help Cover: Coopérative d’habitation Kamouraska mural, Coalition advance knowledge of the history and culture of the Englishspeaking de la Petite Bourgogne, St. Jacques Street, Montreal, from communities of Quebec. QAHN’s “Remembering Black Little Burgundy” walking tour. Photo: Rod MacLeod. Annual Subscription Rates: Individual: $30.00; Institutional: $40.00; Family: $40.00; Student: $20.00. Canada Post Publication Mail Agreement Number 405610004. ISSN 177072670 PRINTED IN CANADA 2 WINTER 2020 EDITOR’S DESK Restoring Faith by Rod MacLeod he building on the corner of name “Maison CuvillierOstell” in Papineau house launched Old Montreal Notre Dame Street and St. honour of both the original owner and on its road to recovery as a proud feature Laurent Boulevard in Old the man largely responsible for the of the city’s muchtouted livable urban TMontreal is now home to what design Montrealers had known for a space. must be the fast food emporium with the century and a half. Gold standard indeed – and yet the choicest location anywhere – patrimoni My fellow conference attendees result was so different from the building ally speaking, at least. For me, that’s just were fascinated by this idea that one anyone alive could remember it was as fine. Back in 1987, it was a ruinous should acknowledge the work of inter much innovation as restoration, a con shell. vening builders rather than insist on scious rejection of one vision and the It was a stop on a hardhat tour of artistic purity at all cost. The Cuvillier imposition of another: the Papineau restoration sites I took during a confer Ostell case went against most estab house as it ought to be, at least accord ence on architectural conservation. After lished thinking, which tended to hold the ing to McLean. One could even argue gingerly climbing a rickety stairway and efforts of nineteenthcentury architectur that it would have been a more honest positioning ourselves around act of restoration, one the secondfloor scaffolding, more respectful of the we listened to the foreman patina of time, to have explain the challenges this simply cleaned up the project entailed. While the fourstorey flophouse, structure itself was so far leaving the extra storeys, gone from recent fire dam and maybe the Coca Cola age that restoration would signs, intact. Perhaps largely be a matter of the restoration of the Pap “façadism” (normally a ineau house amounted to much criticized practice), a kind of cultural cleans they planned to return the ing, a denial that the exterior to its original muchabused flophouse, appearance. Not so simple, or the streets around it, however: this late had any heritage value. Or eighteenthcentury house perhaps we should inter had been heavily remodelled pret such a restoration in the 1830s, leaving no use project less as a statement ful trace of how it had “orig about the past than as a inally” appeared; one would vision of the future – an have to extrapolate from architectural leap of faith. other, presumably similar buildings that al meddlers in low regard. Certainly the When it comes to the built environ had survived. Moreover, there was a gold standard of sensitive restoration ment, the question of authenticity is procedural issue, and perhaps a moral was Eric McLean’s meticulous work on rarely straightforward. We tend to value one: restoration dogma required scrap the Papineau house in Old Montreal, old buildings and quaint streets for their ing away all the intervening alterations which returned a grossly scarred flop “human” scale – meaning presumably to get back to the original builder’s in house to its pristine preVictorian condi their ability to accommodate our pre tended look – and yet the alterations had tion, inside and out. This had been a ferred human activity in a way that cliff been carried out by none other than John painstaking process, involving the dem like skyscrapers and desertlike plazas Ostell, one of Montreal’s greatest nine olition of two storeys that had been bru can’t. And beyond the matter of scale, teenthcentury architects. Would it be tally added in the 1870s and their re there is something about old styles that right to destroy a structure by the de placement by a roof built with reference appeals to us – something reassuring and signer of the Customs House and McGill to a contemporary sketch; drawings also tangible, linking us to a sense of her Arts Building simply to pay lip service formed the basis for the reconstruction itage, like home cooking and artisanal to purist theory? The project leaders of countless fixtures and features that beer. And yet, so many of our “old” eventually opted to restore the house to had been removed from the house over urban spaces have been carefully de its 1830s appearance rather than retreat the years. The result was architecturally signed to look that way. Though starting further back into questionable historical satisfying, but its impact was even more from original structures, restorers have territory. The building was given the sensational. McLean’s restoration of the typically added layers of detail to give Thomas Humphry, “Building, formerly Austin Cuvillier's store, 3 St. Lawrence Street,” 1984. Photo: McCord Museum, MP1984.134.7.9. QUEBEC HERITAGE NEWS buildings and streets a look that massacred their way across the we have come to recognize as south in an effort to cleanse the “authentic.” Visitors certainly region of the Cathar heresy. And flock to such spaces: the more so, our travels took us to the ex “authentic,” the more popular. travagantly medieval Carcassonne For some, that is reason enough to feast our eyes on centuries of to be critical. Blanche Lemco, stone, and then to Nimes, which is who along with her architect hus by contrast a showcase of things band Sandy van Ginkel virtually classical. Both towns are case stud coined the name “Old Montreal” ies in the complexities of heritage back in the 1960s, later lamented restoration. that the area had become a tourist Carcassonne is famous for trap. Lemco’s actions, of course, being both a dazzling display of like McLean’s, helped to erase Gothic splendour and a riot of the old town’s gritty, adhoc com Victorian fakery. Yes, it is both mercial market quality and re these things, but for my money all place it with an “authenticity” the more fascinating as a result. that people came to love. By con Carcassonne continues to exist, trast, no one loved the flophous along with a great many famous es, the abattoirs and the cabbagy places in Europe and North Ameri streets. Even so, people lived and ca, thanks to the hard work and worked there, and, as in most imagination of wellmeaning intel development projects, they were lectuals who despaired at the sad displaced to make room for state of old buildings around them casual visitors. and wanted to restore them – in These sorts of issues would every sense of the term: not just to have seemed nonsensical a cou their previous appearance but to ple of centuries ago. Until then, their rightful place within the his most people felt no romance torical narrative. about the past, and did away with In France, the natural attrition the old when they had no further of the Middle Ages – what one group of time had been radically fastfor use for it – or if they lacked the funds to called “PreRaphaelite,” meaning the warded by the destructive hand of revo build new they grafted some new onto time before the onset of corrupting lutionaries, who directed their ire at the old. The rise of History as a disci Classicism. This rejection could take on Ancien Regime monuments, especially pline brought a new fascination for the essentialist and even racist tones: for churches. After the political Restoration, forces that had shaped the present. This many, Gothic was quintessentially Romantics began to call for a cultural fascination involved not just Big Impor Northern, the natural product of a colder restoration of bygone glory.