REDCOATS, DRUMS AND MYSTIC BARNS: QAHN VISITS MISSISQUOI COUNTY $10 Quebec VOL 8, NO. 3 S UMMER 2014 HeritageNews Happy Canada Day! Now move! Finding Meaning in the Madness January in July Ice Palaces and Winter Camping Containing Typhoid Northern Electric’s Emergency Hospital, 1910 QUEBEC HERITAGE NEWS Quebec CONTENTS HeritageNews EDITOR Editor’s Desk 3 RODERICK MACLEOD Redpath’s many mansions Rod MacLeod PRODUCTION DAN PINESE; MATTHEW FARFAN Letters 5 Don’t wait for the obit Jim Caputo PUBLISHER New England Forgues Eileen Fiell THE QUEBEC ANGLOPHONE HERITAGE NETWORK Heritage News from around the province 6 400-257 QUEEN STREET Jim Caputo SHERBROOKE, QUEBEC J1M 1K7 Jim Caputo’s Mystery Objects Challenge #4 7 PHONE 1-877-964-0409 The Play’s the thing: A theatrical photo mystery 8 (819) 564-9595 FAX Press Pedigree 9 (819) 564-6872 A Brief History of the Quebec Chronicle Telegraph Charles André Nadeau CORRESPONDENCE [email protected] Northern Electric’s Heroic Moment 11 WEBSITES The Montreal Emergency Typhoid Hospital, 1910 Robert N. Wilkins WWW.QAHN.ORG WWW.QUEBECHERITAGEWEB.COM Annual QAHN Convention, 2014 14 Matthew Farfan PRESIDENT SIMON JACOBS Canada Day, Montreal-style 18 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR & Elisabeth Dent WEBMAGAZINES EDITOR MATTHEW FARFAN Was Solomon Gursky Here? 20 Literary ghosts in the snow Casey Lambert OFFICE MANAGER KATHY TEASDALE Just Visiting 24 Quebec Heritage News is produced four The world inside the gates of the Trois-Rivières prison Amy Fish times yearly by the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN) with the support Discovering the Ice Palace 26 of the Department of Canadian Heritage and Quebec’s Ministère de la Culture et Montreal’s winter carnivals, 1883-89 Justin Singh des Communications. QAHN is a non-profit and non-partisan organization whose mis- sion is to help advance knowledge of the New France Joseph Graham history and culture of the English- The Spanish connection 29 speaking communities of Quebec. Annual Subscription Rates: Individual: $30.00; Organization: $40.00 Review 30 Canada Post Publication Mail Unexpected Fever Rod MacLeod Agreement Number 405610004. A Mind at Sea by John Fry ISSN 17707-2670 PRINTED IN CANADA Cover photo: Cornell Mill, Mississquoi Museum, Stanbridge East, Quebec. Photo: Matthew Farfan. 2 SUMMER 2014 EDITOR’S DESK Redpath’s many mansions by Rod MacLeod o the infamous Redpath man- died of typhus in 1834 he farmed the six toward business, there would have been sion is gone. Heritage activists children out to his sister Elspeth near no perceived conflict between Redpath mourn last March’s demolition Kingston. On one of his visits there, he the politician and Redpath the developer, of the house’s remaining fragile also dropped in on an old friend, Robert much less a need for a proto-Charbon- Swalls, although perhaps there is some- Drummond, whose much younger sister neau commission.) Along with fellow thing to be said for being able to ring the Jane was also visiting from Scotland. landowner Thomas Phillips and city sur- curtain down on a particularly nasty, 28- One thing led to another, John and Jane veyor John Ostell, Redpath opened the year battle between developers and were married, and the family returned to mountainside to urban development, preservationists. (See QHN, Spring Montreal. In the spring of 1837, they which followed two general patterns: the 2011.) In the end, one had the feeling moved permanently up to a country villa lots on the higher ground above that all that was holding the mansion to- house in the midst of a 235-acre estate Sherbrooke Street, and a “New Town” of gether was the mud slung by opposing Redpath had purchased on the side of terraced townhouses on the plateau that is factions. Mount Royal. This dwelling was a com- now Montreal’s downtown. Even so, it is a loss. Aside One challenge emerged early from its architectural features, the on, which Redpath easily turned house was the last surviving Mon- into an advantage. Feudal inheri- treal residence associated with the tance practices, still technically in illustrious Redpath family. Their effect in Canada East despite a product, with their name on it, is growing campaign for reform, still a household commodity – dictated that children had rights which is more than can be said for to a portion of a man’s property most of those great nineteenth- even after it was sold. Redpath century purveyors of vice (Mol- feared that potential purchasers of son being the other notable excep- his building lots on the side of the tion, of course.) Yet, of more sig- mountain might be deterred by nificance to Montreal than the the prospect of his heirs making sugar that sweetened its tea (itself special claims later on – which considerable, given that prior to was standard practice under the the opening of the Redpath refin- old regime. His solution was to ery Canada had to import all its draft formal agreements with his sugar) was the factory’s role in children whereby they would re- launching the nation’s industrial revolu- fortable eighteenth-century farmhouse, nounce any such claims in return for cer- tion in the early 1850s, situated as it was which Redpath would later have refur- tain gifts – namely, gifts of land. As they along the newly-widened Lachine Canal. bished as a state-of-the-art mansion came of age, the children received moun- Ironically, the factory is still there, albeit called Terrace Bank. In the autumn of tain lots on which they then built houses. condofied, while all the Redpath houses 1837, he rented the house on Notre Dame As a result, Redpath kept his expanding are now gone. Street to General John Colborne, who family nearby – particularly his sons, These houses, I would argue, played needed a Montreal base from which to at- who would soon be directly involved in an even greater role than sugar in shaping tack rebel forces. running the sugar business. Moreover, by the city. In 1840, when the political situation providing space for his grown children, Long before there was a granular calmed down, and Montreal was incorpo- Redpath was able to seed his property (as twinkle in his eye, John Redpath made a rated as a city, John Redpath got himself it were) with respectable residents, there- fortune for himself in construction and re- elected to council. Here, he served on, by removing any doubt in the minds of al estate. As a master mason, he super- and later chaired, the Committee for prospective lot purchasers that the moun- vised the building of such key 1820s Roads and Improvements, a body that su- tainside was a proper place to move to. stone structures as Notre Dame Church, pervised the building and repair of streets The first of the Redpath offspring to the British and Canadian School (in to- and generally regulated the city’s expan- take advantage of this arrangement was day’s Chinatown) and the Lachine Canal. sion. Redpath saw to it that his own real Elizabeth, the eldest (just four years He lived with his growing family in a estate projects were promptly green lit, younger than her step-mother), who mar- house on Notre Dame Street in the old his streets paved and the sewers dug. ried textile merchant and newspaper edi- town, but when his wife Janet McPhee (Given mid-nineteenth century attitudes tor (the Temperance Advocate and later Frank Redpath's study, Inglenook, c.1920. 3 Photo: McCord Museum, MP-1986.18.3. QUEBEC HERITAGE NEWS the Montreal Witness) John Dougall in of the estate, a small piece of land below family physician at the time of the 1840, and received a large lot near Ter- Terrace Bank fronting on Ontario Avenue tragedy (and in whose memory she would race Bank. For a few years, the young (now Avenue du Musée), on which he commission the distinctive entrance gates couple lived in a townhouse in the emerg- built a house, “Inglenook.” Having wait- to McGill University), and later with her ing New Town, one of the fifteen units of ed so long for a place of his own, Frank beloved companion Mary Rose Shallow, Beaver Hall Terrace, which John Redpath did not budge from it, dying there in 1928 who had been a housemaid at the time of had also built. Before long, however, they in his early eighties, two decades after the tragedy. (If any of these three knew moved into a new house on their moun- Caroline. more about the mystery than they let on tain lot known as Ivy Cottage. It was By that time, the Redpaths were al- at the time, such knowledge went with here that their children grew up and most all gone from the mountainside. them to their graves.) Like so many of played amid the orchards: John, who Jane, the matriarch, spent the last 22 her family, Amy died alone in 1954, and would succeed his father as editor of the years of her life alone (except for ser- eventually the house was razed and re- Witness into the 1930s, and Lily, who vants) in Terrace Bank; when she died in placed by the massive and unlovely Port would move to England and have a suc- 1907 in her early nineties, the house was Royal apartments. cessful career as the writer of somewhat torn down and what was left of the estate When Amy died, Frank’s Inglenook moralistic novels. turned into building lots for a last bout of had been empty for over a quarter centu- In time, the other Redpath children mountainside development. ry. It would remain unoccupied another would take up residence in mountainside John Redpath Dougall, Elizabeth’s fifteen years before being used as a con- homes, helping to form the elite neigh- son, lived in nearby Ivy Cottage until a valescent home and then as a homeless bourhood later known as the Golden year or so before his own death, also in shelter.