All posts by Janice Hamilton

Janice Hamilton is a Montreal-based writer, genealogist and photographer.
genealogy, Quebec, Stanley Clark Bagg

The Life and Times of Stanley Clark Bagg, part 1

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Revised and Condensed

In this article, I refer to Stanley Clark Bagg (1820-1873) as SCB to differentiate him from his father, Stanley Bagg (1788-1853,) and from his son, Robert Stanley Bagg (1844-1912).

Many young people spend a long time deciding what they want to be when they grow up. The career of Stanley Clark Bagg, however, was determined long before he was born.

Stanley Clark Bagg, Montreal, QC, 1863, photo by William Notman; McCord Stewart Museum, Montreal.

SCB was destined to become a large landowner on the Island in Montreal, thanks to the foresight of his grandfather. John Clark, a butcher who had immigrated to Canada in the late 1790s and purchased several adjoining farms along the west side of Saint Lawrence Street. This was the road that led out of the old city gates and past the eastern slope of Mount Royal, to the north shore of the Island of Montreal.  

When Clark died in 1827, he left some of this property to his daughter, Mary Ann (Clark) Bagg, but he left most of his estate to SCB, his only grandchild.1 SCB was just seven years old then, and he spent much of his youth preparing for his future responsibilities as a landlord and a gentleman. For many people whose ancestors had settled in Canada, or who had themselves immigrated to North America in the 19th century, owning land was their greatest dream, so property brought social status, as well as having monetary value. SCB was set for life.

Unfortunately, being a landowner wasn’t what he really wanted to do. According to grandson Stanley Bagg Lindsay, SCB wanted to be an Anglican minister. “He was a very religious man and I understand would have entered the ministry, but for the fact that would have entailed leaving Montreal, where there was no theological college, and going to Lennoxville (in Quebec’s Eastern Townships), where theology could be studied at the University of Bishops College. With all his property interests in Montreal and getting married in 1844, it was not possible for SCB to be away from Montreal for so long.”2 Fortunately, SCB had the means and the time to read, write (including articles, poetry and hymns), travel and support philanthropic organizations, such as the English Workingman’s Benefit Society of Montreal, which he founded.

SCB’s mother, Mary Ann Clark, wife of Montreal merchant Stanley Bagg. She was born in Durham, England and came to Canada as a baby. artist unknown. private collection.

Stanley Clark Bagg was born on Dec. 23, 1820, the son of American-born merchant Stanley Bagg and his English-born wife, Mary Ann Clark (1795-1835.)3 He grew up at his parents’ home, Durham House, on St. Lawrence Street, just outside what was then the small city of Montreal.

SCB probably grew up playing in his father’s orchard and learning to ride a horse – a necessary skill in those days. He was educated by an Anglican minister and studied at McGill, then just a small college. A hired farm hand would have looked after the cows, chickens and other animals at Durham House, but perhaps SCB was also required to do some farm chores.

On Feb 10, 1835, when SCB was 14, his mother died. His father never remarried, although he probably hired a housekeeper to cook and help look after young Stanley. Soon after Mary Ann’s death, Stanley senior met with a group of friends and relatives in front of a judge to choose a tutor, or guardian, for the boy. Stanley was named his son’s tutor and Gabriel Roy, husband of Stanley’s sister Sophia, became sub-tutor.4 Stanley also acted as executor of both John Clark’s and Mary Ann’s wills, so he managed the properties and SCB’s funds until his son turned 21.

Two years after Mary Ann’s death, Lower Canada faced a crisis as some moderate nationalists and members of a more radical group known as the Patriotes took up arms in a rebellion, demanding responsible government. Troops from the regular British army, joined by members of the local volunteer militia, prepared to defend the status quo.

Stanley Bagg was a major in the 1st Batallion Loyal Montreal Volunteers5 and SCB served as a standard-bearer at the Battle of Saint-Eustache.6 About two weeks before his 17th birthday, he witnessed the bloodiest battle of the rebellion in the village of Saint-Eustache, northwest of Montreal. Fought in December 1837, this event resulted in the deaths of 100 rebels, and many buildings in the area were destroyed by fire.

SCB continued to participate in the volunteer militia for more than 20 years, going on inactive status in 1859 with the rank of captain.7

At about age 16, he started to train to be a notary. Notaries played an important role in Quebec society, recording people’s wills, marriage contracts, business agreements, disputes (especially when money was owed) and, most importantly for SCB, property deeds and rentals. As a notary, SCB would be familiar with the laws pertaining to property transfers.

He served a four-year apprenticeship with notary W.S. Hunter and, in August 1841, his father indentured him for a final eight months to N.B. Doucet, a well-known Montreal notary.8 Doucet undertook to instruct him, give him access to books and render him fit to serve as a notary, while SCB undertook to apply himself.

The Custom of Paris

In 1840, many English-speaking citizens of Quebec could not read the civil laws that governed their everyday activities. Although Quebec had been a British colony for almost 80 years, the collection of civil laws called the Coutume de Paris (Custom of Paris) had not been translated from French into English. So in 1841, SCB translated excerpts of the Coutume de Paris, completing the project shortly before he finished his apprenticeship. 

Today this manuscript — the earliest recorded translation of the Coutume de Paris into English — is housed in the library of York University’s Osgood Hall Law School in Toronto, and it can be found online at https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/library_digital/1/

The first page of SCB’s translation of the Coutume de Paris.

SCB’s translation consists of about 200 pages, neatly handwritten in a small, hardcover notebook.9 He focused on definitions of French legal terms in English, and English translations of laws governing rights of property ownership, marriage and inheritance. On the final page he noted, “The laws of every nation are more or less mixed with the laws of nations that have passed away, but none more than the laws of Canada, which have for their basis the jurisprudence of France and England.”

By the spring of 1842, a few months after he turned 21, he had finished his apprenticeship. As a legal adult, he could now manage his inheritance, collect the rent for the farms he owned and buy and sell properties. Perhaps he also started to think about marriage and opening an office as a notary. First, though, he and his father travelled to England to explore County Durham, in the northeast, where his mother had been born.

A Trip to England in 1842

The trip was a combination of business and pleasure. The business involved selling property that SCB’s maternal grandfather had owned in Durham, and the pleasure involved a whirlwind tour of London, Scotland, Ireland and France, as well as visits with various great-aunts and great-uncles who still lived in England.

A few months after his return to Montreal, SCB wrote to his cousin in Philadelphia, describing the trip. Unfortunately, he did not include any details or impressions of their adventures, but he listed the places they visited.

Their trip across the Atlantic was fast. The age of the trans-Atlantic steamship had arrived in the 1830s, and SCB wrote, “We made the passage to Liverpool from Halifax in the incredible short space of nine days and six hours, which was I believe the shortest passage ever made across the Atlantic. From Liverpool we went to London, thence to Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, York, Darlington, Durham, Stockton, Sunderland, Newcastle, Shields, Tynemouth, Otterburn …. ”10

Durham Cathedral. JH photo.

In Scotland, they explored both Glasgow and Edinburgh. After a few days in London, they crossed the Channel to France, visiting Paris and several other cities before returning to London. SCB wrote, “We left London shortly afterwards for Ireland, and having visited Kingstown, Dublin and Kilmainham, returned to Liverpool, where … we embarked on board a steamship and after a boisterous passage of 14 days arrived at Boston exceedingly gratified with our tour.”11

Anchor-maker William Mitcheson, brother of SCB’s grandmother Mary Mitcheson Clark, lived in London, and the Baggs visited him there. While in County Durham, they visited more Mitcheson relations, including Mrs. Dodd (Mary Mitcheson’s sister Margaret) near Ryton, and Mrs. Maugham (Mary’s sister Elizabeth) at Sunderland. 

It is clear that the visit to Durham was the highlight of the trip, but not because of the business they finalized there. In fact, SCB did not mention it at all in his letter. When he turned 21, he gained control over an inheritance of property in Durham from his grandfather, John Clark (1767-1827). The property generated rental income, but SCB wanted to sell. In a notarized document dated after their return to Montreal, Stanley Bagg listed the sales of three properties in Durham.12

Meanwhile, SCB’s real interest was in ancient legends, old coins, Norman castles and the like, and he was enthralled with the ancient city of Durham. More than 20 years later, he presented a lecture to the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Montreal on “The Antiquities and Legends of Durham.”

He described the legend surrounding the founding of Durham city by 9th century monks. When Danes attacked England’s northeast coast, the monks fled their monastery on the Island of Lindisfarne with the miraculously well-preserved body of their former bishop. Eventually they built an abbey at the future site of the city and buried him there. Today, that bishop is remembered as Saint Cuthbert, and pilgrims still visit the huge abbey church, Durham Cathedral.

In his 1866 lecture to the Numismatic Society, SCB described his feelings on that trip. He recalled, “The first time I had the privilege of attending a divine service in Durham Abbey, I was enraptured with the sweet and masterly chanting, unsurpassed in the empire. My father and I obtained seats in the choir. The service was exceedingly impressive, so much so, that …. whenever the portion of the Psalter chanted upon that occasion recurs in the services of the church, it carries me back in imagination to the first service I attended in the venerable abbey of my mother’s native city.”13

This article is condensed from a series of articles about Stanley Clark Bagg (my two-times great-grandfather) posted in 2020 on my personal family history blog Writing Up the Ancestors (www.writinguptheancestors.ca). Part 2 will follow on July 1, 2026.

Notes  

King Louis XIV made the Coutume de Paris the civil law of New France in 1664. It did not include criminal law or cover commercial law. Some of its provisions dated from feudal times and were based on concepts such as moveable property (objects that can be moved) and immovable property (such as land and buildings), as well as community of property between married couples, provisions to protect widows and inheritances for daughters.

After the British Conquest of New France, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 introduced British Common Law to the colony, however, French Canadians resisted this new way of doing things. In 1774, the government passed the Quebec Act, bringing back the property and family laws of the Coutume de Paris, while British Common Law applied to criminal matters. Some reforms were made in 1840, but legislators realized that the laws had to be updated to meet the needs of a changing society. The old seigneurial system of land ownership was being phased out, and new laws were needed to make it easier for commerce, investment and industrialization to expand.

The new Civil Code of Lower Canada, which came into force in 1866, clearly had some roots in the Custom of Paris, making Quebec’s legal traditions unique in Canada. Today, Quebecers still rely on notaries to prepare their wills, property deeds and marriage contracts.

Sources

1. Henry Griffin, notarial act #5989, “Last Will and Testament of Mr. John Clark of Montreal,” 29 August 1825, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ); also, George Dorland Arnoldi, notarial act # 3842,  “Last Will and Testament of Mrs. Mary Ann Clark, wife of Stanley Bagg,” 10 December 1834, BAnQ

2. Unsigned, undated (probably Stanley Bagg Lindsay), “Stanley Clark Bagg,” Lindsay family collection.

3. Stanley Clark Bagg, born Dec. 22, 1820; baptized Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal, July 2, 1822. Institut Généalogique Drouin; Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Drouin Collection; Author: Gabriel Drouin, comp.,Quebec, Canada, Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1968 [database, Ancestry.ca:  on-line]. (Accessed 23 Dec. 2019) entry for Stanley Clark Bagg, citing Gabriel Drouin, comp. Drouin Collection. Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Institut Généalogique Drouin.

4. Although Lower Canada was a British colony at the time, it retained many legal traditions, including this one, stemming from the French Regime. “Tutorship: minor Stanley Bagg” BAnQ microfilm #1857, Tutelles, 5 Decembre 1834 au 20 Mars 1835, Document 174 – 27 Feb. 1835.

5. Elinor Kyte Senior, Redcoats and Patriots: The Rebellions in Lower Canada. 1837-38, p 214, Stittsville, ON: Canada’s Wings, Inc., 1985.

6. Pierre B. Landry, “BAGG, STANLEY CLARK,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 10, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed December 24, 2019, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/bagg_stanley_clark_10E.html.

7. “List of Officers of the Sedentary militia of Lower Canada, 1862,” database, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.ca: accessed Dec. 23, 2019), entry for Stanley C. Bagg, citing List of Officers of the Sedentary militia of Lower Canada, 1862, Quebec: S. Derbyshire and G. Desbarats, 1863.

8. Joseph-Hilarion Jobin, notarial act #2977 23 Aug 1841, “Indenture of Stanley C. Bagg to N.B. Doucet,” Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec; abstract by Sherry Olson.

9. Bagg, Stanley Clark, “A Collection of Extracts from the Coutume de Paris: Translated from the French,” 1841. https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/library_digital/1/

10. Letter from Stanley Clark Bagg to Rev. R. M. Mitcheson, Dec. 6, 1842, probably transcribed by Stanley Bagg Lindsay; Lindsay family collection.

11. Record in a passenger list of Stanley Bagg and S.C. Bagg travelling from Liverpool to Boston aboard the Acadia. Boston Courier (Boston, Massachusetts, Monday, Sept. 19, 1842, issue 1921;) 19th Century Newspapers Collection, special interest databases, www.americanancestors.org (accessed April 18, 2019.)

12. Joseph-Hilarion Jobin, “Account and mortgages from Stanley Bagg Esq to Stanley Clark Bagg,” 8 October 1842, notarial act #3537, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.

13. Stanley Clark Bagg, “The Antiquities and Legends of Durham: a Lecture before the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Montreal,” p. 21, Montreal, 1866. https://archive.org/details/cihm_48731/page/n4 (accessed Dec. 27, 2019) This article can also be found here: http://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.48731/1?r=0&s=1

England, genealogy, Montreal

John Clark of Durham, England

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revised and condensed

According to family lore, my four-time great-grandfather John Clark (1767-1827) was a butcher who came to Canada from County Durham, in northeast England, with his wife and young child around 1797. A search of the baptismal records of Durham for the mid-1700s brought up more than a dozen men named John Clark. Which one was mine?

Fortunately, about 100 years ago another descendant left a note in the family records: “John Clark, pork butcher, 9-6-1767.” I checked the parish records again, and there it was: John Clark, of Wingate Grange, was baptized at Kelloe parish church, County Durham, on 9 June, 1767.

Portrait of John Clark, private collection. It may have been painted after his death from a miniature by Sir Martin Archer Shee RA, (1769-1850).

County Durham was later known for its coal mines, but when John Clark was born, the region was mostly farmland, and Wingate Grange was a rented farm, located several miles south of the city. A rental noticepublished in the Newcastle Courant in late 1777 described Wingate Grange Farm as being “526 acres and tithe free, within six miles of Durham, well watered and enclosed; a draw kiln lies contiguous and limestone upon the premises; there are two very good farm houses, four barns and all other necessary buildings.”

John was the eleventh of the twelve children born to Ralph Clark and his wife Margaret Pearson. Ralph Clark was born in rural Kirk Merrington Parish, County Durham in 1721 and Margaret Pearson was baptized in 1725, also in Kirk Merrington.1 Ralph and Margaret were married on May 8, 1746 in Kirk Merrington2 and their first child was born a year later. The family probably rented Wingate Grange around 1763, and the three youngest were baptized at St. Helen Church, Kelloe Parish.  

St. Helen Church, Kelloe Parish. JH photo.

When John was just eight years of age, his mother died. His father wrote his will the following year and died in November, 1776.3 Knowing that his children would be orphaned, Ralph was clearly concerned about their prospects, and in his will he gave his cousin Robert Dent, of Morden Red House in Sedgefield parish, some financial control over the bequests left to the younger children.

Ralph realized that each of his children had different needs, so he varied his bequests to them. He also ensured that not just his sons, but also his daughters, received inheritances.4

Daughters Letitia and Elizabeth were already married when their father died. Letitia (also known as Lettice, and married to butcher Richard Jefferson,) was to receive £15. Ralph seems to have been particularly concerned about Elizabeth. He left her £40 in trust, and her husband “shall have no power or control whatsoever and shall in no wise be liable to the payment of his debts or otherwise.”

Son Thomas was left £20 and a horse. Anne was to have £40 and a third of Ralph’s household goods when she reached 21. Ralph jr. and Edward would each get £60 when they reached 21. Lancelot, the youngest child, was to receive £90 when he turned 21. Ralph appointed William, Mary and Margaret as joint executors and residuary legatees. John was to receive £70 when he turned 21 – about £8500 in today’s money.

I do not know where John lived after his parents died. Perhaps he stayed with his sister Letitia, and perhaps it was her husband who trained John to become a butcher.

Fields of Wingate Grange Farm. JH photo.

In 1785, John Robson Clerk married Eleanor House.5 If this was my John, he would have been just 18 years old. This marriage had been left out of the family stories until I found The Marriage Bonds and Allegations document associated with John’s second marriage.6 This document stated that John was a widower when he married Mary Mitchinson in 1794. I know nothing about Eleanor, including where or when she died. 

John’s second marriage took place on June 10, 1794, at St. Giles parish church, on a hill above the Wear River. Mary Mitchinson, or Mitcheson, (1776-1856), was my eventual ancestor and the daughter of Joseph Mitcheson (1746-1821) and Margaret Philipson (1756-1821).7 The fact that John and Mary were not married at Whickham parish church, where she had been baptized and her parents were later buried, suggests that perhaps her parents did not approve of the marriage.

St. Giles Parish Church, where John Clark and Mary Mitcheson were married. JH photo.

The following year, Mary gave birth to a daughter, Mary Ann Clark, and around 1797 the family boarded a ship, bound for a new life in Montreal, Canada.

A Freehold Estate in Durham

According to another family legend, John owned a freehold estate near the cathedral in Durham. I imagined a large house surrounded by shady old trees. This was a misunderstanding on my part: the term freehold estate simply refers to a property, or real estate, that is “free from hold” of any entity besides the owner. I also imagined that Clark lived on his own land. When he married Mary, he lived in St. Giles parish, a largely agricultural suburb of the city of Durham, however, I found no evidence that he owned property there.

Furthermore, if he owned land in England, why would he want to go to Canada? I began to wonder whether John Clark owned property in England at all.

John Clark’s will, written in Montreal in 1825, settled the question. It stated, “The said testator doth will, bequeath and devise unto his said daughter Mary Ann, her heirs and assigns, the whole of his real estate of all and every nature and description soever, situated and being in the city or town of Durham or in the neighbourhood thereof in England.”8 In other words, Clark did own property in Durham, but his will gave no clue as to its use or location.

Over the years, I hired several professional researchers in Durham to search collections such as land tax records, deeds, enclosure records and tithe applotment records at the archives in Durham, and they added small pieces to the puzzle. Finally, after many years of looking at this question off and on, it became clear that the exact nature and location of this freehold estate will likely remain a mystery, however, Clark’s property may have been located in the heart of the city.

Durham is a very old city built on a peninsula surrounded by the meandering River Wear. Several bridges cross the river, leading to the market square, and from there, Sadler Street goes up a hill to Durham Cathedral and Durham University. At one time, Sadler Street was also known as Fleshergate and butchers had their shops there.

Sadler Street, Durham, England. JH photo

An old Durham city deed notes that a man named John Clark was an occupant of the building at no. 5 Sadler Street until 1796,9 which was shortly before my ancestor left for Canada. He was probably renting or subletting, since his name is not listed among the main parties to the deeds.

When Clark died in 1827, he left his Durham property to his daughter, Mary Ann. Her husband, Montreal merchant Stanley Bagg, was executor of the will. Clark also left 13 bequests of 50 pounds each to several of his brothers and sisters in England, and to several of his wife’s relatives.

In 1829, Mary Ann decided to sell the property in Durham.10 It was probably difficult to manage the property from across the Atlantic, and she could use the proceeds to pay these bequests. William Mitcheson, John Clark’s brother-in-law who was an anchor maker in London, was appointed an executor of Clark’s will in England, however, I was unable to find proof of Clark’s will being probated in England.

It is clear, however, that the family sold some property in Durham in 1842. Mary Ann had died in 1835, leaving it to her son, Stanley Clark Bagg (SCB), who was then a minor. Stanley Bagg was the executor of her estate until SCB turned 21 in 1841.

Durham Cathedral at sunset. JH photo

The following summer, Stanley and SCB travelled to Durham and sold the remaining property. On their return, Stanley recorded the names of the three buyers in a notarized document in which he admitted he had used some of the rental income from the Durham properties for his own purposes. He arranged to repay his son and listed the names of three people who purchased the properties, as well as the name of a Mr. “Bromwell” who had collected the rents. The name “Bramwell” was listed in the document regarding no. 5 Sadler Street at the Durham University archives.

Several questions remain: how extensive was Clark’s property? Did the properties SCB sold in 1842 represent all of Clark’s English real estate? And how and when did Clark acquire it in the first place? His father left him 70 pounds when he was a child, so perhaps someone helped him invest it wisely.

Later in life, John Clark proved to be a successful butcher and an astute businessman who supplied meat to the British army and invested in properties near Montreal.

Notes:

This article has been revised and condensed from four articles previously posted on my personal family history blog Writing Up the Ancestors: John Clark of Durham, England, May 30, 2014; A Freehold Estate in Durham, May 4, 2019; Ralph Clark’s 1776 Will, April 17, 2019; A Trip to England in 1842, Feb. 7, 2020 (also posted on Genealogy Ensemble)

Special thanks to Margaret Hedley, Past Uncovered, for research in County Durham, 2018-2019, and to Geoff Nicholson, a highly respected genealogist in the area. We corresponded for several years, and in 2009 he took my husband and me on a tour of the area. Geoff died in 2021.

Recently a Clark descendant who lives in New Zealand, contacted me to say that he has researched two more generations of the Clark family, bringing their tree back to the mid-1600s. He has posted the Clark family tree on MyHeritage.com and the Kane-Wilson and Hurworth-Hirst public member’s tree on Ancestry.

When I first did this research, I found the record of John Clark’s birth at St. Helen Church, Kelloe parish, Easington, in the Northumberland and Durham Baptisms on Findmypast.com. Find My Past is a good source for County Durham records. Another good place to search for obscure County Durham records is Durham Records Online, www.durhamrecordsonline.com. The Northumberland and Durham Family History Society is an active organization with an extensive website and helpful members. See https://ndfhs.org.uk/. The Story (formerly The County Durham Record Office) has a variety of historical resources; see  https://www.thestorydurham.org/.

The note about John Clark’s date of birth was made by his great-grandson Rev. Sydenham Bagg Lindsay (1887-1975) of Montreal. I found it in the Bagg family bible at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal around 2010.

Marriage of Johannes Dent to Elizabetha Clark in Sedgefield in 1721: “England Marriages, 1538–1973,” database, FamilySearch(https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:NLZY-9MB : viewed 10 February 2018, Johannes Dent and Elizabetha Clark, 16 May 1721; citing Sedgefield, Durham, England; index based upon data collected by the Genealogical Society of Utah, Salt Lake City; FHL microfilm 91,112.

In 2012, I found a record of the marriage of John Robson Clerk and Eleanor House in Kelloe parish in the Bishop’s Transcripts on familysearch.org. The link – www.familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/NKXW-BHM — still leads to a record of the marriage, but the image is no longer available. The Bishops Transcripts were copies, made annually, of the original parish records. John did not usually use his middle name, but he is remembered as John R. Clark on a plaque in the Bagg family mausoleum in Montreal, Canada

Prior to most marriages in England, banns were read and people could express their opposition to the union. Couples could bypass this step by paying a fee for a marriage license. A marriage allegation is a sworn statement in connection with the license application, in which the couple state there is no known reason for the marriage not to take place. The Durham Diocese, England, Calendar of Marriage Bonds and Allegations, 1494-1815, can be found on Ancestry, while familysearch.org has the records for the years 1692-1900.  CHECK

I have written a number of articles about the Mitcheson family in Durham, Montreal, London and Philadelphia, searchable on my personal family history blog Writing Up the Ancestors (www.writinguptheancestors.ca), and will copy them to Genealogy Ensemble in the near future.

There are several clues that father and son visited Durham. In 1866, John Clark’s grandson, Stanley Clark Bagg, wrote an article called “The Antiquities & Legends of Durham, a lecture before Numismatic & Antiquarian Society of Montreal” in which he recalled his own visit to the cathedral with his father more than 20 years earlier. There is a record in a passenger list of Stanley Bagg and S.C. Bagg travelling from Liverpool to Boston aboard the Acadia. Boston Courier (Boston, Massachusetts, Monday, Sept. 19, 1842, issue 1921;) 19th Century Newspapers Collection, special interest databases, http://www.americanancestors.org; accessed 18/04/2019. A search for Mary Ann Bagg in the Durham University Archives online catalogue brings up a result in the Durham Cathedral Library: J.H. Howe Collection. It cites Montreal parish records showing how John Clark was related to Stanley Clark Bagg, and includes an affidavit from Montreal notary Henry Griffin and a note from Charles Bagot, Governor General of British North America, verifying the information. Reference: JJH 11 Dates of creation: 1842 JJH 11/1, 27 April & 9 May 1842. Similarly, there is a note appended to Clark’s will, dated 13 May, 1842, from Charles Bagot, certifying the information; attached to records for lot 110, Saint-Laurent Ward, Montreal, p. 395, Registre foncier du Québec online database. 

Revised Sources

1 “England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975,” database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:NBC9-BQD : accessed 11 February 2018), Margret Pearson, 31 Oct 1725; index based upon data collected by the Genealogical Society of Utah, Salt Lake City; FHL microfilm 91,097, 94,097.

2. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “International Genealogical Index (IGI),” database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/2:1:MDK6-CRN : accessed 15 April 2019), entry for Ralph Clark, batch A23286-7; citing FHL microfilm 455,471. This marriage is also included in Boyd’s Marriage Index, 1538-1840, Findmypast.com

3. Burials, Stockton District, record # 573795 2, St. Edmund the Bishop Church, Sedgefield, 8 Nov. 1776, Ralph Clerk {Clark] of Wingate Grange in the Parish of Kelloe.

4. Will of Ralph Clark, Oct. 11, 1776; 1776/C8/2, University of Durham Special Collections Department.

5. Marriage of John Robson Clerk and Eleanor House “England Marriages, 1538–1973”, FamilySearch https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:NKXW-BHM, Entry for John Robson Clerk and Eleanor House, 10 July 1785.

6. England, Durham Diocese, Marriage Bonds & Allegations, 1692-1900, database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q21P-XMQK : accessed 29 July 2017), John Clark and Mary Mitchinson, 07 Jun 1794; citing Marriage, Durham, England, United Kingdom, Church of England. Durham University Library, Palace Green; FHL microfilm.

7 “England, Births and Christenings, 1538-1975”, database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:N5D4-DGM : 5 February 2023), Joseph Mitchinson in entry for Mary Mitchinson, 1776.

8. “Last Will and Testament of Mr. John Clark of Montreal,” Act of notary Henry Griffin, #5989, 29 Aug. 1825, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, p. 9.

9. Durham University Library, Special Collections Catalogue, http://reed.dur.ac.uk/xtf/search, results for John Clark, Durham City Deeds, Bundle 22, Sadler Street alias Fleshergate, 5 Sadler Street, east side, Reference: DCY 23/1-34, Dates of creation: 1776-1856. The entry says, “These premises were described as a burgage [land or property in a town that was held in return for service or annual rent] and shop, with appurtenances, almost throughout. In 1856 it was called a freehold dwellinghouse and shop….The occupants of the property included, initially, John Clark, by 1796 one Haswell ….”

10. Annex attached to John Clark’s Last Will and Testament, by notary Henry Griffin, 10 Nov. 1829 and attached to records for lot 110, Saint-Laurent Ward, Montreal, p. 391, Registre foncier du Québec online database.

genealogy, Montreal, Quebec

Thomas Workman’s Legacy

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A wealthy Montreal businessman during his lifetime, Thomas Workman (1813-1889) has been largely forgotten, however, several of the companies he helped to found still exist, and his bequest to McGill University supports cutting-edge research today.

Thomas Workman, 1869

Thomas was the eighth of the nine children of Joseph Workman (1759-1848), a teacher turned estate manager, and his wife, Catherine Gowdy (1769-1872). Thomas was probably born at the family home in Ballymacash, a village near Belfast, Ireland (now Northern Ireland). His parents were strict and ambitious for their children and believed that too much hugging would spoil them.

Members of Thomas’s family moved to Canada a few at a time. In 1819, the oldest son, Benjamin, decided to start a new life in North America and booked passage on a ship bound for Quebec. Over the next few years, brothers Alexander and John followed. Fourteen-year-old Thomas, accompanied by Samuel (16) and Francis (12), arrived in Montreal in 1827, following a hazardous voyage across the Atlantic. The brothers lived with Ben and his wife and attended the Union School that Ben owned, studying grammar, mathematics and the classics. Their parents, sister Ann (who was my two-times great-grandmother) and brothers William and Joseph followed in 1829.

In Ireland, the family attended the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland in Dunmurray, and, like its minister, they strongly believed in freedom of thought in religion. When Thomas first arrived in Montreal, he attended a Presbyterian church, but after his brother Benjamin played a key role in founding a Unitarian congregation in the city in 1842, Thomas became a life-long Unitarian.

Like a number of Irish-born Protestants, Thomas joined the Doric Club, an organization founded in Montreal in 1836 to help maintain Lower Canada’s British connection.1 Along with a number of other Doric Club members, Thomas participated as a loyalist volunteer in the bloody battle of Sainte-Eustache during the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837-38. The following spring, he was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant.

Thomas was described as someone who did not show much emotion, but he did have a life-long close bond with his brother Dr. Joseph Workman, who lived in Toronto. They visited each other and shared interests, such as the new theory of evolution.2

In 1845, Thomas married Scottish-born Anna Eadie (1822-1889). Although they had no children, they moved into a large house at the northwest corner of Sherbrooke and University Street in 1877.

Thomas Workman’s house on Sherbrooke Street, Montreal. Photos of this house have sometimes been erroneously identified as his brother William Workman’s home.

Thomas began his business career working for a Montreal merchant. In 1834, he was hired as a junior clerk at the hardware firm Frothingham and Workman, where his brother William was a partner. Nine years later, Thomas became a partner, and when both William Workman and John Frothingham retired in 1859, Thomas became head of the company. At this time, Frothingham and Workman was the largest hardware wholesaler in Canada, importing tools and supplies from Britain and the U.S. and with its own manufacturing facilities near Montreal’s Lachine Canal. 

Like many of his peers, Thomas was involved with several companies over the course of his career. He was a director and later the vice-president of Molson’s Bank, which was incorporated in 1855 and merged with the Bank of Montreal 70 years later. He was a founding director and first president of Sun Mutual Life Insurance Company of Montreal (now simply known as Sun Life) from 1871 until his death 18 years later. He was also involved with the City and District Savings Bank, founded by the Bishop of Montreal and a group of city business leaders to help working people save money. It later became the Laurentian Bank. His other business interests included shipping, insurance and real estate.

A Liberal in politics, Thomas was elected in 1867 to Canada’s first federal parliament, representing the riding of Montreal Center. He did not run in the following two elections, but in 1875 he returned to the House of Commons as the Member of Parliament for Montreal West. The topics he addressed in parliament mainly focused on business interests such as canals, railways and exports and imports.   

Governments did not fund health and social services as they do today, so Montreal’s wealthy citizens gave generously to a variety of causes. Thomas donated to the Mackay Institution for Protestant Deaf Mutes (now the Mackay Centre School), and he was president of the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society for two years. He was also a governor of the Fraser Institute and Free Library of Montreal, known in recent years as the Fraser Hickson Library.

Thomas’s wife Anna died in June 1889, and his brother Joseph commented that when Thomas succumbed to diabetes a few months later, he probably died of a broken heart.

Thomas and Anna are buried in the Workman family plot in Mount Royal Cemetery, where their massive headstone is inscribed with their names on one side, and the names of his parents and brother Samuel on the other. 

The smith workshop in the Workman Engineering Building at McGill, around 1901.

Thomas was reputed to be a millionaire – a rare achievement in Canada at the time. The organization that benefited the most from his estate was his neighbour, McGill College, now McGill University. He bequeathed his house to McGill, and it became home to the School of Music. The Otto Maass Chemistry Building is now located on this spot.

In addition, he left $120,000 to the fledgling department of mechanical engineering, then known as the Applied Science Faculty. Half of that sum paid for the construction of a new building to house machine and technical shops, including a foundry, hydraulics and electrical science.3 The Governor General of Canada laid the building’s cornerstone at a ceremony on Oct. 30, 1890.4 The Workman Wing of the Engineering Building is still there, although it has undergone many changes over the past century and a quarter.5

Thomas also provided long-lasting funds for research. The current Thomas Workman Professor of Mechanical Engineering studies satellites and space robotics, while the current Thomas Workman Emeritus Professor’s expertise is in the interactions between fluids and structures, with applications in the power-generating industry and the aeronautical industry.

This article is also posted on my personal family history blog, http://www.writinguptheancestors.ca

Photo credits:

Thomas Workman, Montreal, QC, 1869. William Notman, I-36832, McCord Stewart Museum

Thomas Workman’s House, Sherbrooke Street, Montreal, Quebec, 1912-13. Wm. Notman & Son, VIEW-12850, McCord Stewart Museum

Smith’s Shop in the Workman Building, McGill University, Montreal, about 1901. Photographer unknown. MP-000025286, McCord Stewart Museum

Sources:

1.  Gerald J. J. Tulchinsky, “WORKMAN, THOMAS,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/workman_thomas_11E.html, accessed May 4, 2026.

2.  Christine I. M. Johnston, The Father of Canadian Psychiatry: Joseph Workman, Victoria: The Ogden Press, 2000, p. 94. 

3.  MacDonald Engineering, the Workman Wing and the Electrical Wing. https://cac.mcgill.ca/campus/buildings/Macdonald_Engineering.html, accessed May 4, 2026.

4.  Keen Science’s New Home. Laying the Corner Stone of McGill’s Latest Buildings, The Gazette, Oct. 31, 1890, p. 2. www.newspapers.com accessed March 10, 2026.

5.  McGill. Civil Engineering. History of the Department, https://www.mcgill.ca/civil/about-us/history, accessed May 4, 2026.

genealogy, Quebec

The Surviving Daughter

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It must have been a happy wedding. For a girl from humble American roots to marry the owner of one of Lower Canada’s (Quebec) vast seigneuries, this must have seemed like a wonderful match. And the groom had recently lost his parents, so his family members were no doubt pleased to see him marry.  

Unfortunately, there was no fairy-tale ending to this story. 

Detail of a 19th-century painting showing Sainte Anne with local landowner C.A.M. Globensky and his wife and cousin, Virginie Lambert Dumont. JH photo.

The bride was Sophia Mary Roy Bush. She was born Sophia Mary Bush around 1815, the daughter of farmer William Bush, of West Haven, Vermont, and his wife, Polly Bagg Bush. This family struggled financially, so Sophia had come to Lower Canada to live with her aunt and uncle, Sophia Bagg and Gabriel Roy, a landowner and politician, who had no children of their own. 

The groom was Charles-Louis Lambert Dumont, born in 1806, the son of Eustache Nicolas Lambert Dumont.1 Eustache Nicolas had been a judge, militia officer, politician and co-seigneur of Milles-Îles, but he had accumulated crippling debts running the seigneury and had fallen out with his sister because their father had left them unequal shares of the seigneury.  

On the bride’s side, Sophia Bagg and Gabriel Roy signed the parish record book, as did the bride’s uncle Stanley Bagg, his 15-year-old son, Stanley Clark Bagg, and his mother-in-law, Mary Mitcheson Clark. Abner Bagg’s wife, Mary Ann Mittleberger, signed the register, as did her daughter Mary Ann. Among Louis Charles’ relatives who signed the book were his sister Elmire, her husband, Pierre Laviolette, and seven other members of the Laviolette family. The groom’s brother, Louis Sévère Dumont, was also present. Source: Quebec Canada Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection) 1621-1968 for BM Dush, Saint Laurent, 1830-1840, Sept. 25, 1835,  p. 106, www.Ancestry,ca.

The Dumont family had been seigneurs of Milles-Îles since 1743, owning a vast area of wilderness and fertile farmland northwest of Montreal. According to traditions that went back to the time of New France, the habitants, or farmers, paid rent annually to the seigneur, cleared the land and grew crops. The seigneur was responsible for building grist mills, saw mills and roads. In 1770, the Dumont family donated land for the construction of a Catholic church, and the village of Saint-Eustache grew up next to it. They later built the seigneurial manor house near the church.2

Charles-Louis’ and Sophia’s wedding was held at the parish church in Saint-Laurent, where the Roy family lived, on September 22, 1835. The newlyweds lived in the manor house in Saint-Eustache, but their life was not easy. Charles-Louis was learning how to administer the debt-ridden seigneury, arguing over money with his brother and fighting off court challenges over the property from his aunt. Then the couple’s first-born child, a daughter, died in 1837, shortly after her first birthday. 

Meanwhile, social and political tensions were increasing in Lower Canada, and when the government refused to approve reforms, an armed rebellion broke out. On December 14, 1837, 1500 government troops and loyalist volunteers attacked the Patriotes, or rebels, who had barricaded themselves inside the church at Saint-Eustache. The government forces burned the church, the convent and much of the village. Seventy Patriotes died during the battle and 120 were taken prisoner.

The Catholic parish church in Saint-Eustache. JH photo.

Charles-Louis and Sophia had anticipated trouble and left Saint-Eustache for Montreal in November. When they returned in the spring, they discovered the manor house had been destroyed so they moved into a smaller house down the road. Their second child, Marguerite Virginie Lambert Dumont, was born there on August 21, 1838. 

On June 27, 1841, Sophia died suddenly, age 26. The body of Charles-Louis, 36, was discovered in his house on November 1. His brother, Louis Sévère, died eight weeks later, age 31. None of the accounts of this family’s history explains these deaths, and several historians seem to suggest that these events were suspicious.4

Three-year-old Marguerite Virginie Lambert Dumont was now an orphan and future heiress.to the seigneury of Milles-Îles. 

An arranged marriage

Her father had named Gabriel Roy as the little girl’s legal guardian in case something happened to him. Virginie was sent to live with the Roy couple in Saint-Laurent, but Roy, now 71 years old, realized he was unable to raise the child. She returned to Saint-Eustache where notary Frédéric-Eugène Globensky became her new guardian. He and his wife, who had no children of their own, brought her up, and she attended school at the convent in the village. 

Everyone expected that when Virginie became an adult, she would marry her cousin Charles-Auguste-Maximilien Globensky (1830-1906), known as C.A.M. But in 1854, the government announced that the seigneurial system was to be abolished. Virginie’s marriage to C.A.M. was fast-tracked, with special permission from the church, and on July 21, 1854 she married C.A.M. She was just 15 years old.

In Quebec, a married woman’s property belonged to her husband unless they had signed a marriage contract making them separate as to property. In Virginie’s case, the seigneury was the dowry she gave to C.A.M.. He now became co-seigneur.5

C.A.M. was a tall and imposing man, not always liked in the community, but respected for his honesty and known for his intellect and his many interests, especially agriculture and railways. He is still remembered for the book he wrote about the causes of the Rebellion of 1837 in Saint-Eustache. His father, Maximilien Globensky, a lieutenant-colonel in the British Army, had led a company of volunteer militia at the Battle of Saint-Eustache.

The bitter fallout from the rebellion hung over Saint-Eustache for many years. But the aftermath of the battle was not the only shadow over Virginie’s life. There were disputes over the shared inheritance of the seigneury and its large debts. Virginie was in court several times, fighting family members over various property disputes.

Although the seigneurial system had been abolished, it took decades to dismantle. A committee evaluated property values and the habitants had the right to buy their farms from the seigneurs or continue to pay rent. As co-seigneurs of Milles-Îles, a territory so vast that it included the sites of the city of Saint-Jerome and the town of Saint-Sauveur, Virginie and C.A.M. were very wealthy. 

Altar of Saint-Eustache parish church, with the painting of Sainte Anne, C.A.M. and Virginie behind it on the right. JH photo.

C.A.M. built a new seigneurial manor house in Saint-Eustache and the family moved into it in 1865. Every Sunday, Virginie and her growing family sat in the front pew of the church, a privilege reserved for seigneurs. 

Virginie and C.A.M. had eight children. When Virginie became ill, she made out her will, leaving C.A.M. as her sole beneficiary. She died August 19, 1874, age 36, and he remarried two years later. 

The year Virginie died, C.A.M. visited Rome and brought home a painting of the Adoration of Saint Anne in which Virginie, C.A.M. and the village priest were portrayed sitting at the saint’s feet. This huge painting hangs behind the altar of the parish church in Saint-Eustache to this day.6

Notes Concerning the Extended Bagg Family

Some written accounts refer to Sophia Mary Roy Bush as Gabriel Roy’s adopted daughter. The parish marriage record simply refers to her as the daughter of William Bush and Polly Bagg. Sophia’s birth parents were Protestant, so in 1827, Sophia was baptized Catholic and added Roy to her name. That church record refers to Gabriel Roy and Sophia Bagg as her sponsors. She was age 12 at the time and signed the parish record book herself. In French-speaking Quebec, people probably called her Sophie.

Polly (Bagg) Bush (1785-1856), Stanley Bagg (1788-1853), Abner Bagg (1790-1852) and Sophia (Bagg) Roy (1791-1860) were siblings. Their father was Phineas Bagg, a farmer from Pittsfield, Massachusetts who moved to the Montreal area with his family around 1795. Their mother, Pamela Stanley, was born in Litchfield, Connecticut and probably died in Pittsfield. Stanley and Abner were well-known Montreal merchants, but I had never heard of Polly or Sophia until I started researching the family.

Polly and William Bush had three other children besides Sophia. They were Pamelia Ann (1812-1880), who married Methodist Episcopal minister John W. York and lived in Benton County, Oregon; William Stanley (1816-1892), a Baptist preacher in the Lake George area of New York State; and Phineas (1820-1867) who moved to the Midwest with his parents before 1850. He is buried in Harrison Cemetery, Marion County, Illinois, along with his parents and three young daughters. (Polly’s grave in Illinois can be viewed on Findagrave.com, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/65952231/bush)  After Phineas’ death, his widow, Louisa, and two surviving daughters moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Gabriel Roy (1770-1848) was born in Montreal, the son of a market gardener from France.8 His first wife was a widow 24 years older than him. She named him the guardian of her adopted daughter, Marie-Rosalie Sabrevois de Bleury, the heiress of a wealthy Montreal family, and he managed their affairs. Shortly after his first wife died in 1810, Gabriel married 19-year-old Sophia Bagg. The couple moved from the city to Saint-Laurent, now a Montreal suburb but at that time a rural area. He became a wealthy landowner, school commissioner and road commissioner, and in 1841 he was appointed to the Legislative Council of the Province of Canada,9 a position he held until his death at age 78. He was then referred to as l’Honorable Gabriel Roy. After his death, Sophia referred to herself as Sophia Bagg, veuve (widow) Gabriel Roy. In her will, she left money to the Catholic church and to many relatives. As requested in her will, and according to the church funeral record, she was buried in the Saint-Laurent parish church.

This article is a condensed version of several stories I wrote in 2014, 2015 and 2016 and posted on my personal family history blog, Writing Up the Ancestors (www.writinguptheancestors.ca). They were: The Doomed Marriage of Mary Sophia Roy Bush and Charles-Louis Lambert Dumont, posted Jan. 28, 2015; Marguerite Virginie Globensky, posted Jan. 28, 2015; Polly Bagg Bush: a Surprise Sister, posted May 23, 2014; Polly Bagg Bush and her Family, posted April 28, 2016 and William S. Bush, Baptist Preacher, posted May 19, 2016.

Sources:

1.  In collaboration with W. Stanford Reid, “LAMBERT DUMONT, NICOLAS-EUSTACHE (Eustache-Nicolas),” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed March 21, 2026, https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/lambert_dumont_nicolas_eustache_6E.html, accessed March 22, 2026.

2.  André Giroux, Histoire du territoire de la ville de Saint-Eustache, tome 1, L’époque seigneuriale 1683-1854, Québec: Les Éditions GID, 2009, p. 49.

3.  Samuel Venière, “Battle of Saint-Eustache” The Canadian Encyclopedia, https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/battle-of-st-eustache, accessed March 22, 2026.

4.  André Giroux, Les héritiers d’Eustache-Nicolas, http://www.patriotes.cc/portal/fr/docs/revuedm/06/revuedm06_6.pdf accessed March 23, 2026.

5.  Yvon Globensky, Histoire de la Famille Globensky, Montreal: Les Éditions du Fleuve, 1991, p. 110.

6.  Globensky, p. 122

7.  Notary J.A. Labadie, 18 mai, 1856, #14278, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec

8.  E.-Z. Massicotte, “l’Honorable Gabriel Roy,” Bulletin des Recherches Historiques, vol. 31, Septembre, 1925, p347-348, https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/2657299?docsearchtext=347%20Gabriel%20Roy accessed March 23, 2026.

9.  “Legislative Council of the Province of Canada”, Wikipedia,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislative_Council_of_the_Province_of_Canada, accessed March 23, 2026.

genealogy, Montreal, Quebec

Montreal Mayor William Workman

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Mayor William Workman in his robes of office, 1870.

In 1848, Montreal hardware merchant William Workman was encouraged to run for mayor. He refused. Twenty years later, Workman was elected as the city’s mayor, bringing his extensive experience in business, banking and philanthropy to the position for three years.  

A Protestant immigrant from Ireland, Workman (1807-1878) came from a middle-class family. He became a partner with the Montreal wholesale hardware company Frothingham and Workman and, after retirement in 1859, he remained active on the boards of several banks and philanthropic organizations.1

In politics, he was a liberal and, like several of his eight siblings, a member of the Unitarian Church. “All the (Workman) brothers had been instilled with a strong sense of morality, had learned skills to earn their living, possessed an ability to think through issues for themselves, and seemed to seek knowledge for its own sake,” Christine Johnston wrote in her biography of Willam’s brother Dr. Joseph Workman.2

In 1868, when Workman agreed to run, democratic institutions were relatively new. Montreal had been incorporated as a city in 1833, but its mayor was not elected by public voters until 1852, and there was no secret ballot until 1889. At first, only property owners were eligible to vote. As of 1860, renters – and in this city, most people were renters – could vote, provided they had paid their taxes. Anyone running for mayor, however, had to own property worth at least 1000 pounds.3 Thus, most of the city’s early mayors were from the business community, and about 60 percent of the people elected to city council were anglophones.

Banker and railway entrepreneur William Molson put Workman’s name forward at a nomination meeting. His opponent was Jean-Louis-Beaudry, a businessman who had already served several years as mayor. At first, there was a question as to whether Workman was eligible to run, then Beaudry claimed that Workman should be disqualified. His objections were dismissed and Workman beat Beaudry with 3134 votes to 1862.4

In 1869 and 1870, Workman was acclaimed mayor, but he did not run again in 1871.

When Workman was mayor, the municipal council met on the ground floor of the Bonsecours Market building, in what is now known as Old Montreal. In this 1870 photo, Workman was standing on the raised area at the far end of the room.

The most distressing of Montreal’s problems was the high mortality rate for young children. Some people suspected that this was linked to its water supply. Cholera epidemics had reached Montreal in 1832, 1849 and 1854, but even most physicians did not understand that cholera was caused by bacteria, spread in contaminated drinking water. Instead, they believed that disease was spread by miasma, or unpleasant vapours in the air. William Workman, however, may have had some understanding of the contagiousness of cholera because his brother Joseph had done his thesis on cholera while a medical student at McGill University.6

As president of the Montreal Sanitary Association, William realized the importance of clean water. Over the three years he served as mayor, he looked at municipal economic development and urban life as two sides of the same coin. He was the first mayor to do so.7 His administration focused on improving the city’s water system, improving sanitation and making the city more livable for residents.

Workman improved the city’s aqueduct system to ensure it could provide enough water to everyone. He ensured that the sewer system was modernized, replacing rotting wooden sewer pipes with clay ones. He also saw to it that low-lying areas, where potentially contaminated water could accumulate, were drained.7

He turned his attention to garbage collection, introducing regulations concerning the pickup of manure, dead animals, soot and ashes. People were required to store waste in boxes or barrels, and the city now picked up garbage on a daily basis. The city built public baths, since many homes did not have hot running water, and it constructed municipal slaughterhouses.

To ensure that the city benefit all residents, he advocated for the creation of large public parks, on the top of Mount Royal and on Île Sainte-Hélène, where people could breathe pure air.8 Not long after Workman left office, the city purchased the necessary land and hired famous landscape architect Frederick Olmstead to design Mount Royal Park. It was officially opened in 1876 and it is still today a much-loved feature of Montreal. Île Sainte-Hélène, in the St. Lawrence River, also remains a popular green space.  

One of the most exciting events of Workman’s time as mayor may have been the clear, crisp October day in 1869 when 19-year-old Prince Arthur, Queen Victoria’s third son, arrived in Montreal as part of a Canadian tour. Workman greeted the prince in the old port and made a short welcoming speech, then he and his guest took part in a procession through the streets. People cheered as they passed by, and homes and commercial buildings were decked out with banners and flags. The following day a lacrosse tournament took place.

On the day of the 1869 lacrosse tournament, Workman, back row on the left, posed with a group of indigenous people.

Workman proved to be a very popular mayor among both English- and French-speaking Montrealers, and when he left office, citizens showed their appreciation. A public banquet was organized in his honour, and people from all classes came to thank him for his hard work and the generous hospitality he had offered to visitors. The Gazette was effusive in its description of the banquet and the expensive thank-you gifts of a diamond ring and silver dishes that Workman received.

The speech Workman gave during this dinner revealed that he had had concerns about going into politics. Addressing the crowd, and especially members of municipal council, he said, “I entered upon the duties of my office under great inexperience.… I laboured under great misgivings and suspicions as to the conduct of affairs in your corporate administration. Then, as now, the press had been sounding the alarm as to combinations, jobs and rings. I watched with great attention and anxiety in every department to discover the truth of these assertions, but I watched in vain and, after three years experience, I can truly say that, if it is one of the great blessings of a city … and of the citizens to find the corporate action of its representatives in unison with right and honest discharge of duty, then Montreal enjoys that blessing to its fullest extent.”

This story is also posted on my personal family history blog, http://www.writinguptheancestors.ca.

See also:

Janice Hamilton, “William Workman: Public Successes, Personal Problems” Genealogy Ensemble, Jan. 7, 2026, https://genealogyensemble.com/2026/01/07/william-workman-public-successes-personal-problems/

Photo credits:

Mayor William Workman, Montreal, QC, 1870, photo by William Notman, McCord Stewart Museum, 432611, accessed March 3, 2026

Archives de Montreal, Bref historique des élues et élus de la Ville de Montréal, https://archivesdemontreal.com/2021/06/01/bref-historique-des-elues-et-elus-de-la-ville-de-montreal/, Galerie photo,1870, https://archivesdemontreal.com/documents/2021/06/1870_VM166-D00015-22-5-002.jpg, accessed March 4, 2026

Kanien’kehá:ka group with William Workman, Mayor of Montreal, Montreal, QC, 1869; 1869 10 09; photo by James Inglis, McCord Stewart Museum, M6308, accessed March 4, 2026

Sources:

1. G. Tulchinsky, “WORKMAN, WILLIAM,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 10, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed February 22, 2026. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/workman_william_10E.html.

2. Christine I. M. Johnston, The Father of Canadian Psychiatry: Joseph Workman, Victoria: The Ogden Press, 2000, p. 38. 

3. Archives de Montreal. Montreal: Democracy in Montreal from 1830 to the present: Electoral system. http://www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/archives/democratie/democratie_en/expo/institutions-municipales/systeme-electoral/index.shtm, accessed Feb. 22, 2026.  

4. Claude-V. Marsolais, Luc Desrochers, Robert Comeau, Histoire des maires de Montréal, Montreal: VLB Éditeur, 1993, p. 309

5. Paul-Andre Linteau, translated by Peter McCambridge, The History of Montreal: the story of a Great North American City, Montreal: Baraka Books, 2013. p 87.

6. Johnston, The Father of Canadian Psychiatry: Joseph Workman, p. 22. 

7. Marsolais et al, Histoire des maires de Montreal, p. 87.

8. Archives de Montreal. Montreal: Democracy in Montreal from 1830 to the present: Mayors of Montreal: William Workman. (1868-1871), http://www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/archives/democratie/democratie_en/expo/maires/workman/index.shtm, accessed Feb. 21, 2026

9. “Dinner to Wm. Workman, Esq.” The Gazette, March 8, 1871, p. 2. Newspapers.com, accessed Feb. 23, 2026. 

Montreal, Quebec

William Workman: Public Successes, Personal Problems

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The Workman family plot in Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery is a large one, including six large tombstones engraved with the names of almost 30 people. But William Workman (1807-1878), a successful businessman who served as mayor of Montreal for three years, is not buried there. He was laid to rest alone, in a large mausoleum some distance from the family plot.

Before I started researching the Workmans, a cemetery staff member told me that William had wanted family members to be buried in the mausoleum with him, but they refused. Neither of us knew why, but now I have an idea.  

William Workman, 1866, Montreal, QC, William Notman Studio, McCord Stewart Museum online collection, I-22186.1, accessed Jan. 6, 2026.

Born in 1807, William was the fifth of nine children. The family lived near Belfast, in what is now Northern Ireland, where his father was a teacher and estate manager. In 1819, William’s oldest brother, Benjamin, immigrated to Montreal. Three brothers followed soon after and, in 1829, the rest of the family moved to what was then Lower Canada.1

Before emigrating, William worked as a surveyor for the Royal Engineers, mapping Ireland for the Ordnance Survey project. In Montreal, his first job was as assistant editor of the Canadian Courant and Montreal Advertiser, a weekly newspaper owned by brother Benjamin. Soon, however, William found his true calling: as a businessman.

He found employment with a hardware firm, Frothingham & Co., and within a few years he became a partner. As of 1836, the company was known as Frothingham and Workman, and it became the largest wholesale hardware company in Canada, selling scythes, shovels, augers and nails. When William retired from the hardware business in 1859, his brother Thomas took over running the company.2

Frothingham and Workman, Iron Mongers, Montreal, John Henry Walker, McCord Stewart Museum online collection, M930.50.7309, accessed Jan. 6, 2026.

Montreal was growing rapidly, and William found opportunities to invest in fields such as banking, transportation and real estate. William was elected president of the City Bank in 1849 and served in that capacity until 1874.3 In 1846 he was one of a group of prominent Montrealers who founded the City and District Savings Bank, established to help ordinary people save their money, and he was president of that institution for several years.

William invested in Canada’s first railway, the Champlain and St Lawrence, completed in 1836 to connect Montreal to Saint-Jean on the Richelieu River.4 He was also a shareholder in the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad, and he collaborated with several other individuals to found the Canadian Ocean Steam Navigation Company in 1854.

Around 1850, he and a business partner became real estate developers. They bought a piece of land south-west of Montreal’s city limits, near the Lachine Canal. The canal attracted industries such as brass foundries and rolling mills, and nearby manufacturing facilities belonging to Frothingham and Workman employed hundreds of people. The partners laid out streets, built sewers and divided the property into housing lots. The area, known as Sainte-Cunégonde, became a village in 1876 and a tiny independent city in 1890, but eventually it became part of the City of Montreal.5 Workman Street, named after William, still exists in the area.

William was also a generous philanthropist. He was president of the St. Patrick’s Society at a time when that organization was involved with both the Roman Catholic and Protestant communities. Later, he supported the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society. In 1864, he helped create the Montreal Protestant House of Industry and Refuge, serving as president from 1874 to 1877. He was also president of the Montreal Dispensary and Hospital for Sick Children.

He was not deeply involved in politics, but he was elected mayor of Montreal from 1868 to 1872 and proved to be very popular. This aspect of his life will be the topic of another story.

Around this time, wealthy merchants began building large homes on the slopes of Mount Royal, an area that became known as the Golden Square Mile. William bought a full block on the north side of Sherbrooke Street, between Drummond and Stanley, and built a mansion he called Mount Prospect.

“Plan of property belonging to the Estate of the Late W. Workman Esq. subdivided into lots.” H.M. Perrault, 20 Novembre, 1879; Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, entry for William Workman, https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/3394052?docsearchtext=William%20Workmanaccessed 6 January 2026.

William Workman and Elizabeth (Eliza) Bethell were married at St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church on February 10, 1831. Eliza came from the same part of Ireland where William had grown up, so perhaps they had known each other there. They had seven children, so the house should have been full of activity, but it didn’t turn out that way.

It was all too common for children to die young in 19th century Montreal, and William and Eliza lost three little ones. Their firstborn, Elizabeth, was born in December 1831 and died the following summer. Their third child, Emma, was born in August 1837 and died in April 1839. Another girl, Malvina, was born in July 1845 and died in April 1847. Two daughters, Louise (or Louisa) and Elizabeth (Eliza), grew to adulthood, but Eliza, who married Robert Moat, died in 1871. Louisa married Joel C. Baker, a lawyer who went into the hardware business with Louise’s uncle Henry Mulholland.

But William found the death of his only son, also named William (1840-1865), the most devastating blow of all. By then, he and his wife may have already been living apart.

An image of the 1861 census suggests that Eliza was not living at Mount Prospect house, but with her married daughter Louisa Baker and her husband,6 so perhaps William and Eliza had unofficially separated by then. In the 1871 census, seven people were listed as living at Mount Prospect, including a cook, a coachman and a horseman. William was the only family member listed.

In a book about William’s brother, The Father of Canadian Psychiatry, Joseph Workman, author Christine Johnston remarked that Joseph did not have a high opinion of William, commenting in his diary that he thought Wiliam had damage in his head, as well as bumps outside it.7 Perhaps William was also concerned about his own mental health: Johnson wrote that William visited a phrenologist in the United States to examine those external bumps. Johnston also noted that family records suggested William was an alcoholic. If true, that might explain the difficulties in the Workman household.

Nevertheless, many people admired him. When he died, Montreal’s English-language newspapers published extensive obituaries, describing William’s many accomplishments as well as the long and painful illness that led to his death.8 According to one newspaper account, some 400 people attended his funeral at St. James the Apostle Anglican Church, and many followed the hearse to Mount Royal Cemetery.

Wiliam Workman seemed to have everything, but without his family surrounding and supporting him, his life appears to have been a sad one, and those problems followed him to the grave.

The article is also posted on my personal family history blog Writing Up the Ancestors.

Notes

William’s sister Ann (1809-1882), who married hardware merchant Henry Mulholland, was my great-great-grandmother.

Some photos of brother Thomas Workman’s house on Sherbrooke Street are erroneously identified as William’s house. I have not found a photo of Mount Prospect.

There are several photographs of a young man identified as William Workman in the McCord Stewart Museum’s online photo collection. This must the son who died in 1865.  

Phrenology was a popular pseudoscience in the 19th century. Its proponents believed that the measurements of the skull were indicative of mental faculties and character traits.

Sources:

1.   Christine Johnston. “The Irish Connection: Benjamin and Joseph and Their Brothers and their Coats of Many Colours,” CUUHS Meeting, May 1982, Paper #4, p. 2. 

 2.  John Frothingham, Obituary. The Portland Daily Press, May 24, 1870, p. 3. Newspapers.com, accessed Jan. 5, 2026.

3. Nicholas Flood Davin, The Irishman in Canada, London: S. Low, Marston, 1877, p. 334, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/irishmanincanada00daviuoft/page/334/mode/2up accessed Jan. 5, 2026.

4. G. Tulchinsky, “Workman, William,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 10, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–,  https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/workman_william_10E.html

5. Olivier Paré, “Les bâtisseurs de la Petite-Bourgoyge” Encyclopédie du MEM, https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/memoiresdesmontrealais/les-batisseurs-de-la-petite-bourgogne5 accessed Jan. 5, 2026.

6. Ancestry.ca, 1861 Census of Canada. entry for Joel C. Baker, Canada East, Montreal. Library and Archives Canada, Canada East Census, 1861, p. 4210. accessed Jan. 6, 2026.

7. Christine I. M. Johnston, The Father of Canadian Psychiatry: Joseph Workman, Victoria: The Ogden Press, 2000, p. 122. 

8. “Late William Workman”, The Gazette, Feb. 25, 1878, p. 2. Newspapers.com, accessed Dec. 30, 2015. 

Montreal

Huntly Ward Davis, Montreal Architect

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With additional research from Justin Bur

Huntly Ward Davis (1875-1952) was a Montreal architect who designed elegant downtown homes, banks and institutional buildings in the first half of the 20th century. Some of those buildings still stand today, others have disappeared. Many of Montreal’s heritage buildings, built when the city was Canada’s most important business and banking center, have been demolished and replaced by high-rise office towers and apartment buildings. As a result, Davis has been largely forgotten by the public, but his descendants – my cousins – are proud of his architectural legacy.

Huntly Ward Davis. Bagg family collection

Huntly was born in Montreal on October 22, 1875, the oldest son of Moses Davis (c. 1847-1909), head of a customs brokerage firm, and Lucy Elizabeth Ward (1850-1924). Moses was originally from St. Andrews, Quebec, a village on the Ottawa River between Ottawa and Montreal.1  

His mother’s father was well known in business and in politics. James Kewley Ward (1819-1910), was born on the Isle of Man, located in the Irish Sea. James immigrated to New York State in 1842 and married his first wife, Elizabeth King, there. The family moved to Lower Canada in the early 1850s and James bought a lumber mill on the Maskinongé River, northeast of Montreal.

Elizabeth died when daughter Lucy was four years old. James remarried and he and his second wife, Lydia Trenholm, had a large family. Lucy’s granddaughter later recalled how warm and compassionate Lucy was, so perhaps she grew up helping her younger siblings.

In the 1870s, the Ward family moved to Montreal, where James opened a sawmill on the Lachine Canal and expanded his business interests to cotton. A Liberal in politics, he served as mayor of the village of Côte St. Antoine (now the City of Westmount) from 1875 to 1884, and in 1888 he was appointed to the Legislative Council of Quebec. He was known for his generosity to charities.2

Moses Davis and Lucy Ward were married in Montreal in 1874, and Huntly, the eldest of their three sons, was born the following year. Huntly attended school in Montreal, then studied architecture in Boston, graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1898. He returned to Montreal and eventually went into partnership with architect Morley Hogle. After Hogle’s sudden death in 1920, Huntly worked on his own.3 He was a member of the Quebec Association of Architects and of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

House at 1814 Sherbrooke Street W. near St. Mathieu, designed by Hogle and Davis in 1908. The ground floor window was added later and the house is still there today. Photo, taken 1986, from Repetoire d”architecture traditionelle sur le territoire de la Commununaute Urbaine de Montreal, Architecture domestique 1, Les Residences.

Huntly married Evelyn St. Clair Stanley Bagg (1883-1970), eldest daughter of Robert Stanley Bagg and his wife Clara Smithers, on Oct. 26, 1910, at Montreal’s Anglican Church of St. James the Apostle. The following day, The Gazette’s society reporter called the event “one of the prettiest of the season’s fashionable weddings” and described the bride’s ivory satin gown, embroidered with seed pearls.4

Huntly and Evelyn lived in an apartment building that Huntly had designed on Summerhill Avenue, a short street off Côte des Neiges Road, just up the hill from the house where Evelyn had grown up. Evelyn lived on Summerhill for the rest of her life and the couple’s granddaughter still remembers the spacious eight-room apartment and the furniture Huntly had designed.

Huntly and Evelyn also had a country house at Ste. Marguerite, in the Laurentian mountains north of the city. That was where Huntly died, suddenly, on October 12, 1952, at age 76.5 His name is on a plaque in the Bagg family mausoleum at Mount Royal Cemetery.

Huntly and Evelyn had one daughter, Clare Ward Davis (1911-2007). As an adult, she often repeated expressions she had learned from him as a child that reflected his simple sense of justice: “never assume”; “I divide, you choose”; and “a nectarine is a plum’s mistake”.

This down-to-earth approach to life was alsoreflected in the buildings he designed. Son-in-law Norton Fellowes, who was also a Montreal architect, prepared an obituary of Huntly, focusing on his professional activities and published in the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Journal.

Norton wrote, “In the early years of the 20th century, Mr. Davis was a ‘contemporary architect’ for during this era of post-Victorian vulgarity, he allied himself with that small group of young architects who saw beyond the ornate fashion of the day and consistently designed quiet, dignified town houses, country homes, banks and institutes of learning, always in the tradition of fine craftsmanship and classical proportion. The Greenshield and Townsend country houses still grace the bays of Lake Manitou in the Laurentians and the main building of the Children’s Memorial Hospital, the Trafalgar Institute, the Walter Molson residence on McGregor Street, and the head office of the Bank of Toronto in Montreal are all still permanent monuments to a man who followed the highest traditions of the profession.

“During the last few years, although well beyond the age when others retire, Mr. Davis, at the age of 75, was still young enough to understand the trend to more functional design and it was not surprising that in 1952, he designed and supervised the building of several small, efficient new branches for the Bank of Toronto in the Montreal area. Mr. Davis thus worked with dignity and courage for a full half century as a member of the architectural profession.”6

Hogle and Davis designed this branch of the Bank of Toronto in Montreal’s Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district. It features a white vitrified terracotta facade. Source: : l’Atelier d’histoire Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (AHMHM).

Neither is it surprising that he designed at least one building for his wife’s family. The Bagg family had extensive properties in Montreal, mostly in the Mile End area, just east of Mount Royal, but they also owned a few properties downtown. In 1926, Huntly designed a brown brick apartment block on Ste-Catherine Street West, near Guy, for the Stanley Bagg Corp. It was three stories, with small shops on the ground floor.

He may have been involved with another project on land that belonged to the Baggs, a commercial building at the southwest corner of Ste-Catherine Street and Peel. It was built in 1911, shortly after Huntly and Evelyn were married, however, no architect’s name was mentioned in any newspaper reports or in the building’s lease. All building permits were destroyed in a 1922 fire at city hall.

The gleaming, white vitrified terracotta façade (a treatment popular between 1910 and 1915) of the H&M clothing store still stands out at this busy intersection in the heart of downtown. Thousands of people pass by it every day. Although his name was never officially associated with it, this may be the most familiar building Huntly designed.

Notes

Some sources, including the Biographical Dictionary of Architects of Canada, spell his name Huntley, however, his baptism record and a letter written by his mother spell it Huntly. I have used his mother’s spelling. Most architectural references say H.W. Davis.

The lot on Ste-Catherine just west of Guy (St. Antoine Ward, lot 1679, minus a strip of land previously detached for a laneway,) was purchased by the Estate of the late Stanley Clark Bagg in 1885, probably as a rent-generating property. At the time, a three-story brick building and several other buildings were on the lot. The property passed to the Stanley Bagg Corp. when it was founded in 1919. The current building, designed by Huntly Ward Davis, was constructed in 1926. The property was sold in 1957.

The property at Ste-Catherine and Peel (Saint-Antoine Ward, lot 1477) was purchased by the Bagg Estate in 1879. At the time there were three, three-storey stone-front brick houses on the lot. In 1886, these buildings were converted to shops with flats above. They were demolished in 1911 and construction began on the current building, at a cost of $60,000. The Stanley Bagg Corp. sold the property in 1951. 

Sources

  1. “Mr. Moses Davis Died Suddenly Last Night”, The Montreal Star, April 17, 1907, p. 6. Newspapers.com, accessed Oct. 28, 2025.
  2. Leslie Quilliam and Victor Neale, “James Kewley Ward”, Kelly Dollin, editor, New Manx Worthies, Manx Heritage Foundation/Culture Vannin, 2006, iMuseum, https://imuseum.im/search/collections/people/mnh-agent-94625.html, accessed Oct. 27, 2025.
  3. “Huntley Ward Davis”, Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada, 1800-1950, Robert G. Hill, editor, http://dictionaryofarchitectsincanada.org/node/825, accessed Oct. 27, 2025.
  4. Social and Personal, The Gazette, Oct. 27, 1910, p. 2. Newspapers.com, accessed Oct. 27, 2025.
  5. Huntly Ward Davis, Obituary, The Gazette, Oct. 15, 1952, p. 14, Newspapers.com, accessed Oct. 27, 2025.
  6. Norton A. Fellowes, “The Late Huntley Ward Davis, Montreal Architect,” Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, Nov. 13, 1952

This article also appears on my family history blog http://www.writinguptheancestors.ca

genealogy

A Neighbourhood of Rural Villas

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In collaboration with Justin Bur

Montreal in 1832, painting by James Duncan. McCord Stewart Museum.

This view of the city of Montreal from the slope of Mount Royal was painted by artist James Duncan in 1832. In the distance, the city lay on the banks of St. Lawrence River, while in the foreground, the foot of the mountain was rural and traversed by only one road – today’s Saint-Laurent Boulevard.  

This area is now a dense neighbourhood of homes, shops and commercial buildings, but 200 years ago, it was described as a neighbourhood of rural villas. Several of those buildings belonged to my ancestors, including butcher John Clark (1767-1827) and merchant Stanley Bagg (1788-1853). These homes were all torn down years ago, but fortunately, artists and photographers captured them before they disappeared. This article tells their stories.  

Saint-Laurent Boulevard began as a country road passing through a landscape with a mix of rural functions. In the 1700s, a large tannery was located nearby, to the east along Mount Royal Avenue. Later, numerous quarries were excavated to provide the grey limestone used for much of Montreal’s Victorian architecture – churches, civic buildings, places of business and attractive houses. The Beaubien family acquired a large tract of land along the east side of the road in 1842, as well as property in what later became the municipality of Outremont. A railway line was built across the Bagg and Beaubien land in 1876, along which an industrial corridor emerged in the early 1900s.

During the lifetimes of the Clarks and Baggs, their property, on the west side of Saint-Laurent, was farmland. The soil was mostly sandy and rocky. Hay to feed cattle and horses was the main crop, but vegetables and fruit trees could be grown in fertile areas. Back from the road, rising up toward the side of the mountain, there were a handful of rural villas belonging to the Baggs and a few neighbours, including the Perrault-Nowlan and the Hall families.

Butcher John Clark, my four-times great-grandfather, was the first member of my family to live in this area. He brought his wife and young daughter to Montreal around 1797 from County Durham, in northern England, and began investing in land. In 1804, Clark purchased a farm on the west side of Saint-Laurent, and over the next few years, he added adjacent parcels of land. He called the property Mile End Farm, probably inspired by Mile End in London, England.1 His choice of name is still familiar today, as this neighbourhood is known as Mile End. In 1810, he leased the farm to American-born Phineas Bagg (c. 1751-1823) and his son Stanley,2 and they ran an establishment called the Mile End Tavern there until 1818.

Montreal Hunt Club at Mile End Road, Montreal, QC, 1859. photograph by J. Henry, MP-1978.29.8, McCord Stewart Museum. The corner of the building on the right is likely the Mile End Tavern.

After Phineas retired and Stanley moved on to other business interests, various tenants operated the Mile End Tavern. It was demolished in 1902 when the local municipality expropriated the land to widen Saint-Laurent Boulevard. New owners purchased the lot in 1905, and the following year a department store opened on the corner of Saint-Laurent and Mount Royal Avenue, where the tavern had stood for so long.3 The department store was converted into a commercial building during the Great Depression. Today, a Couche Tard convenience store and a Tim Horton’s coffee shop are on its ground floor.

By 1891, both Stanley Bagg and his son Stanley Clark Bagg had died and most of the Mile End Farm property was sold by the late Stanley Clark Bagg’s five adult children to developers McCuaig and Mainwaring.4 An economic depression and lack of basic services such as sewers and tramways delayed development for a few years. Meanwhile, the most valuable lots – the ones that faced Saint-Laurent Boulevard – were divided into five equal shares and allocated at random to the five Bagg siblings.5

Map of Mile End Farm and the locations of Mile End Tavern, John Clark’s Mile End Lodge, Stanley Bagg’s Durham House and Stanley Clark Bagg’s Fairmount Villa, prepared by Justin Bur, 2024.

John Clark’s house was not as well known as the nearby tavern. In 1815, Clark sublet a 16-acre square of land back from the Baggs, a “piece of ground on which is erected a new house of butchery called by the said John Clark, Mile End Lodge”6 – in reality, a two-storey stone house for his family. Facing south, toward the city and the river, it was located between the current Bagg and Duluth Streets, just above what was then the Montreal city limit.

After Clark’s death in 1827, his widow, Mary Mitcheson Clark, moved to a smaller house at the current northwest corner of Bagg and Clark Streets. An inscription noting that this was once the location of the Mitcheson Cottage can still be seen on the foundation of the house that stands there today,

Mrs. Mitcheson’s Cottage, watercolour painting by John Hugh Ross, Stewart Museum collection, McCord Stewart Museum, Montreal.

As for Mile End Lodge, although it remained in the hands of Clark’s descendants, no family members ever lived there again. Various tenants rented it over the years. The land around it was subdivided, with a chunk sold in 1873 and the rest in 1893, but the house itself was not sold until 1914. The badly deteriorated building was demolished soon after that, and there is now a large commercial building in that location.7

Mile End Lodge, watercolour painting by John Hugh Ross. Stewart Museum collection, McCord Stewart Museum, Montreal.

Durham House, the home of my three-times great-grandparents Stanley Bagg and Mary Ann Clark, was located south of the tavern and Mile End Lodge. John Clark purchased the property in December, 1814 and gave it to his daughter as a wedding present in 1819. Durham House was on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, at the current southwest corner of Prince Arthur. Early references describe its address as Côte à Baron.

Durham House, watercolour painting by John Hugh Ross, Stewart Museum collection, McCord Stewart Museum, Montreal.

This two-storey stone building also faced south. There was a covered well on the property, a barn and several other outbuildings. The original Durham House property measured 6 ¾ x 4 arpents, so it was a large piece of land, including property between Prince Arthur and Guilbault Streets, known as the Upper Garden.

After Stanley Bagg’s death in 1853, Durham House was briefly used as a school, then it housed a fruit store for a number of years. Meanwhile, the large property that surrounded it was one of the first to be subdivided for building lots. Stanley Clark Bagg subdivided it in 1846, and the Upper Garden was subdivided by his heirs in 1889. The house was demolished in 1928 to allow for the expansion of the modern TD Bank branch which sits on the spot today.

Stanley Bagg also purchased land near the corner of Sherbrooke Street and St. Urbain at a sheriff’s sale in 1837, and sold it to his son in 1844. Stanley Clark Bagg and his wife, Catharine Mitcheson Bagg (1822–1914), built a large house they called Fairmount Villa on that lot and raised their five children there. The house included a small chapel, while the irregularly shaped property, which extended to the boundary of the Durham House land, had a garden with lilac trees, statues and flower beds. The house was likely named after Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, where Catharine grew up.

Fairmount Villa. photograph, Bagg family collection.

Stanley Clark Bagg died in 1873, but Catharine remained at Fairmount Villa for the rest of her life. The house was sold in 1915, and it was demolished in 1949 when Saint-Urbain Street was widened.

The Fairmount property (lot 100 of the cadastre of St. Lawrence Ward) was subdivided in 1872, then redivided in 1922. In 1884, Stanley Clark Bagg’s son, Robert Stanley Bagg (1848-1912), built a house on one of the subdivided lots, at 436 (later 3470) Saint-Urbain. He and his young family moved to a bigger house in a more exclusive neighbourhood on Sherbrooke Street West a few years later, and his sister Mary Heloise Lindsay and her family lived in the house on Saint-Urbain from 1890 until 1906. The house changed street numbers several times, then changed vocations: it became part of the Herzl Jewish Hospital, was subdivided into apartments, and was finally demolished in the early 1960s.

This house on St. Urbain Street was designed for Robert Stanley Bagg by architect William McLea Walbank. When this photo was taken the building was a medical clinic known as the Herzl Dispensary.

Today, two large buildings that once housed Montreal’s school of fine arts are located on the former Fairmount property. The smaller one, of yellow brick, at 3450 Saint-Urbain, was designed by celebrated architects Omer Marchand and Ernest Cormier in 1923 for the École des beaux arts de Montréal. It will soon be home to Montreal’s new Afro-Canadian Cultural Centre.

The larger building, at 125 Sherbrooke St. W., a heritage building constructed in 1905 as the Commercial and Technical High School, later became the Marie-Claire Daveluy building of the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec (1982–1997). It has housed l’Office québécoise de la langue française since 1999. 

Notes

Built by the Sulpician priests in 1717, Saint-Laurent Boulevard was initially known as a grand chemin du Roy – Great King’s Highway. Over the years it has been known by many names, both English and French, including Chemin Saint-Laurent, St. Lawrence Street and “the Main”. Since 1905, it has been designated Boulevard Saint-Laurent.

The name Côte à Baron, or Coteau Baron, cannot be found on today’s city maps, but in the late 19th century, this was the name of a sloping stretch of Saint-Laurent Boulevard just below Sherbrooke Street and extending a short distance north of there. Côte à Baron was described as a neighbourhood of rural villas. The first-ever Lovell’s city directory for Montreal, published in 1842, listed Stanley Bagg’s home at Côte à Barron.  (https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/3652365). Another building with a Côte à Baron address, at the northwest corner of Sherbrooke Street and Saint-Laurent, was an extravagant mansion nicknamed Torrance’s Folly. It was built around 1815 by businessman Thomas Torrance and sold to John Molson in 1832. A gas station is now located at that corner.

An arpent is a French unit of measurement that can refer to either area or length. It is equivalent to an acre of land, or about 58 metres in length. It has been replaced by metric measures since 1970, but can still be found in old property records.

Source of the photo of the Herzl Dispensary: The Jew in Canada: a complete record of Canadian Jewry from the days of the French régime to the present time, ed. Arthur Daniel Hart, 1926 (on BAnQ numérique).

This article is also posted on my personal family history blog, Writing Up the Ancestors. It was updated on Sept. 16, 2025 to add the photo of the Herzl Dispensary.

See also:

Janice Hamilton, “The Mile End Tavern”, Writing Up the Ancestors, October 21, 2013   https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2013/10/the-mile-end-tavern.html

Janice Hamilton, “John Clark, 19th Century Real Estate Visionary”, Genealogy Ensemble, May 22, 2019, https://genealogyensemble.com/2019/05/22/john-clark-19th-century-real-estate-visionary/

Janice Hamilton, “The Life and Times of Stanley Bagg, 1788-1853”, Writing Up the Ancestors, October 5, 2016, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2016/10/the-life-and-times-of-stanley-bagg-1788.html

Janice Hamilton, “A Home Well Lived In”, Writing Up the Ancestors, January 21, 2014, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2014/01/a-home-well-lived-in.html

Janice Hamilton, “Fairmount Villa”, Writing Up the Ancestors, Dec. 18, 2019, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2019/12/fairmount-villa.html

Janice Hamilton, “Bagg Family Dispute Part 2: Stanley Clark Bagg’s Estate”, Genealogy Ensemble, Feb. 14, 2024, https://genealogyensemble.com/2024/02/14/the-bagg-family-dispute-part-2/

Janice Hamilton, “History of a Downtown Montreal Property”, Writing Up the Ancestors, Dec. 31, 2022, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2022/12/history-of-a-downtown-montreal-property.html

Justin Bur, “À la recherche du cheval perdu de Stanley Bagg, et des origines du Mile End.” A la recherche du savoir: nouveaux échanges sur les collections du Musée McCord; Collecting Knowledge: New Dialogues on McCord Museum Collections. Joanne Burgess, Cynthia Cooper, Celine Widmer, Natasha Zwarich. Montreal: Éditions MultiMondes, 2015.

Mile End Memories, http://memoire.mile-end.qc.ca/en/

sources:

1.  Justin Bur, Yves Desjardins, Jean-Claude Robert, Bernard Vallée, Joshua Wolfe, Dictionnaire historique du Plateau Mont-Royal (Montreal, Éditions Écosociété, 2017), p 256.

2.  J.A. Gray, n.p. no 2874, 1810-10-17

3.  Justin Bur, Yves Desjardins, Jean-Claude Robert, Bernard Vallée, Joshua Wolfe, Dictionnaire historique du Plateau Mont-Royal (Montreal, Éditions Écosociété, 2017), p 258.

4.  William de Montmollin Marler n.p. no 17571, 1891-11-20

5.  John Fair n.p. no 3434, 1892-05-18

6.      Henry Griffin, n.p. no 931, 1815-04-15

7.   Justin Bur, Yves Desjardins, Jean-Claude Robert, Bernard Vallée, Joshua Wolfe, Dictionnaire historique du Plateau Mont-Royal (Montreal, Éditions Écosociété, 2017), p 259.

genealogy, Montreal, Quebec

Mile End Farm: the Origins of a Neighbourhood

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with additional research by Justin Bur

The Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal is famous as the home of Montreal bagels and of novelist Mordecai Richler. Its iconic architecture features outside staircases attached to two- and three-storey rowhouses, next door to churches, synagogues, shops, cafés and renovated manufacturing buildings. But Mile End’s history goes back to one small tavern at a crossroads in the countryside more than 200 years ago.

The Mile End Tavern was located at today’s northwest corner of Saint Laurent Boulevard and Mount Royal Avenue,1 now the starting point of the Mile End neighbourhood. In turn, Mile End is on the Plateau, an elevated plain lying north of Sherbrooke Street and east of Mount Royal.

The first known reference to Mile End was dated April 21, 1808, when landowner John Clark placed a notice in the Gazette advertising Mile End Farm as providing “good pasture for horses and cows at the head of the Faubourg [suburb] Saint-Laurent.”

Screenshot

Clark (1767-1827), an English-born butcher, acquired the land he would call Mile End Farm in several transactions, including purchase agreements and leases, between 1804 and 1810.2 Like most farms in Quebec, it was long and narrow. At its greatest extent in 1810, it measured 2.5 kilometers from south to north, and between 400 and 550 meters wide. Clark was almost certainly the one who chose the name Mile End. The centre of his property was about a mile north of the small city of Montreal, and the area might have reminded him of another Mile End, a mile east of London, England. The name caught on and has been in use ever since.

John Clark, a butcher from Durham, England, settled in Montreal around 1797. Portrait in a private collection.

When Montreal was founded in 1642, Mile End was probably uninhabited. The ground was too rocky for settlements or agriculture, and few Indigenous artefacts have been found there. The northeastern region of the Island of Montreal was covered by a vast cedar forest. The heart of Mile End was also forested, but there, both cedar and ash trees were the dominant species. This forest was still intact when the Sulpician priests mapped the area in 1702, but as the city’s population grew — it stood at around 1,200 residents in 1700 – more and more trees were cut to provide firewood.   

By 1780, most trees had disappeared from the foot of the mountain, replaced by houses, farm buildings, hay fields and pastures. In the Mile End area, livestock pastures, vegetable crops, tanneries and quarries dominated the countryside, and orchards were planted in the mid-1800s.

In 1663, the Sulpician priests became the seigneurs, or feudal lords, of the entire island. In 1701, the Hôpital Général acquired an extensive piece of land from the Sulpicians in the future Mile End area, and the Grey Nuns took over the hospital and all its lands in 1747. In 1803, the nuns sold the piece of land that would become Mile End Farm to two masons, Jean-Baptiste Boutonne and Joseph Chevalier. They wanted to quarry its stone and sand for building materials.

The masons had to pay the Grey Nuns a rente constituée (annual interest), as well as yearly seigneurial dues to the Sulpicians. So when John Clark bought the property – the first part of his Mile End Farm — in 18044 and gave Boutonne and Chevalier the right to continue collecting building materials for seven years after the sale, they must have been relieved. Meanwhile, Clark found another use for the land, first advertising pasture for other peoples’ cows in 1808.

When the same ad for livestock pasturing at Mile End Farm appeared the following year, it was placed by Phineas Bagg (c.1751-1823) and his son Stanley Bagg (1788-1853), my four-times and three-times great-grandfathers. A farmer from western Massachusetts, Phineas had brought his family to Canada around 1795. Initially he worked as an innkeeper in LaPrairie, near Montreal, and then the family moved onto the island. In 1810, Phineas and Stanley signed a lease with John Clark.5 Paying an annual rent of 112 pounds, 10 shillings, they ran the Mile End Tavern and managed the farm for the next seven years before subletting to another innkeeper.

description below.

The lease described the property as having a two-storey house (which at some point must have been converted into the tavern), a barn, stable and outbuildings. The Baggs were required to sufficiently manure the pastures and arable land, to cultivate and to perform road maintenance and other required duties. They were permitted to cut wood for fencing and firewood, but they had to preserve the maple grove. They were also permitted to cut and remove stone.

No doubt the tavern brought them a good income since it was located at an important, if somewhat remote, intersection. Stanley must have attracted many additional customers after he built a racetrack nearby. In May 1811, he signed an agreement with the Jockey Club of Montreal, subletting a piece of land to the club and promising to build the track within five weeks. The club supervised the races. The track, partially on land leased from the Sisters of the Hôtel-Dieu, was about a mile in circumference and what is now Jeanne Mance Park, extending east to Saint-Laurent. It was most likely the first racetrack in Montreal.6

Another reference to Mile End appeared in the Gazette on August 4, 1815 when Stanley Bagg, Mile End Tavern, placed a notice offering a reward for information about a lost bay horse, about 10 years old, with a white face and some white about the feet.7

In 1819, Stanley married John Clark’s daughter, Mary Ann (John Clark was also my four-times great-grandfather). Their son, Stanley Clark Bagg (1820-1873), eventually inherited the Mile End Farm, as well as other properties Clark had owned nearby.

In the second half of the 19th century, Stanley Clark Bagg began subdividing and selling the properties he had inherited from his father and grandfather. He died in 1873 and the next generation of the family continued to sell building lots from the Stanley Clark Bagg Estate.

In 1891, they sold most of the Mile End Farm property to McCuaig and Mainwaring, a pair of promoters from Toronto who envisioned a high-end residential suburb they called Montreal Annex.8 The project got off to a slow start because basic services such as water, sewers and streetlights were nonexistent and a promised electric tramway did not materialize in time. A recession that started in 1893 put an end to their dreams. A few years later another group of investors, the Montreal Investment & Freehold Company, took over the property and the area developed as a mixture of duplexes, triplexes and commercial buildings.

Meanwhile, the Mile End Hotel continued to appear in city directories at the corner of Saint- Laurent and Mount Royal until 1900. The property was expropriated for road widening in 1902 and the building was demolished. A department store had replaced it by 1906.

Description of Map: The areas with a greyish tinge are the areas that John Clark held by lease rather than owning them; none of them ever came back to Clark-Bagg possession after the leases ended. The yellow areas are cutouts belonging to and reserved by other people, excluded from the rectangles describing the property leased to P & S Bagg in 1810. Mile End Farm was bounded by the modern Saint-Laurent Blvd. in the east, while the future Park Avenue was just to the west and Pine Ave. would have been the southern boundary. RHSJ refers to the Religieuses Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph de Montréal, a religious order dedicated to caring for the sick.

This article also appears in my personal family history blog, www.writinguptheancestors.ca.

See also:

Janice Hamilton, John Clark, 19th Century Real-Estate Visionary, Writing Up the Ancestors, May 22, 2019, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2019/05/john-clark-19th-century-real-estate.html

Janice Hamilton, The Life and Times of Phineas Bagg, Writing Up the Ancestors, Oct. 17, 2018, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2018/10/the-life-and-times-of-phineas-bagg.html

Janice Hamilton, The Life and Times of Stanley Bagg (1788-1853), Writing Up the Ancestors, Oct. 5, 2016, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2016/10/the-life-and-times-of-stanley-bagg-1788.html

Notes and Sources

1.  Mount Royal Avenue is the continuation of Côte Sainte-Catherine Road, which traverses the northeast slope of Mount Royal and continues east of Saint-Laurent Boulevard. Saint- Laurent, now a busy commercial street, was at one time the only road leading north from city to the Rivière des Prairies, on the north shore of Montreal Island. Built by the Sulpician priests in 1717, Saint Laurent was initially known as Le grand chemin du Roy – the Great King’s Highway. Over the years it has been known by many names, English and French, including Chemin Saint-Laurent, St. Lawrence Street and “the Main”. Since 1905, its official name has been Boulevard Saint-Laurent.

2.  Yves Desjardins, Histoire du Mile End, Québec: Les Ēditions du Septentrion, 2017, p.  22.

3.  Island of Montreal property owners were required to pay dues to the Sulpicians every year until the seigneurial system was gradually abolished there, starting in 1840. The system was abolished in the rest of Quebec in a gradual process starting in 1854.

4.       Louis Chaboillez, n.p. no 6090, 30 May 1804. A reference to the purchase also appears in J.A. Labadie, n.p. no 16733, 7 June 1875. This was the inventory of Stanley Clark Bagg’s Estate. It includes the name of the seller, the date of the sale and the notary who prepared the deed. This part of Mile End Farm is item #264.

5.  Jonathan A. Gray, n.p. no 2874, 17 Oct. 1810.

6.  Justin Bur, Yves Desjardins, Jean-Claude Robert, Bernard Vallée, Joshua Wolfe, Dictionnaire historique du Plateau Mont-Royal (Montreal, Éditions Écosociété, 2017), p 107.

7.  Justin Bur, “À la recherche du cheval perdu de Stanley Bagg, et des origines du Mile End.” A la recherche du savoir: nouveaux échanges sur les collections du Musée McCord; Collecting Knowledge: New Dialogues on McCord Museum Collections. Joanne Burgess, Cynthia Cooper, Celine Widmer, Natasha Zwarich. Montreal: Éditions MultiMondes, 2015, p. 143.

8.  Justin Bur, Yves Desjardins, Jean-Claude Robert, Bernard Vallée, Joshua Wolfe, Dictionnaire historique du Plateau Mont-Royal (Montreal, Éditions Écosociété, 2017), p 271.

Ireland

The Miller of Moneymore

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If you are looking for the old corn mill in Moneymore, Northern Ireland, turn off High Street in the village centre and go to the end of Mill Lane. It’s right there, although you might not guess that old stone building was once a busy mill since the water wheel has gone and the water that powered it flows in an underground river.

the old corn mill at Moneymore. Photo courtesy Sebastian Graham, http://www.millsofnorthernireland.com

Long ago, this corn mill (corn refers to oats in Ireland) was a very important building in the community: this was where people brought their oats, wheat, barley, and rye to be ground into flour. In the mid-1700s, my five-times great-grandfather Benjamin Workman was probably well-known in Moneymore because he was the local corn mill operator.

His great-grandson recounted the family’s history in a journal, written around the 1850s.1 He explained that Benjamin’s father, William, had a mill (probably a flax mill) and a farm at Brookend, County Tyrone, several miles south of Moneymore. Benjamin inherited the Brookend property from his father, but he was unhappy there because he didn’t get along with the neighbours.

When Moneymore needed a new miller, Benjamin left Brookend and took the job in town. He was not the owner – he rented the mill from the Drapers’ Company of London, which owned most of the property in the area – but everyone paid him to grind their flour.

It was a good move for Benjamin, and for the area residents. According to the journal account, when he died around 1767, he was mourned by Protestants and Catholics alike.

This story may be backed up by historical data: the 1766 Religious Census of County Derry confirms that Benjamin Workman, Protestant Dissident (in other words, Presbyterian,) was a landholder in Moneymore Townland, Barony of Loughinsholin, Derry County.2 An earlier census of Protestant householders in Ulster, carried out in 1740, showed there were several individuals with the name Workman in the area.3

Benjamin Workman, miller of Moneymore, and his wife (whose name is unknown) had at least one son, also named Benjamin. According to the journal, he succeeded to the business and property interests in Moneymore, and, like his father, he died at an advanced age.

This Benjamin married Ann Scott and the couple had four sons and two daughters. All but one of them left Ireland, although two returned and settled in other parts of the island. Only daughter Letitia stayed in Moneymore. According to the journal, she married, first, a man named Scott, with whom she had a daughter, and second, a man named McIvor. Letitia had five more children with her second husband. She died in Moneymore in 1832.4

Caption: This illustration of the Moneymore corn mill accompanied an 1817 report on the plantation. The mill had a thatched roof and two water wheels, which was unusual and ineffective.

That is all I was able to discover about the Workman family in eighteenth-century Moneymore, so my curiosity turned to the mill and the town itself

More than 5000 mills were built in Northern Ireland, including 510 in County Derry (Londonderry) and 573 in neighbouring County Tyrone. There were several types, including corn, or grist mills, flax mills (flax is the plant that is used to make linen) and tuck mills (used to remove impurities from woolen cloth). Today, many have been demolished while others lie neglected, but studying them reveals much about the industrial and architectural history of the area.    

Moneymore’s corn mill was originally built around 1615, about the time Moneymore was founded. One and a half storeys high and 34 feet long, it was built almost entirely of wood, with a shingled roof. The smith at Moneymore provided most of the iron nails and fittings, the spindle shaft was manufactured in Ireland and other components were imported from London.5

It was rebuilt in 1785, but when a report was prepared on the plantation at Moneymore in 1817, the mill was found to be inefficient and in need of more repairs.6  Now, Sebastian Graham of the Mills of Northern Ireland heritage group, told me in an e-mail, “the mill is technically still there, but heavily changed. It became a flax mill as well as a corn mill around 1860 or so, and then a creamery.”

As for the village of Moneymore, located west of Lough Neagh, it was founded in the early 1600s as a part of a scheme to populate Ulster with Protestant settlers from England and Scotland. Ulster was the name of the northeastern part of the island of Ireland, now Northern Ireland and part of the United Kingdom. For decades, the English army fought the native Irish forces, but things turned in favour of the English at the end of the 16th century. The English confiscated the properties of the Irish chieftains in Ulster and, in 1608, launched a plan to create the Plantation of Ulster.

English and Scottish landlords were granted vast estates. In return, they were required to build towns, fortifications and houses, and to bring settlers to the area. They leased out properties of about 15 acres each, including cultivated land, turf-bogs and rough pastures, to tenant farmers.

The project required investors with deep pockets. The plantation of Moneymore was the property of the Drapers’ Company, a London trade association of wool and cloth merchants that had been founded in medieval times.

Like several other plantation-era villages, Moneymore was planned in a cruciform shape, with a marketplace at the intersection of two main streets. Proclamations were read out to the residents next to a tall wooden pole located beside the marketplace.  

From the beginning, however, the Drapers did not meet all the goals the government in London had set out. The fortifications at Moneymore were poorly built, the houses were tiny and the native Irish population remained larger than the number of settlers. Surveys carried out in the early 1800s found the manor house was in bad shape, as were the mill and the tenants’ cottages.

Today, the manor house has been restored and Northern Ireland is peaceful. As I researched this topic, I discovered my husband and I visited the area near Moneymore in 2008, before I began researching my family history. If only I had known!

This story is also posted on my family history blog, http://www.writinguptheancestors.ca

Sources

1.  Dr. Benjamin Workman, A Family Orchard: Leaves from the Workman Tree, Part 1. The Determinate Branch of the Compiler. Family History, Branch Introduction. https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~database/misc/WORKMAN.htm, accessed May 6, 2025. 

2.  1766 Religious Census for some parishes in Co. Derry, https://www.billmacafee.com/1766census/1766religiouscensusderry.pdf, Bill Macafee’s website, Family and Local History, Databases compiled from 18th Century Census Substitutes, https://www.billmacafee.com/18centurydatabases.htm, accessed May 6, 2025.

3.  Ireland, Ulster, Census of Protestant Households, 1740, results for Workman, Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.ca/search/collections/62769/?name=_Workman&count=50, accessed May 6, 2025.

4.  Death notice for Letitia McIver; Belfast, Northern Ireland, The Belfast Newsletter, Birth, Marriage and Death Notices, 1735-1925, notice for Letitia McIver, Ancestry.com,  accessed May 7, 2025, https://www.ancestry.ca/family-tree/person/tree/117115991/person/432122459458/facts

5.  Philip Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster, Belfast: The Ulster Historical Foundation, 1994, p. 146.

6.  Reports of the Deputations of The Drapers’ Company of Jan. 23, 1817, … Estates of the Company in the County of Londonderry, in Ireland. Google Books. Accessed May 7, 2025. P. 32.