An earlier era preserved, and they wouldn't have it otherwise
By Dane Lanken
SEVENTY-FIVE years ago, there was a blue book, called the Blue Book, that listed the "elite families" of most North American cities. Names were arranged alphabetically, "with Much Additional Information Regarding Families, Club Membership, Summer Residences, Maiden Names, Receiving Days and Other Items of Social Interest."
For instance, the Montreal Blue Book of 1911 listed 3,500 elite families, and looking at it now, you can get a good idea of who did what, where they did it or, in the case of this composition, how they spent their summer vacations.
The Lakeshore was popular. That's the area along the St. Lawrence on the west end of Montreal Island. It's all city and suburb now, but it was rural then, with farms and fields and rambling summer houses along the riverfront.
The lakes in the Laurentians north of Montreal were proving attractive then too. And New Brunswick and the coast of Maine had their devotees as well.
But the most prominent areas were those far down the St. Lawrence, where the river is wide and majestic and the water salt. Colonies of well-to-do summer folk had sprung up at spots like Cacouna, Metis Beach and Murray Bay (now St-Georges-de-Cacouna, Metis-sur-Mer and
La Malbaie) in the middle of the 1800s, and they grew and matured through the Victorian era and into the 20th Century.
Holidaying was different in those days. People didn't motor from one place to the next and sleep in a different bed every night. It was more a matter of going someplace and staying there. Where you went and how long you stayed, whether you built a summer place or rented a room, were dictated by your means.
The key was the growth of steamship service on the St. Lawrence -- John Molson's Accommodation had started it in 1809 -- and later the arrival of the railway age. The Intercolonial had a line down the south shore of the St. Lawrence (and on to the Maritimes) by the 1870s.
The river boats soon became quite fancy. Companies like the Richelieu & Ontario Navigation Company and, from 1913, Canada Steamship Lines maintained large fleets of elegant bateaux blancs on the St. Lawrence route. Some holidayers merely cruised, others dropped off at their summer homes. Many availed themselves of the luxury hotels the steamship lines built, the Tadoussac, where the Saguenay River meets the St. Lawrence, or the Manoir Richelieu at Murray Bay.
The attractions were many: the views, the fresh air, the cool sea breezes (important when people wore all the clothes they did then), the summertime society that built up over the years and, often, the opportunity to see and buy handicrafts from a then-untouched and traditional French-Canadian society.
Thus, many of Montreal's elite families trooped off down the river year after year, the Allans, Drummonds and Redpaths, the Refords, Molsons and Birks. But so did many families of lesser means. There were hotels, as they said then, for all classes.
The pattern began to break in the 1950s. The automobile made travelling easy and weekend cottages more convenient. Passenger rail travel became erratic, and the bateaux blancs were scrapped or sold as ferries in Europe. The hotels hit hard times too -- a three-month season was no longer economical. Besides, there were fewer and fewer well-to-do Anglo-Quebeckers to keep the whole system going.
So some of the old summering spots dried up. The hotels vanished and locals took over many of the summer homes as year-round residences. At other places, a remnant of diehard summer residents carries on, fiercely proud of the houses and riverfronts their families have been coming to for four or five generations.
But others again are doing just fine. The giant Manoir Richelieu, apart from some dreadful labour strife lately, has found new life with a clientele drawn from Quebec's still-growing francophone middle class. In what was once the preserve of rich Americans and English-speaking Canadians, one hears today only the language of Molière.
And way down the river, at Metis, some things haven't changed much at all. The same families still come to the same comfy summer homes, still stroll the same clipped lawns, still golf at the same club. It's an earlier era preserved, and the people there wouldn't have it any other way. At least that's how it all looked when we took a drive down the south side of the St. Lawrence and back along the north shore one fine week last July.
It's lovely land down in the Bas Saint-Laurent. By Rivière-du-Loup the St. Lawrence is more than 20 kilometres wide and, but for the hills on the far shore, oceanlike. The river valley is broad too, but green and fenced into long thin strips, bordered by the distant Notre-Dame Mountains.
The old summering spots are on the old road along the river: Notre-Dame-du-Portage, so named because it's at one end of the ancient land route between the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic; St-Patrice (St. Pat's to the English), where John A. Macdonald and Louis St. Laurent had summer homes; and on the other side of Riviere-du-Loup, Cacouna, once the Brighton or Saratoga of Canada, very quiet now.
There are a couple of hotels at Portage, down from a half-dozen 50 years ago, catering mostly to old folks now. There are cottages, too, all named (Jé me lo or Mon Ideal), and a nice one called Summerholm of yellow clapboard with vines around the door. It's the Wright's summer residence.
"My father bought the house in 1912," Hope Wright says. "I've been here every summer since. My children and grandchildren love it here too."
Mrs. Wright has always swum in the river, frigid by most standards, and she used to bike up into the hills behind to fish for trout in the little rivers there, up where they put the Trans-Canada Highway through. Retired from the real estate business in Montreal, she likes to garden now.
"The English church was across the road from us here," she says. "There used to be 200 people there on a Sunday, but we're just four families here now. The church was torn down years ago. Portage was always a quiet place. The social life was over at St. Pat's."
"Well, it was lively when the boarding houses were open," says Clive Meredith. He's a translator with the government in Quebec City. His great-grandfather, Sir William Meredith, a prominent judge, built a summer house at St. Pat's in 1867. "But there aren't enough of us here any more. We can only manage a cocktail party or two a year now."
So it isn't the social scene that brings people back. "It's just some sort of extraordinary attachment," Meredith says. "The place where you spent your childhood is always going to be special. And the views are so nice, the river, and the sunsets."
Still, more and more people are resisting the urge to return. The distances are great, and so are the expenses, and as Mrs. Wright notes, "Young people today can fly off to Europe. They're not interested in a simple place."
There is little glamour at these locales. There are farms and a few small towns, all solidly French-Canadian, with a scattering of summer homes. True, some of the homes are quite grand, but it's hard to believe, especially in the case of Cacouna, that this was a major spa.
Yet that's what it was a century ago. There were boarding houses and big hotels -- St. Lawrence Hall alone had room for 600 guests. There were beaches for bathing, games of tenpins after breakfast, wide verandahs to watch sailing ships from, and concerts in the evenings. The rich built villas, and staffed them appropriately. James Coristine, a Montreal accountant, notes that his grandfather and namesake, the city's leading furrier a century ago, always sent maids downriver early to prepare his St. Pat's house for the family's arrival. The present-day Coristines still summer at St. Pat's, but they open up the house themselves.
Perhaps the richest family at Cacouna, certainly the builders of the most sumptuous summer houses, were the Allan brothers, Hugh and Andrew, of Montreal's Allan shipping line. Hugh, the older brother, had the bigger house, named Montrose, a chateau of white clapboard surrounded by splendid lawns. It passed to his son Montagu, a banker and sportsman, on Hugh's death in 1882.
Sir Montagu had a rather sad family life -- his only son was killed in World War I, two daughters went down with the Lusitania, and his third daughter, Martha, who founded the Montreal Repertory Theatre, died before him in 1942. Yet a half-century ago, Montrose remained the heart of Cacouna society.
Betty McMaster (née Budden), whose family had a big house nearby, fondly remembers putting on a long gown and going to a ball at the Allans when Lord Bessborough, then governor general, was guest of honour. And Geoffrey Scott, a Montreal doctor who still summers at Cacouna, recalls being permitted to play on Montrose's superb grass tennis courts "if we wore white and didn't swear."
Both Allan houses later became hotels, and Hugh's eventually a home for Capuchin friars. Andrew's, sad to say, is now abandoned and vandalized, and seems destined, as so much of Cacouna summer society already has, to pass from the scene.
Farther downriver, near Rimouski, is Bic. It was considered by many to be the prettiest place in the Bas Saint-Laurent, and was a popular holidaying spot. It's still lovely -- the mountains and the river and the odd bumps of islands. But there is little trace of the old summer scene.
But go farther -- down where the river is really wide, 50 kilometres or more and you can no longer see the far shore, where the water is icy even in midsummer -- on beyond Mont-Joli, and you come to Metis. The old road is lined with tidy stone fences and cedar hedges. There are big lawns and flower gardens and impeccably kept houses with tasteful little signs that say Molson, Harrington, Birks or Osler.
Sir William Dawson, geologist, long-time principal of McGill University and first Canadian-born scientist of worldwide fame, led a party of fellow professors down to Metis in the 1850s and established it as a summering spot. He was attracted, suggests Alice Sharples Baldwin -- who has passed many summers at Metis and written books about it -- by the "exceptional health-giving properties of its air" as well as its geological riches.
Dawson may also have been intrigued by the status of Metis as, in Mrs. Baldwin's words, "a patch of heather in a vale of fleur-de-lis." Whereas the Bas Saint-Laurent is almost wholly French-Canadian, Metis -- pronounced "muh-TEESE," from the Micmac for birch or aspen, and unrelated to the "may-TEE" of the Canadian West -- was a Scottish settlement. A man named John McNider led a party of colonists there in 1818, and though the Gaelic was gone by the early 1900s, the Scottishness of the year-round residents survives to this day.
Other summer people followed the McGill professors and, particularly after the railway went through in 1876, Metis came to rival Cacouna as a favoured spot. One of the attractions was the local salmon fishing, and one of the Montrealers who built fishing lodges there was Sir George Stephen, president of the Bank of Montreal and the CPR, and later Baron Mount Stephen. He married twice but had no children, and in the early 1900s he gave his lodge to his favourite niece, Elsie Reford. She was the daughter of Robert Meighen, a founder of Lake of the Woods Milling Company, and Lord Mount Stephen's sister Elsie, and the wife of Robert W. Reford, prominent in the shipping business in Montreal.
Mrs. Reford's passion was flower gardening, and she transformed the spruce woods on her estate into pathways and flower beds and imported rare plants from the Alps and the Himalayas. She created one of Canada's great gardens -- and in so doing provided much-needed employment during the hungry 1930s. Happily, shortly before her death at 95 in 1967, the Reford gardens were bought by the Quebec government, and what was for 60 years a private passion is now a public jardin botanique.
Meanwhile, Metis grew as a holidaying locale. By the 1910s or '20s, there were eight or nine hotels, Turriff Hall and the Metis Lodge among them, and the Seaside (which had a ballroom) and the Boule Rock. Metis was touted as a "fashionable summer resort," with hotels catering to a "discriminating clientele."
Tennis and golf were the major diversions, "tennis in whites and golf in plus fours" according to Campbell Merrett, a retired Montreal architect who spent his first 20 summers there. There was swimming, too, at the rocky, seaweedy beach, and cocktail parties, or tea at the tearooms that once flourished, The Firs and Blue's and the Knotty Pine.
But the hotels were gone by the 1970s (save for a little one, still going, called the Killiecrankie Inn), leaving the healthful air and the river views to the cottage owners, whose numbers grew (there are perhaps a hundred families now) as the hotels declined.
"Well, we kept going, and our children keep going because it's just a wholesome sort of place," says Conrad Harrington, a prominent Montreal businessman, now retired, former chancellor of McGill University and great-grandson of the pioneering Sir William Dawson. "The climate is invigorating, there's swimming if you can stand the cold, golf, tennis, bridge and we've got a little painting group. We may be in a rut, but we enjoy it."
Some say it's a trifle stuffy too; one doesn't tee off before church is out on Sunday, and putting on a tie for dinner at home is not unknown. But things are less formal on the side roads around Metis, away from the village and the golf and tennis club.
"Metis for us is a point of magic for the whole family," says Hugh Verrier, a young man of an old Montreal family, now a lawyer with a New York law firm. His great grandfather built a house at Metis that is now owned by his great-aunt and great-uncle, the Duchess and Duke of Portland, and his immediate family has a place just outside the village.
"Our family is sort of spread out now," says Verrier, "and Metis is the one place we all see each other, at least for a few weeks every summer. I think we'll come here indefinitely."
The easternmost ferry across the Lower St. Lawrence is at Matane, just down from Metis. It crosses to Godbout (where I saw a big whale feeding in the harbour). From there it is more than 200 kilometres upriver along the north shore, which is all big hills and bush, to Tadoussac.
The dominant feature of the town is the Tadoussac Hotel, long, low, white, with its famous red roof. It looks out grandly on the St. Lawrence, and on the wharf where the bateaux blancs used to dock, where there is now a marina full of small yachts. Just over the next hill is the mouth of the Saguenay, wide, fast-flowing, deep, sheer cliffs along its banks, some of them 500 metres high.
The hotel is busy now, recovered from the lean years after the boats stopped coming in the mid-1960s. The clientele today seems entirely francophone, and the chief diversion is whale watching. Indeed, all along the river here are signs advertising charters to see the big baleens and the smaller white belugas. It is a far cry from past days when beluga shooting was sport (one man in 1900 bagged 60 in a day), though industrial pollution now poses a bigger threat to the whales, perhaps, than hunting ever did.
The low, rounded hills around Tadoussac -- the name is Algonquian for breasts -- have been witness to summer gatherings for centuries. In Indian times, it was the site of "a sort of summer fair," as W. H. Coverdale, the industrialist, Canada Steamship Lines president and Canadiana collector, wrote in Tadoussac Then and Now in 1942, "where pearls and tobacco from the Caribbean and Florida changed hands for fine furs and walrus ivory from Labrador and Newfoundland, and copper from Lake Superior bought the maritime products of Acadia and the Atlantic coast."
So when white men sailed the St. Lawrence in the middle 1500s, they fitted right in, and Tadoussac was the centre of Indian-European commerce for a century. Its career after that was up and down, until the rise of the Canadian timber trade in the early 1800s. William Price, who came to Canada from England at 19 and was soon sending back a hundred shiploads of lumber a year, had a sawmill at Tadoussac by 1840, one of three dozen he operated on the Lower St. Lawrence and Saguenay rivers.
At the same time, the local salmon fishing and the stunning scenery of the Saguenay were beginning to attract tourists. By the 1850s, William Price was the major shareholder in a steamship line that ran regular Saguenay cruises, and his son, David, led a group of Quebec and Montreal businessmen that built a hotel at Tadoussac in 1865. Both the steamship line and the hotel were later bought by the Richelieu & Ontario Navigation Company, which by the late 1800s had come to dominate steam travel from (as their ads put it) "Niagara to the sea."
The R & O had originated in 1845 when a group of Sorel area farmers and merchants organized the Société de la Navigation du Rivière Richelieu to transport their produce to Montreal. The company grew phenomenally, expanding its routes and taking over other lines (including, in 1875, Hugh Allan's Canadian Navigation Company of Ontario, to become the Richelieu & Ontario). Soon, under dynamic presidents like L. J. Forget and his nephew, Sir Rodolphe Forget, it owned dozens of ships carrying passengers, mail and freight on Great Lakes and St. Lawrence routes. It also bought hotels, like the one at Tadoussac, and built new ones, like the Manoir Richelieu at Murray Bay.
Finally, in 1913, the R & O was reorganized and renamed Canada Steamship Lines. And though it enjoyed record passenger traffic in the 1940s, even replacing the old Tadoussac Hotel with a new red-roofed one, such traffic thereafter declined. In 1965 the company discarded its last passenger ship in favour of the cargo and bulk carriers it continues to operate on the same Great Lakes-St. Lawrence routes.
The disappearance of the bateaux blancs had a great effect on Tadoussac, both on the fortunes of the hotel and on the little colony of English summer folk. The colony had been there since the 1860s and '70s, when William Price built a row of guest houses, and Lord Dufferin, then governor general, an elegant summer home. Most of the row, and the Dufferin house (which was situated, as Lady Dufferin wrote affectionately of Tadoussac, in "the oldest and smallest place in Canada") are still there.
"Summer life centred on the boats and the hotel," says Benny Beattie, a Montreal teacher who has been summering at Tadoussac since boyhood. "When we were kids, we hung around the hotel pool. And as teenagers, we hung around the hotel. And we always went down to meet the boats.
"There were always things going on -- picnics, bonfires, masquerade parties, or dances on board the boats in moonlight. And there were always lots of people, some from Montreal or Toronto, but mostly Americans, staying at the hotel for two or three weeks. It was just made for summer romances."
Things are much quieter now, Beattie says, and the hotel people and the cottage dwellers are effectively two solitudes. But it is still a lovely place, and expeditions by foot, boat or car are popular with some summer residents, including trips to smaller local rivers that offer fine white water canoeing or rafting.
The trip across the mouth of the Saguenay is far less challenging: 15 minutes by car ferry and you're off again upriver, amid the calm beauty that has made Charlevoix County a favourite among artists and tourists for generations. Lucius O'Brien, Clarence Gagnon, Marc-Aurele Fortin, A. Y. Jackson and others in the Group of Seven, Jori Smith and Jean-Paul Lemieux -- all came here to paint (a painting by Gagnon, La boulangère, Baie-Saint-Paul, set a record for Canadian paintings last October when it sold for $275,000).
Plunk in the middle of the county is Murray Bay, or to be more accurate, the little collection of towns and villages --Cap-à-l'Aigle, La Malbaie, Pointe-au-Pic and, just up-river, St-lrénée -- that has always been known to anglophone visitors as Murray Bay.
Champlain is said to have called the inlet la malle-baye -- "the bad bay" -- when an unexpectedly low tide left his ship flopped on its side on a mud flat. But after the British conquest, James Murray, Wolfe's successor and the first British governor in Canada, divided the seigneury of La Malbaie between two of his lieutenants, Fraser and Nairn, who named their properties, respectively, Mount Murray and Murray Bay. And the names stuck.
Both lieutenants settled discharged British soldiers on their properties, and these intermarried with the local demoiselles, which is why to this day there are Warrens, Blackburns, McNicolls and Bherers (a German mercenary's name) among the region's francophone population.
Both lieutenants, or their heirs, also built fine manor houses facing each other across the Malbaie River. Both houses survived to recent times in fine shape. But, alas, the owners of the Nairn house had it knocked down in 1960 to make way for a housing project, and the Fraser house burned in 1975 while on loan to Radio-Canada as a film set. And that was the end of the twin manor houses of Murray Bay.
As a summering spot, the region was known to the Indians in pre-white days, to the French before the English came, and to the English right from Murray's day. Scenery, fishing, sea bathing and bracing air are time-honoured attractions.
Steamships started bringing tourists there in number in the mid-1800s, well-to-do Montrealers and, increasingly, Americans (including Abraham Lincoln's widow). There were comfortable hotels by the 1870s, and soon, substantial summer homes on the hillsides overlooking the bay. Charles Warren, a La Malbaie native who studied architecture in the United States, returned to design dozens of summer houses, but celebrated U.S. architects like Charles McKim and Stanford White are represented there too. Most of the houses are still there, but many are now obscured by grown-up greenery.
The proprietors of these houses often filled them with hooked rugs, woollen blankets, quilts and furniture made by local artisans. Indeed, the sale of handicrafts remained an important local industry, and a strong selling point to outsiders, until quite recently.
Leonard L. Knott, writing in Canadian Homes and Gardens in 1935, remarked on Murray Bay's marvellous and harmonious summertime mixture of "smart society" from elsewhere and the local people's ox teams, open-air bake ovens, dog carts, spinning wheels and "pretty young girls with milk pails dangling from wooden yokes across their shoulders and habitant chansons on their lips."
There were, nonetheless, wealthy French-Canadians at Murray Bay, and more just upriver at St-lrénée. Louis Fréchette, the very popular "poet laureate of French Canada," was there, as were Sir Adolphe Routhier, a prominent judge, better known as the author of the French words of O Canada, and Sir Rodolphe Forget, president of the R & O (and of various railways, iron works, banks and power companies). He built a fine hilltop mansion at St-lrénée called Gil'Mont that burned in 1965, though the outbuildings now house a summer music school. The Forgets' daughter, Thérèse, grew up at Gil'Mont and, as Thérèse Casgrain, led the fight for women's right to vote in Quebec, campaigned for the CCF, co- founded the Voice of Women and became a senator.
There have been two Manoirs Richelieu at Murray Bay. The first was a 250 room "wooden castle" built by the R & O in 1899. It was lost in a spectacular fire in the fall of 1928. But just as spectacularly, a new one of concrete and steel, with 350 rooms, was built immediately over the winter by Canada Steamship Lines inside a wooden shell heated by locomotive boilers and opened on time the next summer.
It was (and is) the classic "exclusive resort," a grand but graceful building, isolated but comfortable, surrounded by fine lawns and panoramas of the mighty St. Lawrence, offering golf, swimming, riding, archery and tennis plus fine food and a social life, as a 1935 ad put it, "of Continental gayety or of quiet exclusiveness, just as you wish." And all this -- in 1935 -- at "rates as low as $9
a day."
The new Manoir had about 35 good years. Then the bateaux blancs were scrapped, business fell off, and Canada Steamship Lines sold it. There was a series of new owners, and a bankruptcy, and the Quebec government stepped in. It oversaw the hotel's return to prosperity, with a Quebecois clientele, then sold it in 1985 to a motel-chain owner named Raymond Malenfant. He let much of the old staff go and refused to recognize their union. And that led to a labour quarrel that has tarnished the Manoir's name and to which there is no solution in sight.
Meanwhile, changes came to the summer home owners too. Mrs. Jean Paterson of Montreal, who has spent the past 80 summers at a house her father (lumberman Harold Kennedy) built at Pointe-au-Pic, notes that few of the old families, particularly the Canadian ones, come back any more. Many of the old summer homes have become year-round residences, and others, recently, auberges.
"Murray Bay was always a wonderful place," she says. "And there were many interesting people. But what we liked best was the simplicity. When we were young we went for picnics, or down to the beach in moonlight. Some of the local fellows drove us down in buckboards, and on the way back they'd sing French-Canadian folk songs and we'd join in on the choruses. It was lovely but, you know, that sort of thing just doesn't happen any more."
One of the old families with no intention of leaving is the Cabots, of Boston and Washington, whose ancestors (some of them Canadian) have been at Murray Bay since the 1840s, and who have owned the Mount Murray seigneury (the one that burned down in 1975) since 1902. Francis H. Cabot now lives in another house on the property -- which at 230 square kilometres is much smaller than it once was -- and spends the summer working on his eight-hectare (20-acre) flower garden.
"Sure, a lot of English-Canadians and Americans have left," he says, "but many French-Canadians have moved in. They've got a lot of spirit, and that's good for the community. Besides, I see the Americans coming back. This is a lovely place, a nice climate, excellent for gardening, and the values are good. A few years ago, '83 or '84, you could get a nice 10-bedroom house for $35,000."
If Pointe-au-Pic was always the richer, more social area, Cap-à-l'Aigle was for people given to gardening and taking long walks. Mary Naylor, daughter of an Anglican clergyman, hasn't missed a summer at Cap in 82 years. And though she's seen a diminishing English population too, she notes that her son still comes to Cap every summer with his family.
"He lives in Florida," she says, "but he's happiest here on the beach."
And her friend and neighbour, Eileen Kerr, a retired newspaper editor, thinks she saw the future at the tennis courts last summer. "There was a great bunch of teenagers," she says, "all together, some English, some French, talking first in one language, then in the other. Maybe that's what things are going to be like at Murray Bay."
