Huntly Ward Davis, Montreal Architect

by

with additional research by 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.

This house at 1814 Sherbrooke Street West was designed by Hogle and Davis in 1908. The ground floor window was added later. The photo, taken in 1986, is from the Repetoire d’architecture traditionelle sur le territoire de la Communaute Urbaine de Montreal, Architecture domestique I, 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 also reflected 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 building as a branch of the Bank of Toronto in the eastern part of Montreal. 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 is also posted on the collaborative blog Genealogy Ensemble, https://genealogyensemble.com

A Neighbourhood of Rural Villas

by

written in collaboration with Justin Bur

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

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 was 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.  

Today, this area is 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 homes belonged to my ancestors, including butcher John Clark (1767-1827) and merchant Stanley Bagg (1788-1853). These buildings 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.

Hunt Club Party on Mile End Road, photo by J. Henry, McCord Stewart Museum, Montreal. The corner of the building on the right is probably 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

This map shows where the Mile End Farm, Mile End Lodge, Durham House and Fairmount Villa property were located. Map prepared by Justin Bur.

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. Clark also sublet a strip of land in the axis of Park Avenue for unspecified purposes.

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.

Mitcheson 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, 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.

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 sizeable piece of land, including property between Prince Arthur and Guilbault Streets, known as the Upper Garden.

Durham House. Watercolour painting by John Hugh Ross. Stewart Museum Collection, McCord Stewart Museum.

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 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.

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.

A photograph of Fairmount Villa. Bagg family collection.

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.

The house on St. Urbain Street designed for Robert Stanley Bagg by architect William McLea Walbank. It later became a medical clinic serving the area’s immigrant Jewish community.

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 story is also posted on the collaborative family history blog Genealogy Ensemble. It was updated on Sept 17, 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.