History of a Downtown Montreal Property

by

By Janice Hamilton and Justin Bur 

The former Bagg and Smithers houses at the corner of Sherbrooke St. W. and Côte-des-Neiges Road. JH photo.

The commercial building that occupies the northeast corner of Sherbrooke Street West and Cote des Neiges Road in downtown Montreal was built as a family home in 1891 by my great-grandfather Robert Stanley Bagg (RSB). That makes the house more than 130 years old, but thanks to Montreal’s system of recording property sales, it is possible to trace the history of the lot back to the 1700s.

I had asked my friend Justin Bur, an urban history researcher and expert in researching property records, about the building that is attached to my ancestor’s house. I wondered whether RSB had built it, and if not, why it so closely resembles the Bagg house. Using the old cadastral lot number of the Bagg house—lot 1728 of St. Antoine Ward—Justin came up with the following story.

  ***

Just behind the Bagg house runs a 17th-century line separating agricultural land from the land reserved for the Sulpician priests’ First Nations mission on and around Mount Royal. This line runs north-northeast from approximately the corner of Sherbrooke and Fort to Milton and University. In the 1690s, the Sulpician mission was moved from the bottom of Mount Royal, north to the Rivière-des-Prairies. The Sulpicians planned to give up much of the mountain slope to allow for the creation of agricultural lands for settlers in Côte Sainte-Catherine, Côte-des-Neiges, and Côte Saint-Antoine. For themselves, they retained some of that land and expropriated a bit more. There, they built a country retreat that later became the site of the Grand Séminaire and the Collège de Montréal.

This is where fur trader and explorer Alexander Mackenzie comes into the picture. He was the first person of European origin to cross northern North America by land. On his first great expedition, in 1789, he followed the river that now bears his name to the Arctic Ocean. In a historic 1793 expedition, he reached the source of the Peace River in the Rockies, crossed the continental divide, and reached the Pacific Ocean.

Mackenzie then spent several years in Montreal, where he invested in land. At the beginning of the 19th century, he purchased an orchard, along with a strip of the mountain, then acquired another strip of land along the east side of the Sulpician domain. Côte-des-Neiges Road veers to the west at the midpoint between these two properties. Nearby there was a triangular piece of Sulpician land, adjacent to Mackenzie’s orchard but separated from the rest of the priests’ domain by the road. Mackenzie acquired that parcel in December 1804, and this triangle includes the site of the Bagg house.

Mackenzie spent little time in Canada after 1805 and died in Scotland in 1820. His land in Montreal was probably rented. Finally, in 1845, a subdivision plan was drawn up and the whole property was sold to Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

The following year, Simpson sold lot 40 of the subdivision plan – a chunk of the triangle – to brush maker Thomas Jenking. Jenking built a two-storey brick house there, just northeast of where the Bagg house later stood. In 1857, Jenking sold the property, and in 1862 it was resold to a banker.

Cadastral Plans, City of Montreal, Montreal, E.H. Charles Lionais, 1874, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, image 15
https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/2244456

In 1890, Warden King, who had made a fortune manufacturing central heating equipment, bought the property. He then divided it into three parts: the western lawn along Côte-des-Neiges; the centre part containing the old Jenking house; and the eastern lawn. King never lived there; the house had been rented a few years previously to the manager of a telephone company. At this point, the Bagg family arrived on the scene.

On June 25, 1891, Robert Stanley Bagg (1848-1912), a lawyer who managed his deceased father’s extensive properties on the Island of Montreal, purchased the western lawn from King. This property corresponds to current lot numbers 1065572 (the RSB house) and 1065571 (an outbuilding on the Côte-des-Neiges side, currently a convenience store). RSB had plans for a red sandstone house drawn up by architect William McLea Walbank (1856-1909). The house had the street address 1129 Sherbrooke Street, but over the years the street numbering system changed more than once, and it is now at 1541 Sherbrooke St. West.

This detail of an 1881 map shows the Jenkins house. Chas. E. Goad, Atlas of the City of Montreal, Montreal, 1881, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, image 20 detail, https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/2246915

On the same day, RSB’s mother, Catharine Mitcheson Bagg, purchased the eastern lawn from King. Six months later RSB’s brother-in-law Albert E. Lewis purchased the centre lot containing the old house. In January, 1892 Lewis sold that centre lot to RSB, and at the end of the month, RSB’s mother sold her son a three-foot strip along the west side of her property. A year later, RSB and his mother ceded the centre and eastern lots to Thomas Collins in exchange for a property on the northwest corner of Sherbrooke and Hutchison, near McGill University. There was no mention of the old house and outbuildings, which had likely been demolished.

Collins signed an agreement stating that he would build a house that closely resembled RSB’s residence. The attached building was to have a facade of red stone on a foundation of grey stone and sit on a line with the residence of RSB, with no bay windows or porch projecting more than three feet, three inches from the front of the building. In addition, Collins was to build an entirely separate and distinct side wall adjacent to the gable wall of RSB’s house.

***

Records show that in 1895 Collins hired architect William Edward Doran to design a house on Sherbrooke Street. This was likely the house attached to the Bagg house that I had asked Justin about.

Two years later, Lovell’s Montreal street directory listed G. H. Smithers at 1127 Sherbrooke Street. George Hampden Smithers was the brother of RSB’s wife, Clara Smithers. Smithers must have rented the house from Collins initially, but in 1899, Collins sold that house to Frances Clark Cook, wife of George Hampden Smithers. The vendor certified that the house, with its red sandstone façade and separate side wall, conformed to RSB’s deed of exchange of 1893.

All of that to explain that the house attached to RSB’s home did not belong to my direct ancestors, but to my great-grandmother’s brother, and that it was designed to appear similar to the Bagg house.

Notes

Here are further notes from Justin Bur on researching property in Montreal:

A cadastre is a system to record and map the size, location and ownership of real estate property, unambiguously over a large territory. It is used to identify property in sales and leases and for tax purposes. In Montreal, you can find the cadastral lot number of your property on city tax assessment documents and on cadastral maps. The Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec BAnQ) has a large collection of digitized maps and diagrams (cartes et plans) online, including cadastral maps from 1874, 1879, 1881, 1890, 1907 and 1914. See https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/ressources/details/cart

When the cadastre was created in the mid-1870s, it was organized according to the municipalities (and in Montreal, the municipal wards) of the time. (Our lot 1728 is in the cadastre of Saint-Antoine ward.) Starting in the 1990s, a single cadastre for the entire province of Quebec was put into place, with 7-digit lot numbers. If you want to do a property record search, according to cadastral lot numbers, you need to use the Registre foncier du Québec, https://www.registrefoncier.gouv.qc.ca/Sirf/.  That’s where I found much of the source material for this story.

Information on property owners can also be found from the municipal property tax assessment rolls (rôles d’évaluation), which are held at the Archives de la Ville de Montréal. They are arranged by municipal wards. Ward boundaries evolved over time and some wards were split. In 1921, moreover, major changes were made to the ward system. See Lovell’s map of Montreal 1920, https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/2243931 and with the 1921 changes added, https://archivesdemontreal.ica-atom.org/1920-3-lovells-map-of-city-of-montreal-including-westmount-outremont-verdun-montreal-west-and-st-laurent-john-lovell-son-limited-publishers-of-lovells-montreal-directory-every-year-since-1842-1920

Once you’ve got the right municipal ward, you can browse the assessment rolls by street address. Cadastral lot numbers are a good check to make sure you’ve got the right property. Even and odd street numbers are in separate listings. I checked St-Antoine Ward, west section, 1900 as a test. After getting to the end of Sherbrooke even numbers, we find Sherbrooke odd numbers. The Bagg house is listed with the lot number “pt 1728”. This roll, for property tax purposes, lists only owners (no tenants).

One more point of detail: until 1905, the street numbers are on Sherbrooke Street (period), no West. That was the case when the houses were numbered 1127 and 1129. The origin point of the street was somewhere arbitrary in the east end. So in 1905, when the origin point moved west to Saint-Laurent Blvd., the numbers had 390 subtracted from them. Then in 1928 the street number increased greatly, because a new street address numbering system came into effect, made to handle a much higher density of numbers. These numbers are still in use today.

See also:

A Montreal Landmark, Writing up the Ancestors, Dec. 7, 2022, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2022/12/a-montreal-landmark.html

Fairmount Villa, Writing up the Ancestors, Dec. 18, 2019, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2019/12/fairmount-villa.html

Mrs. Robert Stanley Bagg, Writing up the Ancestors, March 7, 2014, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2014/03/mrs-r-stanley-bagg.html

A Montreal Landmark

by
This photo of the Bagg house was taken by my grandmother, Gwen Bagg, in 1903. It is in one of the photo albums she put together that now belong to the McCord Museum in Montreal. This photo can be found on the McCord’s website.

The old house at the corner of Sherbrooke Street West and Cote des Neiges in downtown Montreal pops up regularly on the internet sites devoted to historical photos of the city, but often the information that accompanies those photos is incorrect. Frequently, people erroneously identify the owner as Montreal landowner Stanley Clark Bagg (1820-1873). In fact, the house belonged to his son, Robert Stanley Clark Bagg (1848-1912).

The building is prominently located on the corner of Sherbrooke Street West and Côte-des-Neiges, which leads up the hill toward Mount Royal. Thousands of people pass by daily, and it is hard not to notice the four-story red sandstone building with its pink tiled top floor.

It has gone through several reincarnations over the years. When it was built in 1891, it formed the south-west anchor of the Golden Square Mile, the neighbourhood where Canada’s wealthiest businessmen, manufacturers and bankers lived. Today it is a commercial building, across the street from other small businesses and medical offices.

The original owner, R. Stanley Bagg (I will refer to him as RSB), grew up in a house called Fairmount Villa that was at the corner of Sherbrooke Street West and Saint-Urbain. His father, Stanley Clark Bagg (SCB), was one of the largest landowners on the Island of Montreal, having inherited several adjoining farm properties along St. Laurent Boulevard from his grandfather, John Clark.

RSB studied law at McGill University and went abroad to continue his studies after graduation, but when his father died of typhoid in 1873, RSB came home. He practiced law in Montreal for a short time, but quit to manage the properties belonging to his father’s estate, a position he held until 1901. He married Clara Smithers (1861-1946) in 1882, and for several years the couple lived just around the corner from Fairmount Villa, where RSB’s mother still resided. Eventually they decided to build a new house in a more fashionable part of the city. When they moved, they had two daughters, Evelyn (1883-1970) and Gwendolyn (1886-1963)—my future grandmother. Their only son, Harold Stanley Fortescue Bagg (1895-1945), was born a few years after the move.

The Bagg house is in the bottom right corner of this map, found in Goad’s fire insurance map, 1915 edition, sheet 94. This collection of Montreal city maps can be found on the Quebec archives website. Go to https://numerique.banq.qc.ca and search cartes et plans (digitized maps).

Many houses in Montreal were built of locally quarried grey limestone because it was abundant and cheap, but RSB chose red sandstone, probably imported from Scotland. Originally designed by architect William McLea Walbank, the house was renovated twice in the eleven years RSB lived there, with a major addition constructed in 1902 and other changes in 1906.

It was a large house, even for a family of five, but the Baggs employed at least two live-in domestic servants—a cook and a maid—and perhaps a man to do the heavier chores. The interior was ornately furnished, as shown in photos my grandmother took of the drawing room, with a carved mantlepiece over the fireplace, heavy floor-to-ceiling drapes, and pillows and knickknacks everywhere. She also took photos of the interior of the tower on the Côte-des-Neiges side of the building. It must have been a sunny spot for reading and a good place to watch people struggle up the hill during a snowstorm.

My grandmother’s photo of the living room is in one of her photo albums now belonging to the McCord Museum.

RSB died of cancer while on vacation in Kennebunkport, Maine in 1912. Clara (who was usually identified as Mrs. Stanley Bagg) divided the house into two apartments and continued to live there until her death at age 85, in 1946.

After she died the house was sold and renovated, with a new entrance facing Côte-des- Neiges, and Barclay’s Bank (Canada) moved in. Many of Montreal’s elite families became customers of this British-based institution. In 1956 the Imperial Bank of Canada took over Barclay’s (Canada) and five years later, it became the Canadian Imperial Bank of Canada (CIBC). In 1979 CIBC decided it could no longer upgrade the old Bagg building to the modern requirements of banking and it moved its customers to a branch down the street at the Ritz Carlton Hotel.

For the next few years, the building was home to a jazz bar on the main floor and a bookstore upstairs, until a fire destroyed the interior in 1982. It may have been that fire that destroyed the cone-shaped roof of the tower. Many years earlier, my mother noticed that a stained-glass window displaying the Bagg family crest had disappeared.

The building was restored in 1985-86 and two art galleries moved in, but the interior featured bare brick walls, a style that was popular at the time in some older parts of the city, but was not appropriate for this Edwardian-era building. An oriental carpet store rented the main floor in the mid-1990s.

Today, Adrenaline Montreal Body Piercing and Tattoos has been located there for many years. I suspect my great-grandparents would not be impressed.

Note: Lovell’s Directory of Montreal shows the address of this building changed several times over the years. It was at 1129 Sherbrooke in 1894-97, and 739 Sherbrooke W. in 1908-1910. The attached house, on the right, had a separate address – 737 Sherbrooke West—and belonged to another family. The Bagg house had been divided into apartments 1 and 2 at 739 Sherbrooke W. by 1927-28, and the address had changed to 1541 Sherbrooke W. apartments 1 and 2 by 1935-36.

This post also appears on the collaborative blog https://genealogyensemble.com

Sources:

Edgar Andrew Collard, “A sandstone house on Sherbrooke St.”, The Gazette, October 20, 1984. (There are several errors about the family history in that article.)

Répertoire d’architecture traditionnelle sur le territoire de la communauté urbaine de Montréal. Les residences. Communauté urbaine de Montréal, Service de la planification du territoire, 1987.

Charles Lazarus, “Farewell to Landmark”, The Montreal Star, April 30, 1979.