Tag: Golden Square Mile

Horses, Snowshoes and Family Life

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Horses were a common part of daily life in turn-of-the-century Montreal. Tradesmen delivered milk and other items by horse and cart, fire engines were horse-drawn, and many people got around the city in horse-drawn carriages in summer and sleighs in winter. For those who could afford it, horseback riding, horse racing and horse shows were also popular.

My great-grandfather Robert Stanley Bagg (1848-1912) was a skilled rider and every spring in the early 1900s, he and his wife, Clara, attended the Montreal horse show, held in suburban Westmount. Hunters, jumpers, harness horses and ponies competed for honours, but the show seems to have been more of a social activity than a sporting one, and proceeds from a tea served during the afternoon’s events were donated to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

A newspaper illustration of the Montreal Horse Show, 1904.

The Montreal Star published columns of names of attendees, and in 1904, the paper noted that R. Stanley Bagg had a private viewing box. Perhaps, like other boxholders, he and Clara entertained guests at dinner prior to the evening events.

Two years later, the Star reported that Clara, dressed in green tweed with a black hat trimmed with white, attended the show with her sister-in-law Amelia Norton, in a purple dress and a white hat, and her daughter Evelyn, in a grey homespun dress and a pale blue hat, trimmed with white.1

Stanley was still riding at age 59 when he was injured in an accident on Mount Royal, the mountain that rises behind the city center.The Star reported that he was riding on rough ground near the park ranger’s house when his horse stumbled on a rock, fell and rolled over on one side, pinning Mr. Bagg beneath him. Two men who happened to be nearby helped him get up and encouraged him to rest for a few minutes before riding home. Stanley had sprained his shoulder, hit his head and his face was badly scraped, however, he soon recovered.2

Snowshoeing was also a popular sport in Montreal, and one of Stanley’s favourite winter activities. Between the end of November and the beginning of March, the city’s rival snowshoeing clubs competed in races, held weekly “tramps” over the mountain and organized longer excursions to other locations on the Island of Montreal. Club social activities usually included an annual dinner, charity fundraisers and lots of singing. Stanley was a member of the St. George Snowshoe Club, and it had its own club song with a chorus that began, “Hurrah! Hurrah! It’s jolly on the snow. Hurrah! Hurrah! The stiffest storm may blow.…”3

Stanley was on his club’s building and furnishing committee, overseeing the construction of a new clubhouse at Côte St. Antoine. The building was constructed in the early English stye of architecture, with spacious verandas on all sides, a high-pitched roof with dormers and a square entrance hall that gave way to an assembly room with a huge fireplace and large windows overlooking the veranda. When the club house held its grand opening on the evening of December 21, 1887, Stanley was among those who led the way from the Windsor Hotel downtown to the new building.4

When he wasn’t enjoying sports, Stanley, a lawyer, worked in the Bagg family real estate business.  Family life was also important, especially when family members were travelling together or on summer holiday.

Stanley was married to Clara Smithers (1860-1946). One of eleven children, she was the daughter of Charles Francis Smithers, president of the Bank of Montreal, and his wife, Irish-born Martha Bagnall Shearman. When he started pursuing Clara in 1880, Stanley was age 32 and living at home at Fairmount Villa with his mother and sisters. (His father had died in 1873.) Stanley and Clara were married on June 8, 1882 at St. Martin’s Anglican Church in the presence of guests who included “the elite of our inner social circles.”5

The couple’s eldest child, Evelyn St. Clare Stanley Bagg, was born in 1883, and another daughter – my future grandmother – Gwendolyn Stanley Bagg was born in 1887. Their third child, Harold Fortesque Stanley Bagg, arrived in 1895.

Having started a family, Stanley and Clara must have realized it was time to own a house of their own, so Stanley hired architect William McLea Walbank to build a house at 436 Saint-Urbain, near his mother’s home. It was completed in 1884. 

According to a newspaper report, it was a handsome, well-finished brick villa of the Early English style of architecture, on Upper St. Urbain Street. The house contained all the modern conveniences of the time and was heated by Spence’s patent hot water furnace throughout. It claimed to be rat-proof. The bricks were all of Montreal manufacture and compared favourably with imported pressed bricks.

The family did not stay there long, however. In 1890, Lovell’s city directory listed Stanley as living in Georgeville, Quebec, while his sister Mary, the wife of stock broker Robert Lindsay, was living in the house on St. Urbain. Stanley had purchased a large house in Georgeville, on Lake Memphremagog, although it was probably a summer residence. Montreal was a very dirty and unhealthy city, especially in the heat, so many Montrealers left town during the summer months.

The Bagg family on summer vacation, probably at Cacouna, on the lower St. Lawrence River.

It does not appear that the Baggs owned the Georgeville house for many years. My grandmother acquired a camera around 1901 and her snapshots showed family summer vacations at Cacouna on the lower St. Lawrence River, at a rented a house on a lake near Ste. Agathe in the Laurentian Mountains, and at a summer hotel at Kennebunk Beach, Maine.

As for their city home, perhaps Stanley and Clara realized that their house on St. Urbain was not in the city’s most desirable neighbourhood. The place to live in Montreal was an area known as the Golden Square Mile, on the southwest slope of Mount Royal. Montreal was the financial and industrial capital of Canada, and businessmen were making fortunes and building mansions in that part of the city.

Stanley purchased a lot at the western edge of the Golden Square Mile, the corner of Sherbrooke Street and Côte des Neiges Road, and architect Walbank designed a new red sandstone house for him. Construction started in 1891, and the Baggs were living there by 1892. It was Stanley’s home until his death from cancer in 1912.6 Clara then divided the house into two apartments and remained there until she died in 1946.

This story was posted earlier on the collaborative blog https://genealogyensemble.com.

Photo sources:

The Montreal Star, May 7, 1904, p. 20

The Montreal Star, Feb. 12, 1887, p. 6

Gwendolyn Catherine Stanley Bagg, Portrait of the Family, Cacouna, 1903, McCord-Stewart Museum, M2013.591.134

Sources:

  1. “Horse Makes Farewell Bow Tonight,” The Montreal Star (Montreal, Quebec), May 12, 1906, p. 12, digital image, https://www.newspapers.com/image/738949773; accessed Aug. 4, 2024.
  • “Snowshoeing; The Red Cross Knights; St. George’s Snowshoe Club Inaugurated Last Night,” The Gazette, (Montreal, Quebec), Dec. 21, 1887, p. 8, digital image, https://www.newspapers.com/image/419349867; accessed Aug. 3, 2024.
  • “Marriage Chimes: Fashionable Wedding at St. Martin’s Church Yesterday,” The Gazette, (Montreal, Quebec), June 9, 1882, p. 3.

A Montreal Landmark

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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.