On Oct. 17, 1810 in the afternoon, my
great-great-great grandfather Stanley Bagg and his father, Phineas, visited the
office of a Montreal
notary to co-sign a lease for the Mile End Tavern with landlord John Clark. That
lease was the first documented evidence of Stanley’s relationship with his future
father-in-law.
Although it was not a mile from
anywhere significant, the Mile End Tavern was in an excellent location for a drinking
establishment, at the corner of St. Lawrence Street, the main road leading north
from the city to Rivière des Prairies, and Ste. Catherine Road, which crossed the
northern flank of Mount Royal.
The Mile End Tavern was at the corner of St. Lawrence Blvd and Mount Royal Ave. |
Running a tavern and a farm must have
kept father and son busy, but Stanley
had greater ambitions. During the war of 1812, he and a business partner landed
a dangerous contract from the British army to transport iron guns from Montreal to Kingston.
Stanley used
the profits from this and similar contracts to buy shares in a steamboat, and, being
a horse enthusiast, to build a race track near the tavern.
Later, he obtained other army
contracts, including the leveling of the Montreal
citadel in 1819. In 1821, he and three partners were awarded a contract to excavate
the Lachine Canal, a project that took more than
four years and involved hiring hundreds of Irish immigrant labourers.
Meanwhile, in 1815, Stanley and Phineas
had renewed the tavern lease but, in 1818, with Phineas in his late 60s, they
closed the business and placed an ad in the newspaper asking anyone with an outstanding
account with the tavern to settle it. A year later, Stanley Bagg and John Clark
signed another notarized agreement: it was a marriage contract between Stanley
and John’s only daughter, Mary Ann Clark.
Durham House, home of Stanley Bagg and his wife, Mary Ann Clark, was on St. Lawrence Blvd, near present-day Prince Arthur Street. Photo courtesy Lucy Anglin Hunt. |
Stanley and Mary Ann made an
attractive couple. At 31, Stanley
had broad shoulders, a straight nose and full lips, while Mary Ann, 24, was
slim and dark-haired. As a wedding present, her father gave the couple a handsome
two-storey stone house called Durham House, where their only child, Stanley
Clark Bagg, was born a year later. The house was named after Durham County, England,
where John Clark, a butcher by trade and an investor by aptitude, and his wife
were born.
When Stanley and Mary Ann began their
lives together in Montreal,
the city was already 180 years old, but it was going through a period of rapid
change. Stanley Bagg and John Clark took advantage of opportunities that came
their way because of those changes, thus laying the foundations of the family’s
future.
Post updated with additional photo on May 7, 2015
Post updated with additional photo on May 7, 2015
Research
remarks: Those of us who had ancestors in
Quebec have a gold-mine of genealogical information at our finger-tips:
notarial documents, housed at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationale du Québec
(BANQ), the national library and archives of Quebec. Every time someone signed
a lease, wrote a will, purchased a property or made a protest (usually because
money was owed), a notary prepared the document.
Although these documents can be
difficult to find (you have to know the name of the notary before you can even
start searching the indexes), the results are often worth the trouble. For
example, the Mile End Tavern lease, act # 2874 in the records of notary J.A.
Gray, suggests that John Clark was a knowledgeable farmer who cared for the
land and valued his relationship with the nuns next door.
Stanley Bagg’s military contracts, the
agreement he signed with his business partners to build the Lachine Canal and
his marriage contract were also notarial documents that reveal a great deal
about his business activities and private life.
The BANQ website (www.banq.qc.ca) is
not easy to use, even if you click on the English version. But if you know the
name of a notary your ancestor used in the 19th century, try browsing
the indexes at http://bibnum2.banq.qc.ca/bna/notaires/index.html.
Not all notaries’ indexes have been digitized.