Mont Tremblant Park

Parc de la Montagne Tremblante, 1895

In 1894, Dr. Camille Laviolette of Laval University convinced the Quebec provincial government to set aside a large parcel of Laurentian property for the creation of a forestry reserve. His plan was to build a tuberculosis sanatorium in a completely protected environment. The proposal, originally drafted in 1893, was accepted in July 1894. Dr. Laviolette had studied in Paris, London and Berlin. He was a member of la Société Française d’Otologie et de Laryngologie de Paris, a specialist at l’Institution des Sourdes et Muettes, and was a medical doctor at the University of Laval. He planned the Sanatorium d’Altitude pour la tuberculose which was to be situated only four miles from the St. Jovite railroad station on the south-east face of La Montagne Tremblante (Trembling Mountain). The “Act to establish the Trembling Mountain Park” was voted into law on January 12, 1895. It set aside 14,750 acres for the forest reserve and an additional 400 acres for the treatment complex, and the property was to be available “to any persons or corporations who furnish sufficient sureties that they will erect and maintain such sanatorium...” While the land was reserved, the sanatorium was never built.

According to F. Ryan, author of Tuberculosis: The Greatest Story Never Told, an estimated one billion people died of tuberculosis between 1700 and 1900. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that the world population did not reach two billion until 1930. Today, we talk of pandemics such as the Spanish Flu that struck at the end of World War One, COVID, that was more recent, and the risks of avian flu. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, our cities were hit by other diseases like cholera and smallpox (for which vaccinations existed from 1796). Most of these come and go. Tuberculosis, TB or consumption as it was also called, just sat there and took its toll year after year, cutting people down in the prime of life, disrupting families and weakening communities. It was, and still is, highly contagious through airborne bacteria.

For most of the 1800s, there was no conception of bacteria, and people believed that the disease itself lived in a miasma that floated in the air in low, damp areas, and that the night mists and fog could carry the disease. People believed this viscerally. Mothers would fear night chills as though they were ghosts. The wealthy would build high up the hill, not just for the view, but also to distance themselves from the miasma. Fogs hanging in the valleys were sinister.

Forty-five years ago, students were still x-rayed for TB in the schools. Everyone was involved in fund-raisings, selling stamps showing the cross with the double horizontal bar, the symbol of the International Union Against Tuberculosis. Fear of tuberculosis pervaded society and almost everyone knew someone who had gone to a sanatorium for the rest cure.

The rest cure was discovered serendipitously in the 1850s when Hermann Brehmner, a German botany student, moved to the Himalayas to die while exploring his passion. He was consumptive, that is, he had tuberculosis, and the odds were that it would simply progress until he withered away. Removed from his urban environment, with all its pressures, he began to recover, and in time he had completely regained his health. Leaving botany, he went back to school and studied medicine, proposing in his doctoral thesis that tuberculosis could be cured. He went on to pioneer the rest cure, building a large sanatorium in the mountains where patients would be fed a well-balanced diet and forced to rest, spending the days on balconies in the clean, cool mountain air, wrapped against the cold.

Dr. Edward Trudeau, the grandfather of the cartoonist Gary Trudeau, lived an almost parallel experience, leaving New York City and moving to Saranac Lake to die. When he first arrived, he was so close to death that a man had to carry him to his room, remarking that he weighed no more than a light bag. He began a sanatorium there in the 1880s.

Dr. Laviolette’s project was never used in the treatment of tuberculosis. Given the credentials of Dr. Arthur Richer, founder of the first tuberculosis sanatorium to open in Ste. Agathe, and Dr. Laviolette’s less appropriate, albeit impressive, credentials, one might wonder if there ever was a sincere intention of building a sanatorium on the location that the government set aside for Dr. Laviolette’s dream. If the intentions were sincere, it is curious that Dr. Richer did not take advantage of the reserve of 400 acres that was set aside for that purpose. His hospital was opened in 1899 and 200 doctors came to celebrate the inauguration. Surely the planning started a few years before that. Surely he would have been told.

The act creating the park contained a curious stipulation. Clause 4 read “This act shall not affect any rights acquired under any license to cut timber or any lease to any person or to any fish and game club.” A short article some years later (1902) in the St. Jerome paper L’Avenir du Nord deplored the monopolisation and misuse of public lands for maintaining an exclusive fish and game club effectively protected by the reserve land. The article suggested that the club members had friends in high places and that the $50 per year cost was a gift; it was worth twice that amount, the article claimed. Listed among the activities that Dr. Laviolette envisioned for his patients were fishing, hunting, bathing and canoeing in summer, music, parlour games, snowshoeing, tobogganing, skating, hunting and ice fishing in winter. It is hard to imagine these terminally ill patients taking advantage of such elaborate facilities.

By 1954, a cure had been found for tuberculosis and today, few people are aware of the shadow that the disease once cast. It no longer seems important whether the intentions of the politicians were sincere or self-serving. We all live with a half-conscious faith that governments will be there for us again the next time we are confronted with a real enemy.

In the meantime, le Parc de la Montagne Tremblante, Quebec’s first provincial park will celebrate its 131st anniversary on January 12.