Villa Gardens of Ste. Agathe des Monts

From the mid-1800s, the forests surrounding Ste. Agathe began to be cleared, one back-breaking stump at a time, and when the train arrived in 1892, it was a region of subsistence farms with fenced fields that took advantage of every possible nook. Bucolic rolling hills dotted with cows and small farmhouses clumped together along winding roads proved to be an irresistible lure to the leisure class of Montreal. Most of the subsistence farmers were rightly happy to unload their rocky fields for a cash settlement that would grubstake them in a more lucrative enterprise, often offering their services to the same people who bought their farms. Between 1892 and 1912, almost every farm in the hills surrounding Lac des Sables and the neighbouring lakes changed hands and the total real estate assets, as measured by the tax roll, grew to twenty times its original size.

In its heyday Ste. Agathe boasted large estates equipped with showpiece gardens complete with greenhouses, gazebos, ponds, stone walkways and railings, as well as outbuildings for the staff, a stable and barn, all surrounded by cleared, rocky fields that pushed the line of the forest off to the hilltops. The memoir of Osias Renaud, a local farmer who chose his vocation as an adult, giving up a prosperous photography studio, describes annual agricultural exhibitions in which he, the best local farmer, regularly came in second to Senator Donat Raymond’s gentleman’s farm, a real feat considering how much money gentleman farmers were pouring into their properties. As late as the 1960s people with the means still hired specialists from as far away as Holland and Denmark to live on their estates and maintain their gardens and fields. Now, while a rare few such properties still exist, they are hidden from prying eyes on roads and in villages behind second growth forests.

In the early years, prior to the First World War, British-style fox hunting was the weekend and holiday sport, with the leisure class riding over open fields with their dogs. One of the big promoters of the sport was Alfred Baumgarten, a German Anglophile who founded St. Lawrence Sugar and built the Hunt Club in Montreal. His Ste. Agathe stables were used as a recreation centre after he was gone, standing at one time beside the Manor House hotel and below the ski-hill that carried the Baumgarten name, all on his original farm. Today that land houses two complexes belonging to the Laurentians’ health and social services institution dedicated to the needs of the young and the elderly. Baumgarten’s own country home across the road sits above a few dozen upscale condominiums on the lakefront. Most of this local history is forgotten and his name is associated only with an early rope tow.

Among other early gentleman farmers were Lorne McGibbon, Sir Mortimer Davis, the Ogilvy family, Lord Shaughnessy and Octavian Rolland, but today McGibbon’s house and gardens are perhaps the best documented.

Descended from Scottish immigrants who settled into farming in Cote de la Visitation (currently the Botanical Gardens) in Montreal in the 1820s, young Lorne must have grown up with an idyllic image of the family farm. His own father had set up a grocery store, and the farm was only a part of his heritage. He graduated from Montreal High School and pursued a business career, first in insurance and coal in St. Paul, Minnesota, next in a trading company in Medicine Hat, then back to Quebec with Laurentide paper, always working his way up through the hierarchy of the corporations until he headed the Canada Rubber Company in Montreal.

McGibbon was aware of Ste. Agathe before he fell ill with tuberculosis around 1907, and he lamented the fact that he could not be treated in Canada, nearer to his Montreal home. Instead, he stayed in Saranac Lake, New York, a country town dedicated to the tuberculosis cure, and he was so impressed that he donated a small building to their efforts. While supposedly taking the rest cure, he plotted out the construction of a sanitarium in Ste. Agathe, interviewing and hiring the New York architects Scopes and Feustman who had built the hospital in Saranac Lake. When he was released, with the hospital construction well under way, he acquired a large parcel of land, five hundred acres, on the south shore of Lac des Sables in Ste. Agathe and he and his wife designed their country home, a veritable chateau surrounded by gardens, fields, outbuildings, a greenhouse and barns, incorporating an 8-acre peninsula on the water and a private lake, both carefully circumscribed by the remaining forest lands. Engaging the services of Hogle and Davis, the architects who would design the Merchants Bank (Bank of Montreal) and buildings currently on the McGill University campus, and of the gardener Del Torquio, they expressed their desire to have a large stone manor set in an Italianate garden. During the construction, 200 workers, many from Montreal, set to work creating the gardens, blasting out the hillside, setting patios and ponds outlined with stone and concrete and decorated with statues and other ornamentation. The result was Stonehaven, a property worthy of a local duke or count, a residential focal point for Ste. Agathe, but it was only one of many such properties that graced the shores of Ste. Agathe’s large lakes.

Just down the road, Sir Mortimer Davis built a stunning manor house overlooking his own gardens, a greenhouse, a lakefront peninsula, private lakes and secondary homes, including an elaborate waterfront home for his personal physician. Davis, also a graduate of Montreal High School and four years senior to McGibbon, turned his father’s business, the Davis Cigar Store, into the largest tobacco company in Canada. As a young man, he took particular interest in how tobacco was grown and spent serious time experimenting with cultivating it. He is credited with pioneering its production in Canada, and his business, the Imperial Tobacco Company, survives to this day, with its plants in Guelph, Ontario and head office in Montreal. His Ste. Agathe property, Chateau Belvoir, named for the 12^th century Belvoir Castle overlooking the Jordan River, was a clear rival to McGibbon’s, and although his gardens are not as well documented, his property and career paralleled that of McGibbon, even to the point that he, also, founded and supported a chest hospital in Ste. Agathe called Mount Sinai. Together the efforts of these two men contributed to the small country-town’s vocation as an important Canadian tuberculosis treatment centre, and they also set a standard for magnificent estates.

The idea behind the Italianate garden was to situate the house in the garden rather than to have a garden as an adjunct to the house, trying to evoke both the imposing gardens surrounding the villas of ancient Rome and the daily involvement and activities that monastic gardens demand. The residents are encouraged to live in the garden, to sit, to walk, to admire. To this end, ponds and statues, broad open spaces with destinations like benches or gazebos and walking paths are encouraged. The Italianate garden contrasts with the old French garden that was intended to be admired at a distance. In both the cases of McGibbon and Davis the properties would eventually fall into the possession of religious orders. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate acquired the McGibbon property early enough to maintain some of the gardens, and the current owners of the Mortimer Davis Chateau Belvoir property have restored it and call it Manoir Davis. Mount Sinai did not survive but during its operation as a tuberculosis hospital for the rest cure, they maintained walking paths through the grounds and vegetable gardens that fed their patients long after Sir Mortimer Davis was gone.

Most of the imposing estates are in the distant past now, and in many cases their history is lost or fast fading from memory. It is rare today to find one of these country properties that survives as a private estate but the original country home of Noah Timmins that sat side-by-side on the waterfront with his nephew by marriage Senator Donat Raymond still exist as a private country estate today. Of all these great estates, all competitors for agricultural honours, it was only Senator Raymond’s property that won out over Osias Renaud, Ste. Agathe’s renown photographer in his day who rejected his profession, acquiring a farm on the road to Ivry. Renaud, the only serious farmer among the competitors, was recognized as the owner of a model farm, a farm that was a benchmark for other farmers to aspire to.

The McGibbon property, like Davis’s, has been reborn with a new mission as a luxury resort redubbed with echoes of its original name as StoneHaven Le Manoir, and the new owners are restoring McGibbon’s Italianate gardens.