Lachine, Montréal, Québec, Canada (Saints-Anges-de-Lachine)
1882-84 - Lachine

...From the wharf at Montreal we take the steamer which is to carry us up the Ottawa to our destination at the Capital. We proceed for the first eight and a half miles along the Lachine Canal amid scenery tranquil and uneventful as that of a Dutch village. Along the level banks are occasional trees and houses, whose general appearance is scarcely such as to indicate the neighbourhood of Canada's wealthiest city. Before us the canal extends mathematically straight, for the most part on a higher level than the surrounding fields, so that sometimes we can peep into the top-storey windows of the houses as we pass. Every now and then we are delayed by a lock, of which we encounter five on our way to Lachine...

At Lachine it will be well to land and stroll awhile amid the scenery of this quiet suburb of the great city, with its reminiscences of Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle, and its association with so many vicissitudes in the history of the heroic and saintly founders of New France. In the words "La Chine" we have a record of the belief common to so many American explorers, from Columbus downwards, that through America lay the highway to the Orient, a belief which the increasing facilities of communication with the Pacific Coast will yet redeem from the list of delusions. Lachine is a quaint and picturesque old town, of some 4000 inhabitants ; the houses with tall, steep gables, dormer windows and square stone chimneys ; the streets gay with visitors from Montreal, a considerable number of whom reside during the summer months at Lachine, whence they come and go to their places of business in the city by the railway. Nestling among trees of immemorial growth are the parish church, and the convent, amid its high-walled gardens. The former is a handsome edifice, whose twin spires, gracefully decorated, rise high above the surrounding streets. The style is that modification of Renaissance-Gothic which the French brought from Europe, and on which French Jesuitism-the Jesuitism of the Martyrs, not of the political intriguers - has impressed the character of its glorious traditions.

Before the canal was built, Lachine was a place of greater commercial importance than at present ; it was then the trading emporium for Montreal, to which was conveyed all the merchandise from the Western centres, and even the cargoes of skins and furs which the trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company had collected during the winter...

Picturesque Canada: The Country as it was and is Lucius Richard O'Brien, Publisher - J. Clarke, 1882

Visit Lachine, Montréal, Québec, Canada (Saints-Anges-de-Lachine)
Discover the people who lived there, the places they visited and the stories they shared.