Montreal’s lost Fort Ville-Marie resurfaces
Artifacts from area’s first settlement showcased at Pointe-à-Callière Museum
Imagine what else lies under Old Montreal.
After the Pointe-à-Callière archeology and history museum opened in 1992, executive director Francine Lelièvre sent employees on a mission: scour the neighbourhood for buildings without basements.
They found one and only one — a nondescript, two-storey, brownbrick, 19th-century building, a former ship-repair warehouse on Place-d’Youville, a few doors from the museum.
No cellar meant that the earth under the structure might have not been excavated in centuries — secrets of the past could still lay underneath, waiting to be discovered. The museum bought the building in 2000.
“We wanted to see if we could maybe find traces of the French period,” Lelièvre said in an interview. “What we found was Montreal’s first (European) construction.”
It’s Montreal’s birthplace, a lost fort.
During more than a decade of digging and sifting, archeologists found the ruins of the original Fort Ville-Marie, built in 1642-43 by the French missionaries who arrived with Montreal’s founders, Paul de Chomedey, sieur de Maisonneuve, and Jeanne Mance.
On Wednesday, May 17 — 375 years to the day when Maisonneuve and Mance arrived — a new museum pavilion will open where the warehouse once stood, showcasing remains of the forts and artifacts from the first Montrealers.
The $18-million project began with discoveries about two metres below the warehouse.
Archeologists found, among other things, a well, a metalworking shop and such artifacts as munitions, pieces of pottery and a sundial etched into a piece of slate.
Thanks to the discovery of part of the northwest wooden palisade under a nearby sidewalk, the fort’s layout was pieced together — rectangular and measuring about 2,500 square feet with wooden bastions in each corner. Within the walls, the fort measured about 30 metres by 40 metres, not including the bastions.
The museum demolished the warehouse and built a four-storey pavilion over the ruins.
Parts of the fort’s palisades and stone foundations and a forge will be on display, as will artifacts. Visitors will walk on a glass floor above part of the remains of the fort.
Reaching the pavilion will be an experience in itself. From Pointeà-Callière, visitors will walk through a refurbished stone sewer that itself will feature a light and sound show by Moment Factory, the company that’s also lighting up the Jacques Cartier Bridge.
Thought to be the oldest in North America, the William collector sewer was built in the 1830s on the bed of the river that once ran beside the fort; it remained in service until 1989.
Atop the pavilion, a new 630-kilogram bronze bell will ring, commemorating the bell from the fort’s chapel.
Fort Ville-Marie was abandoned in 1670, but for more than a quarter century it was at the core of the settlement that would eventually be known as Montreal.
When they arrived in 1642, French settlers already knew where they would establish themselves.
They set up camp on a point of land that Samuel de Champlain had scouted in 1611, between the St. Lawrence River and a small river that flowed into it (where Place-d’Youville now stands).
“They brought with them the workers who could chop down trees and build the fort,” Lelièvre said. “They wanted to convert the indigenous people, it was an evangelical mission — it wasn’t for commerce or to populate the area.”
It wouldn’t be long before the missionaries realized that conversions would be difficult and land would have to be granted to colonists if the settlement were to thrive.
By 1643, attacks on the fort by the Iroquois began and colonists were living in a state of siege. Some were killed.
“It was a precarious life,” said Louise Pothier, head archeologist at the museum. “People were afraid. They were living in a fort, it wasn’t a free life.”
Winter was also difficult. “They didn’t have it easy — they weren’t used to this type of winter and they weren’t clothed for it,” Lelièvre said. They survived, she said, because “they were profoundly religious and they lived in a very tightly knit community.”
“I try to put myself in their shoes,” Pothier added. “They arrived with army tents and said, ‘OK, let’s start from zero.’ Really from zero. There was nothing. There were no other resources other than what they brought with them and what was around them.”
They arrived sure of one thing, however: food would be plentiful.
“They could fish and hunt and grow food,” Lelièvre said. “That was different from France. Here, nature was very generous. You just had to put your line in the water to fish.
“And we know that they ate a lot better here than they did in France. Most of them had been poor in France. They didn’t have a lot there. Here, they had everything. Fruit in the summer, birds, fish, all the meat they wanted.”