Montreal dig uncovers long-lost history
300,000 items unearthed from Parliament building that burned down in 1849
MONTREAL— On April 17, 1849, an Ontario politician named Malcolm Cameron sent a letter from the Parliament of the United Canada in Montreal to London, England.
In it, the merchant and elected member from Kent, in Western Ontario, requested payment on a bill. Before being sent, it was stamped as official correspondence of the legislative assembly. It arrived a few days later in the hands of its intended recipient, a London lawyer named John D. Hughes.
Most everything that was contained in the prestigious building located just a block from the busy St. Lawrence River was lost when angry English rioters stormed the building eight days after Cameron’s letter was sent, resulting in a devastating fire on the night of April 25, 1849.
Now, 168 years later, archeologists who have been excavating the site that had been a city parking lot for most of the last 90 years believe they have found the official copper alloy stamp that was stained with blue ink and pressed down on Cameron’s envelope.
Unearthed just a few weeks ago, the coin-sized stamp is one of the highlights of a years-long dig that has recovered hundreds of thousands of artifacts ranging from pipes and wine bottles to fine china plates and tea sets to oyster shells that would have served as “rich snack food” for the likes of John A. Macdonald, Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, George-Étienne Cartier and Robert Baldwin.
“We didn’t think we’d find them,” Louise Pothier, chief curator with Montreal’s Pointe-à-Callière archeological museum, said of the official stamps, which were discovered in areas that correspond to the office of the clerk of the legislative assembly and from the legislative council library.
Pothier said such items would normally be carefully stored in the archives when not in use.
“The fact that it was a quick and violent fire resulted in them being left on site and rediscovered more than a century-and-a-half later. It’s a very precious discovery for Montreal and we’re very happy to have stumbled upon them.”
It was a time of great change, when lawmakers here were beginning to shake off colonial masters abroad and when French and English were learning to co-exist. The protests and fires occurred during anglophone protests about financial compensation for francophone rebels who suffered property losses during an uprising against British rule in 1837.
The flurry of digging and discovery since 2011 also inspired the neigh- bours of the1849 parliamentarians — the Grey Nuns of Montreal — to delve into their own archives this summer.
There, they discovered a contemporary account of the incident that sheds new light on the fire’s origins.
Protest leader Alfred Perry, Montreal’s then-fire chief, suggested it was accidental — the result of a broken gas line — after he and four others were charged with arson. But the account from the nunnery is more nefarious.
“One small element that came out of it was that (rioters) lit the fire at the four corners of the building and that, in three-quarters of an hour, the building was no longer there,” Pothier said.
The fire also destroyed the two par- liamentary libraries, and an estimated 22,000 public documents from Upper and Lower Canada — Ontario and Quebec.
Some of them dated back hundreds of years to the earliest days of French colonization.
About 30 charred fragments of the 6,000 volumes contained in one of the libraries were recovered. One, which looks like little more than a carbonized crumbling mass, has since been identified as the minutes of the lower chamber of France’s parliament for the months of October and November of 1830.
Archeologist Hendrik Van Gijseghem said the specimen was shipped to the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa and subjected to an experimental treatment that allowed a page to be extracted.
It was carefully frozen and progressively dried until it became readable.
“After that it was just a question of googling a sentence or two and we immediately had the title of the work,” he said.
“To find paper like that calcified or not in an archeological context is extremely rare unless you’re working in an arid environment in the Middle East. It’s almost unheard of.” With the dig drawing to a close, researchers now have a staggering amount of work ahead cleaning, examining and cataloguing all the artifacts. Ultimately, the Pointe-à-Callière museum hopes to showcase the artifacts in a pavilion that would mark the site.
“We have the privilege as archeologists to touch the past, to get closer to the people who lived during a certain time,” Pothier said. “What we want to do is go much further and allow the population to have this privilege to be in contact with the people of the past . . . and to reduce the space that separates us from historic events.”