Mile End Farm: the Origins of a Neighbourhood

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with additional research by Justin Bur

The Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal is famous as the home of Montreal bagels and of novelist Mordecai Richler. Its iconic architecture features outside staircases attached to two- and three-storey rowhouses, next door to churches, synagogues, shops, cafés and renovated manufacturing buildings. But Mile End’s history goes back to one small tavern at a crossroads in the countryside more than 200 years ago.

The Mile End Tavern was located at today’s northwest corner of Saint Laurent Boulevard and Mount Royal Avenue,1 now the starting point of the Mile End neighbourhood. In turn, Mile End is on the Plateau, an elevated plain lying north of Sherbrooke Street and east of Mount Royal.

The first known reference to Mile End was dated April 21, 1808, when landowner John Clark placed a notice in the Gazette advertising Mile End Farm as providing “good pasture for horses and cows at the head of the Faubourg [suburb] Saint-Laurent.”

Clark (1767-1827), an English-born butcher, acquired the land he would call Mile End Farm in several transactions, including purchase agreements and leases, between 1804 and 1810.2 Like most farms in Quebec, it was long and narrow. At its greatest extent in 1810, it measured 2.5 kilometers from south to north, and between 400 and 550 meters wide. Clark was almost certainly the one who chose the name Mile End. The centre of his property was about a mile north of the small city of Montreal, and the area might have reminded him of another Mile End, a mile east of London, England. The name caught on and has been in use ever since.

John Clark. Private collection.

When Montreal was founded in 1642, Mile End was probably uninhabited. The ground was too rocky for settlements or agriculture, and few Indigenous artefacts have been found there. The northeastern region of the Island of Montreal was covered by a vast cedar forest. The heart of Mile End was also forested, but there, both cedar and ash trees were the dominant species. This forest was still intact when the Sulpician priests mapped the area in 1702, but as the city’s population grew — it stood at around 1,200 residents in 1700 – more and more trees were cut to provide firewood.   

By 1780, most trees had disappeared from the foot of the mountain, replaced by houses, farm buildings, hay fields and pastures. In the Mile End area, livestock pastures, vegetable crops, tanneries and quarries dominated the countryside, and orchards were planted in the mid-1800s.

In 1663, the Sulpician priests became the seigneurs, or feudal lords, of the entire island. In 1701, the Hôpital Général acquired an extensive piece of land from the Sulpicians in the future Mile End area, and the Grey Nuns took over the hospital and all its lands in 1747. In 1803, the nuns sold the piece of land that would become Mile End Farm to two masons, Jean-Baptiste Boutonne and Joseph Chevalier. They wanted to quarry its stone and sand for building materials.

The masons had to pay the Grey Nuns a rente constituée (annual interest), as well as yearly seigneurial dues to the Sulpicians. So when John Clark bought the property – the first part of his Mile End Farm — in 18044 and gave Boutonne and Chevalier the right to continue collecting building materials for seven years after the sale, they must have been relieved. Meanwhile, Clark found another use for the land, first advertising pasture for other peoples’ cows in 1808.

When the same ad for livestock pasturing at Mile End Farm appeared the following year, it was placed by Phineas Bagg (c.1751-1823) and his son Stanley Bagg (1788-1853), my four-times and three-times great-grandfathers. A farmer from western Massachusetts, Phineas had brought his family to Canada around 1795. Initially he worked as an innkeeper in LaPrairie, near Montreal, and then the family moved onto the island.

In 1810, Phineas and Stanley signed a lease with John Clark.5 Paying an annual rent of 112 pounds, 10 shillings, they ran the Mile End Tavern and managed the farm for the next seven years before subletting to another innkeeper.

see caption below.

The lease described the property as having a two-storey house (which at some point must have been converted into the tavern), a barn, stable and outbuildings. The Baggs were required to sufficiently manure the pastures and arable land, to cultivate and to perform road maintenance and other required duties. They were permitted to cut wood for fencing and firewood, but they had to preserve the maple grove. They were also permitted to cut and remove stone.

No doubt the tavern brought them a good income since it was located at an important, if somewhat remote, intersection. Stanley must have attracted many additional customers after he built a racetrack nearby. In May 1811, he signed an agreement with the Jockey Club of Montreal, subletting a piece of land to the club and promising to build the track within five weeks. The club supervised the races. The track, partially on land leased from the Sisters of the Hôtel-Dieu, was about a mile in circumference and what is now Jeanne Mance Park, extending east to Saint-Laurent. It was most likely the first racetrack in Montreal.6

Another reference to Mile End appeared in the Gazette on August 4, 1815 when Stanley Bagg, Mile End Tavern, placed a notice offering a reward for information about a lost bay horse, about 10 years old, with a white face and some white about the feet.7

In 1819, Stanley married John Clark’s daughter, Mary Ann (John Clark was also my four-times great-grandfather). Their son, Stanley Clark Bagg (1820-1873), eventually inherited the Mile End Farm, as well as other properties Clark had owned nearby.

In the second half of the 19th century, Stanley Clark Bagg began subdividing and selling the properties he had inherited from his father and grandfather. He died in 1873 and the next generation of the family continued to sell building lots from the Stanley Clark Bagg Estate.

In 1891, they sold most of the Mile End Farm property to McCuaig and Mainwaring, a pair of promoters from Toronto who envisioned a high-end residential suburb they called Montreal Annex.8 The project got off to a slow start because basic services such as water, sewers and streetlights were nonexistent and a promised electric tramway did not materialize in time. A recession that started in 1893 put an end to their dreams. A few years later another group of investors, the Montreal Investment & Freehold Company, took over the property and the area developed as a mixture of duplexes, triplexes and commercial buildings.

Meanwhile, the Mile End Hotel continued to appear in city directories at the corner of Saint- Laurent and Mount Royal until 1900. The property was expropriated for road widening in 1902 and the building was demolished. A department store had replaced it by 1906.

Caption for Map The areas with a greyish tinge are the areas that John Clark held by lease rather than owning them; none of them ever came back to Clark-Bagg possession after the leases ended. The yellow areas are cutouts belonging to and reserved by other people, excluded from the rectangles describing the property leased to P & S Bagg in 1810. Mile End Farm was bounded by the modern Saint-Laurent Blvd. in the east, while the future Park Avenue was just to the west and Pine Ave. would have been the southern boundary. RHSJ refers to the Religieuses Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph de Montréal, a religious order dedicated to caring for the sick.

This article also appears in my collaborative family history blog, https://genealogyensemble.com

See also:

Janice Hamilton, John Clark, 19th Century Real-Estate Visionary, Writing Up the Ancestors, May 22, 2019, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2019/05/john-clark-19th-century-real-estate.html

Janice Hamilton, The Life and Times of Phineas Bagg, Writing Up the Ancestors, Oct. 17, 2018, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2018/10/the-life-and-times-of-phineas-bagg.html

Janice Hamilton, The Life and Times of Stanley Bagg (1788-1853), Writing Up the Ancestors, Oct. 5, 2016, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2016/10/the-life-and-times-of-stanley-bagg-1788.html

Notes and Sources

1.  Mount Royal Avenue is the continuation of Côte Sainte-Catherine Road, which traverses the northeast slope of Mount Royal and continues east of Saint-Laurent Boulevard. Saint- Laurent, now a busy commercial street, was at one time the only road leading north from city to the Rivière des Prairies, on the north shore of Montreal Island. Built by the Sulpician priests in 1717, Saint Laurent was initially known as Le grand chemin du Roy – the Great King’s Highway. Over the years it has been known by many names, English and French, including Chemin Saint-Laurent, St. Lawrence Street and “the Main”. Since 1905, its official name has been Boulevard Saint-Laurent.

2.  Yves Desjardins, Histoire du Mile End, Québec: Les Ēditions du Septentrion, 2017, p.  22.

3.  Island of Montreal property owners were required to pay dues to the Sulpicians every year until the seigneurial system was gradually abolished there, starting in 1840. The system was abolished in the rest of Quebec in a gradual process starting in 1854.

4.       Louis Chaboillez, n.p. no 6090, 30 May 1804. A reference to the purchase also appears in J.A. Labadie, n.p. no 16733, 7 June 1875. This was the inventory of Stanley Clark Bagg’s Estate. It includes the name of the seller, the date of the sale and the notary who prepared the deed. This part of Mile End Farm is item #264.

5.  Jonathan A. Gray, n.p. no 2874, 17 Oct. 1810.

6.  Justin Bur, Yves Desjardins, Jean-Claude Robert, Bernard Vallée, Joshua Wolfe, Dictionnaire historique du Plateau Mont-Royal (Montreal, Éditions Écosociété, 2017), p 107.

7.  Justin Bur, “À la recherche du cheval perdu de Stanley Bagg, et des origines du Mile End.” A la recherche du savoir: nouveaux échanges sur les collections du Musée McCord; Collecting Knowledge: New Dialogues on McCord Museum Collections. Joanne Burgess, Cynthia Cooper, Celine Widmer, Natasha Zwarich. Montreal: Éditions MultiMondes, 2015, p. 143.

8.  Justin Bur, Yves Desjardins, Jean-Claude Robert, Bernard Vallée, Joshua Wolfe, Dictionnaire historique du Plateau Mont-Royal (Montreal, Éditions Écosociété, 2017), p 271.

The Miller of Moneymore

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If you are looking for the old corn mill in Moneymore, Northern Ireland, turn off High Street in the village centre and go to the end of Mill Lane. It’s right there, although you might not guess that old stone building was once a busy mill since the water wheel has gone and the water that powered it flows in an underground river.

The old corn mill in Moneymore, Northern Ireland. Photo courtesy Sebastian Graham, www.millsofnorthernireland.com

Long ago, this corn mill (corn refers to oats in Ireland) was a very important building in the community: this was where people brought their oats, wheat, barley, and rye to be ground into flour. In the mid-1700s, my five-times great-grandfather Benjamin Workman was probably well known in Moneymore because he was the local corn mill operator.

His great-grandson recounted the family’s history in a journal, written around the 1850s.1 He explained that Benjamin’s father, William, had a mill (probably a flax mill) and a farm at Brookend, County Tyrone, several miles south of Moneymore. Benjamin inherited the Brookend property from his father, but he was unhappy there because he didn’t get along with the neighbours.

When Moneymore needed a new miller, Benjamin left Brookend and took the job in town. He was not the owner – he rented the mill from the Drapers’ Company of London, which owned most of the property in the area – but everyone paid him to grind their flour.

It was a good move for Benjamin, and for the area residents. According to the journal account, when he died around 1767, he was mourned by Protestants and Catholics alike.

This story may be backed up by historical data: the 1766 Religious Census of County Derry confirms that Benjamin Workman, Protestant Dissident (in other words, Presbyterian,) was a landholder in Moneymore Townland, Barony of Loughinsholin, Derry County.2 An earlier census of Protestant householders in Ulster, carried out in 1740, showed there were several individuals with the name Workman in the area.3

Benjamin Workman, miller of Moneymore, and his wife (whose name is unknown) had at least one son, also named Benjamin. According to the journal, he succeeded to the business and property interests in Moneymore, and, like his father, he died at an advanced age.

This Benjamin married Ann Scott and the couple had four sons and two daughters. All but one of them left Ireland, although two returned and settled in other parts of the island. Only daughter Letitia stayed in Moneymore. According to the journal, she married, first, a man named Scott, with whom she had a daughter, and second, a man named McIvor. Letitia had five more children with her second husband. She died in Moneymore in 1832.4

That is all I was able to discover about the Workman family in eighteenth-century Moneymore, so my curiosity turned to the mill and the town itself.

More than 5000 mills were built in Northern Ireland, including 510 in County Derry (Londonderry) and 573 in neighbouring County Tyrone. There were several types, including corn, or grist mills, flax mills (flax is the plant that is used to make linen) and tuck mills (used to remove impurities from woolen cloth). Today, many have been demolished while others lie neglected, but studying them reveals much about the industrial and architectural history of the area.    

Moneymore’s corn mill was originally built around 1615, about the time Moneymore was founded. One and a half storeys high and 34 feet long, it was built almost entirely of wood, with a shingled roof. The smith at Moneymore provided most of the iron nails and fittings, the spindle shaft was manufactured in Ireland and other components were imported from London.5

This illustration of the Moneymore corn mill accompanied an 1817 report on the plantation. The mill had a thatched roof and two water wheels, which was unusual and ineffective.

It was rebuilt in 1785, but when a report was prepared on the plantation at Moneymore in 1817, the mill was found to be inefficient and in need of more repairs.6  Now, Sebastian Graham of the Mills of Northern Ireland heritage group, told me in an e-mail, “the mill is technically still there, but heavily changed. It became a flax mill as well as a corn mill around 1860 or so, and then a creamery.”

As for the village of Moneymore, it is located several miles west of Lough Neagh. It was founded in the early 1600s as a part of a scheme to populate Ulster with Protestant settlers from England and Scotland. Ulster was the name of the northeastern part of the island of Ireland, now Northern Ireland and part of the United Kingdom. For decades, the English army fought the native Irish forces, but things turned in favour of the English at the end of the 16th century. The English confiscated the properties of the Irish chieftains in Ulster and, in 1608, launched a plan to create the Plantation of Ulster.

English and Scottish landlords were granted vast estates. In return, they were required to build towns, fortifications and houses, and to bring settlers to the area. They leased out properties of about 15 acres each, including cultivated land, turf-bogs and rough pastures, to tenant farmers.The project required investors with deep pockets. The plantation of Moneymore was the property of the Drapers’ Company, a London trade association of wool and cloth merchants that had been founded in medieval times.

Like several other plantation-era villages, Moneymore was planned in a cruciform shape, with a marketplace at the intersection of two main streets. Proclamations were read out to the residents next to a tall wooden pole located beside the marketplace.  

From the beginning, however, the Drapers did not meet all the goals the government in London had set out. The fortifications at Moneymore were poorly built, the houses were tiny and the native Irish population remained larger than the number of settlers. Surveys carried out in the early 1800s found the manor house was in bad shape, as were the mill and the tenants’ cottages.

Today, the manor house has been restored and Northern Ireland is peaceful. As I researched this topic, I realized my husband and I visited the area near Moneymore in 2008, before I began researching my family history. If only I had known!

This article is also posted on the collaborative blog https://genealogyensemble.com.

Sources:

1.  Dr. Benjamin Workman, A Family Orchard: Leaves from the Workman Tree, Part 1. The Determinate Branch of the Compiler. Family History, Branch Introduction. https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~database/misc/WORKMAN.htm, accessed May 6, 2025. 

2.  1766 Religious Census for some parishes in Co. Derry, https://www.billmacafee.com/1766census/1766religiouscensusderry.pdf, Bill Macafee’s website, Family and Local History, Databases compiled from 18th Century Census Substitutes, https://www.billmacafee.com/18centurydatabases.htm, accessed May 6, 2025.

3.  Ireland, Ulster, Census of Protestant Households, 1740, results for Workman, Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.ca/search/collections/62769/?name=_Workman&count=50, accessed May 6, 2025.

4.  Death notice for Letitia McIver; Belfast, Northern Ireland, The Belfast Newsletter, Birth, Marriage and Death Notices, 1735-1925, notice for Letitia McIver, Ancestry.com,  accessed May 7, 2025, https://www.ancestry.ca/family-tree/person/tree/117115991/person/432122459458/facts

5.  Philip Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster, Belfast: The Ulster Historical Foundation, 1994, p. 146.

6.  Reports of the Deputations of The Drapers’ Company of Jan. 23, 1817, … Estates of the Company in the County of Londonderry, in Ireland. Google Books. Accessed May 7, 2025. P. 32.