This text is part of the special Pleasures notebook
Soon, moving and the housing shortage in Montreal will make headlines. But there was a time when the situation was very different and when the city was mainly occupied by vast fields. Back in time.
When you drive on the Metropolitan Highway, it’s hard to imagine that where you see buildings, big box stores and parking lots today, there was once a vast agricultural countryside. And that was just over 70 years ago.
Micheline Bastien and her twelve brothers and sisters were born on the family dairy farm in Saint-Léonard-de-Port-Maurice (the current borough of Saint-Léonard) starting in the late 1930s. They lived in a Canadian house with large stone walls on the Saint-Léonard coast, now called rue Jarry. At the time, you couldn’t be wrong: it was the only street in the area! The land of his father, Bernard Bastien, belonged before him to Wilfrid Bastien, Micheline’s grandfather. The family had several market gardening neighbors and, as a child, she helped them harvest their vegetables, for pennies on the pound. His grandfather Wilfrid also had an orchard, in which the little Bastiens picked their apples on the way to school in the fall. As for Bernard, to increase his cultivable area, he rented land (current Delorme Park) where he grew potatoes which he sold in Montreal. “We lived in the countryside; going to Montreal was going to the city! » says Micheline, retired director of La Plaine HLM.
Digging through her memories, the woman remembers… There was a grocery store in the village where you could buy flour, sugar and spices. The bread was delivered to the house. For the rest, the peasants of Saint-Léonard were self-sufficient. The Bastiens raised chickens for meat and eggs, and they maintained a vegetable garden for vegetables. Come fall, they made pies, jams and pickles, then filled the basement with potatoes.
Further west, Saint-Laurent was a village core surrounded by agricultural properties. Aurèle Cardinal was born in the 1940s, and grew up with his four brothers and sisters on a market garden farm on the Saint-François coast. His father, Leopold, had 25 dairy cows, whose manure fertilized the fields. At the bottom of the earth, there was a wooded area, from which they got firewood and maple sap. The family grew hay for the animals and had a few chickens and pigs, as well as a basement, where they stocked up on potatoes until the next harvest. “It was a diversified farm, far from the monocultures that we see everywhere today,” says the man.
Still in Saint-Laurent, André Jasmin and his three brothers and sisters were born in the late 1930s on a farm on Chemin Bois-Francs (now Boulevard Henri-Bourassa), where mainly producers lived. The vast land of their father, Adrien, extended as far as the Rivière des Prairies. The farmer bottled milk from his 45 cows and worked in the stable with his boys. The Jasmins then raised pigs and grew vegetables that they sold to processors, says André.
When the countryside gives way to the city
In the mid-1950s, the lands of Saint-Laurent and Saint-Léonard were purchased by speculators who then resold them. André Jasmin explains that they deposited a tempting check on the table of the farmers on Chemin Bois-Francs. They found it difficult to resist the lure of the money offered to them, especially if they were getting older or if they had no successors. This land speculation has changed the face of the agricultural sectors of northern Montreal.
Micheline Bastien remembers that her father had no desire to give up his farm; he opposed it while around him, the neighbors were selling. He decided to imitate them in 1955 and bought a less expensive farm in La Plaine. “It was a shock for my father to leave the land where his father and grandfather had lived, and where he himself had had his children. »
As far as Léopold Cardinal was concerned, the beginning of the end came with a notice of expropriation: his land, like that of the neighbors, bordered the Dorval airport, which needed new runways. In 1961, the Cardinal family had to leave the farm to settle in the village core of Saint-Laurent. Ultimately, the planned expansions were never carried out.
André Jasmin remembers that at the same time, production on the family farm had slowed down: his father was getting older, and the children, who were studying, were less available to support him. That’s when his mother came up with an idea: why not provide a garden center on the land? This almost didn’t exist at the time, explains the man who grew the Jasmin Nursery with his siblings and with the help of his father.
From yesterday to today
Today, at the corner of rue Jarry and boulevard Langelier, very few traces remain of Bernard Bastien’s farm and of this era when Saint-Léonard, which has already been nicknamed “the garden of Montreal”, was an agricultural campaign.
On the Saint-François coast, in Saint-Laurent, only the wooded area, now the Sources nature park, remains of what was the Cardinal farm.
You can shop in what was the Jasmin farm barn, now the nursery shop. “It is more than 150 years old,” says André Jasmin. Over the years, his family watched, with a certain helplessness, as the surrounding area was covered with buildings. “The city has joined us! » says André, who mentions having never sold as many herbs, vegetables and organic seeds as today. Montrealers may no longer have peasant neighbors, but they seem to be regaining a taste for self-production. After having grown vegetables themselves, the Jasmins now equip urban residents who wish to grow them in turn.
This text was initially published in 2017 in the Caribou Special Montreal magazine and was updated by the Caribou team for publication in this notebook.
This content was produced by the Special Publications team at Duty, relating to marketing. The writing of the Duty did not take part.