The Early Days
(from the memoirs of V.M. Manning)
In 1916, my father was working at the Grand Trunk Railway shops in Point St. Charles. One of his workmates wanted to join the army, as the First World War was raging in Europe. This man had bought some land on the South Shore and, having no use for it, sold it to my father.
The land was inspected by my parents, some building material was bought, and a small shack with a flat roof was built. We lived there while a seven room house (which is still standing) was made to house the growing family of three boys and one girl. This was the first lonely house on that side of the track. The subdivision was called "Upper Springfield" (later known as Pinehurst).
Across the track was the village of East Greenfield, comprising about thirty houses and shacks (mostly shacks).
The Montreal & Southern Counties Railway had been built about four years earlier (1912), and farmers' land had been bought and turned into subdivisions then sold as building lots. Stops and stations were arrranged and some platforms and station houses (or just shelters). Such a building was erected at East Greenfield and was used by the community as a church on Sunday and as a school during the week. I attended this station house school until 1920.
The old French seigneurie system of allotting land made things easy, as the long strips (about 600 feet wide and a mile long - 192 arpents), bounded by ditches and hedges, made perfect subdivisions. Each was given a name by the new landowners, who had surveyed and laid out for roads and numbered building lots. Each section had a "cadastre" number, and people began to move in - not as fast that they should have done, because of the uncertainty of the First World War. Many young men who bought building lots on the South Shore did not return, and their land was reclaimed by St. Hubert for non-payment of taxes.
So land was sold for building lots to people from Montreal - a great many of them from Point St. Charles - because of the Montreal & Southern Counties Railway, where most of them worked. "The Point" they called it. Others worked at the Northern Electric, which was in that area. All were English-speaking, a great many Irish.
A Most Tragic Fire
(from the memoirs of V.M. Manning)
The early years of the subdivisions were dangerous ones. The First World War was raging in Europe. Some men joined the forces. Women were left alone with the children and had to do all the chores associated with manual housework. As there was no electricity, there were no motorized appliances - everything was done by hand.
Every house was heated with a wood and coal stove or Quebec heater. There were a few coal oil stoves around. All lighting was done by the use of oil lamps. I did all my school work and homework by the light of an oil lamp.
I can still see about a dozen boys and girls standing on the station platform, each with a lantern to light their fathers home across the muddy fields. At that time there were neither streets nor lights.
House fires were frequent (at least one every winter). Stoves overheated [or] oil lamps were knocked over by children. One such fire I remember distinctly. We were all in school in the station house. We were kept in and told nothing, door locked.
At a nearby house, Mr. Gregory had gone to work, leaving his wife and four children. Mrs. Gregory was sick in bed. The children, playing downstairs, knocked over an oil lamp, which set fire to the tablecloth. The frightened children ran upstairs to their mother, who couldn't move. All five were overcome by smoke, and the house burned to the ground. None was saved.
See Timeline item: 27-Feb-1920 - Fatal Fire Cut Family in Half.
Electricity Comes to Pinehurst
(from the memoirs of V.M. Manning)
Electricity came to East Greenfield in the early twenties, but there was none on Pinehurst for another ten years. The Montreal Light, Heat & Power Co. said they could not get permission to pass over the M&SC because it was an electric railway with overhead power lines.
This was their excuse at the time, but after my father bothered them for half a dozen times at their office at the tramway building on Craig St., they finally said that they had permission to pass a cable under the track and would supply power... if we would guarantee three houses. This we did, and they put a pole on our land to short cut the line to the other two houses (Stockley and Morris).
In 1930, I wired our house by running two separate wires through the ceiling from room to room. This wiring [was] still there, fifty years later.