Class Structure in Industrial Neighbourhoods of late 19 th century Montréal. I would like to start with a bit of family history, because I realize there is a real danger amidst all the maps and data that we will lose sight of my main point. Two of my great grandparents, John Grey and Anne Gourlay emigrated to Montréal from Dundee, Scotland in the 1870s. Jute was a staple of Dundee commerce and shortly after arriving in the city, with the financial assistance of his wife, John Grey opened the Gourlay Bag Company factory on an industrial lot on St Patrick street that backed onto the Lachine Canal in Pointe St Charles. The family could afford to live anywhere in the city and yet they chose to live in the Pointe, the most industrialized neighbourhood in Canada. There they raised a son and two daughters. And it was there that my grandmother Mary met Charles Sweeny, a clerk in the offices of the Grand Trunk Railway and youngest son of a former sugar boiler at the Redpath refinery also in the Pointe. Mary and Charles married at the Centennial Presbyterian Church on Wellington street, now a Sikh temple, and shortly afterwards they ‘moved up’ to the ground floor of a newly built duplex at the corner of Terrebonne and King Edward in Notre Dame de Grace. Meanwhile, my great grandfather, having sold the family firm in the 1906 merger that created Canada Bag, continued to work as a jute wholesaler. He lost most of his money in the stock market crash of 1921. After the death of his wife, he moved in with his spinster daughter Margaret on the top floor of Mary and Charles’ NDG duplex, where he lived until his death in 1926 at the age of 87. This brief sketch of part of my family history highlights a number of elements that have become increasingly central to my own exploration of what the maturation of capitalism meant to people living in Canada’s largest city. Since industrialisation involved the proletarianisation of skilled craftsmen, therefore, at least implicitly, gender and property relations were always central to this complex process. However, for the longest time we managed to ignore them, perhaps because these are not relations that can be properly understood within the confines of the workplace. In a series of articles 1 and recent papers 2 I have developed the following analysis. Pre- industrial craft production depended heavily on the labour of young, unmarried women 1.«Risky Spaces: The Montreal Fire Insurance Company 1817-1820.» Les territoires de l’entreprise. Claude Bellavance & Pierre Fournier (dirs). Ste-Foy, Les Presses de l’Université Laval. 2004, 9-23. «Paysans et propriétés : Les commutations montréalaises, 1840-1859.» Famille et marché XVI e —XX e siècles. Christian Desseureault, John Dickinson et Joseph Goy (dirs). Sillery, Septentrion, 2003, 161-6. “Industry and nation in a colonial space: Nineteenth century Lower Canada.” Des Amériques: Impressions et expressions. Paris: l'Harmattan, 1999, 127-33. With the collaboration of Grace Laing Hogg. “Land and People: Property investment in late pre-industrial Montréal.” Urban History Review, 24, 1 (October, 1995) 44-53. 2. “Urban Ecology, Social Segregation and Industrialisation in a 19 th Century Town” 20ième Congrès international des sciences historiques, Sydney, 2005. “Artisans and Gender” American Historical Association, Seattle, 2005. “Property, Immigration and Identity in Late Pre-Industrial Montréal” Canadian Historical Association, University of Manitoba, 2004.With Sherry Olson, “Digitalizing and Visualizing Montreal's Streets Across Time.” In the street a Mayday Conference, McGill University, 2004.“Understanding Boundaries: Interdisciplinary lessons from the Montréal l’avenir du passé (MAP)
Transcript
Class Structure in Industrial Neighbourhoods of late 19th century Montréal.
I would like to start with a bit of family history, because I realize there is a real danger amidst all the maps and data that we will lose sight of my main point. Two of my great grandparents, John Grey and Anne Gourlay emigrated to Montréal from Dundee, Scotland in the 1870s. Jute was a staple of Dundee commerce and shortly after arriving in the city, with the financial assistance of his wife, John Grey opened the Gourlay Bag Company factory on an industrial lot on St Patrick street that backed onto the Lachine Canal in Pointe St Charles. The family could afford to live anywhere in the city and yet they chose to live in the Pointe, the most industrialized neighbourhood in Canada. There they raised a son and two daughters. And it was there that my grandmother Mary met Charles Sweeny, a clerk in the offices of the Grand Trunk Railway and youngest son of a former sugar boiler at the Redpath refinery also in the Pointe. Mary and Charles married at the Centennial Presbyterian Church on Wellington street, now a Sikh temple, and shortly afterwards they ‘moved up’ to the ground floor of a newly built duplex at the corner of Terrebonne and King Edward in Notre Dame de Grace. Meanwhile, my great grandfather, having sold the family firm in the 1906 merger that created Canada Bag, continued to work as a jute wholesaler. He lost most of his money in the stock market crash of 1921. After the death of his wife, he moved in with his spinster daughter Margaret on the top floor of Mary and Charles’ NDG duplex, where he lived until his death in 1926 at the age of 87. This brief sketch of part of my family history highlights a number of elements that have become increasingly central to my own exploration of what the maturation of capitalism meant to people living in Canada’s largest city. Since industrialisation involved the proletarianisation of skilled craftsmen, therefore, at least implicitly, gender and property relations were always central to this complex process. However, for the longest time we managed to ignore them, perhaps because these are not relations that can be properly understood within the confines of the workplace. In a series of articles1 and recent papers2 I have developed the following analysis. Pre-industrial craft production depended heavily on the labour of young, unmarried women
1.«Risky Spaces: The Montreal Fire Insurance Company 1817-1820.» Les territoires de l’entreprise. Claude Bellavance & Pierre Fournier (dirs). Ste-Foy, Les Presses de l’Université Laval. 2004, 9-23. «Paysans et propriétés : Les commutations montréalaises, 1840-1859.» Famille et marché XVIe—XXe siècles. Christian Desseureault, John Dickinson et Joseph Goy (dirs). Sillery, Septentrion, 2003, 161-6. “Industry and nation in a colonial space: Nineteenth century Lower Canada.” Des Amériques: Impressions et expressions. Paris: l'Harmattan, 1999, 127-33. With the collaboration of Grace Laing Hogg. “Land and People: Property investment in late pre-industrial Montréal.” Urban History Review, 24, 1 (October, 1995) 44-53. 2. “Urban Ecology, Social Segregation and Industrialisation in a 19th Century Town” 20ième Congrès international des sciences historiques, Sydney, 2005. “Artisans and Gender” American Historical Association, Seattle, 2005. “Property, Immigration and Identity in Late Pre-Industrial Montréal” Canadian Historical Association, University of Manitoba, 2004.With Sherry Olson, “Digitalizing and Visualizing Montreal's Streets Across Time.” In the street a Mayday Conference, McGill University, 2004.“Understanding Boundaries: Interdisciplinary lessons from the Montréal l’avenir du passé (MAP)
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and men. Craft families reproduced themselves through the combined labour and savings of both husband and wife. This had always been a difficult task, but a fundamental change in the nature of property in the late 18th and early 19th centuries seriously compounded the difficulties. Abruptly, in Europe and the Americas, the relative value of real property compared to moveable property changed dramatically. This change was highly gendered. First it devalued women’s goods and then, consistent with the precepts of the moral economy, it justified the decrease in women’s wages. This greatly undermined the ability of craft people to create independent commodity producing households. These changed property and gender relations were what permitted the subsequent and much better known changes in social relations associated with early industrial society. It was a wrenching experience and so this society developed a novel and highly patriarchal family model. Access to and control over real property were essential to capital accumulation in British North America. By the 1840s, profits from urban land far exceeded those generated by inter-colonial and international trade. In this context, social mobility, patriarchal authority and cultural identities were all closely connected to property ownership. While I think these processes apply throughout British North America, my own research has focused on Montréal, where it is clear that prior to industrialisation significant numbers of local landlords emerged from within the popular classes and that a minority of property owning men exercised increasing political power in their neighbourhoods as they industrialised. By 1880, the distribution of property ownership in Montréal had spatial characteristics. Large landlords active in multiple wards dominated the town centre, parts of St Antoine, eastern Ste Marie and along the Lachine canal in Ste Anne. Elsewhere, local landlords owned most of the land. Simple homeowners did outnumber the owners of duplexes and triplexes combined, but the bulk of the city’s families lived in properties owned by large landlords, more than half of whom had all their investments in a single ward. In a recent paper, I examined the investment strategies of these landlords according to their occupational title in the municipal tax role. The investment strategies of merchants and lawyers largely mimicked the pattern for large, multi-ward, landlords. By contrast, both gentlemen and those involved in the construction trades were ubiquitous; there were however important local differences. In each of the popular class wards one can easily discern distinct clusters of properties owned by men in the building trades, particularly in areas of the city where unskilled labour pre-dominated. Furthermore, gentleman seems to have been the occupational title of choice for local rentiers. This was of course a self-validating title, rather like ‘Esquire’ in Great Britain; it was their ownership of rental property that made these men gentile. Whereas property ownership among those in the building trades followed the opposite path. It was their skilled work that allowed so many of them to become owners of rental property.
project.” Newberry Research Library, Chicago 2004. «Deux perceptions divergentes du Montréal préindustriel : John Adams et James Cane.» Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française, Université McGill, 2003.
For many involved in production and petty commerce it was also the nature of their work that led them to invest so heavily in local real estate. This was clearly the case for butchers, blacksmiths, founders, tanners, carters and many manufacturers. The right to use and abuse was not a right shared by tenants, so those engaged in noxious or polluting activities had a strong incentive to invest in land. Furthermore, defence against municipal zoning restrictions would have encouraged many to become local landlords, for therein lay the power to influence ward politics. In today’s talk I would like to explore the contours of this local bourgeoisie by contrasting it with the occupational distribution revealed by Lovell’s city directory of 1880. My emphasis here will be on those people, like the Greys, who had a choice where they could live. I will be arguing that the residential patterns of bourgeois families involved in commerce, finance and the professions were quite different from those involved in manufacturing, the trades or petty commerce. These differing patterns are consistent with the divergent investment strategies by occupational title just noted. This convergence, between residential patterns and property ownership, strongly suggests that prior to the Great War there remained a class-based hierarchy within each popular class industrial neighbourhood. In that sense, the choice the Greys made to live in the Pointe was not that unusual, although the fortuitous result for Mary and Charles was an unintended consequence.
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The value of property in Montréal increased five-fold during the first 30 years of industrialisation, from $16 to $79 million. Property values in the town centre were almost uniformly high, but so too was the value of properties above the escarpment – with the singular exception of eastern St Laurent ward. As Phil Ochs once remarked, these were distances only money could measure. Elsewhere properties ranged from three to four thousand dollars along Notre-Dame in the east, St Antoine in the west, in St Laurent, Griffintown and the former St Joseph ward, to one to two thousand dollars in the Pointe, western parts of St-Anne ward and in St Jacques and Ste Marie away from the river. To put these values into perspective, most working class families earned between five and eight hundred dollars a year, so a vacant lot in a popular class neighbourhood could easily be worth twice the annual income of a family living on that street.
The vast majority of property owners restricted their real estate investments to a single ward. Given the arbitrary nature of the ward boundaries between Ste Anne and St Antoine in the west and in St Jacques and Ste Marie in the east, both of which divided historically constituted communities, this local focus is all the more remarkable. These local investors owned the bulk of the properties below the escarpment in the west and the vast majority of properties in eastern St Laurent, St Jacques and Ste Marie. As the values per square metre make clear these were some of the most intensely exploited areas in the city. Proportionally speaking, eastern St Laurent and much of St Jacques were worth more than the vaunted “Golden Square Mile.” While many of the largest properties, owned by the wealthiest individuals and firms in the city, were worth only pennies a square foot.
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There were 32,341 entries in the 1880-81 Lovell’s directory for the city of Montréal.
Overwhelming these people and firms provided only a single address, usually the residence. For most of these people linking residence and workplace is not possible, except when they identified their employer as part of their occupational title. The largest single such group were the 584 people who said they worked for the Grand Trunk Railway. Their concentrations in the Pointe and presence throughout much of Ste Anne need to be kept in mind when
evaluating class structures within and without these popular class wards. Although Mary may have met Charles by chance, clearly, meeting Grand Trunk employees would have been a normal part of her daily life.
One in ten people in the directory, 3202 of the 32,341entries, provided two or more addresses and of these slightly more than three out of four (2566 of 3202) explicitly identified at least one of the addresses as being their home. Not all lived in the city. It was not uncommon, for example, for people to provide a work address and a summer residence. In all, 948 entries included an address that was on the island but outside the city limits, while a further 237 gave addresses that were off the island completely. It was possible to link people to 1,898 city lots as homes and 1,081 lots as work addresses. The differing patterns by occupational title indicate that spatial segregation was most pronounced among petty bourgeois professionals and those involved in finance. Professionals lived above the escarpment or along the St Denis/St Hubert corridor, but worked overwhelmingly in the old city. It should be noted, however, that no doctors made it into this group, because they worked and lived at the same addresses. By 1880 the physicians and surgeons in the city were disproportionately concentrated in the Beaver Hall Hill section of St Antoine ward. People active in banking and stock brokerage also worked in the town centre, while living in St Antoine. Merchants were present in all wards of the city, but nonetheless their offices were concentrated in the town centre and the majority lived in St Antoine and western St Laurent wards. It was much more common in these three occupational categories, for people to be living at the same address with family members who did the same work. Complex households, while not the norm, were clearly widespread. Among those who worked in production or petty commerce, the situation was quite a bit more complicated. Slightly more than a third of the manufacturers, a quarter of the crafts people and a fifth of those involved in petty commerce resided in St Antoine ward. Furthermore, in all three categories their places of work were to be found throughout the city. Multiple entries for the same home address were much less frequent. A third way of identifying where people both lived and worked was possible. In this city directory, 1,875 people said they were ‘of’ a firm. In 1,793 of these cases the person provided only one address, so the overlap with previous test was minimal. Most of the firms identified had their own entries in the directory and it was rare for the address of the firm to be the address given by the person. The firms identified were almost exclusively partnerships; merchant houses and professional firms predominate. This is clearly a more exclusive form of self-identification as it implied proprietorship in way that was not affirmed in the entries with multiple addresses. Not surprisingly, therefore, the contours of social segregation suggested by both of the earlier analyses are even more in evidence here. In this brief paper I have used in three differing ways a city directory to distinguish residences from places of work. The mapping of this information revealed clear patterns of social segregation, that were much more pronounced among petty bourgeois professionals, people active in finance and those in mercantile pursuits, than was the case for those in control of production or petty commerce. Manufacturers, crafts people, grocers, butchers and others active in petty commerce provided the bulk of the non-working class presence in popular class neighbourhoods of early industrial Montréal.
This local presence in production and exchange dovetailed neatly with the same groups preeminence as local landlords. The class structure of these neighbourhoods did not mirror that of the larger city. Significant elements of the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie were conspicuous by their absence, but it was a real and multi-facted presence nonetheless. I suspect it played not an insignificant role in maintaining the remarkable social stability of late Victorian Canada. So Mary and Charles’ love story was, in that respect at least, quite exceptional.
