24 
House & Garden 
THE COTTAGES AND HOUSES OF FRENCH CANADA 
Their Architecture and 
Native Peculiarities 
RAMSAY TRAQUAIR, A. R. I. S. A. 
Professor of Architecture, McGill University 
S CATTERED through the Island of Mon¬ 
treal from St. Anne to Bout de l isle, all 
down the shores of the St. Lawrence to St. 
Anne de Beaupre, stand the broad-roofed stone 
cottages of the Quebec habitants. Clustered in 
places into little villages, centering in the pres- 
bytere and the church with its slender, needle¬ 
like spire, scattered along the side of the high¬ 
way, they mark everywhere the older settlements 
and have a character of simple, homely com¬ 
fort which we will seek in vain elsewhere in 
Canada. These are no temporary shells, 
thrown up to be abandoned within a few years; 
they are the ancestral homes of a people deeply 
attached to their land. 
Colonial Simplicity 
The early French settlers of “New France” 
were a simple folk. Even the wealthiest of 
them do not seem to have brought much from 
the motherland, though here and there an old 
piece of furniture still survives. But only the 
simplest methods of building were transferred 
from France to the St. Lawrence. Unlike the 
settlers of New England, who brought with 
them from the south of England a tradition of 
wood framing, lined with clapboarding and 
roofed with shingles, the Normandy peasants 
were accustomed to stone houses, with para- 
petted gables and steep roofs, often spreading 
at the eaves with a strong bell-cast. There is 
indeed wood building in the North of France, 
but so little did it affect the building of Que¬ 
bec, that when the French settlers did use the 
abundant logs of Canada they copied the forms 
of stone building in them and their log houses 
are architecturally of stone form. 
The settlers brought with them no stylistic 
or ornamental architecture. The date of the 
early settlements corresponds to the early classic 
Renaissance of France, but the vernacular was 
still Gothic. Excepting in the churches there 
are but few classic moldings, indeed few mold¬ 
ings of any kind. In the houses a simple basis 
of medieval construction is modified by the 
needs of the climate, with its alternations of 
' 
The typical cottage 
of the village is an 
oblong building of 
rubble masonry 
with a steep roof 
and having a par- 
apetted gable at 
each end 
Edith E. Watson 
A steep roof of 40° 
and a hipped, cen¬ 
tral chimney are 
ch aracte ristics 
found in in any 
farmhouses. This 
type is from Beau- 
port, Quebec 
winter snow and sum¬ 
mer heat. 
Dates of Establishment 
Few records are 
available as to when 
most of these houses 
were built. The type 
seems to have been 
fully established by 
the end of the 17th 
Century, for there are 
houses of the kind in 
Montreal of about 
1695, and the Chateau 
de Ramezay, built in 
1703, is a fully de¬ 
veloped example of 
the cottage type on a 
large scale. The tra¬ 
dition seems to have 
lasted until about 
1850 when it was sub¬ 
merged by the wave 
of commercial prosperity. We may take it that 
most of our examples were built towards the 
second half of the 18th and the beginning of 
the 19th Centuries. 
Early drawings of the City of Quebec show 
us that the town houses of the mid-18th Cen¬ 
tury were of two or three stories, with plain 
square windows, steep roofs and corbelled 
gables with high parapets separating each from 
its neighbor. The chimneys were large, often 
double, and set in the gable walls. The roof 
is always parallel to the street. Under the 
French regime the gable end to the street, with 
its accompanying privacy of side entrance, 
seems to have been a privilege, and the right 
“d’ avoir pignon sur rue” was allowed only 
to a few. To this day even the village house 
stands front to the road. 
The French law of inheritance, which re¬ 
quired an equal division of all property, had 
one curious result. It led to the division of 
The larger 
country houses 
are in two 
stories, often 
with two addi¬ 
tional floors in 
the roof, these 
rooms being 
lighted by 
dormers 
