Bridge to Suburbia : Vanished English Towns are Part of South Shore’s Past

The author points out that the expanded roots of the English community on the South Shore of the St. Lawrence began with the completion of the Victoria Bridge in 1860 by the Grand Trunk Railway. With the opening of the bridge’s passenger lanes, people who wanted to get away from the noise and grime of Montreal soon began to settle along the rail line on the South Shore. The author notes that the better-off folk settled in the towns of Saint-Lambert and Montreal South, a mainly English-speaking town located near the base of the south-end of Jacques Cartier Bridge that today forms part of the City of Longueuil. Soldiers returning from overseas from the Second World War, through veteran housing programs, brought great growth to the South Shore English-speaking community in the 1950s. By 1956 the end of the tramway line led to tiny makeshift villages named Croyden, East Greenfield, and Brookline, home to hundreds of Anglophone families whose breadwinners worked in the Point St. Charles rail yards. The opening of the Champlain Bridge and new massive housing programs saw the birth of Brossard and Candiac in the 1960s. With the mass exodus of English-speakers from Quebec beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, Greenfield Park (now part of the City of Longueuil) and Otterburn Park are currently the only South Shore cities granted official bilingual status under Quebec’s Charter of the French Language Charter (Bill 101).

Quebec Heritage News

Vol. 3

no. 12

November-December 2006

p. 21

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