By Nancy Miller Chenier
Dr. Pierre St-Jean (1833-1900) was born into one of the founding families of Bytown. The Rideau Canal had been completed the year before his birth and the population of the developing community was estimated at about 1000. Sylvain St-Jean, Pierre’s father, was a joiner, one of the early Lowertown artisans who worked on furniture and smaller more ornamental pieces. Sylvain and his wife, Elizabeth Marie Louise Casaubon, initially lived on St. Patrick Street near the Cathedral, and Sylvain may have been one of the many people employed to work on both the early St. Jacques Church and the later Notre Dame Cathedral.
Pierre St-Jean attended local schools and acquired a fluency in English as well as French, a skill that he used well in his professional and political life. He spent some time at the College of Bytown that opened in 1849 with 85 students. The following year, he moved to Montreal to study medicine and five years later, was licensed by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Lower Canada. In 1858, after the death of his first wife, Rose Delima LaRue, Dr. St-Jean moved back to Ottawa and set up a practice as a general practitioner. In 1860, he was one of only three French-Canadian doctors in the city.
Pierre St-Jean was credited with a lifetime of quiet diplomacy, dedication to higher education, generous charitable actions, and attention to the needs of the wider community. Beyond his medical practice, Pierre St Jean took leadership roles with major Francophone institutions such as the Institut canadien-français d’Ottawa and the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste. He engaged directly in political action to achieve positive changes for Canada and for Ottawa. In 1874, he began a four-year term in the House of Commons as the first French-speaking Member of Parliament from Ontario. In 1882, he became Ottawa’s second French-Canadian mayor.
changed, the house still looks much the same today.
Early directories indicate that Pierre St-Jean was probably living with Marie Louise Frechette, his second wife, at 174 St. Patrick Street from at least 1863. The 1878 fire insurance plan shows a 2 ½-storey residence set back from the street with a front porch. Sometime after a major fire in 1895 and before 1912, the building acquired a third storey with elements of the Second Empire style in the roofline and a decorative cornice visible along the second storey.
In addition to serving as a physician’s office, this house was a family home. Like other families of the period, Pierre and Marie Louise faced the death of several children. But they also had a house filled with talented daughters, educated at the Rideau Street Convent and regular soloists and pianists at public events. The young women eventually married and after the death of Dr. St-Jean in 1900, Marie Louise moved to the Glenora Hotel on Rideau Street where she died in 1912.
The house became the home to the family of Napoleon Belanger shortly after the death of Dr. St-Jean. Belanger, a clerk in the federal Department of Public Works, and his wife Rose-de-Lima Ste-Marie moved to 174 St. Patrick with younger members of their family. By the 1940s, the building contained three apartments and was owned by the daughter Alice Belanger, who lived here until her death in 1960.
Over the years, Dr. St-Jean’s house has sheltered a variety of occupants. Physicians, priests, photographers, public servants, tailors, insurance agents, and a secretary to an Italian Consul General have called it home. And after a time, the story of Dr. Pierre St-Jean and his contribution as a builder of our capital city was forgotten by many Lowertowners. Now is the time to read a fuller story of this early resident at the Canadian Dictionary of Biography website. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/st_jean_pierre_12E.html