The story of the building that housed Canada’s first provincial parliament is one of political turmoil, fire—and odor management.
The structure was originally built between 1832 and 1834 to host the city’s first indoor market.
St. Anne’s Market, as it was known, was also one of the first public structures in North America with an enclosed sewer beneath it. “Back in the mid-1800s, Montreal’s rapid population growth was putting pressure on the nearby Saint Pierre River, which basically became an open-sky sewage,” says Hendrik Van Gijseghem, Archaeology Project Manager at Montreal Pointe-à-Callière Museum, which has been leading archaeological investigations at the site of the parliament building over the last several years.Concerns about health risks from the river—at the time the miasma theory, which posited that diseases such as cholera could be carried by “bad air,” held sway—led Montreal’s government to channel part of the river into a collector sewer under the new, 330-foot-long Georgian building. “It was, at the time, an extraordinary feat of civil engineering,” says Van Gijseghem.
After 10 years as a produce market, the building was converted to host the Province of Canada’s first unified parliament, in 1844. Five years later, on the night of April 25, 1849, it burned to the ground.
At the time, politics there were dominated by fierce debate over whether Canada was to be autonomous or remain a British colony. It was as polarized as could be, and following the passage of a controversial piece of legislation, loyalist rioters burned the building down.
A new market was built at the site after the fire, but it was destroyed in 1901 and later turned into a parking lot, though the sewer remained functional until 1989. This infrastructure kept the site sealed and undisturbed for decades. Archaeologists started to unearth the site once the sewer was closed off, but the big finds came starting in 2011, when a team led by Louise Pothier, an archaeologist and curator at the Pointe-à-Callière Museum, discovered the “spectacularly well preserved” foundations of the building, along…
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