Montreal is now a large metropolitan area encompassing most of Montreal Island in the St. Lawrence river and seaway. Back in the 1600’s though, it was compose of many small villages and parishes.
Pete and Lee visited two sites on the island. On the northwest shore is XXX which is actually on the XX river and as the picture shows is still wooded on both sides of the river. The other on the southwest shore a more urban seaport look and feel. On the north shore is a religious shrine built in XXX and which may have been know tour ancestor XXXX who lived in the village/parish of XXXX
Pete’s, thinking Montreal might be like Manhattan, expected to be able to walk from one old town center to another as the island was explored. Wrong. Distances between these sites and downtown Montreal were much to far apart to be covered on foot. Lee did a lot of city driving that day.
Photo below is of the area of the shrine in near XXXX. nothing but water and trees in sight, much as the area much have looked in the 1600 and 1700s.
More on Montreal’s history and culture here and below
History of Montreal
The short history below is found in Britannica’s site
Early settlement
The site of Montreal was called Hochelaga by the Huron people when the French navigator and explorer Jacques Cartier visited it in 1535–36 on his second voyage to the New World. More than 1,000 Native Americans (some sources say as many as 3,500) welcomed him on the slope of the mountain that he named Mont Royal (Mont Réal). More than 50 years elapsed before other Frenchmen returned, this time with Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Quebec city. The Hurons had disappeared, but Champlain saw the potential of the location as a fur-trade site. He had land cleared and called it Place Royale; however his ambitions never materialized.
Montreal’s beginnings were not as a fur-trade fort but rather as a missionary centre, named Ville-Marie by its founder, Paul de Chomedey, sieur (lord) de Maisonneuve, in May 1642. He built dwellings, a chapel, a hospital, and other structures, protecting the settlement against Indian attack with a stockade. Indeed, the community was under constant attack from the Iroquois, who were aligned with the British until a peace treaty (La Grande Paix) was negotiated in 1701. The community was granted its first civic charter by King Louis XIV in 1644, and Chomedey became its first governor. The first hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu, was founded in 1644 by Jeanne Mance and the first school for girls in 1653 by Marguerite Bourgeoys. Almost immediately, a society of priests, Les Messieurs de Saint-Sulpice, took charge of education for boys.
Although Montreal began as a missionary settlement, its importance as a fur-trade centre soon surpassed that of Quebec city, because its location allowed movement via the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes and south to the Gulf of Mexico, whereas the Ottawa River watershed facilitated movement west and north. The region encompassed by those waterways constituted a great interior fur empire—one that France’s rival Britain wanted to control. Being the key transportation centre for the fur trade, however, did not promote rapid population growth. By 1700 fewer than 1,000 people lived in Montreal, but immigration and encouragement to settle through the French seignorial system (under which a landowner leased portions of his holdings to numerous farming families) increased Montreal’s population to some 5,000 by the early 1760s.
The decisive battle in the military conflict between Britain and France in North America occurred on the Plains of Abraham, adjacent to Quebec city, in 1759 and was won by the British. In 1760 Montreal surrendered peacefully to British forces and, with all of New France, became part of the British North American empire in 1763. In November 1775 Montreal was occupied by American Revolutionary forces, who retreated in the spring following the abortive siege of Quebec city by Benedict Arnold and thus failed to secure Canada for the new United States.