On a beautiful spring day, while we were having lunch, a car stopped in front of our home. The occupants disembark and one of them begins to photograph my property. My mother, who makes scenarios worthy of being Oscar winners, spills a few lines that perhaps should have been censored. It was enough for us to go out in dressing gowns and others in pajamas to castigate these cheeky and unscrupulous people who came to disturb our morning tranquility.
We then learn that these one-day paparazzi have in fact left Ontario, where they live, to offer a homecoming to one of them as a sixtieth birthday gift. She wanted to see the house she grew up in.
This is how she explains to us that our humble bungalow from the 1950s was the first to be built on the street and that the members of her family were the first residents. And as it was the custom at time, the city of Beaconsfield granted said family permission to choose the name of the street on which the house had been erected. His father, originally from England, had therefore decided to honor the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and therefore Winston Place had just been crowned. Imagine my mother's head that had just changed from the script of Psycho to that of The Crown ;-)
As for me, your humble conqueror of the West Island, who sometimes found myself grazing grass in the ditches adjacent to the asphalt of our now famous property, because I had a tough time staying on the saddle, I wanted to cross the borders and learn more about our city and its citizens.
The toponym of Beaconsfield saw the light of day in 1876 when a man named Henry Menzies, who was far from suspecting that in a more distant era, we would see on the shelves of the branches of one of our state companies’ names of controlled origins, owned a vineyard on the estate of farm 31. He nicknamed it "Beaconsfield's Vineyards" in honor of his friend at the time, the novelist and Prime Minister of England, made Count of Beaconsfield by the Queen Victoria, Benjamin Disraeli.
Unfortunately, Bacchus having led Mr. Menzies dizzily to the bottom of the barrel, his concession was sold at an auction and acquired by a certain Frank Upton, who undertook to transform it into a summer resort in 1891. The place quickly became a vacation spot for the Montreal elite who then offered chalets on the shores of the majestic Lac St-Louis.
Two decades later, the name "Beaconsfield" was retained by Mayor Joseph Léonide Perron when the municipality was incorporated. Moreover, the magistrate himself took up residence in what is now known today as Centennial Hall, before his estate sold it to the owner and trainer of Sainte-Flanelle, Léo Dandurand in 1940. The house will then pass into the hands of Marian Hall Incorporated who will turn the site into a reformatory for girls. Consequently, the place will be recovered by the municipality to house its administrative staff before converting it into a Cultural Center in 1967.
Meanwhile, the year 1911 welcomed the construction of Beaconsfield Boulevard from Pointe-Claire Avenue to Woodland Street before extending to Baie d'Urfé in 1913. Also, the current will pass between Beaconsfield and Baie d 'Urfé since the first will provide electricity to the second for seven years having acquired a power station before reselling it for twenty thousand dollars to the company "Montreal Light, Heat and Power".
Thus, the economic boom following the Second World War will benefit the development of the West Island and Beaconsfield will quickly become a popular suburb. The municipality will be annexed to that of Baie d'Urfé from 2002 to 2006 before each regains its independence in the agglomeration of the City of Montreal.
Today, more than twenty thousand residents live in this part of the West Island and their children, like me, will one day go on an adventure through their bedroom window to cross the rail of the Grand Trunk to join their friends on one side of our municipality. However, take note, your parents are smarter than you think. So, avoid crushing the lily of the valley tiller or the flower bed near your bedroom. It’s part of the script!
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaconsfield_(Qu%C3%A9bec)
https://www.beaconsfield.ca/fr/notre-ville/portrait-et-histoire/16080-histoire-de-beaconsfield
https://histoire-du-quebec.ca/beaconsfield
https://www.shbbhs.ca/index.ph...
