Educational circles remember the year of the meeting in Montreal of the American Association for the Advancement of Learning and as the opening of the Jacques Cartier and the McGill Normal schools for teachers. This was practically the earliest converging point of the two boards of school commissioners in the building up of their educational system.
January 1, 1858, marks the supplanting of the L.S.D. system by the decimal coinage; January 5th, the purchase of the Montreal and Bytown (Ottawa) Railway for £5,300 by Mr. (afterward Sir John) J.J.C. Abbott.
On February 26th, Griffintown was flooded and beds stood three feet in water, being one of the annual spring floods.
The martial enthusiasm of the citizens was evoked in the city in the early part of 1858 by the Indian mutiny, when the Imperial Government accepted the offer of a regiment to be raised in Canada for service abroad under the title of the “One Hundredth Prince of Wales Royal Canadian Regiment.” The recruiting sergeant, with his flying ribbons, fife and drum band and his cry of “Come, boys, and join the war,” was a novelty then. Montreal contributed for the first overseas contingent 110 young men, who drilled with the detachment of 500 men on St. Helen’s Island previous to being embarked for England in July following. This was the first contingent raised for the front, but it did not get as far as India, doing duty at Malta and Gibraltar. None the less, as the old ballad says, “Their will was good to do the deed, that is if they’d have let ’em, with a ‘Re fol de roy, etc.’”
On September 1st the laying of the first Atlantic telegraph cable was celebrated in the city by trades, military and torchlight processions, the latter being two miles long on the average of six abreast. A bonfire on the mountain signalized this occasion.
Next year, 1859, the Prince of Wales presented the One Hundredth Regiment with its colours at Shorncliffe.
On December 12th, the Victoria Bridge was at last opened and on the 17th the first passenger train went through. It was called the “Victoria” after the revered Queen of that name and it was hoped to have had Her Majesty formally open it.
Before leaving the construction works the men engaged placed the great boulder over the resting place of the many victims of the ship fever of 1847. The words of a Montreal lady, Mrs. Leprohon, commemorate the event thus:
“Long since forgotten, here they rest,
Sons of a distant shore
The epoch of their short career
These footprints on life’s sand,
But this stone will tell through many a year
They died on our shores and slumber here.”
This year Mr. Charles S. Rodier was mayor. A picture worth preserving has lately been given of the city hall life of that time. The city was then very small and the questions were comparatively parochial and the revenue was negligible in comparison with today’s, yet the meetings were very important and very dignified and probably more eloquence flowed than now. The English were then predominant and Mr. Rodden was the leader of the council. The mayor, Mr. Rodier, was, as a contemporary has recently described him, “a man of much eccentricity, but a man also of education and ability. He was what you might call an aesthete—well groomed, neat, and polished, to the finger nails; always with his frock coat and silk hat; always ready to make a sweeping bow; always on the watch to assist a lady from her carriage—a lady who might be shopping on Notre Dame Street, which was the great retail street of the city in my young days. It didn’t matter that His Worship was not always acquainted with the ladies; he was naturally a gallant and, anyway, there was less formality in those days than now.”