The next legislative provision enacted regarding the bar was the enactment of 1836 (6 William IV, C. 10) regulating that those who had followed a regular higher course of letters and had served their clerkship in a law firm were fit to be admitted to practice at the bar. The bar association of Montreal was incorporated in 1840 and the bar of Lower Canada in 1849. The title of batonnier was given officially by act of 1849 to the president of the corporation. It comes from days as far back as 1342, when the president of the Sodality of Lawyers carried a bâton, the emblem of St. Nicholas, their patron.
The act to incorporate the bar of Lower Canada was the gradual dissolution of the Library Association so that about a quarter of a century ago the library began to be considered by comity the property of the bar. Since 1898 the Junior Bar Association has been formed for the purpose of mutual information, interest and friendly relations with similar bodies abroad. About 1907 the Montreal Bar Association was founded “for the purpose of promoting the interest of the bar and of facilitating professional labours and of fostering friendly relations among its members.”
THE COURTHOUSES
The courthouse used after the conquest was held in the Jesuit residence confiscated by the government. On the 3d of January, 1799, the sum of £5,000 was appropriated by the parliament for the erection of a new courthouse and at the same time the ground was granted by the government without any pecuniary indemnity. It was built in 1800 at the cost of $25,000 upon part of the site occupied partially before by the chapel and residence of the Jesuits. It contained many large halls and six fine vaults in which the notarial deeds and registers of births, marriages and deaths were stored. In 1803 at the east end of this courthouse there was built a prison which was partially demolished in 1849.
In 1844 the old courthouse was burnt. Until the present courthouse was built the courts were held partially in the prison adjoining the Château de Ramezay. The present courthouse was opened for business in 1856 on the site of the old courthouse and the prison. What was left of the latter was demolished in 1860 and a square was made between the garden of the government fronting the Château de Ramezay and on this place between the Champ de Mars and Notre Dame Street there was placed a fountain with the statue of Neptune, since removed to Park Mance.
In the present courthouse there are kept the judiciary archives of the district of Montreal, which are certainly the richest of any district in the Dominion because nothing has been destroyed, so that all the notarial deeds and official papers from the times of Maisonneuve to our day are available. These archives occupy a space on the basement floor of the courthouse of nearly three hundred by one hundred and twenty-five feet and also nearly half of the ground floor. Under the French régime the archives were under the care of the governor and the seigneurs of the island. Afterwards they were at the old French courthouse at the corner of St. Francis Xavier and Notre Dame streets and they followed the subsequent fortunes of the courthouse transmigrations. When the courthouse was burnt in 1844 the only documents destroyed were a part of the criminal court record. No systematic indexing and classification of the documents were undertaken before Doctor Lemieux was named sheriff in 1910. As this office in Montreal embraces the administration and supervision of the courthouse and prison, it was to this sheriff’s zeal that in 1911, after many demands, he succeeded in having a staff named under Mr. E.Z. Massicotte as the first archivist to put the archives department on an efficient modern basis. This was done, comparing favourably with the best kept contemporary archives in America. This was attested to by the visitors of the Great American Bar Congress held in Montreal in 1913. While the archives in the courthouse represent the collection of all documents relating to the city anterior to the period of English rule and of all the judiciary courts of the Montreal district since, including the preservation of the births, marriages, deaths and notarial deeds, there has lately been established in the city hall a municipal bureau of Archives under Mr. Beaudry, which preserves all documents concerning the government of the city under the system of the Justices of the Peace and the modern municipal corporation of Montreal. The historians of the future will bless both these forward movements of recent years.
THE OLD COURTHOUSE
COURTHOUSE AT MONTREAL