Molson family long inhabited bizarre mansion with tunnels at St. Lawrence and Sherbrooke - Excerpt from Montreal 375 Tales

Folly on the Main  The gas station at the corner of the Main and Sherbrooke was once home to an eccentric mansion nicknamed Torrance's Folly, a title critics devised to mock its unreasonably remote location, as it sat amid babbling brooks and fields of wildflowers far from the buzzing St. James Street. 

    Steamship magnate Thomas Torrance moved into 1 Sherbrooke W. with his seven daughters in a home that contained a magnificent spiral staircase and mysterious tunnels. 

    Torrance remained only seven years before selling the home to beer tycoon John Molson in 1825. Four generations of Molsons occupied the home until John Molson III died in 1907. 

   It then went mostly vacant until United Automobile Supplies started selling gas at the site in 1924. 

    Every spot needs it tragedy and so that same year Mrs. Henri Lavallée became the first woman to be charged with manslaughter in a car accident after crushing Abraham Finger at the gas station. 

   Finger, 38, had just sold his bakery and bought his train ticket out of town. 

     The mansion burned in 1935, its remains demolished two years later and its mysterious tunnels sealed off. The Torrance family went on to own another impressive-but-doomed mansion near the now-barren downtown street that still bears their family name.

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   Hundreds of such entries are found in Montreal 375 Tales, my most-unusual and spicy history of Montreal that would make a great Christmas gift in paper or e-book form.