Answer: Brodie Farm Park at Convent and St. James in St. Henry is 2.4 kilometers away from where the Brodie farm actually was, which is Oxford Park, at Upper Lachine and Oxford. Somewhere in my notes I have a 12 page family memoir of the Brodie family which I will one day post. I've already posted a little bit of it here.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
!Q-how is this part of the profound dumbness of how things are dun in Montreal?
Answer: Brodie Farm Park at Convent and St. James in St. Henry is 2.4 kilometers away from where the Brodie farm actually was, which is Oxford Park, at Upper Lachine and Oxford. Somewhere in my notes I have a 12 page family memoir of the Brodie family which I will one day post. I've already posted a little bit of it here.
That nobody ever referred to it as "Ferme Brodie", least of all with the hyphen...moral of the story: A hyphen is worth millions, an apostrophe is worth less than the lint from your electric dryer.
ReplyDeleteI think it used to be a spinach farm, with all that iron still in abundance. hee-hee.
ReplyDeleteOops, there's a hyphen.
It's a hyphen farm. That's where they grow 'em. They use old apostrophes for fertilizer.
ReplyDeletePeabody
"The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe" as the late Frank Zappa put it. (No mention of hyphens.)
ReplyDeletePeabody
The original Brodie farmhouse still stands at the top of the Turcot cliff ... at the bend of what was Upper Lachine Road near Terry Fox Park. It still has the original false mansard roof along the sides, but the front of the house was sliced off probably when Upper Lachine was widened. The type of brick used suggests the surgery was performed in the late 20s or early 30s.
ReplyDeleteThe house and property appear on the detailed 1874(?) map of the city, at which time the Brodie lands reached from what appears to be about the level of Monkland Boulv., then all the way down the cliff to the Lachine canal. By the turn of the 20th century much of the land had been sold off.
I knew a lady in the family who was familiar with the house in her girlhood in the 20s and she spoke fondly of the fine rose garden down the east side of the house. It's nothing but a rough parking lot today.
Oxford Park was always called Oxford Park, but in the mid=80's, the Parish of Saint-Raymond and the Caisse populaire Saint-Raymond decided that a way to mark their 50th anniversary would be to get the City to name something after the Caisse's founder, Georges Saint-Pierre. It was then that the City discovered that Oxford Park had never been "formally" named. Various hypotheses were examined, including naming the seniors' residence just north of the park after St Pierre; the building's residents rejected that and the Caisse rejected some other ideas. At the time the predecessor of the local borough council was asked to change the park name frm Oxford to St Pierre, , descendants of the Brodies showed up with a request to change the park's name. The City said that this request was too late, but that something else in the general vicinity (!) would be found to honour the Brodies. The new name for the park in St Henri soon appeared.
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