Mill Street - the Driving Grounds and its past and future glory

  No street in Montreal has suffered worse uglification than Mill which in the 1880s was home not only to the Exchange Hotel (above) but was also where you'd find the Montreal Horse Exchange, which was where people would buy and sell horses. The adjacent area was known as the Driving Grounds and that was where Montreal's earliest baseball was played.
  As well, 8,000 watched Buffalo Bill and his team of 150 perform a one-week Wild West Show there in August 1885.


The first real solid mentions we find of baseball on the Driving Grounds are in the late 1880s, about 30 years after the sport hit it big in New York.On May 25, 1888 the Beavers beat the Clippers who were angry because two of the Beavers were ringers from the Albany professional team. A year prior the Clippers had beaten their bigger Beavers rivals at the Driving Grounds. The Point still loves baseball.
   Mill Street suffered a better fate than parallel neighbours Forfar and Brittania which were demolished in the Goose Village razings of 1964.
   Mill begins, or ends at Bridge, where from Club Price/Costco is now. Bridge was called St. Emilien back then. Alternately you can get there from Common Street in Old Montreal very easily, just by crossing Black's Bridge.
  This illustration of the stock yards of Mill Street from about 1905 (click to see large) may or may not be the same part of the strip where the hotel and fields were.
   We predict that in 25 years when Bud Selig is dead and baseball has a salary cap, Montreal will once again have a club an it will be based near the Driving Grounds in one of the many empty spaces that sit there now.