January 8th, 2023: The Original Building

St. Matthias’ was officially founded as a mission of St. George’s, Place du Canada, in 1873, which means our community is 150 this year! For the next 12 months, we’ll be diving into the archives to shine the spotlight on particularly interesting parts of our history.

Our first installment is a beautiful watercolour painting of the original church building, painted by Mrs. A.M. Sweeny in 1897. Westmount was quite different in the 1870s – for one thing, it wasn’t even called “Westmount” and wouldn’t be incorporated (as “the Village of Cote-St-Antoine”) until the year after St. Matthias’ was founded, in 1874. St. Matthias’ itself was called the “Cote-St-Antoine Mission” at the time, and met in people’s houses for the first two years, only beginning to build the white-frame church in this painting in 1875. It's hard to imagine that our bustling little city was once primarily farmland and woodlots, but it was! Even in the 1890s, when this painting was painted and Westmount became “Westmount,” it was still not quite an urban space – Mrs. Sweeny’s child who captioned their mother’s painting notes that there were still only 8 houses on Cote-St-Antoine Avenue, and their mother had an “unobstructed view of the mountain from our window.” According to the City records, the “hillside” part of Westmount where the church currently stands only began to be built up after WWI. As a result, the painting of the first church building looks unfamiliar to our eyes not just because its shape is different, but because there seems to be so much space around it. That space would be taken up by a new church building by 1913, and the old church would make way to a new parish hall in the 1930s, but in 1897, it was still space enough to house quite a lot of snow!

What might members of that first congregation think about our grey-brick building, surrounded closely by the community our founders wanted so much to serve?