page_title: History of Montreal
section_title: Industrialization
hierarchical_section_title: History of Montreal / The City of Montreal / Industrialization
caption_attribution_description: Lachine Canal, Lachine, QClabel QS:Len,"Lachine Canal, Lachine, QC"label QS:Lfr,"Le canal Lachine"
context_page_description: The history of Montreal, located in the province of Quebec, Canada, spans about 8,000 years. At the time of European contact, the area was inhabited by the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, a discrete and distinct group of Iroquoian-speaking indigenous people. They spoke Laurentian. Jacques Cartier became the first European to reach the area now known as Montreal in 1535 when he entered the village of Hochelaga on the Island of Montreal while in search of a passage to Asia during the Age of Exploration. Seventy years later, Samuel de Champlain unsuccessfully tried to create a fur trading post but the Mohawk of the Iroquois defended what they had been using as their hunting grounds.
  A fortress named Ville Marie was built in 1642 as part of a project to create a French colonial empire. Ville Marie became a centre for the fur trade and French expansion into New France until 1760, when it was surrendered to the British army, following the Montreal Campaign. British immigration expanded the city. The city's golden era of fur trading began with the advent of the locally owned North West Company.
  Montreal officially became a city in 1832.
context_section_description: The Lachine Canal and major new businesses linked the established port of Montreal with continental markets and led to rapid industrialization during the mid-19th century. The economic boom attracted French Canadian labourers from the surrounding countryside to factories in satellite cities such as Saint-Henri and Maisonneuve. Irish immigrants settled in tough working-class neighbourhoods such as Pointe-Saint-Charles and Griffintown, making English and French linguistic groups roughly equal in size. The growing city also attracted immigrants from Italy, and Eastern Europe.
  In 1852, Montreal had 58,000 inhabitants and by 1860, Montreal was the largest city in British North America, and it was the undisputed economic and cultural centre of Canada. From 1861 to the Great Depression of 1930, Montreal developed in what some historians call its Golden Age. Saint Jacques Street became the most important economic centre of the Dominion of Canada. The Canadian Pacific Railway made its headquarters there in 1880, and the Canadian National Railway in 1919. At the time of its construction in 1928, the new head office of the Royal Bank of Canada at 360 St. James Street was the tallest building in the British Empire. With the annexation of neighbouring towns between 1883 and 1918, Montreal became a mostly Francophone city again. The tradition of alternating between a francophone and an anglophone mayor began, lasting until 1914.
  Montreal shared control of the Canadian securities market with Toronto from the 1850s to the 1970s causing a persistent rivalry between the two. The financiers were Anglophones. However both cities were overshadowed by London and later New York, for they had easy access to these much larger financial centres.
caption: View of Lachine Canal in 1852. Bypassing the rapids west of the city, the canal linked Montreal with other continental markets, spurring its industrialization.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "96", "Image YResolution": "96", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2010:07:22 18:54:18", "Image Padding": "[]", "Image ExifOffset": "2236", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "2414", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4895", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "759", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "507"}