The Story of Jeanne Mance, the Co-Founder of Montreal Who Fought to Keep It Alive

At some point, every Montrealer has been to Jeanne-Mance Park, whether to kick around a soccer ball, drink a few with friends, or to let a toddler burn off some steam through play. Like most public places in Montreal, Jeanne-Mance Park is an eponym for someone notable in Montreal’s history.

It wasn't always. For most of its life, the 14 hectares of grass across Park Avenue from the mountain were known as Fletcher's Field, supposedly after a man named Fletcher who lived at the edge of the grounds and let his cows graze there. The field went on to host a little of everything: Montreal's Crystal Palace, moved there in 1878 and lost to fire in 1896; lacrosse and golf clubs; military parades; and troops drilling for the First World War. In 1879, a British pharmaceutical society even singled it out as a reliable place to find henbane, a psychoactive weed, which is not the kind of honour that usually ends up on a plaque.

The co-founder of Montreal, and the founder and director of the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, Jeanne Mance was born in 1606 in Langres, France to a bourgeois family and came into caregiving at a young age following the death of her parents. She began pursuing nursing particularly during the Thirty Years’ War, and after a visit with a cousin who was a missionary priest, learned that a number of women had left.

Mance had always shown a keen interest in being a lay woman, an ambition furthered when she discovered that Madeleine de Chauvigny de la Peltrie, a lay woman and benefactress of the Ursulines of Quebec, was among the women who had left for New France. From there, Mance was determined to make her mark in what would become Quebec.

The founder of Canada’s first lay hospital

Financing travel to New France, and Montreal in particular, was no small feat since the colony was still a new and uncertain venture for the French. However, things changed when Angélique Faure de Bullion, widow of Claude de Bullion, inherited her husband’s fortune, and opted to invest much of it in a hospital in New France, one that she entrusted Mance personally to establish. That trust was one of the reasons Mance was chosen for the journey to Montreal.

But before the expedition could leave, money was still short. Mance suggested appealing to the upper class in Paris, using her connections to recruit affluent Parisian sponsors to provide moral and financial support for the colony, ultimately securing enough financing in order for the expedition to go ahead.

She would go on to found Canada's first lay hospital, but she was also the biggest reason Montreal survived such an uncertain start. Without her persistence to secure funding, it is unlikely that the expedition would’ve gone ahead, let alone the establishment of such critical infrastructure.

In August of 1641, Mance arrived at Quebec alongside Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve and the other settlers, spending her first winter just outside of Quebec City. In May of 1642, Mance, de Maisonneuve, and the first settlers arrived in Montreal, where she co-founded Ville-Marie at what is now known as Pointe-à-Callière.

They weren't the first people to settle the island. Jacques Cartier had found the Iroquoian village of Hochelaga there in 1535, but by the time Samuel de Champlain came through in the early 1600s, it was gone without a trace. Champlain did make note of a point of land by the river, and that's where Mance, de Maisonneuve and roughly four dozen others others built their fort: a Catholic mission whose backers saw it as a place to spread the faith to the Indigenous peoples of the region.