A butcher's gamble, a forgotten tavern, and how the Mile End earned its name

John Clark had the kind of ambition that makes people do reckless things with money: Standing in the woods in 1804, the English butcher from Durham County was betting his entire savings on a hunch that a patch of forest north of Montreal would someday be worth more than the meat business that had gotten him this far.

Clark was buying land, but like many at the time in his show, he was buying an idea of where Montreal was headed, and he wanted to position himself right at the edge of that expansion. When he named his new property Mile End Farm, he was borrowing from centuries of English tradition: Back home, every county had villages called Mile End, places that had started as waypoints and grown into destinations themselves.

The name stuck because Clark understood something fundamental about Montreal geography. His farm sat roughly where the city's natural growth would hit its first major obstacle—the steep slope that locals called "côte à Baron," which had kept Montreal's sprawl from pushing much further north. Just beyond that ridge lay open country, perfect for the kind of development Clark was envisioning.

He was right about Montreal's expansion, though he probably never imagined his throwaway farm name would outlast everything else about his legacy.

Americans who made it happen

By 1810, Clark was ready to cash in on his investment, at least partially. He leased a chunk of Mile End Farm to Phineas Bagg, a Massachusetts refugee who'd arrived in Lower Canada fifteen years earlier carrying debt, kids, and the kind of desperation that makes for either spectacular success or complete failure.

Phineas and his son Stanley set up the Mile End Tavern right at the crossroads where Saint-Laurent Road met what was then called Côte-Sainte-Catherine Road—now Mont-Royal Avenue. It was the first significant stop north of Montreal's urban edge, and the Baggs understood that location could be everything.

Stanley had bigger ideas than just serving drinks to travellers, however: In 1811, he talked the Montreal Jockey Club into building a horse racing track right there on Clark's farm, stretching along Saint-Laurent between what's now Mont-Royal and Duluth. This was Montreal's introduction to organized spectator sport, complete with betting and social mixity with city people venturing into the countryside for fun. The whole operation had a distinctly Anglo flavour, but like most things in Montreal, it wouldn't stay that way for long.

A legend of a horse

Stanley Bagg was apparently the kind of guy who lost things—important things, like horses. In August 1815, he placed an advertisement in the Montreal Gazette that tells you everything about what Mile End was like back then:

"STRAYED or STOLEN from the Pasture of Stanley Bagg, Mile End Tavern, on or about the end of June last, a Bay HORSE about ten years old, white face, and some white about the feet."

Stanley was offering ten dollars for information—serious money in 1815, roughly what a labourer made in two weeks. The fact that he wasn't sure whether the horse had wandered off or been stolen captures something essential about Mile End's character. It was still country enough that livestock could disappear into the woods, but urban enough that theft was a real possibility.

Whether Stanley ever got his horse back is a minor mystery at best that remains to this day, but the advertisement proves that the Mile End Tavern was a going concern by 1815, and that Stanley was confident enough in his business to advertise in both English and French.

The story gets even more intertwined when Stanley married Mary Ann Clark in 1819—John Clark's daughter. When Clark died in 1827, he left his entire Mile End operation to his grandson, Stanley Clark Bagg, who would grow up to become a fixture of Montreal's English-speaking elite. The inheritance came with specific instructions about street names that you can still see today: Clark Street runs right through the old racing grounds, exactly as the butcher wanted.

A neighbourhood that forgot its own story

Here's where things get weird: By the 1940s, Montreal's own historians had completely forgotten about John Clark's farm and the Bagg family's tavern. When city archivist Conrad Archambault researched Mile End's origins, he found evidence of horse racing but identified the wrong track entirely—one that operated decades later and in a completely different location.

Archambault's mistake became Montreal's official explanation, repeated in guidebooks and city documents for the next seventy years. Meanwhile, the real story survived in the folk memory of French Montrealers, who had transformed "Mile End" into "la Molenne"—their own pronunciation that made the English name feel more at home.

Even as the neighbourhood went through multiple official name changes—Saint-Louis-du-Mile-End in 1878, Saint-Louis in 1895, Laurier Ward after Montreal absorbed it in 1910—older residents kept using la Molenne to describe the area around Saint-Laurent and Mont-Royal (truth be told, even we fell for this at The Main).

By the 1970s, the Mile End name had almost disappeared entirely. Most people thought of the area as just part of the Plateau, if they thought about it at all. The neighbourhood had become home to waves of Jewish families, then Greek and Portuguese communities, then Italian families further north. Each group left its mark, but nobody was particularly interested in reviving an old English farm name.

Back to the crossroads

The resurrection started in the 1980s, when artists and musicians discovered Mile End's combination of cheap rent and central location. By the 1990s, tech companies like Ubisoft were moving in, creating the same kind of transformation that the railway had brought in 1876.

In 1982, municipal redistricting brought "Mile End" back as an official electoral district name—the first time it had appeared in city documents since the 19th century. Suddenly, everyone wanted to claim Mile End identity, even though nobody could agree on where the neighbourhood actually began and ended.

Today's Mile End bears almost no physical resemblance to John Clark's forest farm or Stanley Bagg's ye olde entertainment complex. The racing track is buried under Jeanne-Mance Park. The Mile End Tavern has been a health clinic for a long time now. But the essential character remains: it's still a crossroads, still a place where different communities intersect and Montreal figures out what it wants to become next.

Walk down Saint-Laurent today and you'll encounter Orthodox Jewish families, Portuguese grandmothers, Greek restaurateurs, and the hipster café culture that made Mile End globally famous. Each group has its own version of where Mile End begins and ends—some say Saint-Laurent is the eastern boundary, others extend it to Saint-Denis.

A name that won't quit

The question everyone asks on walking tours—why is it called Mile End?—has a surprisingly personal answer. It wasn't about city planning or precise measurements. It was about one English butcher's real estate speculation and his decision to borrow a name that sounded respectable and established.

John Clark wanted his Montreal farm to evoke the same kind of growth and possibility that Mile Ends represented back in England—places that had started as endpoints and become destinations. He got exactly what he wanted, just not in any way he could have predicted.

The name survived because it captured something essential about the place: Mile End has always been about what comes next, about the journey beyond the familiar. Even today, as gentrification has largely priced out the artists and families who gave the neighbourhood its current character, Mile End keeps evolving.

Clark's gamble from 1804 is still paying dividends, just in ways he never could have imagined. His throwaway reference to medieval English geography outlasted his quarries, his tavern, and his family's connection to the land. But like everything else in Mile End, it got transformed along the way—from Mile End Farm to la Molenne to the globally recognized creative district that borrows cachet from both its English origins and its distinctly Montreal character.

The butcher who wanted to sound established ended up naming one of the world's coolest neighbourhoods—not bad for a guy who just wanted to make a buck on Montreal real estate.