Laurent Quetton St George's mansion
Built in 1809 and
photographed here many years after his death,
the house gives an idea of how prosperous he had became.
Quetton St. George' role in the history of Jarvis
Collegiate is indirect but important: he was
one of the businessmen in early
Toronto (York) who lent so much money to
William Jarvis as to ruin two generations of
the family.
Q
uetton was an extraordinary man. Born Laurent
Quet—the family also used the name Quetton—in France
in 1771, he belonged to a Roman Catholic family which
were strong supporters of the King. The French Revolution
destroyed his prospects in France. He began a career in
business as a merchant in 1789, but after his father and
brother were inprisoned for their royalist sympathies in 1789,
he fled eastward out of the country and joined several
counter-revolutionary armies in succession, fighting bravely.
By 1796 he had given up the effort to restore the monarchy
and joined other French éigrés in England. Because
he arrived in England on St George's Day, he began calling
himself Laurent Quetton St George, saying, "Revolution deprived
me of my motherland, hence I will have the same devotion to
the [land] that adopted me."
B
y 1808 he ran one of the most substantial businesses in Upper
Canada. For an entire generation, he was one of the three dominant
commercial figures in York. By the time he returned to England,
then to France, in 1816, he had amassed a fortune and owned
26,000 acres of land in Upper Canada.
The huge debts, undertaken in what seems to have been
the only task that ever meant much to William Jarvis,
namely, the business of achieving the lifestyle of
an English gentleman, led him to take money that was not
his, almost causing him to be disgraced and relieved
of his position in government. When his son, Samuel, took
on the same debts, they involved him in a fatal duel
with a neighbour, John Ridout, and forced him to sell
the family estate, thereby creating Jarvis Street.
To assist the émigrés, the British government gave
them a grant of land in Upper Canada, in Windham, north of the
newly created town of York. Quetton and 13 other former French
soldiers arrived in Quebec in late 1798, stayed the winter,
then settled in their new homes in the spring of 1799.
Of the group, only Quetton succeeded in the new world. He spent
two or three years trading furs successfuly with the Indians. A
sign of his thoroughness is a vocabulary notebook he kept to
learn the language of the Mississaugas.
In 1803 he opened a general retail store in York, Quetton St
George and Company, the foundation of his fortune. Some of his
business continued to be fur trading with the Indians, but more
and more focused on supplying settlers and the military wit
provisions, as well as credit. In 1806 he opened branches in
Kingston and Niagara, the year after that one in Amherst, the
year after that another in Dundas.
When Daniel Sullivan wrote from
York in 1817 to his father in Ireland, advising him to move
to Canada, he used Quetton's success as an object lesson:
"When Mr. St George first set up here he carried what little
goods he could collect from place to place on his shoulders,
notwithall his industry he failed three times, but at length
he surmounted all his misfortunes and is now worth eighty
thousand pounds."
Returning to France, Quetton bought land, became a French landed
gentleman and began using the name Quetton de St Georges. In 1819 he
married. In 1821 he died. A son, Henry, returned to Canada in
1847.
Although Quetton St George never married in Canada, he had two
illegitimate children, the first, a girl, by the daughter of the
blacksmith in Windham, the second, a son, in Montreal. In his
will he provided for his Canadian daughter but not for his
Canadian son.
Immigrating to Canada in 1796, he first entered the fur
trade, becoming very successful. He then opened
a general store in the growing town of York (Toronto),
which was enormously successful and made him
very wealthy.
The Archives of the Government of Ontario has an online exhibit entitled French Ontario in the 17th and 18th Centuries with an interesting section on Laurent Quetton.
More stories about the history of Jarvis Collegiate, early Toronto and William and Samuel Jarvis.
Armstrong, Frederick H. Armstrong, Toronto: The Place
of Meeting, Windsor Publications (Canada) Ltd., 1983.
Dictionary of Canadian Biography,
vol. vi, University of Toronto Press, 1983.
ISBN 0-8020-3398-9