Civilized man must drink!

That was the big idea behind Quetton St. George & Co. They were wine merchants, and owner Henry Quetton St. George was quoting a book describing how wine — good wine — was a tonic for the old and a cure-all for the sick. He was an aristocratic Frenchman and amateur painter in the Toronto of the 1870s, and he cloaked his booze-selling business in the halo of medicine. Of all his customers, he said the “medical men” were the most enthusiastic about his wines — though he never said whether for themselves or their patients.

Never one to neglect his health, our first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, placed a formidable pre-Christmas order for 324 bottles in 1881 — just in case anyone should drop-in unexpectedly, one supposes.

Henry never stinted on the virtues of his wares; he owned a French vineyard and selected the vintages personally on frequent trips to Europe. He sold the better wines of France, Spain and Germany — none of the local, adulterated dreck many Torontonians guzzled with pretentious, ill-informed relish. He was a salesman on a mission to up the quality, increase the connoisseurship and keep the medicinal arguments strong.

And those arguments needed to be strong because pouring out of the Protestant pulpits of English Canada was an ever-increasing doctrine of temperance advocating restriction or even outright banning of alcohol in the province. Ban whisky? Certainly, said Henry. But ban wine? That sweet, gentle, gift of the gods? It was a constant battle. There was literally a town called Temperanceville a few miles west of his Oak Ridges Estate.

The estate has for many years been known as the Lake St. George Conservation Area and of course the lake and facility have taken Henry’s name. But the better known St. George St. in Toronto is actually named for Henry’s father and to fully explain Henry we really must start with Papa.

Laurent Quetton St. George was a merchant from the south of France who sided with the king during the French Revolution. When the king went down, he and about 130,000 other French royalists fled to England.

They were like the anti-Castro Cubans sailing to Miami, and Laurent even survived a doomed Bay of Pigs-type assault on the French coastline. When that failed, he threw his big, floppy French hat in with an even crazier venture — the settlement of about 40 French aristocrats as pioneer farmers on the Oak Ridges Moraine, just north of Toronto.

It was 1798. There wasn’t much here. Picture the three musketeers whacking at old-growth pine with their fencing swords and you’ll pretty much have the picture.

Of them all, only Laurent thrived and that’s because he wasted no time hoeing the gravelly, glacial till of the moraine but instead trotted off to trade with the native Ojibwa people up around Lake Simcoe.

Ever the good salesman he noted people’s names in his little Day-Timer along with translations of numerous handy words. He traded with Sissagua (the “Rattlesnake”) and Nipinanacouate (“Summer Cloud”). And of course, business being business, he noted that “Jonia” meant money.

In a handful of years, Laurent had more money than any other merchant in the colony. His real break came in New York City where he borrowed $150, a rowboat and a house near Niagara Falls from one of his departing compatriots. He then put $150 of inventory into the boat and rowed it back to Niagara where he converted the house into his first store. Within a few years, he had a handful of stores across the colony, selling everything from food to books, wine to hinges. He also had a fine house in Toronto, an illegitimate son and daughter, and an astonishing 10,500 hectares of land.

In 1815, flush with cash, he left for France for a little visit; he hadn’t been home in 20 years. His mother had died the year before, his father was getting older, his daughter was starting school in Paris and the politics had changed — France once again had a king.

The king showered the ever-loyal Laurent with titles and honours, enough apparently to attract the attention of a young noblewoman. He soon had himself a trophy wife, a chateau and vineyards in the south of France and his only legitimate child, our hero Henry.

With wine, sun and a French woman half his age, quiet evenings by the fire in Toronto lost their charm. Laurent never did come back. He also died soon after. He was just around 50 and he’s buried at the chateau where they still sell their best wine under the name of Quetton St. George.

The new wife and son got everything. The illegitimate son and his mother got nothing. The illegitimate daughter — with the unmistakable French royalist name of Marie Antoinette — got the schooling in Paris, a lifelong annuity and a signing bonus when she married. The whole kit and caboodle was managed in trust from Toronto by Laurent’s old friends, the Baldwin family, who kept in close touch with his young spendthrift widow as Henry grew up.

At 24, Henry appeared in Toronto with a wife and 1-year-old daughter. He had never known his father, been to Upper Canada or met the Baldwins but it seems nothing but warm welcomes greeted the young French heir as he embarked on managing his vast land holdings.

He noodled around with a brewery at Oswego, N.Y., for a bit but his first Ontario foray was when he founded the town of Washago. Today best known for the Washago Village Restaurant — that steep red-roofed thing up on Highway 11, just north of Orillia — it was the lumber mill of Quetton St. George and Co. that got the party started in 1852.

Around this time he bought land for his estate. With big logs and big fireplaces it was like some kind of authentic Interwest lodge but his wife hated the place. She christened it “Glen Lonely” and you can’t really blame her. Her infant daughter had died just after they got to Canada and her second daughter could only do so much to make trading in the Mediterranean Sea for a kettle lake on the Oak Ridges Moraine seem like a good idea. She and her daughter soon returned to France leaving Henry to ping-pong back and forth across the Atlantic in the coming decades. The first house burned but Henry rebuilt.

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Often away in France, Henry needed local partners. The Washago operation was soon shared with a 32-year-old Upper Canada College graduate named Richard O’Brien. A painter like Henry, O’Brien had given up his big-city artistic aspirations for a married, middle-class life as a merchant and local politician in his hometown of Orillia.

But it seems it wasn’t him and Henry likely saved O’Brien for his real destiny. Not long after St. George and O’Brien was painted above the door at the Washago mill, O’Brien’s own paints and brushes came back out, first around Orillia and then around Henry’s estate and vineyards in France. The south of France must have been a revelation and you can almost see O’Brien’s cogs turning: With his shopkeeping experience and Henry’s European wine knowledge they could have a really good Toronto business, one he could do while improving his painting. Quetton St. George & Co., Wine Merchants, was formed almost as soon as they got back.

The company started on King St. E. but after a few years set up for good in a three-storey brick storefront at 16 King St. W., where the Royal Bank building is today.

O’Brien’s artistic life had by then grown exponentially. He had buried his second name in favour of his first, becoming Lucius R. O’Brien, one of Victorian Canada’s foremost painters.

In 1876, the government gave him £1000 to found an art college which he promptly did at the most convenient spot available. The record’s a bit cloudy but if the college wasn’t in the wine shop, it was right next door. The Ontario College of Art began amid the bottles and casks of Quetton St. George & Co.

They ran the business successfully for 15 years until Henry was ready to retire. About 10 years later, Henry died in his mid-seventies in 1896. He was widely remembered for his terrific hospitality, often filling the misnamed Glen Lonely with friends and guests.

O’Brien died a few years later, wealthy and famous, at the age of 67.

In 1904, an expanding Toronto tore down Laurent’s old house and four years after that Glen Lonely burned to the ground — again.

In 1914, Henry’s only surviving daughter died after a lifetime caring for orphans in Paris and soon after that the temperance forces won as Ontario banned alcohol across the province. It would be 10 years before you could legally buy booze in Ontario and from then on you had to buy it from the government-controlled LCBO. Until the early sixties you needed a permit to buy a bottle of wine and into the seventies they kept tabs on who was drinking what.

It’s a lot more casual now, of course. Even that village of Temperanceville that loomed threateningly on Henry’s horizon is now little more than a park and a pair of GO transit stops. In fact, a brand new LCBO just opened up across from where Henry’s been resting in peace these last 120 years. He’s just south of Stouffville Rd., not far from where the French royalists tried and failed to pioneer all those years ago.

As Henry is the only tangible connection to that fiasco, the provincial government has planted a commemorative plaque in front of the church where Henry lies. It tells the story of the French royalists and nearby a Canadian flag flies on a low pole. It’s a flag Henry never lived to see but if he had it’s nice to think he would nip across to the new LCBO, grab something out of Vintages and toast it with all the pomp and style of a real Frenchman.

Angus Skene is a Toronto architect and historian. He can be reached at angus@angusskene.com