New turnaround: promised more than once for the next demolition, the ancestral house of one of the fathers of the colonization of Saguenay, Alexis Picoté, a house also once inhabited by the legendary Alexis le Trotteur, will finally be saved from destruction in the municipality of Clermont, in the land of Charlevoix.
The Charlevoix Historical Society has succeeded, in extremis, to get their hands on this heritage house, while continuing to bitterly regret that the State did not see fit to classify it to protect it.
The President of the Company, Serge Gauthier, waits for the transaction to be officially endorsed by a notary. It is only a formality, he assures in the same breath.
Research has made it possible to determine that this house, important in popular history, dates from 1817. “The first work will consist in clearing the interior which was affected by the fire in a neighboring house,” explains the historian. Serge Gauthier. We will first guard the walls, with a team of volunteers. It is a question of finding the original roof, with its style. It is a house with a very solid structure. “
Serge Gauthier pleads, once again, for consistent attention to be paid to the history of the popular world. “No, it’s not a chic house, a bourgeois house. It doesn’t mean it’s not important. Locals would have noticed if she had gone missing. “
Doctor of history, Serge Gauthier continues to think, like the members of the Charlevoix Historical Society he chairs, that the house should have been the subject of public authorities’ attention for a long time, both in national than municipal level.
No, it is not a chic house, a bourgeois house. It doesn’t mean it’s not important.
“It’s something quite dramatic, in Quebec, to think that we could have passed quite close to the demolition of a house like this. We do not have the same analysis grid as the department on what matters. But it is certain that it would have displeased them, all the same, that the house was destroyed. However, it was very close. It was actually a hair’s breadth away since the Ministry of Culture officially declined the offer to classify it. “The Ministry of Culture at least told us that it would help us, after an audit on the state of the house. “
The major occupant of this house, the most important for two centuries, was certainly Alexis Tremblay dit Picoté (1787-1859), one of the founders, in 1837, of the Société des 21. It is of this company of mutual cooperation in a colonial design that was to be born a movement allowing the opening to the exploitation and the establishment of settlers in Saguenay – Lac-Saint-Jean in 1842. The territory had until then been one of the guarded hunts of the Compagnie de Hudson’s Bay. This Alexis Tremblay dit Picoté was a rather prosperous merchant in the La Malbaie region. His house, later, was also that of a figure of folklore, Alexis Lapointe, known as the Trotter, this legendary man-horse whose destiny in the collective imagination far exceeded real life.
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