Parc du Bois-de-Coulonge
The Parc du Bois-de-Coulonge is a public park in the Canadian city of Québec . It is located on the Grande Allée in the Arrondissement of Sainte-Foy-Sillery-Cap-Rouge , southwest of the Abraham plain . The 24-acre site was the site of the Spencerwood mansion , the former residence of the lieutenant governor . The property was destroyed by fire in 1966 and was never rebuilt afterwards. One of the preserved historical buildings on the edge of the park is the Villa Bagatelle .
history
The original fiefdom with the name Belleborne was transferred in 1637 to the discoverer Jean Nicolet and his partner Olivier Le Tardif. In 1653 it came into the possession of Louis d'Ailleboust de Coulonge . Four years later, he enlarged the 160 arpents property to the 325 arpents (approx. 110 hectares) Castellanei Coulonge, which also included various other properties in the Québec suburb of Sillery . The Séminaire de Québec bought the property in 1676 and left it unchanged for several decades.
After the British conquest of Québec, the area was parceled out in several stages . In 1780 Major Samuel Holland bought the northern part of the castellany, General Henry Watson Powell the southeastern part. The latter named his property Powell Place and had a stately summer house built on it in the Palladian style. The house was later owned by the builder Patrick Beatson and the perfumer François Le Houiller. Governor James Henry Craig rented Powell Place from 1807. In 1811 Michael Henry Perceval bought the property and named it Spencer Wood in honor of his uncle, the British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval . The heirs sold the house to the timber merchant Romuald Henry Atkinson in 1835. He commissioned the Scottish landscape gardener Peter Lowe to redesign the garden. In 1849 a second villa called Spencer Grange , later called Villa Bagatelle , was built (the former Austrian Empress Zita von Bourbon-Parma lived there from 1940 to 1948 ).
Atkinson sold the eastern part of his property to the Canadian government in 1854, which used the Spencer Wood house as its official residence. As a result, three governors-general lived there and - after the founding of the province of Québec in 1867 - 21 vice-governors . In 1950 the Québec Legislative Assembly decided to rename Spencer Wood to Bois de Coulonge to commemorate France's cultural heritage. On February 21, 1966, a fire destroyed the governor's residence to the ground; Lieutenant Governor Paul Comtois died under unexplained circumstances.
The destroyed villa was not rebuilt and efforts were made to make the park available to the public. The Province of Québec Real Estate Management acquired the property in 1985 and then carried out various repair and maintenance work. The National Capital Commission has been responsible for maintaining the park since 1996.
Web links
- Parking information (French)
Individual evidence
- ^ Frédéric Smith: Parc du Bois-de-Coulonge . In: Association des jardins du Québec, Commission de la capitale nationale du Québec (ed.): Les guides des jardins du Québec . Éditions Fides, Montreal 2003, ISBN 2-7621-2495-6 , pp. 12-13 .
- ↑ Histoire à raconter - Villa Bagatelle. (PDF, 4 MB) (No longer available online.) City of Québec, 2008, p. 7 , archived from the original on September 22, 2015 ; Retrieved December 2, 2015 (French). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
Coordinates: 46 ° 47 ′ 16.8 ″ N , 71 ° 14 ′ 19 ″ W.