There is a phrase you still hear from the old families of the island: l'école d'en haut — the upper school. It refers to a specific building at 7492 chemin Royal, which the MRC heritage inventory identifies in plain words as a former one-room schoolhouse.
But an upper school implies a lower one. You do not name the top if there is no bottom.
This page is the exact state of my investigation into that missing school. I am hiding no piece of evidence, including the pieces that trouble me.
"Three schools provide instruction to the children of this parish. The one at the centre was made an academy some years ago." Louis-Philippe Turcotte, Histoire de l'Ile d'Orleans, Quebec, 1867, p. 114 (translated)
The 1870-71 report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction says the same thing differently: "This fine parish has one model school and two elementary schools." One school at the centre, two rural schools. The count matches.
| School | Location | State of evidence |
|---|---|---|
| The village academy | Near the church, village centre | Identified — Turcotte 1867, Gosselin 1904 |
| "The upper school" | 7492 chemin Royal | Identified — MRC inventory: "would originally have been a one-room schoolhouse. To local people it was l'école d'en haut" |
| "The lower school" | Unknown | No consulted source locates it |
On the island's south shore, chemin Royal numbers increase from east to west. This is easy to verify: Saint-Jean, downstream to the east, runs 3517–5532; Saint-Laurent, 6052–7593; Sainte-Pétronille, upstream to the west, 8074–8701. The "upper school" sits at 7492 — on the upstream side, the top. Consistent. The church is at 6985, at the centre. And our house is at 6225: in the eastern third of the territory, that is, the lower parish — exactly where the missing school would have served its children.
The building dates from 1839. The school law creating school commissions and dividing parishes into districts dates from 1841-42. At first glance that is a problem. In fact it is the most plausible explanation: newly elected commissioners had to find premises immediately, with no budget to build. Renting or buying an existing house was standard practice. A house already standing since 1839 in the lower parish was exactly what was needed.
The Quebec Cultural Heritage Directory records a residential function for 6225. That is the most serious objection — and it is also what you would expect if the house was built as a house in 1839 before serving as a school. An architectural inventory records the typology of the building, not the chronology of its successive uses.
The word "school" appears nowhere for this address. Not in RPCQ record no. 106936, not in the Patri-Arch inventory (record 397), not in the MRC inventory adopted March 4, 2026.
And the inventory does name schools when it knows them. It explicitly identifies eight former schools elsewhere on the island — including the upper school, 1.3 km from us. The category exists and is used. It is not applied to our house. That is a silence that counts, and it would be dishonest to pass over it.
This is why this page does not say "our house was the lower school." It says: the lower school existed, no one has found it, and our house is the most consistent candidate I know of. The difference between those two sentences is the whole difference between a story that holds and a story that collapses the day someone checks.
Three documents could turn this hypothesis into established fact. I am looking for them.
| Lead | What it would give | Where |
|---|---|---|
| The cadastral reference book | The owner of lot 30 when the cadastre was created. If it reads "the school commissioners of Saint-Laurent," the case is closed. | Quebec Land Register, Quebec registration division |
| Gosselin, Figures d'hier et d'aujourd'hui à travers Saint-Laurent (1919, 3 vols.) | Canon David Gosselin wrote his native parish's history in detail. It is the source most likely to name the three districts and their schoolhouses. | BAnQ — on-site consultation |
| Registers of the Saint-Laurent school commission | The list of schoolhouses by district, and the leases if the commissioners rented. | Fonds still to be located |
Note Gosselin's own admission, in 1919: "the school archives are silent" on the beginnings of teaching in the village. Even the parish historian hit that wall.
If your ancestors came from Saint-Laurent-de-l'Ile-d'Orleans, you may hold the missing piece without knowing it.
I am looking for: any deed or lease mentioning the school commissioners of Saint-Laurent; any old photograph of the lower parish; any family account placing a school in the eastern part of the village; any mention of l'école d'en bas in a parish monograph or bulletin.
Write to me: mat_ville@hotmail.com. I will publish every piece received here, with credit — whether the verdict proves me right or wrong.
It would have been simpler to write "1839 one-room schoolhouse" and move on. That is in fact what I did for years, in good faith, repeating what local tradition says.
Reading the archives this summer, I discovered that the tradition rested on no document — and that on the web, the only source for the claim was my own website. A closed loop. I preferred to open the file rather than keep going in circles.
What I lose in certainty I gain in solidity: this page will withstand any genealogist who comes to check. And the puzzle is better than the ready-made answer.
See the house for yourself
La Petite Ecole is a house to rent on Ile d'Orleans, 15 minutes from Old Quebec — sleeps 6, river views, wood stove. The French companion piece covers the schools of Saint-Laurent: three schools, a schoolmistress paid $105 a year, an adult night school in 1898.
Investigation conducted in July 2026. This page will be updated with every new piece added to the file.