George Stephen House

In eighteen eighty-three, George Stephen mortgaged this newly completed mansion to raise money for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Stephen came from Scotland, made his fortune in the textile trade, headed the Bank of Montreal, and then became the railway company's first president. Now he was seeking to complete the line to the Pacific Ocean and was risking his own home as well.

The mansion cost about six hundred thousand dollars. For three years, invited craftsmen finished it with rare woods and marble, installed stained-glass windows, ten fireplaces, and a grand staircase of Cuban mahogany. Stephen moved in as one of Montreal's wealthiest men—and soon handed it all over to creditors as security for loans.

Building the railway proved far more expensive than he had calculated. There were not enough buyers for railway securities in London and New York, so Stephen borrowed against his shares and then mortgaged his house on Drummond Street. By the beginning of eighteen eighty-five, he and his partners had exhausted the guarantees available to them. The company could have passed to the creditors along with the unfinished line.

In July, Parliament authorized a new issue of bonds. The money raised was enough to settle urgent claims and complete construction. In November of that same year, the last spike was driven in British Columbia. The creditors did not receive the mansion: Stephen kept it, then a few years later transferred it to relatives and left for England.

The name on the present hotel also came from the railway. In eighteen eighty-six, railway surveyors named a peak in the Rocky Mountains beside the line being built after Stephen. When he received a seat in the House of Lords in eighteen ninety-one, he chose the title George Stephen, Lord Mount Stephen, after that mountain.

In nineteen twenty-six, Stephen's relatives left the house. Several Montreal entrepreneurs bought it to save it from demolition and established a private men's club here for English-speaking financiers and politicians. The club was called the Mount Stephen Club in honor of its first owner. The owners preserved the residential layout and costly finishes, although they adapted the rooms to new rules: for example, they replaced the conservatory with a stone wing containing a separate ladies' lounge.

The club lasted until the beginning of the twenty tens. The owners then turned the site into a hotel: guest rooms went into a modern tower behind the mansion, while a restaurant and meeting rooms opened in the old house. Behind the gray facade remain the stained-glass windows, fireplaces, and mahogany staircase—the property Stephen once pledged as collateral and the club's founders later saved from demolition.