Laurent Quetton St George’s mansion
Built in 1809 and photographed here many years after his death,
the house gives an idea of how prosperous he had became.

Quetton St. George’ role in the history of Jarvis Collegiate is indirect but important: he was one of the businessmen in early Toronto (York) who lent so much money to William Jarvis as to ruin two generations of the family.
      The huge debts, undertaken in what seems to have been the only task that ever meant much to William Jarvis, namely, the business of achieving the lifestyle of an English gentleman, led him to take money that was not his, almost causing him to be disgraced and relieved of his position in government. When his son, Samuel, took on the same debts, they involved him in a fatal duel with a neighbour, John Ridout, and forced him to sell the family estate, thereby creating Jarvis Street.

Q uetton was an extraordinary man. Born Laurent Quet—the family also used the name Quetton—in France in 1771, he belonged to a Roman Catholic family which were strong supporters of the King. The French Revolution destroyed his prospects in France. He began a career in business as a merchant in 1789, but after his father and brother were inprisoned for their royalist sympathies in 1789, he fled eastward out of the country and joined several counter-revolutionary armies in succession, fighting bravely. By 1796 he had given up the effort to restore the monarchy and joined other French éigrés in England. Because he arrived in England on St George’s Day, he began calling himself Laurent Quetton St George, saying, “Revolution deprived me of my motherland, hence I will have the same devotion to the [land] that adopted me.”
      To assist the émigrés, the British government gave them a grant of land in Upper Canada, in Windham, north of the newly created town of York. Quetton and 13 other former French soldiers arrived in Quebec in late 1798, stayed the winter, then settled in their new homes in the spring of 1799.
      Of the group, only Quetton succeeded in the new world. He spent two or three years trading furs successfuly with the Indians. A sign of his thoroughness is a vocabulary notebook he kept to learn the language of the Mississaugas.
      In 1803 he opened a general retail store in York, Quetton St George and Company, the foundation of his fortune. Some of his business continued to be fur trading with the Indians, but more and more focused on supplying settlers and the military wit provisions, as well as credit. In 1806 he opened branches in Kingston and Niagara, the year after that one in Amherst, the year after that another in Dundas.

B y 1808 he ran one of the most substantial businesses in Upper Canada. For an entire generation, he was one of the three dominant commercial figures in York. By the time he returned to England, then to France, in 1816, he had amassed a fortune and owned 26,000 acres of land in Upper Canada.
      When Daniel Sullivan wrote from York in 1817 to his father in Ireland, advising him to move to Canada, he used Quetton’s success as an object lesson:”When Mr. St George first set up here he carried what little goods he could collect from place to place on his shoulders, notwithall his industry he failed three times, but at length he surmounted all his misfortunes and is now worth eighty thousand pounds.”
      Returning to France, Quetton bought land, became a French landed gentleman and began using the name Quetton de St Georges. In 1819 he married. In 1821 he died. A son, Henry, returned to Canada in 1847.
      Although Quetton St George never married in Canada, he had two illegitimate children, the first, a girl, by the daughter of the blacksmith in Windham, the second, a son, in Montreal. In his will he provided for his Canadian daughter but not for his Canadian son.
      Immigrating to Canada in 1796, he first entered the fur trade, becoming very successful. He then opened a general store in the growing town of York (Toronto), which was enormously successful and made him very wealthy.

The Archives of the Government of Ontario has an online exhibit entitled French Ontario in the 17th and 18th Centuries with an interesting section on Laurent Quetton.

More stories about the history of Jarvis Collegiate, early Toronto and William and Samuel Jarvis.

Armstrong, Frederick H. Armstrong, Toronto: The Place of Meeting, Windsor Publications (Canada) Ltd., 1983.
Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. vi, University of Toronto Press, 1983. ISBN 0-8020-3398-9Firth, Edith G., The Town of York, 1815-1834, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1966.