Maison GENEST-MOURIER (formerly known as Maison Pierre-Mourier)

This house, known as LARUE-GOURDEAU, is said to be one of the oldest in North America, being more than 350 years old

and evokes great moments in the history of the Province of Québec.

Between 1678 and 1680, Jean Mourier built himself a comfortable house that still exists and

is known as Maison La Rue. On December 27, 1682, while the families of Jean and Pierre Mourier,

his cousin, were gathered under the same roof, a violent fire broke out and consumed their house in a short time.

Three of the Mourier children, likely asleep, were burned to death in this disaster.

Jean Mourier’s only two children, Marie, aged two, and her sister Marie-Madeleine, aged seven months,

perished in this fire, while Pierre Mourier lost his eldest son Jean, aged four, whereas his

two other children, Suzanne, two years old, and her sister Marie, still in the cradle, escaped the flames.

This house is located on a lot acquired by the ancestor Pierre Mourier on November 19, 1675, from Robert Boulay,

who had himself acquired it on February 26, 1669, from Mgr Laval.

It was indeed Nazaire Larue who inherited this Genest-Larue estate on June 21, 1827.

This land remained in the hands of the Larue family until 1958, that is for more than 131 years.

One can read on page 76 of L.P. Turcotte’s Histoire de l’île d’Orléans, published in 1867, that the notary

Georges Larue made considerable improvements to this property, developing a pond and a natural park there.

The Larue family’s marked taste for society life attracted great figures of the time, including WILFRID LAURIER,

who became Prime Minister of Canada and often stopped there to spend the night, and HONORÉ MERCIER, Premier of Québec.

In 1958, the architect René Blanchet bought this property from the Larue family.

It was then the shipowner Paul Gourdeau, former co-owner of Prévost Car, who owned this estate for more than 40 years

after acquiring it from the architect René Blanchet in 1972.

He kept there a cannonball from Wolfe that he had found at the Lévis shipyard.

It was around 2012 that Mr. Gourdeau put this MAISON PIERRE MOURIER up for sale, after having entrusted its restoration around 1972

to L’atelier de restauration et d’aménagements de bâtiments anciens du Québec (A.R.A.B.A.Q.)

It is this house that appears on the cover of the important work by Messrs. Michel Lessard and Gilles Vilandré:

LA MAISON TRADITIONNELLE AU QUÉBEC, published in 1974 by Éditions de l’Homme Ltée.

Madame Danielle Chartrain and Me. David Rosentzveig reportedly became its new owners after 2012.

In an article from February 16, 2025, published on PieceSurPiece.com, these owners, who are the first occupants to live there year-round

in this old beauty in two centuries, starting in 2017, were led to think about the first builders of this house,

their lives, their sacrifices, their dreams, their labour, their ingenuity, and the importance for them, as for all generations to come,

of keeping alive the memory and the monumental contribution of these first settlers.

After long thinking and believing that this was the house of Pierre Mourier built in 1681, more recent data from the department

of dendrochronology at Université Laval made it possible to date the construction of the first square of the house.

This house is said to have been built in 1723, that is 23 years after their marriage, by Charles Genest and Marie Mourier (daughter of Pierre), and would have

been enlarged in 1742, when the builder couple were reaching their sixties, no doubt as a legacy to their descendants...

A heritage for all of us...

This is why, with precision and certainty, this house would henceforth be designated as the MAISON GENEST-MOURIER...

The first builders, as it is now listed in the Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec.

The couple, Dame Danielle Chartrain and Monsieur David Rosentzveig, who now live in this ancestral home,

find it important to go back to the roots and honour the first builders by creating consistency in the way

ancestral houses are named, even though this house had been given as an inheritance to Nazaire Larue by his

adoptive mother, Geneviève Turgeon, wife of Jean-Baptiste Genest... while this house remained within this same family,

the Genest and then the Larue, for more than 220 years.

According to them, it is indeed essential and important to recognize that establishing a home, building a house,

and the survival of the family were a shared task, husband and wife, hence GENEST-MOURIER.