Exploring an Abandoned Residential Boys Boarding School
Just metres from the Vermont border, on a rise above Missisquoi Bay, sits a building that has lived several lives.
It was built as a luxury hotel. Then for fifty years it housed boys, some as young as nine, far from their families, in the care of a Catholic religious order.
Today, that order is being sued in Quebec Superior Court. The suit alleges its members sexually abused children for decades, and that the order knew.
This building has never been named in that lawsuit. But the more you learn about its history, the harder it is to stop asking questions.
In the 1920s, an American built a grand hotel here and called it the Americana. It was a spot for travellers crossing between Quebec and Vermont, with panoramic windows over Lake Champlain and an orchestra room for evening dances.
A few years later a Canadian bought it and gave it a new name: the Manoir Lafayette.
For two decades it was a place for leisure. That changed in 1947.
In 1947, the Brothers of Christian Instruction bought the hotel. They’re a teaching order founded in France in 1819, and at their peak in Quebec they ran as many as eighty schools.
On June 24th of that year, Bishop Douville blessed a new chapel inside the old hotel. The same day, the first boys arrived, transferred from the order’s postulate in Farnham.
These were boys in grades seven to nine who had been chosen for religious life. They studied a classical curriculum, drilled in a cadet corps, and lived under the brothers’ supervision around the clock.
Over the next decades the building kept changing roles. It became a juvenate in 1952 and an apostolic school in 1961. Finally, around 1969 to 1972, it became what locals remember: the Pensionnat Saint-Jean-Baptiste, a boarding school for boys.
A 1985 newspaper article gives us a rare look inside. It describes around a hundred boys living what the writer called a life of the château. The hotel still kept its 1940s elegance.
The orchestra room with the panoramic windows had become the director’s office. The old hotel dining room was lined with long tables for the boarders. After supper there was a five-minute memorization period for the next day’s recitation.
To the outside world, it looked idyllic. But a boarding school is a closed world. Children sleep in dormitories supervised by adults, far from home, with few ways to reach their parents.
Across Quebec, we now know how often closed worlds like this one hid things.
In April 2022, a man filed for a class action against the Brothers of Christian Instruction. He alleged that a brother sexually assaulted him when he was thirteen. He also said that when he reported it at the time, the school’s director punished him.
In May 2024, a Superior Court judge authorized the case. The class covers anyone sexually assaulted in Quebec by a member or employee of the order from 1940 onward, at any of its institutions.
That September, the full court filing was made public, and it was damning.
By then, more than eighty-seven people had come forward. Most of the abuse they describe took place between the 1950s and the 1970s, the same decades this building was full of boys.
The filing alleges a pattern. When abuse was reported to a school director, the accused brother was often simply transferred to another school. It also alleges that some directors were themselves abusers. And it claims the order chose to move and protect its members instead of helping the children.
The most troubling allegation concerns what happened to the records. The filing claims that the order’s archivists deliberately moved or destroyed documents about abuse, to shield the congregation from future lawsuits.
These allegations have not been proven in court, and the case is ongoing.
So where does Philipsburg fit into this?
The honest answer is that we don’t know.
The schools named publicly so far include institutions in Lac-Etchemin, Pointe-du-Lac, Montréal, Lévis and Dolbeau. They also include the Collège Saint-Romuald in Farnham, the same Farnham program that sent the first boys to this building in 1947.
No public report, lawsuit document, or news story that we found names the Pensionnat Saint-Jean-Baptiste.
That may mean nothing happened here. It may mean no one has come forward. Or, if the allegations about the archives are true, it may mean the records that could tell us are gone.
The lawsuit alleges that accused brothers were moved from school to school, and this building was part of the same network of schools.
In June 1997, with enrolment falling, the brothers closed the school for good. The last brothers packed up, and the building passed into other hands. Later it became Domaine Lafayette.
The chapel was blessed in 1947, and nearly eighty years of history have passed since. The hotel has outlived the orchestra and the schoolboys, and the order’s own records may not have survived.
What the building saw, only the people who lived here can tell us.
If you attended a school run by the Brothers of Christian Instruction in Quebec, the class action is file 500-06-001182-225 on Quebec’s class action registry. And if you’ve been affected by abuse, support is available through your local sexual assault centre.
