Saint-Simon Church

The oldest church still holding worship services between Saint-André and Gaspé, the Saint-Simon Church has been pointing toward the heavens since 1836. 

In 1831, the renowned Thomas Baillairgé was in mid-career when he tackled the plans for this modest sanctuary in a small parish in the Lower St. Lawrence region. He and his mentor, Abbé Jérôme Demers, had just completed the impressive Nicolet Seminary, arguably the masterpiece of their partnership.

For Saint-Simon, Baillairgé was inspired by the Récollet model, typical of the New France era. Its basket-handle arches are reminiscent of a building style that disappeared during the 1870s. Due to a lack of resources, the fieldstone construction proved laborious and took five years to complete. The communities recruited specialized craftspeople, selecting them meticulously in a hiring process they took seriously.

The shape is very similar to that of the very first stone church in Rimouski, erected ten years earlier and converted into a school and then a regional museum in the 1970s. The facade of Saint-Simon Church was redone in 1914, which took away some of its former charm. It’s the only church in the region whose exterior has been completely restored. If you look closely, you can see that the facade does not feature the same type of masonry as the other sections of the church.

Looking at it from the outside, who would suspect that this place of worship, nestled in a Lower St. Lawrence village, contained a hidden treasure inside? It was so unlikely that it took more than 150 years for the parish corporation to discover that the painting of the parish’s patron saint, which sits above the altar, was the work of one of Quebec’s greatest 19th-century painters. It was only in the 2000s that the discovery was made. The painting, which had turned grey due to smoke from the wood-burning stove, bore the signature of Antoine Plamondon, a prolific portrait painter whose works are exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. 

Thanks to a grant from the Ministère de la Culture, des Communications et de la Condition féminine du Québec, the unlisted work was restored to its former glory in 2009. The Centre de conservation du Québec spent months restoring the painting, created by the artist in 1852 and then inadvertently remaining incognito for all those years. 

Genealogy buffs will find it interesting to learn that this painter was the great-uncle of famous lyricist Luc Plamondon, who was himself inspired by an iconic church for the musical Notre-Dame-de-Paris. “Stone by stone, day by day / From century to century, with love,” a translation of the words he sings at the end of the song Le temps des cathédrales. 

Saint-Simon has only had a single church. As Plamondon sings, its stones carry the history of the people, the history of an entire village.