Saint-Jérôme 6.05

Saint-Jérôme, located about 60km northwest of Montreal along Autoroute des Laurentides. The town is a gateway to the Laurentian Mountains and its resorts.The town is named after Saint Jerome, a church father best known as the translator of the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into Latin. His translation is known as the Vulgate.HistoryThe territory where the present city of Saint-Jérôme now stands was granted in 1752 by the marquis de la Jonquière, governor of New France, as the seignory of Augmentation des Mille-Iles . From the 1760s to the 1840s, the seignory was owned by the Dumont and Lefebvre de Bellefeuille families, living in the town of Saint-Eustache, 25km to the south. The Dumont and the Lefebvre conceded the farmland to colonists coming mostly from the region lying north of Montreal. The emerging town was then known under the name of Dumontville. The Catholic parish of Saint-Jérôme was constituted on November 15, 1834 and the village itself was constituted on July 1, 1845 by governor Metcalfe.François-Xavier-Antoine Labelle, a Roman Catholic priest who was the great "colonizer" of the North of Montreal, was in charge of the pastoral administration of Saint-Jérôme of 1868 until his death, in 1891. Eight years after his arrival, he had a railroad built linking Saint-Jérôme and Montreal.