McGill Library
McLennan Library Building3459 rue McTavish
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 0C9
H. Ross Wiggs
Fonds
3 cm of textual records
198 architectural drawings
H. Ross Wiggs, architect and painter, was born in Quebec City in 1895. He studied Architecture at McGill University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In Montreal, he practiced architecture from 1933 to 1967, primarily on his own and with partners Lawton and Walker from 1955 to 1967. He studied drawing and painting with William Brymner and Maurice Cullen. Wiggs served in the First World War and his war drawings are in the collection of the War Museum in Ottawa. Drawings of houses designed by the architect painter and executed once the houses were completed are in the family collection of his work. Wiggs was also Chairman of the Historical and Fine Buildings Committee from 1953 to 1954. He died in 1986 in Hamilton, Ontario.
The architectural material was donated to the archive by John Bland.
Fonds contains 198 drawings (1938-1940) documenting the early development of the Mont Tremblant ski area for Mr. Joseph Ryan in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec. A wide variety of buildings including the lodge, a church, staff house as well as a series of cabins, cottages and out buildings are documented through watercolour and original tracings which are standard sets of plans, sections, elevations and details. There are also various site development drawings showing the topography as well as the layout of buildings, the water, sewers, and electrical systems. Blueprints by G. Lorne Wiggs represent the electrical, plumbing and mechanical layouts for many of the buildings within the development. The fonds also contains other material related to Mont Tremblant including, specifications for the General Contract of a Development for Joseph B. Ryan, Esq. at Mont Tremblant, Quebec 1939, a record of drawings and distribution of prints, and one printed volume (John and Frankie O'Rear, "The Mont Tremblant Story Including Skiing the Mont Tremblant Way", A.S. Barnes and Company: New York, 1954).