7 Wright Street
The Suzanne Joubert House

On April 24, 1871, after the opening of Front (Hanson) Street, Lucinda Cushing, wife of George Millen, an engineer at E. B. Eddy, bought the land between the new street and the creek. In September, she sold half of the land along the water to George White.

White was a millwright at the Eddy factory. Of Scottish descent, he was born in Ontario around 1835. He was widowed in 1881 and left with three children: Lilly, age 16, born in Ontario, and Charles, 14, and Annie, 8, both born in Quebec.

In April 1885, White sold the house to Samuel H. Benedict, son of the Irishman Samuel Benedict, who was an early settler in the region. Samuel H. was born around 1851. He became a salesman and shared the house with his wife, Mary Hurdman, and another adult. Mary stayed on after the death of her husband, some time before 1895, and rented the house to another millwright, Thomas Checkley. He would be followed by Johnny Painter, a papermaker and William Gordon, a foreman.

In 1903, Frederick McLean, a neighbour living at 24 Front Street, bought the house as a rental property. In January 1947, he transferred it to his son Mereweather, who sold it to Albin Styles on September 2. Styles kept the house for five years and then sold it to Nelpha Lepage and his wife. In 1972, they gave it to John Armstrong and his wife, who kept it only two years. The Armstrongs sold it to José Demelo who sold it in turn to Suzanne Létourneau-Joubert in 1983.

Suzanne Joubert is an artist whose paintings have been exhibited from Hull to Tokyo, by way of Quebec, Montreal, Toronto and Los Angeles. This Montrealer lived in Buckingham for several years before settling in Hull. She taught plastic arts at the University of Ottawa, where she had received the gold medal of excellence in 1973 as an undergraduate in Plastic Arts. Between teaching and painting, she managed to earn her Masters in Plastic Arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal in 1989. She had a number of solo exhibitions between 1988 and 2000, and her canvases hang in several public and corporate collections. She was involved in regional affairs and contributed to the little book, Le village d'Argentine (The Town of Argentine), published in 1992. In 1991, she moved from Hull and this house to Mont-Saint-Hilaire. Joubert now resides in Montreal.