Photo credit: Radio Canada
At 496 Dufferin Street in Stanstead, Quebec, one of the last Second Empire-style buildings in this Eastern Townships border town has stood gutted and exposed to the weather for a year and a half. Built in 1884, the Collège des Ursulines served as a school for the Ursuline order and a cultural touchstone. Its mansard roofline and detailed masonry reflect a level of craftsmanship rarely built for a small border town, making it not only a physical landmark but a rare surviving link to Stanstead’s nineteenth-century architectural and institutional history.
In 2020, a connecting passage between the college and a neighbouring building was demolished, leaving a large, unfinished opening exposed to the elements. In early 2025, a lateral wall of the former school collapsed entirely, and windows at the front of the building have been left open. Heritage advocates have pointed to the building as a textbook case of “demolition by neglect”, the slow deterioration of a heritage building until demolition becomes the only remaining option.
The building’s precarious status is compounded by a bureaucratic gap. Because the college was never formally designated as a heritage property or included in the regional municipality’s built heritage inventory, it is currently ineligible for Quebec’s provincial heritage fund. Stanstead’s municipal government requested emergency provincial assistance for the college at the end of June 2026 and remains uncertain of the outcome. The stakes were underscored just months earlier, in the fall of 2025, when a similarly neglected heritage building nearby, the 1812 Wilder-Pierce building, was demolished after years of inaction by its owner despite having been formally protected.
Even amid this uncertainty, a non-profit is actively studying a plan to convert the campus’s rear building (the former school portion, structurally distinct from the ornate 1884 heritage building fronting Dufferin Street) into roughly 40 units of affordable housing, a proposal that could also leverage a renewed purpose for the rest of the complex. The project suggests a pathway forward for progressive housing development and heritage property in harmony.
Location: Stanstead, QC
Endangered Places List: 2026
Status: Endangered
