The history of the Knowlton Sanitarium
An idyllic countryside escape
ISubmitted by Brome County Historical Society
n December of 1954, the Knowlton Inn on Victoria Street burned to the ground and took with it an important part of twentieth century medical history. Before welcoming curious tourists, the building was home to a well-known sanitarium built to treat rapidly propagating respiratory diseases.
The German Doctor Hermann Brehmer founded the first sanitorium in Silesia in the 1850s as a countryside centre for rest and healing away from the contaminated air of squalid industrialised cities. As the problem of respiratory diseases grew – claiming the lives of 2 Montrealers every day between 1880 and 1900 – Canadian community or religious groups embraced the example set by Brehmer and founded their own sanitoria.
The village of Knowlton was no exception to this widespread community movement. The Seventh Day Adventist Church first came to the Eastern Townships from the United States in the midnineteenth century and became a significant community actor in Stanstead and Brome County. In 1902, Adventists converted a boarding house near the intersection of Victoria and Lansdowne into a sanitarium offering treatment in keeping with their theological beliefs on the human body. The pre-eminent Adventist of his time, Dr. John H. Kellogg – best known today for his eponymous cereal brand – officiated the opening of the Knowlton Sanitarium thereafter run by a Dr. White for five years. In 1908, for reasons unclear, possibly tied to the sanitarium’s contested status as a charitable institution, the Adventist Conference sold the sanitarium to Dr. N. Munden Harris. Harris operated the sanitarium from 1908 to 1927, and among the various papers relating to the institution in the BCHS Archives is a pamphlet emphasising that “if your patients or friends desire to get away from business worries or are convalescing from sickness and wish a good rest, advise them to go to Knowlton” and that “Knowlton is eight hundred feet above sea level, situated on the shores of Brome Lake and in the midst of most beautiful scenery.” In keeping with the spirit of sanitaria, the center presented itself as the perfect marriage between professional medical attention and leisure lakeside rehabilitation.
While modern medicine confirms that the Knowlton Sanitarium might have not been particularly adapted to treating respiratory diseases in a clinical sense, the history of the sanitarium highlights the efforts of community groups played to combat disease at the beginning of the twentieth century. The expansion of government healthcare and the spread of effective vaccines in the following decades eliminated the demand for sanitaria but to this day, Knowlton remains an idyllic countryside escape.