Municipality of Franklin Reaches Resolution with Owners of Doréa Site

On September 19th, the Municipality of Franklin passed a resolution concerning the Doreá site, giving current owners Les Immeubles Dandurand Inc. one year to either sell the property or demolish it, at the cost of the company.

According to Director General François Gagnon, the owners of the buildings that make up the area formerly known as Doréa Institute are cooperating, providing the municipality with updates every two months. According to councilor Douglas Brooks, the reasons for this decision are largely motivated by public security. At least 20 arrests have been made on site, to date.

Closed in 1995, The Doréa Institute has become a hub for youngsters and ghost hunters alike. It is made up of approximately ten visible buildings, as well as a number of smaller buildings in the woods, including a sizeable barn. According to Gagnon, the family is trying to sell the smaller buildings located on the north of Covey Hill Road, but have encountered some difficulties due to the location of the site’s water source, which is attached to the main building. On first glance, the site is in ruin, but there is a certain beauty to its starkness. Purchased by Les Immeubles Dandurand Inc in the nineties, the building has fallen prey to vandals, who have inflicted considerable damage to the site.

There is a cloud of mystery that surrounds the site known to locals as Doréa. A quick Google search will bear few facts—instead, research inquiries are flooded with a series of haunting photographs taken by trespassers. This is unfortunate, as the building was originally established around 1954 as a site of positive endeavor by priests Roger Roy and Albini Girouard (La Presse, August 2015), serving as a sanctuary for a number of children who have since been dubbed “Duplessis Orphans”. In the 80s, the home operated as a group home for the intellectually challenged. One source familiar with the site when it was in operation claimed that the patients seemed well taken care of (at this point, the site was managed by the Les Services de Réadaptation du Sud-Ouest et du Renfort (SRSOR)).

Of course, the better known part of this story may be the site’s correlation to the afore mentioned Duplessis Orphans, a group of approximately 20,000 orphaned children who were falsely deemed “mentally ill” by the former Premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis. The former Premier, a strict Catholic, confined these children to psychiatric institutions run by the Catholic Church in the 40s and 50s for fiscal reasons (many of these children were perfectly healthy—they had simply born out of wedlock, orphaned or abandoned). The government of Quebec has since offered the 1500 qualifying survivors a settlement, accepted in 2001. "[The Duplessis Orphans] accepted the offer unanimously but with a very clear message, that even if this offer is insufficient, they are accepting it because they are reaching the ends of their lives,” wrote writer Bruno Roy (Toronto Star, July 2001).