Auberge Baker

Auberge Baker has been welcoming visitors and tourists for more than eighty years. The ancestral building, built in 1840, was a modern construction at the time.

Only nearly a century later, in 1935, would the home be transformed into an inn, at the initiative of Alvin Baker, who rented the building before purchasing it in 1958. To the delight of visitors, Baker reportedly had a pet bear! Following the death of Alvin Baker in the early 1960s, “The Baker’s Inn” was run by his second wife Lucienne Hamel, before being taken over by various successive owners.

Picture: Alvin Baker and his bear. (Auberge Baker. coll. of the Centre de généalogie, des archives et des biens culturels de Château-Richer).

The small, partly buried constructions that can be seen along the Avenue Royale hillside are root cellars. The municipality of Château-Richer boasts an exceptional number of such cellars, which were used to protect food supplies from the winter frost.

Each cellar could contain a year’s worth of vegetables and some 200 twenty-five kilogram bags of potatoes! There are two types of root cellars—those with an arched top and those with a gabled top. Some of the cellars were restored in the early 2000s and several are still in use today.

Photo: Vegetable cellar in Château-Richer (Bergeron Gagnon inc, 2015. Inventaire du patrimoine bâti de la MRC de La Côte-de-Beaupré)