Toward the end of his life, Father Piché wrote:

This is how things stood in 1860 when I arrived in Lachine. … There were just 159 families and more than 20 inns. There was only one small school, where the police station is now, where Mr. and Mrs. Tessier taught 80 children, boys and girls. No convent, no high school and no church. … Where the convent is was the house of the Governor of Hudson’s Bay [Company], Sir George Simpson; it measured 60 feet by 50 and had 2 stories with a ground floor, tin siding and a dressed-stone façade with a balcony. In those days, it was the handsomest house in the Lachine area. The whole front was guarded by a small, low fence with turned posts, a magnificent garden on the presbytery side and, on the other side, a large, 2-story shed where birchbark canoes were put to be repaired at the end of winter.