Calixa Lavallée was born in Verchères on July 28, 1842 — the son of a blacksmith who also tuned organs. His father taught him to play one by the age of eleven. By thirteen, he was performing piano concerts at the Théâtre Royal de Montréal.

At fifteen, he moved to the United States and settled in Rhode Island. When the American Civil War broke out, he enlisted in the Union Army as a band musician — one of tens of thousands of Canadians who fought for the North.

The anthem began as a Quebec song.

Lavallée returned to Montreal in the 1870s. In 1880, the Lieutenant Governor of Quebec commissioned him to set music to a patriotic poem by judge Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The poem was written for Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day — Quebec’s national holiday, named for its patron saint. Not for Canada Day.

The result was O Canada. It premiered in Quebec City on June 24, 1880.

For more than a generation, it was sung mainly at Quebec functions. The English lyrics most Canadians know today were written by Robert Stanley Weir in 1908.

A hundred years before it became Canada’s.

O Canada was not adopted as the official national anthem of Canada until 1980 — by Act of Parliament — exactly a hundred years after Lavallée wrote it.

Lavallée did not live to see it. He died in Boston in 1891 of throat cancer, at the age of forty-nine. He never heard the song played as his country’s anthem.

The recognition came later.

The Canadian government issued stamps and commemorative coins in his honour. There is a Lavallée Park in Verchères, and a village in Montérégie called Calixa-Lavallée.

The country named a place after the man who wrote what would become its anthem.