Although a relatively small city, Saint-Georges is often considered the Metropolis of Beauce Region because it's the largest city in the region. Saint-Georges is an important manufacturing centre, including textiles, steel forgings, garage doors, bicycles and truck trailers. The town is home to the headquarters of the Canam Group, a construction solutions company, and Manac, the biggest semi-trailer manufacturer in Canada. Both these companies are under operation of the Dutil family. The city has a wide array of local and national retailers and restaurants, as well as many services including financial institutions, schools of different levels, medical clinics, a hospital and several others that are not found elsewhere in the region. Carrefour Saint-Georges is the largest shopping mall in town and in the region. Saint-Georges is the headquarters of the intercity bus company Autocars La Chaudière, which provides bus services in the Beauce Region to Quebec City. The city also has a regional airport. The extension of Autoroute 73 to the city has been under discussion for almost thirty years, but the project has not yet been completed; the highway has been extended only to Beauceville, Quebec, approximately to the north, since November 2007. Assessments of the environmental and agricultural impacts of the next segment to Saint-Georges were underway as of August 2008.
The history of Saint-Georges goes back to the late seventeenth century, at which point the region was inhabited principally by "Algonquin Indians". The first European presence recorded is that of a Jesuit missionary called Father Gabriel Druillettes who made three visits in 1646, 1650 and, finally, in 1651, but there was no colonial settlement established at this time. By the middle of the next century, however, two colonial "seigneuries" had been established on the present site of Saint-Georges: these were Aubin-de-l'Isle and Aubert-Gallion. Records indicate that in 1760 one of these, Aubert-Gallion, passed into the hands of Marie-Anne Josephte de l'Estrigant de St-Martin and of her daughter Charlotte-Marie-Anne-Joseph Aubert de la Chesnaye. The two heiresses sold their inheritance in 1768 to William Grant, a Scotsmen with ambitions to become a major Canadian landowner. Grant died in 1805 or 1807 and the estate was sold again, this time to the German, Johann Georg Pfotzer. The canonical parish of Saint-Georges was created in 1835, and the secular parish/municipality in 1856.
