Perhaps the item that best captures the connection between Canada and the Irish lumber barons is the moose head that greets you on entering Hamwood House, Dunboyne. It will confuse Irish visitors who know little if anything of Canada’s rich Irish heritage. But you will know.
The impact and influence of the Irish in Canada is an epic story that deserves to be remembered as a hugely consequential part of the wider story of the global Irish Diaspora. Aside from the many Irish who came to Canada as labourers, farmers, wives, mothers, home-builders, and soldiers, a select few emerged as leaders who helped shape the development of Canada. Best known among them were political figures, like Thomas D’Arcy McGee for his role in Canadian Confederation in when it became the first Dominion of the British Empire in 1867. Others played leading though unsung roles shaping Canada’s colonial administration, jurisprudence, science, journalism, literature, science, exploration, and policing.
The story of these Irish leaders and pioneers defies the stereotype of the Irish as labouring in the lower ranks of whatever they did, as brawn not brain, as workers and definitively not as managers, entrepreneurs, and architects of society. I hazard that this explains why the Irish role in Canada has been ignored and forgotten. Stereotypes are powerful because they reinforce, even define power structures about who is deigned to lead and who to follow. They are a foundational and sustaining trope of imperial projects shaping public opinion and academic biases.
One such group of Irish leaders exemplifies this tension between their influence and their obscurity, the Irish lumber barons. There were pioneers, indeed architects, of Canada’s lumber industry, the mainstay of the country’s economy for almost two centuries.
The key role of the Irish lumber barons was that more impressive where success required mastery of complex logistics, the management of large dispersed workforces, acute business acumen, a capacity for risk taking, an understanding of finance, and a capacity to leverage political influence. Moreover, it required a high degree of physical robustness in a vast, harsh, unforgiving, and largely undeveloped landscape. This was not a business for the feint hearted.
Lumber exports succeeded beaver pelts as British North America’s leading commodity as the 18th century turned to the 19th. They remained the engine of Canada’s economy throughout much of the 20th century. Lumber is still a multi-billion Canadian export. As an export industry, lumber began in earnest with Henry Caldwell, born near Belleek, Fermanagh in 1738.
Caldwell had a distinguished role fighting in the Seven Years War (French Indian War, 1754-1763), rising to become assistant to Quarter Master General Guy Carleton (born 1724 in Strabane) at the 1760 Siege of Quebec, the climatic defeat of the French. Retiring from the army in 1774, he bought land and a house in Quebec, and built a gristmill. The ink was barely dry on the lease when the American Continental Army invaded, led by Benedict Arnold, and seized Caldwell’s house. The Revolutionary Army marched on Quebec City. Caldwell again teamed up with Carleton who was leading the defence of the city. The main attack was led by Brigadier General Richard Montgomery (from Swords), who faced off against Caldwell in a series of attacks in December. The attacks were countered by Caldwell and petered out after Montgomery died in a hail of grapeshot. Caldwell was honoured with the task of taking the news of the victory to the king in England.
On his return to Quebec, Caldwell became a member of the Legislative Council, was appointed the chief tax collector (a dubious source of some of his fortune), resumed his business milling and selling flour to the British Army (£22,000 worth in 1810 alone), acquiring some 600,000 acres of land and building Caldwell Manor and his estate at Belmont. He cut such a dash in Quebec society that he was the model for the hero of Frances Brooke’s The history of Emily Montague (1769), Canada’s first novel.
By the 1790s, Napoleon had emerged from the turmoil of Revolutionary France waging a new type of warfare based on national mobilization. The centuries-long global rivalry with Britain entered its final decisive stage. Caldwell recognized the strategic value of Canadian lumber when war broke out between Britain and France in 1803. In 1804, he persuaded Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, the Lord of the Admiralty, that Canadian timber provide for the Royal Navy what it had formerly secured in the Baltic. Caldwell converted his flour mills to saw mills. The Canadian lumber industry experienced exponential growth with Napoleon’s Berlin Decree of 1806 which made trade with England an offence. England responded with heavy tariffs on imports, notably lumber. The Admiralty’s agreement to source lumber in British North American effectively created Canada’s main export economy for the rest of the 19th century, thanks to Caldwell’s strategic vision and business acumen.
Enter the next Irish lumber baron, George Hamilton from Dunboyne, related to Caldwell by his marriage to Anne Hamilton. She was the daughter of Alexander Hamilton who had settled in Knock, County Dublin from the family base in Armagh. The Hamiltons had been part of Ireland’s history for almost two centuries. Originally from Scotland, they were a famously talented lineage. The first Hamilton in Ireland had been Hugh, arriving from Scotland around 1616 and settling in Co Down. (Hugh was the son of Sir James Hamilton of Evandale and Helen Cunningham. Of Norman lineage, the storied Hamiltons had been in Scotland since at least 1271 with a record of one Walter FitzGilbert Hamilton.) Hugh’s great grandson, Alexander, established Newtownhamilton in Co Armagh but he himself had settled in Knock, Co Dublin. Alexander’s son Charles sold the townland of Newtownhamilton and purchased 500 acres in Dunboyne. There he built Hamwood House between 1779 and 1783 at a cost of £2,500.
Charles married Elizabeth Chetwood and they had fifteen children, of whom six survived to adulthood, five sons and one daughter. His son Charles (1772-1857) inherited Hamwood on the death of his father in 1818. George (born 1781) was the third son after Robert. Since he was not in line to inherit the estate, George was apprenticed to a miller, learning what was thought to be a rewarding business in the flour trade. William, the fourth son, joined the navy. John got a commission in the army. Eventually George and Robert established a business at Liverpool Cove importing timber from the Baltic, Madeira wines, and other goods.
Just as Napoleon’s Continental Blockade had boosted Caldwell’s prospects, it cut off George’s Baltic supply of lumber. No doubt advised by Caldwell of the new opportunities in Canada, George arrived in Quebec sometime between 1804 and 1806. In his early twenties, and backed by Caldwell’s introductions to the social elite of Quebec City, George was soon a man about town, a successful merchant, and a leading voice for the Tories.
By 1807 George was providing Quebec with Madeira wine and other fineries supplied by his brother Robert in Liverpool. William soon joined him and in 1806 was working with the Northwest Company, the upstart company competing with the Hudson Bay Company in the fur trade. By 1809, George and William were business partners as Auctioneers and Brokers, selling a wide variety of goods. By now, imports of European lumber to Britain had plummeted while Canada’s lumber exports were soaring in direct response. That year, the Hamilton brothers took a twenty-year lease of 425 acres from their uncle across the river from the city and called it New Liverpool Cove, named after the location of their business back in England. They were ready to enter the burgeoning transatlantic lumber trade. As the Dictionary of Canadian Biography records, ‘By early 1807 [George] was already among the 21 leading merchants and office holders of conservative convictions who constituted the exclusive Barons’ Club.’
While the small lumber industry had been well established in New Brunswick (Miramichi, St Croix and St John rivers) and Nova Scotia, the Ottawa Valley wilderness offered vast potential to meet the new demand from England as well as the burgeoning ship building industry in Quebec. Infiltration of the Valley by New England settlers had begun in 1800 when Philemon Wright, guided by an Algonquin, arrived from Massachusetts with a group to settle where the Gatineau and Ottawa Rivers met, overlooking the rapids at Chaudière Falls. They cleared two farms, the ‘Gateno’ and Columbia where Wright built a log cabin, sardonically called the Wigwam. The settlement of Wright’s Town followed, with a forge, bakery, tailor, cobbler and eventually a school. This became Hull, today’s Gatineau.
The local Ottawa Algonquin Anishinaabe community, led by Constant Pinesi, had been devastated by European diseases like smallpox and measles. They were in no position to offer resistance to the influx of settlers. Dams and forest clearance by settlers were ruining his traditional hunting grounds. The Algonquin had fought with the French in the wars against the British but had allied with the British with the defeat of the French at Quebec. Pinesi in vain protested to the authorities about the occupation and seizure of his lands either side of the Rideau River, lodging twenty fruitless petitions.
In 1806 Wright floated the first raft of timber and lumber to Quebec: 700 hundred logs, 9,000 boards and countless staves, all hand cut. He sold boards and staves along the way during the journey of sixty-two days to help pay for it. Thanks to Napoleon’s blockade, lumber from the Ottawa Valley was now greatly in demand. As the new industry developed, the system for cutting, hewing and transportation was improving. By 1813, the journey from Hull reduced to thirteen days. Wright shipped twenty rafts a year and employing over two-hundred men.
The Napoleonic wars in Europe created a lumber industry boom in Canada. George Hamilton soon had an expanded mill at Hawkesbury up and running. In the War of 1812, George became an officer of the Militia in Quebec and later Lotbinière. With his relentless energy, business acumen, and hardiness, George was a major figure in the business, social, military, and political communities of Upper and Lower Canada. As his business prospered so did the development of the Ottawa Valley. Meanwhile Constant Pinesi and his son joined the British to fight the invading Americans in the War of 1812-14, though his service did nothing to advance his claim to his lands.
Drawn to the Valley by the nascent lumber industry, and in partnership with Montreal businessman John Shuter, Americans David Pattee and Thomas Mears leased land from the Algonquins and Nipissings for use of the two islands at Hawkesbury (named after Robert Banks Jenkinson, Baron Hawkesbury and, as Lord Liverpool, British Prime Minister 1812-1827). At the head of the Long Sault Rapids, they built dams and the first saw mills on the Upper Canada (Quebec) side of the Ottawa River. By 1809, orders for timber from the Admiralty were worth £2,500,000 a year. Across the river at Grenville on the Quebec side, Scotsman Archibald McMillan established himself in 1810 with 19,000 acres. The Hawkesbury mills became the lynchpin in the supply of lumber from the Ottawa and Gatineau Valleys to Quebec, Montreal and across the Atlantic to Ireland and Britain.
Pattee and Mears lost control of their mills at Hawkesbury in 1811. They had found themselves over-stretched and in debt to Quebec merchants including the Hamiltons. George Hamilton took possession of the mill with the intention of selling it. However, he changed his mind and moved to Hawkesbury to run the operation. It was the start of a long and bitter feud with Mears and Pattee, beginning with a suspicious fire that destroyed Hamilton’s mill and stock the following year.
The rivalry was certainly primarily about control of the lumber business but there was too a clash between the aristocratic and conservative values of Hamilton and the democratic instincts of the American settlers like Wright, Pattee and Mears. Hamilton viewed these republican Americans with deep suspicion as seditious of the natural and aristocratic order of society. Hamilton believed in big business and sought to eliminate the small lumber operators who he believed added instability to a famously capricious and unstable lumber trade. This did not stop his own illegal logging on crown lands.
In 1816, the 34 years old George married 17 years old Lucy Susannah Christiana Craigie. They would have at least seven and upwards of ten children. When George’s brother William retired, George moved to Hawkesbury to oversee his mill, supported by brothers Robert in Liverpool and John in New Liverpool. The DCB explains their business model:
‘The mill-site, at the head of the Long Sault Rapids, was ideal. It was within easy reach of the timber stands on the Ottawa River and its tributaries. The rapids provided ample power and an obstacle to the rafting of timber to market at Quebec; lumberers unwilling to break up and then rebuild their rafts sold them to Hamilton. Finally, the Ottawa valley was opening up, and settlers were happy to sell logs from their lands in return for merchandise from the store that Hamilton had the astuteness to build. Unlike other up-country lumberers, Hamilton, as part of an integrated company, could avoid the costs and delays occasioned by middlemen at Quebec and in England. The Hawkesbury operation grew; by 1818 it employed 80 men, a large number for the time, and in 1822 it reportedly ran 40 saws.’
The lumber boom ended with the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. However, this was just part of the industry’s cyclical nature and exports would resume to the UK and in later decades to supply the rapidly expanding housing market in the United States.
Barely escaping financial ruin with another downturn in the market in the early 1820s, and losing three of his young children when their canoe overturned on the Ottawa River, as well as his house at Hawkesbury to fire, Hamilton undaunted rebuilt the business and by 1825 his mills were employing 200. By the 1830s, Hamilton and the other lumber barons were eyeing the white and red pines of the Gatineau Valley. Along with Peter Alyn, Philemon Wright and Sons, and Charles Low, Hamilton formed an Association and won approval for the Gatineau Privilege, designed to limit logging to the members of the Association, the intention to exclude and suppress smaller operators. The Association in turn invested in improvements to facilitate transport of the logs out of the Gatineau, into the Ottawa River and onward to the mills at Hawkesbury. Employment at Hawkesbury grew accordingly.
While on manoeuvres with the militia, Hamilton caught a cold and died in January 1839. The DCB sums up his influence:
‘George Hamilton was among the first of the great timber barons who played an important part in the public life of British North America in the 19th century. At his worst he was headstrong and opinionated, an inveterate tory of undemocratic principles and élitist sensibilities, prepared even to overstep the law in order to get his way. At his best he brought to the crude and brutal frontier that was the Ottawa valley in the early years of the timber trade a rare politeness of manners and generosity of spirit. Significantly, Hamilton was a gifted businessman and lobbyist. He bent his energy, determination, and influence to building an important firm in a fundamental sector of the colonial economy and to bringing a modicum of stability to a trade plagued by the fluctuating markets and the repeated spates of oversupply that generate the boom-and-bust syndrome of staple-producing colonies.‘
By now, one of the greatest strategists produced by the Irish Protestant Ascendancy, Arthur Wellesley (the Duke of Wellington) was putting into action his plan to fortify Canada against another attempted invasion by the US. Shocked by the War of 1812, Wellington believed that British North America was the key to Britain’s global hegemony. He wanted a canal to supply Montreal from Kingston via the Ottawa River should the Americans lay siege from the St Lawrence. Canals were to be vital part of a defensive network that included Martello Towers, rebuilt fortifications at Quebec City and Halifax, organized militias of retired soldiers (many Irish) and arms depots. Though designed to be militarily strategic, this infrastructure was a boon to the nascent Canadian economy. The construction of the Rideau Canal between 1826 and 1832 prompted the establishment of Bytown, called after the Colonel John By, the British Army engineer who designed and oversaw the Canal’s construction.
Yet if the Canal originated the settlement at Bytown, the lumber industry of the Ottawa and Gatineau Valleys sustained the town as well as providing a ready market for agricultural produce to feed the growing labour force army cutting, hewing, milling, and transporting lumber. As land was cleared of timber, it became farms that fed the lumber workforce and that income sustained towns and hamlets throughout the Ottawa Valley.
All of this economic activity attracted waves of Irish emigrants. The ships that took Canadian lumber across the Atlantic came back with stone ballast and their owners were more than happy to accommodate passengers for cheap fares. This facilitated the first large wave of Irish emigrants to Canada, Protestant farmers, mainly from Wexford and south Wicklow. This region in Ireland had witnessed terrible scenes of sectarian violence during the Irish rebellion of 1798 and in its bloody suppression by the local Yeomanry.
The canals (Lachine at Montreal, the Rideau, and the Grenville at the Long Sault rapids at Hawkesbury) and fortifications to create Wellington’s fortress Canada attracted the second wave of Irish emigrants into the area; Catholics leaving Ireland because of the agricultural depression that followed the conclusion of the Napoleon wars in 1815 (thanks again to Wellington!)
Among the emigrants was Nicholas Sparks (Catholic) from Wexford who got a job working with Philemon Wright’s son Ruggles. Soon he had graduated from labouring to buying supplies in Montreal and Quebec. Having accumulated some money, he bought the John ‘Honey’ Burrows land, 200 acres where the Rideau entered the Ottawa. It cost him ₤95. Today it is downtown Ottawa.
Construction of the Rideau Canal began in 1826. Many of its Irish labourers followed its builder, Thomas McKay, from the newly completed Lachine Canal at Montreal. Because he owned the land at the head of the canal, Nicholas Sparks was suddenly sitting on a fortune. As he said, he also became landlord to a town. Daniel O’Connor, attracted by this business opportunities, arrived from Tipperary. O’Connor became a successful businessman and civic leader, holding several government posts. Named in his honour, O’Connor Street Bridge across Patterson Creek opened up the Glebe to development. In 1826, O’Connor’s daughter Mary Anne By O’Connor was the first European girl born in Bytown (a boy had been born that year too but died in June 1827).
John Egan who arrived in Bytown from Galway in 1830, got a job as a clerk and soon had established a dry goods store at Aylmer, near Wright’s Town. It was not long before he began his lumber business, eventually becoming one of the richest and most influential lumber barons in the Ottawa Valley (thanks to the historian of the Ottawa Valley, Michael McBane has written Egan’s biography, a rare exception to the general amnesia about the Irish lumber barons).
By 1844, Egan was rafting 2.5 million feet of lumber on 55 rafts to Quebec each season. Ten years later his company employed 3800 men in 100 lumber camps, most of them Irish, the largest operation owned and managed by one individual. Egan advertised in ports like Cork, New Ross and Donegal for workers to come and he sold them land at 50c an acre. Once the emigrants had earned enough in the tough and dangerous work of culling timber, they bought land and became farmers. Like Sparks, Egan was close friends with Ruggles Wright. As the elected representative of Ottawa County (then ‘Pontiac’), Egan worked to develop its infrastructure and helped secure the reserve that is today’s Algonquin Anishinaabe’s Kitigan Zibi.
McBane writes:
‘From birth into a poor Catholic farming family in the west of Ireland to wealthy lumber baron and much loved Member of the Parliament, John Egan’s life was a spectacular transformation wrought by the combination of his natural talents and the opportunities provided in the Ottawa Valley. He had left for Canada aged 20 with few resources and little education. By the time he died of cholera aged 46, Egan had used his business and political pre-eminence to develop the lumber industry, encourage Irish settlement, secure land for the Anishinaabe reserve, support the campaign to make Bytown a capital city, and help lay the foundations for liberal democracy in pre-Confederation Canada.’
Army officers and the affluent settled on and to the west of the Hill overlooking the canal works at Bytown. The workers congregated in the swampy reaches of the riverbanks and what would become Lowertown, today’s Byward Market. The dense mix of mainly Irish, French, Scots and Indigenous craftsmen and labourers were a business opportunity. Supplying them with food and alcohol, Mother McGinty’s tavern was a famous haunt, run with fearsome oversight by the woman herself. As Grant Vogl of the Bytown Museum writes, “Sarah Ritchie was born in County Monaghan, Ireland about 1803 and became a somewhat legendary figure in early Bytown, specifically among the navvies (inland navigators) of Corktown along the works of the Rideau Canal. Family history recounts that Sarah was born into a well-to-do Protestant family and at an early age, fell in love with the family’s Catholic stable hand John McGinty (b.1799).”
Chief Pinesi continued to protest in vain against his land being stolen. Even though he and his son had proven their loyalty in the War of 1812, the authorities ignored him. Pinesi and his wife died of cholera of 1834. None of the Ottawa or Gatineau Valleys were ever subject to a treaty and they remain to this day unsurrendered. The Algonquin Anishinaabe still fight to undo this and reclaim their territory.
By now, with the Rideau Canal finished, the Irish looked to muscle in on the French control of the lumber industry. They were led by Peter Aylen, most likely born in Liverpool of Irish parents. Charismatic, cunning and violent, Aylen led the Irish in the Shiners’ war, a period of criminal chaos that terrorized Bytown throughout most of the 1830s. Estimates vary but fatalities perhaps numbered upwards of forty. When it was over, Aylen settled across the river and, as we have seen, became a respectable businessman and one of the Association that had won the Gatineau Privilege.
Andrew Leamy’s family arrived from Tipperary while he and his siblings were still children. Born in 1816, Andrew got his first job rafting Aylen’s lumber to Quebec and in at least one incident disrupted a meeting in Bytown as part of the Shiners’ War. Leamy then worked with Philemon Wright. Handsome and charming, Leamy earned a reputation for great physical strength and hardiness in a community of tough lumbermen. He used his fists when needed, tragically killing a young Scotsman, though he was acquitted having successfully argued self-defence. Despite this, Leamy became an enormously popular figure, known for his generosity and compassion.
The Irish leaders of Ottawa were tightknit. Nicholas Sparks had stayed close to the Wrights, married Philemon Jr’s widow Sally Olmstead and adopted his daughter, Erexina, and after he had died in a carriage accident a year after her birth. Leamy married Erexina; they were aged 19 and 15 respectively. They would have ten children. He eventually bought 160 hectares of the farm that he had worked, along with its pond and reputedly the famous ‘Wigwam’. With money to be made in lumber, Leamy decided to build a mill there, along with a canal connecting Lake Leamy to the Gatineau River to move the timber to the Ottawa River and on to Montreal.
A young carpenter building Leamy’s mill was J.R. Booth, son of Irish emigrants. Fascinated since boyhood with the mills and dams of the lumber industry all around him, Booth methodically learned the business. Having leased the mills at Chaudière Falls in 1857, two years later Booth won the contract to supply Thomas McGreevey, another son of Irish immigrants, who in turn had won the contract to build the new parliament. With this money, Booth bought the rights to the pines of the Madawaska River from John Egan’s widow. This would become the source of Booth’s fortune, eventually making J.R., as he was known, the richest man in Canada (and some say for a time the richest man in the world), and the largest private railway owner in the world. With lumber storage facilities at Rouses Point NY, a lumber operation in Burlington VT, a sales office in Boston, and a network of railways, lumber slides and canals, Booth’s lumber supplied the booming US market as its economy took off after the American Civil War.
McGreevey and Booth were great examples of the success of the first generation of Irish Canadians. Another was Tom Ahearn, whose father John and mother Nora had arrived from Ireland in rough and tumble Bytown. Tom was born in 1855 when Bytown became Ottawa. A precocious inventor, Ahearn became the Edison of Canada, bringing electricity to his home town (before it arrived in the US Congress), creating the electric tram system that defined the city’s residential development, and inventing the electric oven. And at the heart of the city were Sparks and O’Connor streets in tribute to their founding roles. One of the leading figures in Bytown-Ottawa from the 1840s to the 1860s was alderman and three-time Mayor Thomas J. Friel, son of Irish parents from Montreal.
Leamy became fast friends with Canada’s most famous Irishman, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, one of the architects of Canada’s new constitutional status as a Confederation and Dominion. Both friends must have celebrated well in 1867. With Confederation, D’Arcy McGee saw his dreams of a Canadian nation realised. He had been supported in this great project by the Irish Governor General Charles Monck who had visited Ottawa and picked Rideau Hall to be the official residence. While three of Leamy’s children had died, seven had survived to adulthood. He had invested heavily in the development of Hull and was instrumental in the creation of the Independent School Board the previous year. They had many reasons to raise a glass together in 1867.
Both Leamy and D’Arcy McGee were surrounded by their fellow Irish, with the Irish language commonly heard in the streets of Byward and throughout the Valleys. From Byward Market to the settlements of Douglas, Arnpior, Shawville and Sheenboro, to the towns of Almonte, Renfrew and Smiths Falls to the farms and settlements of the Gatineau Valley like Low and Brennan’s Hill, there were thriving Irish communities throughout the region.
Tragically, both Leamy and D’Arcy McGee were murdered just a year later. On 13 April 1868, a Fenian gunman shot D’Arcy McGee in the back of his head as he entered his lodgings. Eight days later, Leamy was found in the morning barely alive at the side of the road near his home, suffering from a bad head injury and bruising to his ribs. Evidently attacked the previous night on his return from Ottawa, his gold watch and chain were missing. He never regained consciousness and died later that day. He was buried in the cemetery of Notre Dame in Hull, on the land he had donated to the Oblate Fathers. Enquiries came to nothing and the authorities at Aylmer entered an open verdict. Ten years later, a disgruntled employee was arrested for his murder.
What does the role of the Irish in the lumber industry tell us? That they were pioneers, innovators, entrepreneurs, as well as community leaders. That they played critical early roles in its early development, notably Caldwell and Hamilton. In a very real way, they were the founders of Ottawa because while Wellington had commissioned the Rideau Canal and thereby created Bytown, the town itself would have failed without the lumber industry simply because the canal was never a commercial venture. Its purpose after all had been military. The next generation developed these pioneering businesses. By the 1870s, Hamilton Brothers (Georges’ sons Robert based in New Liverpool and John in Hawkesbury) were employing 1000 men, producing 700,000 feet of lumber per day, 40 million board feet a year, and generating almost $550,000 annually. John went on to become a Senator and a highly respected banker. And because lumber was so important to Canada, figures like Caldwell, Hamilton, Egan, Leamy and first-generation Irish Canadians like Booth and the Hamilton brothers played leading roles in the development of Canada itself.
Ottawa was famously polluted by sawdust choking the river and smoke from paper mills casting a poisonous smog over the town, leading Oscar Wilde to harangue his audience when he visited in 1881. Logs bobbed from shore to shore of the Ottawa River up to the 1970s. Yet there is little or no evidence of the industry now. Nor is there much if any physical evidence of this significant Irish heritage. The Hawkesbury Mills were literally swallowed by history when the Carillon Dam flooded the Long Sault Rapids in 1964. Few remember or know the origins of Lake Leamy’s name, that Sparks and O’Connor were from Ireland, or that Wellington played a key role in developing Canada’s early infrastructure and indeed its capital city.
Yet if you look hard enough, you can find it. The office of the Hawkesbury Mill (built in the early 1830s) survives as Le Chenail Cultural Centre. In street names like Dufferin, Lisgar, and Booth. The memorial to Thomas Ahearn in the Glebe. The graves of Egan and the Ahearns in Beechwood Cemetery and the graves in Hull of Sparks and Leamy. The granite bench unveiled last year memorializing John Egan in Aylmer. Irish placenames throughout the Ottawa Valley. Irish inflected accents in Douglas. Geddes’s stained-glass window in St Bartholemew’s Church. The Celtic Cross to those who died building the Rideau Canal. We’ll add to these traces soon: Bronze Shoes will be placed in Macdonald Gardens Park to mark the resting place of 360 Irish Famine emigrants who died in Bytown in 1847 (again thanks to Michael McBane who preserved the memory of this site, hitherto forgotten).
There is little if any appreciation of the Irish heritage of Canada though thankfully historians like Mark McGowan, David Wilson, Donal Akenson, Jane McGaughey, William Jenkins, and Michele Holmgren continue to explore it, regularly publish immensely valuable research. Thanks to their efforts and the survival of Irish studies courses, there is a strong foundation on which to develop awareness.
As for awareness in Ireland of Irish emigration to Canada, the twists and turns of our history conspired against it. The horrific drama of the Famine, the scale of emigration to the US in the generations that followed, the rise of Irish America, and the upheavals of 1916-1922 that took Ireland out of the British Empire and separated it from Canada within it, obliterated the memory of the Irish in Canada in the Irish public imagination.
Perhaps the item that best captures the connection between Canada and the Irish lumber barons is the moose head that greets you on entering Hamwood House, Dunboyne. On a trip to Ireland in April last year, I had sought out the current resident of Hamwood House, Charles Hamilton, the seventh in line to occupy the Hamilton seat at Hamwood. Affable and quietly spoken, he had returned to Hamwood after a career in England when he inherited the house and what was left of the estate. Too small to be a viable farm, Charles has opened the house to the public to defray the cost of repair and maintenance. Smaller than some of Ireland’s grand houses from the highpoint of the Ascendancy in the 18th century, Hamwood is a delightful place to visit. Centuries of artefacts sit in easy comfort and the atmosphere is redolent with memories of times past and Ireland’s complex colonial and colonizing history. The moose head in the hall will confuse Irish visitors who know little if anything of Canada’s rich Irish heritage. But you will know.
Eamonn
1 August 2024
eamonncmckee 