The cities of Canada’s interior owe their existence to rivers. For Calgary, the water courses were the Elbow and Bow rivers. Where the two flowed together is where a detachment of the North-West Mounted Police built a command post in 1875 to orchestrate operations to protect the fur trade on the plains. The fort was named after Ephrem-A. Brisebois, a Mounted Police officer, but a year later Colonel James Farquharson Macleod renamed it Calgary after a village on the Isle of Mull in his native Scotland.
The Canadian Pacific Railway built into the area in 1883 and the town was incorporated the following year. The young settlement received a sobering wake-up call on November 7, 1886 when fire broke out in the rear of a flour and feed store. Before the conflagration burned out the flames consumed fourteen wooden buildings, a considerable chunk of the town at the time. No lives were lost but city officials quickly drafted a law that any substantial downtown building going forward must be fashioned from Paskapoo sandstone.
The growth of “Sandstone City” was spurred by the Dominion Government that offered grazing land for rent for one cent per acre up to 100,000 acres. The era of big ranches and cattle barons was on in the rapidly growing frontier town. The four biggest - Pat Burns, George Lane, A.J. McLean and A.E. Cross - transformed a local agricultural fair into the Calgary Stampede in 1912 as a celebration of their long careers. They guaranteed $100,000 to fund a six-day rodeo and the city built an arena on its fairgrounds. The event was a smashing success but the “Big Four” saw the Stampede as a closing act and expressed no interest in a sequel. Civic leaders, however, doggedly pursued the idea until the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede became a fixed annual event in 1923 and eventually a famous worldwide attraction.
Oil was first discovered in Alberta in 1902 but Calgary did not begin transforming from an agricultural and ranching community until the province’s most prolific oil reserves were tapped in the Leduc Formation on February 13, 1947. Until that point Imperial Oil had suffered through 133 dry holes, always missing the 300 million barrels of black gold trapped underground. Over 500 oil exploration companies were formed within days. By the time of the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s Calgary was well positioned to fill the petroleum void. The burst in oil prices led to a building boom that sent steel-and-glass skyscrapers soaring in the downtown core, hard by heritage structures that seldom rose above ten storeys.
Sensing the threat, Calgary officials began preservation efforts. The flavour of turn-of-the-20th century Calgary was salvaged on much of 8th Avenue which became touted as Stephen Avenue and transformed into a part-time pedestrian mall. Our walking tour of Sandstone City will revolve around Stephen Avenue and will begin where the old and new stand side-by-side, clashing in stark opposition to each other...
Three rivers flow into a confluence in the central part of Prince Edward Island’s south shore and this was deemed a most advantageous spot for early settlement. When Samuel Holland, the first Surveyor General of British North America, presented his evaluation of what was then called St. John’s Island in 1764 he selected this site for the county seat. The next year Charlottetown, named for the wife of King George III, was designated colonial capital.
By the time the island’s name was changed to honour the Duke of Kent and Strathearn in 1798, during his term as Commander-in-Chief, North America, Charlottetown was building its identity as a fishing port and shipbuilding centre. In 1855 Charlottetown, some 6,500 residents strong, was incorporated as a city.
On September 1, 1864 a congregation of 24 delegates arrived to meet in the colony’s spacious legislative building that had been constructed two decades earlier. Over the following days at the Charlottetown Conference the groundwork would be laid for the exit from the British Empire and the establishment of Canada as an independent country.
Occasional fires, especially the Great Fires of 1866 and 1884, helped shape much of today’s urban core of downtown Charlottetown. The result is an eclectic mix of Victorian buildings, many taking advantage of the distinctive hewed red sandstone quarried on the Island. And our walking tour to explore the past and the present of this seaside capital will begin at the “Birthplace of Confederation...”
There have been more than a few occasions when Edmonton could simply have ceased to exist. In the 1780s the Hudson’s Bay Company decided to pursue an aggressive strategy of setting up more and more trading posts further west ahead of its competition. In 1795 one of those on a bend in the North Saskatchewan River was named Fort Edmonton after a London suburb by a Hudson Bay employee now lost to the fog of history. Hudson’s Bay Edmonton House was built nearby the North West Company’s Fort Augustus. It was such wild country that even fur traders engaged in cut-throat competition saw the merits of teaming up so the two moved into the same stockade, with the post separated by a dividing wall. Although Fort Augustus was much larger, it was Fort Edmonton that emerged out the other end when the North West Company lost the fur trade battles in 1821.
The next crisis came with consolidation of posts. Edmonton was on the chopping block until the company’s chief trader John Rowand convinced his bosses otherwise and Edmonton emerged as the company’s most important location west of Fort Garry, and the virtual “Gateway to the North.” As the dominant administrative and transportation centre for the next half-century was assumed to be the natural pathway for the Canadian Pacific Railway when it planned to breach the continent but Parliament amended the railroad’s charter in 1882 to send the route south through an unknown outpost called Fort Calgary.
Some of the early settlers moved away but others banded together to found the Edmonton Board of Trade and kickstart the Calgary and Edmonton Railway to link the settlement to the rail line. But when it arrived in 1891 the road only ran to the south shore of the river. Edmonton was faced with an existential crisis. Pack up and pivot development to the railhead where the settlement was likely to become a satellite of Calgary or stubbornly stay on the north bank and attempt to carry on its position as “Gateway to the North” without rail service.
Civic leaders responded by incorporating as a town and working to bring a competing railroad north of the river. The discovery of gold in the Yukon several years later helped validate the decision. When consolidation came in the early 1900s it was South Edmonton, which incorporated as Strathcona, that was swallowed up by Edmonton. When Alberta was made a province in 1905 Edmonton got the capital and the University of Alberta. A population of only a couple thousand that walked on dirt streets at the dawn of the 20th century was 72,000 riding streetcars down paved streets a decade later.
The general malaise that settled over western Canada with war and economic hard times beginning in 1913 affected Edmonton more than most. But once again its position as “Gateway to the North” shook the community out of its somnambulence as an agricultural and government town. During World War II Edmonton was a base for the United States to build the Alaska Highway and the municipal airport, Blatchford Field that had been Canada’s first licensed airfield in 1929, became the hub for the Northwest Staging Route flying planes from Montana to Alaska. Edmonton also became the staging point for developing the oil sands of northern Alberta and diamond mining operations in the Northwest Territories.
Our walking tour of North America’s northernmost city with a population over one million will begin with a landmark whose days of dominance were once as imperiled as the the town’s, but is now perched on a lookout above the North Saskatchewan River as prominent as ever...
There are good things and bad things about a remote location, say 60 miles inland from the mouth of a river. For one thing the chance of being attacked by an enemy’s rampaging armada is signifi- cantly reduced. On the other hand, it is just so, you know, remote.
The Maliseet peoples had long inhabited the area around this bend in the Wolastoq (“beautiful riv- er”), pulling salmon from the pools and gathering berries from the bogs. In the 1690s Joseph Rob- ineau de Villebon, who was in charge of the French colony of Acadia, was enamored by the defen- sive possibilities of this location and constructed Fort St. Joseph where the Nashwaak flowed into the French-named St. John River. He declared it the Acadian capital and indeed a British expedition was repelled in 1696. But the place was too far from everything and the French soon packed up and moved across the Bay of Fundy to Port Royale.
After several more decades French settlers tried again on the south side of the river with a village they called Pointe St. Anne. It would be abandoned after reaching a peak of 15 families and 83 residents. Permanent settlement (save for a few fur trappers) finally arrived with British Loyalists hightailing it out of the new United States in 1783. When New Brunswick achieved formal colonial status the following year governor Thomas Carleton also declared nascent St. Anne’s Point the cap- ital since it was so far from the coast and potential American incursions. He also changed the name to honour the second son of King George.
The British set about constructing all the requisite government and military buildings in Frederic- ton and set up the bones of the future University of New Brunswick. There would eventually be
a brisk trade in lumber and some leatherworks and some carriage building but the main economic driver of the town would be government and education. In the 1840s the Anglican Church was making plans to build a cathedral, the first on British soil in about 300 years. The prospect of such a significant undertaking in a frontier capital with fewer than 10,000 souls was so troubling that Queen Victoria stepped in a elevated Fredericton to the status of “city” so construction could pro- ceed.
England envisioned Fredericton as a miniature London perched on an inland river in the New World. It never quite worked out that way. Fire was a regular visitor: 1849, 1854, 1880, 1911. Spring flooding when the ice began to break up in the St. John River was another problem, even with dams built to divert the flow. But plenty of consequential buildings have survived and we will begin our explorations at one of the many architectural ornaments that grace the roomy streets laid out in the original town plan in 1785...
There was northing organic about the creation of Halifax. On June 21, 1749 Edward Corwallis sailed into Halifax Harbour with 1,176 settlers and their families. Their arrival was a direct violation of the British treaty with the Mi’kmaq in 1726. Within a few months the native raids began as the British were busy fortifying the area.
In short order the new Halifax residents were embroiled in the Seven Years War with France and the new settlement - and capital - became the headquarters of the Royal Navy’s North American Station. The base was the launching pad for the Siege of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island that led to the submission of the French in Atlantic Canada, a much-needed refuge for General William Howe during the American Revolution and the primary staging grounds for the Royal Navy during the War of 1812.
Halifax’s war-filled days wound down after the Royal Navy transferred operations to Bermuda in 1818. The town eventually settled into the business of trade and finance. Samuel Cunard, who was born here in 1787, launched one of the world’s most successful steamship lines from the Halifax docks. Two of Canada’s most powerful banks took their first deposits in Halifax.
After Confederation Halifax did not prosper as anticipated as the leadign city of the new Atlantic Canada. In the following half-century the population rose only from about 60,000 British to 80,000 Canadians. With the arrival of World War I, however, Halifax moved to the forefront of Maritime cities. Halifax was the point of departure for most Canadian troops and the city’s infrastructure was modernised.
On December 6, 1917, however, a French cargo ship called the SS Mont-Blanc, laden with high explosives, rammed the SS Imo flying a Norwegian flag, in the Halifax Harbour. Even though the Mont-Blanc was moving only two kilometres per hour the collision caused a fire which detonated the French ship’s deadly cargo. The Halifax Explosion - some say the larrgest man-made explosion before World War II - claimed some 2,000 lives and left another 9,000 injured. Blocks in the city’s North End lay in ruins.
Halifax set about rebuilding and in the century since has not been shy about sacrificing old build- ings for new in the process. But there are still plenty of pockets of heritage buildings in downtown Halifax Regional Municipality (the City of Halifax, the City of Dartmouth and the Town of Bed- ford amalgamated in 1996) and we will begin our explorations to find them from a spot that har- kens back to a martial past...
Hamilton has hooked on to several nicknames through the years but none has ever been more fitting than “The Ambitious City.” That ambition was in its genes, tracing back to founder George Hamilton. George was one of four sons of Robert Hamilton, a Scottish businessman who landed a contract to supply goods to the British Army at Fort Niagara in 1780 which became the basis of the family fortune.
George Hamilton signed on to the War of 1812 when he was 24 years old and during his service likely gained knowledge that the creation of the Gore District was being planned for colonial Upper Canada. In 1815 Hamilton purchased 257 acres from James Durand with an eye towards building a town that would become the new district capital. New neighbour Nathaniel Hughson was all in on the scheme and together they offered land to the crown for a courthouse and jail.
With help from Durand in the House of Assembly the Gore District was hatched on March 22, 1816 and the as yet non-existent Hamilton was named the district town. George got to work laying out a street grid for the townsite with 80 lots set up as homesites. Just being named a district capital was no guarantee for a young town’s success. Many a government in the North American frontier moved around in the early 1800s and private towns were especially vulnerable to such vagaries.
Hamilton, motivated as much by the desire to keep his land valuable as civic pride, worked hard to ensure the survival of his town. The Burlington Canal was constructed in 1823 and the new court house was ready by 1827, at about the same time all his original lots were finally sold. He established an important market and added more building lots from his land. George Hamilton died in 1836, not living to see his namesake town achieve Official City status a decade later but he had put the venture on solid footing.
One of the last important things to happen during Hamilton’s lifetime was the chartering of the London and Gore Railroad on March 6, 1834. The line ran from Niagara Falls to Windsor and when it was opened in 1854 the then-named Great Western Railway (GWR) lopped 200 miles off the journey from New York City and Boston to the boomtowns of Chicago and Milwaukee. The GWR located its maintenance shops in Hamilton and the city’s industrial foundation was laid.
Soon there would be iron and steel mills. And then beer and tobacco and textiles. Procter & Gamble and the Beech-Nut Packing Company established their first operations outside the United States in Hamilton. Studebaker built an assembly line in the city. Hamilton was a working town, a union town, a progressive town. The first telephone exchange in the British Empire was set up here in 1878.
Most of the industry has shuttered now but Hamilton has segued into the service business, growing to over 500,000 residents with amalgamations of surrounding municipalities. Along the way the “Ambitious City” made a concerted effort to rid itself of the “Victorian rot” on the streets and embrace modernistic structures. To see the results of those efforts our walking tour of the hub of the Golden Horseshoe will begin at the point that George Hamilton designed to be the most important intersection of his nascent town grid, where King Street, the main east-west road, crossed James Street, named for one of Hughson’s sons and the principle north-south thoroughfare...
European settlement at the head of the Bay of Fundy set down roots in the 1670s when French Acadians built homes at a 90-degree bend in the Petitcodiac River. In 1755 the British captured nearby Fort Beauséjour and expelled the French from the region. No move, however, was made to repopulate Le Coude, as it was known from the Acadian word for “The Bend.”
The first to try were a band of Pennsylvania Dutch from the American colonies in 1766, brandishing a land grant from the Philadelphia Land Company. The eight families were led by Nathaniel Shiverick and they christened their new home The Bend of the Petitcodiac. Growth was painfully slow for the mostly agrarian community. There were no real roads and those who arrived by boat usually left. Census takers could count the number of households in The Bend on four hands until the 1830s.
In 1836 the Westmorland Road became usable all year round and the village began to form as an important stopover between Halifax and Saint John. Then Joseph Salter arrived and began to use the abundant spruce forests to build ships. By the 1840s there were over 1000 workers assembling the wooden packets and clippers of the day. Business was so good that The Bend was able to incorporate as a city in 1855 with Salter as mayor. The new name was retrieved from the conqueror of Fort Beauséjour, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Monckton. Paperwork was lax in those days and a “k” went missing in the shuffling of paperwork.
Unfortunately the steamship era was upon the seas and the toll was so great on the sleek wooden ships of the day that Moncton was forced to give back its civic charter in 1862. Gloomy days did not last long, however, as the denuded city was selected as the linchpin for the Intercolonial Railway of Canada (IRC) in 1871. Moncton was now a railroad town and would be so for 120 years. With some deft political maneuvering and its history with the IRC, Moncton became the eastern terminus for the National Transcontinental Railway in 1912. The newly repurposed city was soon the home for the Canadian National Railways locomotive repair shops for the Maritimes.
The railroad and its attending industries left abruptly in the 1980s and the city was once again in crisis. This time civic boosters cast a line back as far as it could go - to the region’s Acadian origins. Moncton had become a centre for the Acadian minority in the region and its cultural strains were now given more prominence. The city’s emergence as a bastion of bilingualism was parlayed into economic services leading to a revitalisation known as the “Moncton Miracle.”
The economic resurgence cost the downtown area many of its heritage buildings but there is still much to see from the days when Moncton was the railroad capital of Eastern Canada. And we’ll start our tour at the tallest freestanding structure in the Maritime provinces...
This is all you need to know about how important St. Catherine Street is - when the Montreal Canadians win the Stanley Cup, as they have done more than any other National Hockey League franchise, this is the street the team uses for its parade route. The emergence of St. Catherine Street can be more or less traced back to 1891 and a decision by Henry Morgan to move “uptown” and away from the financial houses of “Old Montreal.”
In short order six large department stores had lined up along St. Catherine Street and Montreal had a retail artery the equal of any town in North America. The move coincided with the development of new transportation options as the city began to spread out. Many of Canada’s business and industrial leaders settled nearby under the slopes of Mount Royal that came to be known as the Golden Square Mile.
It was said that 70% of all the wealth in Canada could be found behind the gates of the resplendent mansions on the blocks on either side of Sherbrooke Street. A Who’s Who of North American architects was busy on residential commissions and on retail work two blocks south on St. Catherine Street.
But times change. There was a Great Depression, a major world war and shifting attitudes. In 1977 the passage of the Charter of the French Language made French the mandatory language when dealing with companies with French-speaking staff. Many English-oriented businesses decamped from Montreal to Toronto. It was the culmination of an era that saw the decline of Anglo-Canadian influence in the province. Those elegant mansions were regarded as a nagging symbol of decades of French Canadian oppression and the wrecking balls flew with abandon.
These days only a fraction of the opulence of the Golden Square Mile remains, almost nothing south of Sherbrooke Street. In the place of the historic mansions are mostly faceless steel and concrete high rise towers. The Canadians have not paraded down St. Catherine Street since 1993 and probably would not recognize much of what they would ride past today. We will take a look along St. Catherine Street and Sherbrooke Street and see what heritage buildings still stand and we will begin our explorations where Henry Morgan set up shop 125 years ago...
Once French explorer Jacques Cartier started poking around the St. Lawrence River in 1535 he had no choice but to discover what would become modern-day Montreal - it was as far as ocean-going ships could sail upstream before encountering impassable rapids. After planting the French flag there were repeated attempts to establish a fur trading post on the spot but the Mohawks who lived in the area defended their traditional hunting grounds with spirit.
Even after what would ultimately be the permanent settlement of Ville-Marie was established in 1642 its success was scarcely assured. At one point, with the population reduced to 50 by native defenders there were plans to pull up stakes and head back to Quebec City. But the outpost survived and officially became Montreal in 1705. Stone fortifications began rising and a dam was built to link the river to the Île de la Visitation by Simon Sicar which spurred the rise of water-powered industry. It was one of the great engineering triumphs of New France.
Soon the Montreal area was home to over 20,000 people and realized its destiny as the center of fur trade in North America. Then in 1759 the British achieved what the Mohawks and Iroquois Nation couldn’t quite accomplish - they drove the French out of North America on the battlefield on the Plains of Abraham. The people are allowed to stay and keep their French language and institutions as they so desire. Montreal remained primarily French until the 1830s; it was incorporated as a city in 1832 as more British citizens pointed towards the Saint Lawrence Seaway. By the 1850s Montreal was the largest and most important city in British North America.
The streets began to reflect the status of Montreal as the economic centre of the Dominion of Canada with ornate company headquarters designed by some of the leading architects in Great Britain and the United States. Well into the 20th century, as the population climbed over one million, Montreal builders were constrained by a law that limited high-rise buildings to no more than ten storeys, below the height of fabled Notre Dame Basilica.
In the middle of the century the prohibition was removed and Montreal began to modernize. It became a truly international city, staging a world’s fair in 1967, becoming home to the first major league baseball franchise outside of the United States in 1969 and hosting Canada’s first Olympic Games in 1976. While the financial and business sector moved into trendier quarters the part of Montreal where the city grew up on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River was declared an historic district in 1964. The buildings (many of them but not all) were saved, renovation projects were launched and revitalization plans implemented. Today Old Montreal is the leading tourist destination in the city and we will kick off our explorations of this slice of 19th century British North America at the spot where it all began...
Imagine what John By would think if he saw Ottawa today, a metropolitan area of over one million residents. Back in 1826 By, an officer in the British Army Corps of Royal Engineers, received his orders to report to Upper Canada and build a canal to facilitate transportation between Lake Ontario and the Ottawa River. There were concerns about the unpredictable Americans looking to flex their new muscles in British North America.
When By arrived at the Chaudiere Falls he found a small settlement barely two decades old where the residents clawed out a living harvest elm and maples trees and shipping the timber to Montreal. By set about his work, which included laying out streets and carving out building lots for the workers he would need. The place was called Bytown. Six years later the job was complete. By was retired and sent home to England. There was no ceremony for the Rideau Canal, not commendation, no mention of the feat whatsoever. Just another mission checked off of a long to-do list in managing the British empire. By died a few years later at the age of 55.
The Rideau Canal - it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the best preserved slackwater canal from the golden era of canal building in North America in the first half of the 19th century - kickstarted the lumber trade so acutely that Bytown was conferred as a city in 1854. It also took the name of the river, which appropriately enough, derived from the Algonquin word for “trade.” In 1857 Queen Victoria, partly because the Crown owned Bytown, designated Ottawa as the capital of the unified Province of Canada, ending a game of Parliamentary musical chairs between Quebec and Toronto.
The surprising choice of Ottawa for Dominion Capital did not go down well when word filtered back across the Atlantic Ocean. Was it the Queen’s choice or merely a recommendation debated local politicians. After all, in recent years there had been more than 200 votes on where to place a permanent capital since Upper and Lower Canada were welded in 1841. Bytown was typically the least popular of all the vote chasers in those referendums. A motion to ask the Queen to reconsider was quickly introduced. Political wrangling ensued and the Canadian Parliament finally reached a last vote to ratify the wishes of Queen Victoria in 1859. Ottawa won by a scant five votes.
So Ottawa became a government town. Although the city is the agricultural center of eastern Ontario a federal job is the most common occupation in the city. In 1950 Jacques Greber submitted an integrated plan of development designed to beautify the capital city and de-emphasize some of its industrial trappings like the railroads that chugged into the city’s core. The ramifications of the Greber Plan are still in evidence. Ottawa is one of the cleanest major cities in the world (#4 in one ranking) and more than seven million tourists come each year. The focal point for most visits is Parliament Hill and that is where we will begin our explorations...
There likely was not much question is Samuel de Champlain’s mind where he would build a settlement as he sailed up the Saint Lawrence River in 1608. At a spot where the channel narrowed a bit stood a magnificent cliff, facing upstream - a place where a fort could be erected to ward off any incursions beyond.
He hadn’t counted on the winters, however, and 20 of the 28 men in Champlain’s first “l’Habitation” perished. But the New World’s fur trade held so much promise the French settlers kept coming. The Company of One Hundred Associates was chartered to exploit the natural resources around Quebec for profit. By the time the businessmen’s organization dissolved in 1663 there was a full-fledged town of over 500 residents.
The government and the military and the Jesuits, who had early on established a college in Quebec, tended to live on top of the cliff. Below, down by the river, were the houses of the merchants, tradesmen and seamen. The first stairs to link the Upper Town and the Lower Town were constructed in 1635; today Quebec City proudly claims some 30 personality-filled stairways.
Quebec’s imposing geography proved its mettle in 1711 during the Queen Anne’s War with England as the British Royal Navy was unable to lay siege to the city. A half-century later, the Seven Years’ War proved to be a different story. It took three months of bombing before the armies clashed in climactic fighting on the Plains of Abraham in 1759. The British attackers withstood an initial charge by the defenders and it was all over in 15 minutes, although both sides lost their commanding generals.
It didn’t seem to matter much to the Quebec colonists which country across the Atlantic was dishing out the law. The British Parliament passed the Quebec Act in 1774 that allowed “les Canadiens” to openly practice Catholicism and speak French. When the American colonies to the south revolted against the British a year later, those Canadiens took a pass on joining in. Today 96% of Quebec City’s population of more than 600,000 speak French as their primary language.
The Quebec City site was blessed not only with natural defenses but a deep water harbour and by the early 1800s this was the third busiest port in North America. Lumber was the main export, along with tens of thousands of beaver pelts. The city started building up during that time and by the 1870s it became obvious that the impressive Citadele constructed atop of Cape Diamond was no longer needed. But Governor General Lord Dufferin blocked the destruction of the defenses and instead ordered them incorporated into the Quebec streetscape.
That kind of preservation thinking pervades Old Quebec where nearly half of all the buildings in the Historic District were built before 1850. We will set out to explore this unique cityscape and we will begin where Quebec once defied intruders but now welcomes visitors from around the world...
There were more than a few eyebrows raised when it was announced in 1883 that old Pile of Bones would become the new capital of the vast North West Territories, an area greater than the size of Europe. The name came from massive piles of buffalo bones that Cree hunters had stacked on the Canadian plains rather than the deadly prospects for settlement. But still it was a featureless prairie with scant supplies of water nearby.
It wasn’t called Pile of Bones anymore. The year before the wife of Canada’s governor general thought it was better to call the settlement “Regina” from the Latin word for queen. Princess Louise was thinking about her own mother, Queen Victoria, then in the middle of a 63-year reign.
But by any name Battleford, the territorial capital since 1876, and Qu’Appelle, the town with the brightest future, and Fort Qu’Appelle, the headquarters of the North-West Mounted Police, all seemed like better choices for a capital. But Regina was located on the planned route of the transcontinental railroad and, oh by the way, Territorial Lieutenant-Governor Edgar Dewdney had bought up a lot of cheap land in Pile of Bones.
So Regina became a capital and officially a town on December 1, 1883. The Mounties moved into town and the Canadian Pacific Railway arrived as promised. By 1903 the population had grown to 3,000 and Regina became a city. Agriculture was booming and when Saskatchewan became its own province Regina segued smoothly from territorial capital to provincial capital. Some 350,000 trees were planted in this new oasis on the prairie and the population grew tenfold in the first decade of the 20th century.
On June 30, 1912 a tornado formed south of the city at 4:50 in the afternoon, roaring through the city ten minutes later. The Regina Cyclone damaged or destroyed over 500 buildings and 2,500 of the city’s 30,213 residents were left homeless. Twenty-eight people were killed, making the storm still the deadliest tornado in Canadian history. It took two years to fully rebuild and the Regina Cyclone left a permanent mark on the downtown streetscape.
There have not been any devastating downtown natural disasters in the past 100 years but crusaders in the name of progress have taken a toll. Regina has sacrificed some significant civic and commercial buildings to urban renewal but plenty heritage properties remain. To kick-off our explorations of the Queen City we will begin in a place that carries the name of the monarch who inspired the name of the city...
Explorer Samuel de Champlain was sailing along the North American coast in 1604 when he happened upon the mouth of a mighty river. He checked his calendar and noticed it was June 24 - St. John the Baptist’s Day and so the river claimed for France was christened the Saint John River. French Acadia was lost to England with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and settlers from the New England colonies began drifting into the valley.
With the American Revolution that steady trickle became a torrent. The British crown offered land grants along the Saint John River to 14,000 “Loyalists” departing the newly formed United States. Settlements grew on both sides of the river mouth - Parrtown on the east and Carleton on the west. The two groups were quickly joined by royal charter and in 1785 the City of Saint John became the first incorporated city in British North America.
By the middle of the 1800s Saint John was humming, only Montreal and Quebec City were more imporant towns. Shipbuilding was the main economic driver and it was estimated that the harbor was home to the fourth largest accumulation of vessels in the world. A serious body blow to the city’s fortunes was delivered on June 20, 1877 when a small fire in a warehouse in the York Slip triggered a city-wide conflagration. Nearly half of the city was destroyed. Nearly all of Saint John’s buildings had been constructed from wood and the offical tally was 1,612 structures lost. While some 13,000 people were without a home, “only” 20 lives were claimed by the blaze.
Even while directing operations from tents, reconstruction - in brick and stone - began immediately. Many businesses were permitted to set up shop in temporary huts in Kings Square in the center of town, with the stipulation that they be gone by May 1, 1878. And “Shantytown” was indeed gone a year later as new buildings wnet up at a dizzying pace. By the summer of 1879, nearly 90% of the city was rebuilt. Within four years there were over 1,000 new buildings in downtown Saint John.
Many of those structures still stand as they did nearly 140 years ago as the new face of the city. Our explorations of the post Great Fire architecture - and those buildings that came before and after - will begin on the grounds where plans for the rebuilding of Saint John were hatched long ago...
St. John’s is old. By the time Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed through the Narrows to claim St. John’s for England in 1583 it had been marked on Portuguese maps for the better part of the century. The harbour was a regular stopping point for European ships. In the 1600s St. John’s was firmly established as the supply centre for the rich Newfoundland fishing industry.
It was mostly a transient population, however. Fishermen would arrive in the summer to pursue their catch and return to England with the end of fishing season. Local administration was left to fishing admirals. The Newfoundland colony finally got an appointed governor in 1729 but the men in charge would still high-tail it back across the Atlantic when the cold weather arrived, leaving the permanent residents to govern themselves.
Most of the land was in the hands of absentee landlords back in the Mother Country and, ever respectful of the private ownership, it was difficult for the local government to buy up land for development. So St. John’s grew in a patchwork of narrow, curving streets up the hillsides. Not that it was growing much until after the English difficulties with Napoleon sorted themselves out in 1815. This sparked a growth spurt in the British Empire that saw St. John’s boom from 1,000 to 10,000 year-round residents. In 1832 Newfoundland was awarded a colonial legislature.
Through it all the economy was driven by the rich fishing grounds of the Grand Banks. The shallow waters of the underwater plateau teemed with cod, swordfish, and haddock; lobster was so plentiful if was a junk catch. As early as 1620 some 300 fishing boats were already working one of the planet’s best fisheries. St. John’s was the primary station for all things fishing related and by the end of the 19th century the population had doubled to almost 30,000.
The North Atlantic cod fishery collapsed in the 1990s but St. John’s had been diversifying since Newfoundland’s entry into the Confederation in 1949. Oil exploration and tourism proved so profitable that the city was forced to enact restrictions on building height in the downtown core to hang on to its long-earned heritage as a fishing-first outpost.
Fire was always a regular visitor to early St. John’s. The worst of the conflagrations occurred in 1816, 1846 and 1892, clearing the downtown streets of most of its buildings each time. The result is that most of what we will see on our walking tour is of post-1893 vintage and we will begin near the spot where Britain’s overseas empire began...
Saskatoon greeted the 20th century with an official population count of 113 and dirt streets. The town began as a vision of the Toronto-based Temperance Colonization Society to establish a “dry” community in the quick-growing Canadian prairies. In 1882 the anti-liquor contingent acquired land straddling the South Saskatchewan River and John Neilson Lake, a one-time Methodist preacher and commissioner of the Temperance Society, led a band of colonizers west. Unlike hardship tales that accompanied many 19th century settlers Lake’s group was able to take the train most of the way and used horse carts from Moose Jaw up to the site of its grants. Lake staked out the spot for a settlement which eventually picked up the Cree name for a sweet-tasting, violet-coloured berry that grew along the river.
Lake’s group, however, was unable to cobble together a large enough block of land to make the temperance community viable. The Qu’Appelle, Long Lake and Saskatchewan Railway built into town in 1890 which opened the west side of the river to development and by 1906 there was a city of 4,500 residents large enough to be chartered a year after the province of Saskatchewan formed. In 1907 the first Saskatchewan premiere Walter Scott mulled over the merits of the nascent province’s communities and selected Saskatoon for the home of the new provincial university and agricultural college.
With the University of Saskatchewan and its inherent geographical advantages that favoured its growth as a western Canada railway hub Saskatoon boomed in the years before World War I as the population exploded to over 20,000. The post-war years brought tough times and the Great Depression of the 1930s forced families off bankrupt farms but Saskatoon reacted to the lessening reliance on agriculture by expanding its potash and oil industries. The potash deposits in particular are the richest on the planet.
With its eight river crossings Saskatoon has earned the sobriquet of “City of Bridges” but in recent years the economy has hummed along to such an extent it is sometimes called “Sask-a-boom.” Our walking tour willcommence on the banks of the all-important South Saskatchewan River where Saskatchewan’s largest city remembers mileposts in its heritage...
Today Toronto is the fourth-largest city in North America but when the town was officially incorporated in 1834 it was scarcely the fourth most important Canadian city with Montreal, Quebec and Halifax all chugging ahead of it through the Industrial Revolution. The settlement had been founded on the shores of Lake Ontario as an important stop in a water link to western Canada and south to the Gulf of Mexico. It was called York but by the 1830s it was so undeveloped as to be widely known as “Muddy York.”
The first thing that had to be done was to jettison the name which could have referred to any of a dozen other Yorks on the provincial map, let alone New York City. First mayor William Lyon Mackenzie then set about paving and building. Land along the waterfront was filled in and the railroads arrived in the 1850s as Toronto grew into the hub of the Golden Horseshoe on the western shore of Lake Ontario.
Immigration played a significant role in Toronto’s growth from the beginning. Half of the population lays claim to a minority group and while English prevailed as the dominant language there evolved over 200 distinct ethic origins speaking more than 160 different languages.
In 1904 most of the downtown area burned after a fire broke out on Wellington Street West in the elevator shaft of E & S Currie Limited’s neck wear factory. Before the wind-whipped conflagration could be contained more than 100 buildings were destroyed. Toronto, then a city of 200,000 residents, barely flinched. The buildings came back quickly, bigger and better than ever.
The lust for building has led to controversy over the years. Toronto has never been shy with the wrecking ball, causing consternation to lovers of heritage buildings. And the proliferation of Canada’s tallest buildings has led to head-shaking among some in the depths of the urban canyons. To explore this civic tug-of-war of old and new, lost and saved we will begin our walking tour at one of Toronto’s prime battlegrounds in the preservation wars...
The newly formed nation of Canada, comprised solely of eastern provinces, was able to pull British Columbia into its confederation in 1871 on the promise that the transcontinental railroad would link to the Pacific Ocean. Initially the plans were for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) to build into the established town of Moodyville on the eastern end of Burrard Inlet. But in 1884 general manager William Van Horne visited the area and dismissed the existing settlement as too shallow for ocean-going ships to meet the railroad.
So the CPR negotiated for another site on English Bay that, oh by the way, would mean a much greater supply of land grants for the railroad by building deeper into the peninsula. The CPR eventually finished their line just to the west of the existing townsite that was known as Granville and Van Horne got rid of that name as well, opting for what he considered a more cosmopolitan-sounding name - Vancouver, after the English sea captain George Vancouver who had been the first English-speaking native to explore the upper Pacific Coast. The new city was incorporated in 1886 and the first trains from the east rumbled to Burrard Inlet a year later.
When the first CPR station was erected the surrounding neighbourhood was mostly residential. It did not take long for the business community to begin making its way out of the original townsite - now referred to as Gastown - towards the CPR hub and the railroad’s surrounding land which it was eager to develop. One thing Vancouver showed a penchant for early was the skyscraper. Several towers erected on English Bay in the early decades of the 20th century stood as the tallest structures in the British Empire. By the 1950s the axes along West Hastings Street and Granville Street were entrenched as the retail and business centre of the city.
As Vancouver grew into the most densely populated city in Canada it also emerged as one of the world cities most densely populated with skyscrapers. The town’s hunger for ever-higher reaching towers consumed many heritage buildings - the loss of some, such as the original Birks Building, are still mourned today. Other times, in an attempt to retain a scrap of architectural history developers practised what was called “facadism” by preserving the fronts of old buildings and raising towers on the rubble of their demolished innards. Today Vancouver’s City Centre claims some 50 buildings in excess of 100 metres.
21st century Vancouver has established itself as a modern municipal wonder with gleaming skyscrapers that still leave 27 protected view corridors to the North Shore Mountains and the sparkling waters of English Bay and the Strait of Georgia. But there remain pockets of heritage structures as well and to seek them out we will begin at the catalyst for development in Vancouver City Centre...
Although José María Narváez was only 23 years old when he became the first European to sail into what would become Vancouver Harbour in 1791 he was already a veteran of several Spanish expeditions in the Pacific Northwest. The following year Captain George Vancouver charted North America’s northwestern Pacific Coast and although he would die in obscurity at the age of 40 just six years later he made sure his name and those of many of his friends would live on for centuries. Among the landmarks George Vancouver named were the famous American mountains - Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, Mount Baker and Mount St. Helens and the main harbour of the future Vancouver, Burrard Inlet, remembering his friend Sir Henry Burrard.
The first industry that developed along Burrard Inlet was logging; American lumberman Sewell Moody built the first sawmill in 1863 and his Moodyville camp was the first settlement on the inlet. About that time Canada was forming into an independent country back east and in 1871 British Columbia agreed to join the Confederation on the condition that it would be linked to the transcontinental railroad. It took the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) 15 years to make good on the bargain. In the interim it was assumed the western terminus of the railroad would be Moodyville on the eastern end of Burrard Inlet. But in 1884 general manager William Van Horne visited the area and dismissed the existing settlement as too shallow for ocean-going ships to meet the railroad.
He looked around and recommended a site on English Bay occupied by a collection of ramshackle wooden structures called Granville, which happened to have the advantage of plenty of land that could be granted to the CPR to develop a major coastal townsite. So it came to be that the Canadian Pacific Railway terminated on piles on the shore along Water Street in 1886. In keeping with his grand vision for British Columbia’s new mainland port Van Horne jettisoned the “Granville” name and replaced it with “Vancouver.” The town was incorporated on April 6, 1886.
Regardless of what officials were doing with the name, the 400 or so residents were used to calling their home “Gastown,” as it had developed around the saloon of Yorkshire seaman “Gassy” Jack Deighton, a world-class talker. Vancouver was not even nine weeks old when sparks from a brush-clearing fire blew into town and burned every building save two to the ground in a firestorm on June 13, 1886. Undaunted the optimistic townsfolk started rebuilding before the smoke blew out of town and the first brick buildings were being occupied when the first Canadian Pacific Railway train, #374, steamed into the station on July 4, 1886.
The population burst to more than 13,000 by 1890 and after a financial panic in the early 1890s the Klondike Gold Rush insured Vancouver’s status as a major Pacific Coast port city. The original townsite at Gastown, however, did not fare as well during the 20th century as Canada’s third-largest city spread out in every direction. The neighbourhood was rescued by the preservation movement of the latter half of the century, however, and has been re-born as a mix of tourist-oriented businesses, re-purposed housing and cultural destinations. Our walking tour of the transformation of Gastown will begin where the city started - on the site of Gassy Jack Deighton’s whiskey bar...
Vancouver Island is Canada’s most populated island, first settled by the British with a Hudson’s Bay Company post in 1843. It was called Fort Camosack but quickly changed to Fort Victoria. For its first 15 years Victoria was a settlement of only a few hundred frontierspeople dealing in the fur trade. Discovery of gold in the Fraser Canyon in 1858 caused the population to swell into the thousands as Victoria was a convenient port and supply base for prospectors.
Vancouver Island was its own colony in those days and when it was joined with the mainland Colony of British Columbia in 1866 Victoria was made the capital. The mainlanders grumbled about the selection but Victoria has remained the British Columbia capital ever since. The city may have maintained political power but its role as commercial centre of the Canadian Pacific Coast disappeared forever with the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in Vancouver in 1886.
The CPR purchased the Canadian Pacific Navigation Company in 1901 and operated ships out of Victoria so the city still attracted its share of ship traffic. In 1919 William Boeing and Eddie Hubbard touched down with a seaplane that kickstarted International Air Mail service and the harbour as a floatplane airport. Victoria Harbour was a busy place during World War II with 25 ships launching from the Victoria Machinery Depot.
By mid-century Western Canada’s oldest city began to show its age. Things started to turn around in the later years of the 1900s when its large stock of Edwardian style buildings came to be considered “charming” and no longer “dilapidating.” Tourism joined government as a major economic engine and in recent years the “Garden City” has become a treasured retirement spot as well.
Those years in the economic doldrums meant there was little pressure to replace those crumbling buildings. So the streets are lined with 19th century souvenirs, including North America’s second oldest Chinatown district. We will see many on our walking tour but we will begin at Victoria Inner Harbour at a landmark of more recent vintage...
The rapids in the Yukon River through Miles Canyon were so intimidating in the 19th century that they picked up their own name - White Horse Rapids because the frothing water resembled the flowing manes of charging white stallions. The First Nations’ peoples who visited here just camped on their way around the treacherous waters.
It took gold to lure travelers into the White Horse Rapids - the big strikes of the Klondike region in 1896. Many boats were lost in the canyon and there were five documented deaths. But it did not stop the stampeders from trying. Major General Sir Samuel Steele, the head of the Yukon detachment for the North-West Mounted Police marveled, “Why more casualties have not occurred is a mystery to me.”
Entrepreneurs constructed horse-drawn tram cars to ferry goods and small boats around the rapids on both sides of the Yukon River in 1897 but so many prospectors were bottlenecked at the rapids that a tent town called Canyon City emerged on the east bank at the head of the tram. By that time plans were being hatched hundreds of miles away to ease the congestion at the rapids blocking the way to the gold fields around Dawson.
Engineer Michael J. Heney was tasked with constructing a railway from the coast at Skagway, Alaska to the head of navigation on the Yukon River beyond the rapids. It was a daunting assignment but Heney had no doubts he could pull it off. “Give me enough dynamite and snoose and I’ll build a railroad to hell,” he boasted. He got 450 tons of explosives and 35,000 men to do the job. Work began on May 28, 1898 and 26 months and $10 million later a 110-mile narrow gauge railway to the newly named town of White Horse was complete. To clear the coastal mountains of Alaska and southern Yukon required climbs of 879 metres in 20 miles with no more than a 4% grade - the ground was so tough that when a golden spike was driven into final tie it buckled.
Unfortunately the gold rush was mostly over by the time the first trains of the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad steamed into White Horse. But the connection to river travel north caused the new town to boom anyway; Canyon City on the east bank wilted away in favour of the railroad town. In 1920 the first airplanes bounced onto primitive runways at White Horse and in 1942 the United States constructed the wartime Alaska Highway that linked the town to the national road grid for the first time.
The 1950s saw the city name consolidate to Whitehorse and the territorial capital slide down from Dawson. In 1958 the Yukon River was dammed and the rapids that determined the townsite disappeared forever under Schwatka Lake. In the 1980s the railroad stopped running and the driving force behind the growth of the Yukon’s largest city disappeared as well. But we’ll have a clear view of what remains of Whitehorse heritage on our downtown walking tour since, according to the Guinness World Records, this is the city with the least air pollution in the world...
One glance at a map and you realize there had to be a Windsor. Lake Erie and Lake Huron are so close that a settlement was natural to facilitate a continuous water route through the Great Lakes. That settlement arrived in 1748 in the form of a French Jesuit mission. The city it spawned is the oldest continually inhabited city west of Montreal.
It wasn’t Windsor yet, however. At least by name. When the first formal strides towards citydom took place after the British took control and the village was called Sandwich when it started in 1794. With expansion and the assignment of the Essex County seat it would eventually assume the name of the Berkshire, England town and the original village of Sandwich would get its own town status in 1858.
But the biggest influence on the growth of Windsor was not French. It was not British. It was American, specifically the Detroit auto industry. After becoming the “Automotive Capital of the British Empire” the population of Windsor spurted from 10,000 in 1900 to 100,000 in 1925. The Ford Motor plant was established in 1904 and grew so large, at one point employing 14,000 people, that it became its own town known as Ford City.
It was not the first time an American industrialist spawned a municipality on the Canadian side of the Detroit River. Hiram Walker, a Massachusetts man, settled in Detroit and began buying land in Ontario in 1856. He moved to Canada in 1859 to build the Windsor Distillery and Flouring Mill, the surrounding town called Walkerville and a rail line to service his business. Walker moved back to the United States in 1864 but his distillery continued to crank out Canadian Club Whisky, the Dominion’s best-selling exported whisky. In 1935 Sandwich, Ford City and Walkerville all folded into the Windsor jurisdiction.
Windsor has always been defined by its geography on the doorstep of America - it was a hot spot during the War of 1812, it was a major destination for escaped Southern slaves and it was a primary supplier of illegal liquor during the 1920s during the era of American Prohibition. Appropriately we will thus start our walking tour of the southernmost city in Canada where unobstructed views of the Detroit skyline are the main attraction...
Manitoba was at the heart of the vast possessions of the Hudson’s Bay Company that was called Rupert’s Land, named for German Prince Rupert who was an angel investor in the fur trading enterprise. The land was ceded to Canada in 1869. During the many decades of North American fur trade many British and French Canadian adventurers married First Nations women on the frontier. Their offspring who came to span the cultural divide were known as the Métis and their land claims spurred the Parliament to make Manitoba the first addition to the newly formed Canadian Federation the following year. The original province was a fraction of today’s Manitoba - so small it was known as the “postage stamp province.”
More than three in five Manitobans reside in and around Winnipeg that lies almost at the geographic center of North America. The city at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers was Canada’s gateway to the West through the 19th century and its emergence as a major transportation centre in the latter half of the 19th century was based on wheat. The first wheat on the western prairies had been harvested under the auspices of Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, who received a land grant from the Hudson’ Bay Company of 116,000 square miles in 1811. Selkirk engineered the founding of the Red River Settlement as a permanent agricultural base.
There is no native variety of wheat in Canada but when Red Fife wheat was introduced to Manitoba in 1868 it became the dominant cultivar and “Queen of every harvest.” The first shipment from Winnipeg was sent in 1877 and four years later the Canadian Pacific Railway arrived sparking a wave of immigration and building in Winnipeg that continued full bore until the the opening of the Panama Canal lessened the importance of the transcontinental railroad for shipping goods and Winnipeg settled into its role as the financial, manufacturing and cultural nucleus of central Canada. Winnipeg was the third largest city in Canada until the rise of Vancouver in the 1960s. In 1971 the City of Winnipeg Act created the current city by unifying eleven surrounding municipalities with the Old City of Winnipeg.
Winnipeg has been an enthusiastic player in urban renewal, scrapping such treasures as its Victorian City Hall and the Eaton’s department store that helped trigger the shift in importance from Main Street to Portage Street. But many heritage structures still remain, especially in the Exchange District, a National Historic Site stuffed with the city’s earliest skyscrapers, banking temples and landmark grain warehouses and that is where our walking tour will begin...Ottawa