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Whitehern Mansion

“Ghosts walk the grounds of this garden — island of tranquil beauty, oasis within bustling urban core,” Eleanore Kosydar writes in her 2005 poem, “Gardens of Whitehern.” Kosydar was referring to Mary McQuesten’s role when, later in the poem, she writes, “Mother Mary’s hand is everywhere.”[1] McQuesten created what is recognized as one of the finest heritage gardens in Canada, and the profound effect the beautiful historic garden still has despite the encroachment of urban development on the surrounding land.

Of course, the McQuesten family legacy left behind much more than a beautiful and stately garden. The family was instrumental in establishing the Royal Botanical Gardens, McMaster University’s move from Toronto to Hamilton, and the Queen Elizabeth Way highway.[2]

Whitehern (originally named Willow Bank) was the McQuesten family home for 116 years, from 1852 until the death of the final remaining family member, Reverend Calvin McQuesten.[3]

The City of Hamilton describes Whitehern as being “prominently situated in a walled garden” on the corner of Jackson Street West and MacNab Street South in Hamilton. Whitehern, built in 1850, is a Late Classical house that remains an outstanding example of a mid-nineteenth-century urban estate.[4]

Today, the house has “a multi-layered character that reflects the alterations made by three generations of the McQuesten family. It contains elements from many time periods — Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian — all overlaid with original possessions dating up to 1939 when the Honourable Thomas McQuesten was minister of highways.”[5]

In 1839 Dr. Calvin McQuesten gave up a successful career in medicine in the United States in favour of moving to Canada, aligning his fortunes with Hamilton.[6] McQuesten established an iron foundry and, as a skilled businessman, was able to amass a sizeable family fortune over a twenty-year period. Most of that fortune was lost by Calvin’s son, Isaac, who invested in manufacturing ventures that failed. Involved in a very destructive pattern of alcoholism and despair, Isaac died suddenly at the age of forty on March 7, 1888, reportedly as the result of a combination of a sleeping draught and alcohol. It was publicly rumoured that he committed suicide.[7]

However, Isaac’s own son, Thomas, who was six years old at the time of his father’s death, was destined to make significantly positive and enduring marks on the Hamilton region during his life.

Mary Baker McQuesten raised her family alone in Whitehern (which is a Scottish term meaning “White House”). Thomas absorbed his mother’s desire to contribute to the fabric of society, received his law degree in 1907, and devoted his life to politics and public projects that would better the human condition.[8]

McQuesten died in 1948 from intestinal cancer, and in 1968, following the death of the last surviving family member, Whitehern was officially handed over to the City of Hamilton and is today preserved as a museum.[9]

The beautiful Whitehern Historic House and Garden is a feature stop on Haunted Hamilton’s popular Downtown Hamilton Ghost Walk.

Courtesy of Peter Rainford.

Rumours of haunting at Whitehern persist, mostly due to stories from people who spend a great deal of time there. A worker at Whitehern has claimed to have experienced many strange and unexplainable things in her time there, such as the voice of a woman lightly singing from the second floor, accompanied by the sounds of a piano.[10]

On one occasion, this worker was locking up for the night and thought she heard a radio playing from the second floor. She went up the stairs to turn it off, but it stopped before she could get to it. It was only then she realized there wasn’t a radio on the second floor at all.[11] This ethereal singing and music is usually credited to a wife of Thomas’s brother, who was a soprano. But the legacy of mental illness afflicting the family, something Mary Baker often worried about, might be what has led to some other strange encounters in Whitehern.

Another staff member who used to work in the museum relayed a story to the folks at Haunted Hamilton. One day, while all alone in the museum, the employee was walking down the main staircase toward the main floor when she was violently shoved aside. She was pushed so hard that she had to brace herself against the wall to keep from falling down the stairs. As she regained her footing, she saw the shadowy figure of a man, grey in colour, rushing past her, down the stairs, and out the front door.[12]

In her book, The Life Writings of Mary Baker McQuesten: Victorian Matriarch, Mary Anderson, a noted Whitehern and McQuesten scholar, notes the apparent Victorian Gothic elements in the McQuesten family’s tale: “We can add a wicked stepmother, a madwoman in the attic, a tragic heroine, inherited mental disorders, institutionalization, social stigma and secrecy.”[13]

Those walking through the beautiful gardens are said to feel an intensely powerful emotion — and not just that from the sheer beauty and majesty originally instilled under Mary Baker’s hand. There is a lingering sense of the powerful and important family that once called Whitehern their home, of their various hopes, highlights, and hardships through multiple generations.

This historically significant and picturesque home, which sits at 41 James Street, is certainly no stranger to incredible struggles and intense emotions, all of which can lead to echoes of the past randomly exerting their presence on the here and now.