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ОглавлениеGeographically, the head of Lake Ontario is somewhat complex. Two sections of the mighty Niagara Escarpment form a wide steep-sided valley where the walls converge to the west, creating the spectacular Dundas Valley. Here the waters of Lake Ontario reach their western extremity. But before they do, they encounter two hurdles.
One is a sand strip or beach bar separating the main body of the lake to the east from a bay known variously as Lake Geneva or Burlington Bay to the west. At the western end of Burlington Bay lies yet another, higher barrier, Burlington Heights — the remains of an ancient beach deposited by the waters of Lake Iroquois. Beyond this ridge lies the lake’s westernmost body of water, Cootes Paradise, which breaches the Burlington Heights through a small stream known as Morden Creek. Burlington Bay flows into the lake through an occasional breach in the sandbar at the north end of the strip. At least that was how the first Europeans encountered it.
When John Graves Simcoe was obliged to relocate the province’s capital from Newark, he chose a site a safe distance away, in fact so distant that he was told to abandon it. That site was to have been at the forks of the distant Thames River, the location of today’s busy metropolitan centre of London. To access that location, he ordered that a road be laid out from the head of Cootes Paradise to the Thames. Simcoe named that starting point King’s Landing, a landing which, along with the community of Dundas Mills, developed into the town of Dundas.
But Lord Dorchester refused to consider the manning of two garrisons, and ordered Simcoe to forget the Thames and instead locate the new capital near the ruins of an old French fort named Fort Toronto. But as was his custom, Simcoe eschewed the aboriginal name and selected the name York. The location had the advantage over the forks of the Thames in that, while the harbour offered a military advantage, it also lay on Lake Ontario, then the only means of moving troops and supplies. Thus, the head of the lake was no longer the jumping-off point to a new territorial seat of government.
Hamilton developed later than Dundas. The parcel of land that forms the old section of the city today was originally bought by James Durand, the local member of the British Legislative Assembly, who in 1815 sold it, along with his palatial house, to George Hamilton, a local early settler and son of Robert Hamilton, the Queenston entrepreneur. Hamilton, along with another local property owner, Nathaniel Hughson, went on to acquire and subdivide more parcels in 1813, naming early streets James, John, Hunter, and Catherine, after family members. In 1816 he convinced the government to designate the town site as the administrative centre for the District of Gore.
Hamilton was elected as the MLA for the Gore District and lobbied for improvements to Burlington Bay. Up until that time, any exported goods had be hauled across the sand spit, or poled through the occasional breach at the north end, into waiting schooners. Between 1823 and 1832, a canal was cut through the sand strip, allowing vessels to come and go from the harbour with greater ease.
As Smith described it in 1851: “The town of Hamilton was laid out in 1813, but for many years its progress was very slow…. The completion of the Burlington Bay Canal however gave it access to the lake and formed the commencement of a new era in its history.”1 Soon a bustling and doubtless rowdy little community grew at Port Hamilton, well to the north of Hamilton’s original town site.
Railway days were soon to arrive. As early as 1837, lawyer Allan Napier McNab, who had moved to Port Hamilton from York in 1826, had earned much of his fortune through land speculation, and was promoting the building of the London and Gore Railroad, which in the end failed to gain sufficient financing. He did manage, however, to start the Great Western Railway, and by 1850 it had been surveyed from the Niagara River to the Detroit River, with Hamilton as its headquarters. Smith saw potential there, too: “Hamilton is admirably situated for carrying on a large wholesale trade with the West — being at the head of navigation of Lake Ontario and in the heart of the settled portion of the province.”2
This early view from the mid-1870s shows Hamilton’s Great Western rail yards and docks.
Before the rails were laid, Port Hamilton consisted of several small streams that cut their channels into the soft silt of the lake bottom. Pilings more than ten metres deep were required to anchor the many private piers that stabbed out into the bay. McNab’s first wharf originally stood near the foot of Bay Street and is known today as Pier 4. Nearby was the first location of the prestigious Royal Hamilton Yacht Club (RHYC). It lasted here until 1891, when encroaching industry began to reduce the ambience of the location, and an elaborate new clubhouse was built beside the Burlington Canal. Upon its completion, Queen Victoria consented to the use of the word royal — one of only ten yacht clubs in Canada to have earned that distinction. After the new clubhouse burned in 1915, the RHYC returned to its original Bay Street site, and erected a newer clubhouse in 1938 at the foot of nearby McNab, where it remains today.
Other early operations on Hamilton’s bayfront were the Leander Rowing Club and H.L. Bastien’s boathouse. During its heyday as the main passenger line on the Great Lakes, and while also operating several amusement parks, Canada Steamship Lines maintained an office at the foot of Wentworth Street. Following an investigation into the tragic fire on the Noronic in Toronto on September 14, 1949, which killed upwards of 140 people, the company was faulted for its lack of fire alarms, escape plans, and extinguishers. Partly as a result of those findings, Canada Steamships decided to focus instead on freight. McKay’s Wharf, at the foot of James Street, was built to handle larger ships, which began to enter Hamilton Harbour as soon as the Burlington Canal was opened, and ferries such as SS Lady Hamilton puffed out from their slips near James Street.
McNab had by this time purchased a property on Burlington Heights, where he constructed the magnificent Dundurn Castle. From his new perch he could look down upon his railway empire, as the Great Western yards, docks, and station lay along the harbour, literally at McNab’s feet.
Smith’s foresight was prescient. By the late 1800s, Hamilton was indeed in Ontario’s industrial forefront as two more rail lines converged on the growing city. In 1873, the Hamilton and Lake Erie began service between Hamilton and Jarvis, and five years later to Port Dover on Lake Erie. In 1879 the line was extended to Collingwood on Georgian Bay as the Hamilton and Northwestern Railway. This new route gave Hamilton rail access to both American coal from the south shore of Lake Erie and to western grain shipped down the Great Lakes.
In 1896 the Toronto Hamilton and Buffalo Railway (TH&B) laid tracks through the city, providing both Hamilton and Toronto (via running rights over the Grand Trunk) with their shortest rail link to Buffalo. Within a few years, the TH&B had extended a branch line to Port Maitland on Lake Erie, giving Hamilton yet another link to coal from the United States. By the time the TH&B established their headquarters and main yards here, those of the Great Western had largely gone. Following its merger with the GT, the new owner relocated most of the facilities to Stratford and London.
Because of the easy access to coal from West Virginia and Pennsylvania, iron from the Lakehead, and the presence of steel industries building locomotives for the Great Western, Hamilton was well on its way to becoming “Steel Town.” In 1895, the Hamilton Blast Furnace Company began producing iron right in the city, and in 1899 it joined Ontario Rolling Mills to form the Hamilton Iron and Steel Company, which in 1910 became The Steel Company of Canada (Stelco, now US Steel Canada). The other iconic name in steel production, Dofasco, began more modestly as a small foundry, later merging with the Hamilton Malleable Iron Company to become Dominion Foundries and Steel Company, or Dofasco.
As more heavy industry arrived, attracted by the ready availability of steel, the old port of Hamilton became unrecognizable as landfill pushed the docks farther into the harbour. In this emerging industrial landscape, workers’ suburbs also began to take shape. With minimal public transport available, living close to the factories was essential. Union Park was one example of a workers’ subdivision created by land speculators in the east end of the city. Others were laid out by the local factory owners themselves. Most such homes were simple wooden structures of one or one and a half storeys, and often built by the owners themselves, who would enlarge them as money became available.
For many years, Hamilton was scorned for its endless industrial landscape and its yellow, rank air that spewed across the entire peninsula. In recent years the industries and the government authorities have drastically reduced the air pollution, and many of the aging factories have modernized and earned a place in the industrial heritage of Hamilton.
While most of the original industrial buildings have long since been replaced with brighter and safer working environments, a few early survivors remain. In a building set back from Biggar Avenue, Royal Recycling occupies a structure built by the Hoepfner Refining Company in 1899. A stone building fronting on Barton Street at Wellington, once closer to the water, dates from 1876 and began life as a malt house.
The oldest of the industrial buildings is the Hamilton Waterworks. Finished in 1859, it claims to be the only mid-nineteenth-century intact waterworks in North America. When in operation, two steam-powered pumps extracted water from the lake. This water then flowed three kilometres to a reservoir, and from there into the city’s water system. As the city grew, a second pump was added, but by 1938 they could not keep pace with the growing demand, and the plant was closed. Today the buildings — complete with original boiler house, pump house, chimney, and fuel shed — have been preserved and deemed a national historic site. Inside are two original water pumps, fourteen metres high, one of which remains operational and is used for demonstrations. Visible from the busy QEW, the waterworks is situated at Woodward Avenue and Burlington Street.
Hamilton’s historic waterworks, located on Woodward Avenue, were designated a National Historic Site in 1983.
Hamilton Harbour sports two faces. The industrial landscape lies largely east of the HMCS Haida, which was towed to Hamilton in 2002 and is now a popular national historic site.3 West of the Haida, the harbour becomes recreational. The Hamilton City Yacht Club and the Royal Hamilton Yacht Club show off dock after dock of sailboats and yachts. Farther west are the Parks Canada Discovery Centre and Harbourfront Park, once the site of the Great Western Railway’s dock facilities. Now a landscaped landfill, the park offers boat launches, cycling trails, a swimming beach, and fishing docks. Pier 4 Park nearby offers lookouts over the bay and play areas for children.
Though most evidence of old Port Hamilton has long gone, one link remains. The red-brick building at number 469 Bay Street once housed William W. Grant’s sail-making operation. Built in 1869, the exterior still looks much like it did when the nine-by-twenty-eight-metre interior was workspace. But the age of steam rendered the tall ships a thing of the past, and in 1907 the building became Reid’s Gasoline Engine Company. Over the years it was put to a variety of uses, until 1985, when it fell into disrepair and was condemned. The new owner, recognizing the heritage value of this rare building, has begun to restore it — an unusual success story in demolition-happy Hamilton. Nearby streets also reflect the heritage of the harbour, and rows of early workers’ homes are now undergoing gentrification.
One of the first Europeans to arrive at the head of the lake was Richard Beasley. Among the first of the Loyalists to flee the newly independent American colonies, he constructed a small house on the summit of Burlington Heights, overlooking Burlington Bay. This location would prove strategic during the War of 1812, for it was from these heights that on June 5, 1813, seven hundred British and Canadian troops, under Lieutenant Colonel John Harvey, set out for Stoney Creek. Here they surprised 3,750 American troops, putting them to flight and marking a key turning point in the war. A section of the British earthworks remains visible in the Hamilton Cemetery, across from Dundurn Castle, and is marked with a commemorative cairn.
Mention the word castle in Ontario, and two spring to most minds: Casa Loma in Toronto, and Hamilton’s Dundurn Castle. While nearly eight decades separate the ages of the two massive structures, both were the accomplishments of men with vision and dreams. Casa Loma was built by Sir Henry Pellatt in 1912, a home that high taxes, combined with his dwindling fortune, forced him to vacate. Completed in 1835, Dundurn Castle was the dream home of parliamentarian and railway promoter Allan Napier McNab (later knighted by Queen Victoria in 1837 for his role in helping to repress William Lyon Mackenzie’s rebellion).
The sprawling forty-room Regency-style villa, one of Ontario’s grandest then and now, earned the nickname “castle,” although architecturally it was not castle-like in its appearance. From its vast grounds, McNab enjoyed a wide view across Hamilton Harbour (then known as Lake Geneva) and within a few years would add to it the sprawling yards and shops of his pet project, the Great Western Railway.
Today the castle is a national historic site and Hamilton’s most visited museum. Costumed guides lead visitors through the many rooms, refurbished to reflect the 1855 time period. In the basement is the brick and stone foundation of a much older building, the home built by Richard Beasley in 1799. The grounds also contain such unusual features as a one-hundred-hole birdhouse and the controversial Cockpit Theatre. In the late nineteenth century a small amusement park operated on the grounds. The stone Coach House was added in 1873 to shelter the family’s horses and carriages. Now a restaurant, The Coach House is available for rental only. Curators have also recreated a Victorian kitchen garden similar to that which McNab would have harvested.
Although the McNabs resisted overtures from the city to buy the property, thirteen hectares were opened to the public in 1878. As the popularity of the park increased, sports fields and a small roller coaster were added. In 1899 the city finally purchased the park for fifty thousand dollars and closed the amusement facilities, although they opened a small zoo that remained until 1928. Opened as a museum in 1935, then renovated in the mid-60s, Dundurn Castle and its grounds now offer visitors access to the gardener’s cottage and the Battery Lodge, currently housing the Hamilton Military Museum.
In 1839, Dundurn “Castle” was built atop Hamilton’s Burlington Heights by railway entrepreneur Allan Napier McNab. Since the 1930s it has been a museum run by the City of Hamilton.
Another of the Heights’ more prominent features is the striking Thomas B. McQuesten High Level Bridge. Son of Calvin McQuesten,4 Thomas chaired the Hamilton Parks Management Board for twenty-five years, from 1922 until 1947, during which time, as provincial minister of highways, he helped launch the construction of the QEW. But to McQuesten, the highways of his day should be aesthetic as well as functional. The high level bridge, which at the time marked the York Street entrance into Hamilton, was built in 1931–32 to replace an earlier structure over the Desjardins Canal. The new bridge is noted for its four art-deco pylons, each of them twelve metres high and bearing the coat of arms for the city. In 1986 it was declared a historic landmark under the Ontario Heritage Act, and renamed for McQuesten.
The McQuesten legacy for which Burlington Heights is most noted is the Royal Botanical Gardens. Thomas McQuesten was an avid student of garden design and, as Hamilton’s parks commissioner, promoted the beautification of Hamilton’s northwest entrance by adding a botanical garden. Canada at the time had only two botanical gardens — those on the grounds of the University of British Columbia, and the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa. At that time, both the highway and the shoreline leading into Hamilton presented an eyesore of billboards, shacks, and boathouses. In this age of urban beautification, McQuesten reasoned that Hamilton could do better.
In 1929 the parks commission acquired an abandoned gravel pit and converted it into a rock garden. In 1930, local farmer George Hendrie gifted forty-nine hectares of his Hendrie Valley farm, giving the new gardens a total of 162 hectares. That same year McQuesten received royal assent to bestow the designation royal on the gardens, after which the concept was altered from that of a more formal garden to one that reflected the various vegetative components of the world at large.
The Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington started out as a rock garden in an abandoned quarry. Work began in 1929, and it was opened to the public in 1932. Seven themed gardens cover an area of more than 1,100 hectares.
The garden was severed from the parks commission in 1941 and became its own entity. By that time it was spread over 486 hectares, and within a few years would approach one thousand hectares. Landscape architect Carl Borgstrom greatly altered the layout of the gardens and, now encompassing 1,100 hectares, they include an arboretum, various flower gardens — including the immaculate Rose Garden and an indoor garden — and a modernized visitor centre, as well as the original historic rock garden. The Cootes Paradise Sanctuary added another 250 hectares and comprises the largest freshwater marsh restoration project in Canada. Today, visitors can hike, drive, or board a shuttle bus to see the seven garden areas that make up the Royal Botanical Gardens.
Geographically and historically, Dundas is the true head of the lake. To John Graves Simcoe, the site was critical. As noted earlier, anxious to relocate the colony’s capital away from the vulnerable Newark, he ordered the surveying and clearing of a road to lead from the head of the bay, or Coote’s Paradise, to the forks of the Thames River, where he would locate the new town.
Landing at the head of Coote’s Paradise, the site of an earlier aboriginal landing, Simcoe named it the King’s Landing. From this point he instructed his surveyor, Augustus Jones, to lay a road west to the forks of the Thames River. The road became known as the Governor’s Road. However, when Lord Dorchester rejected Simcoe’s site, he chose instead a protected bay on the north shore of Lake Ontario, and laid out the town of York. The road, never fully cleared, grew over, and would remain so for another twenty years. But the Dundas location still had its attractions. Water, potential power for mills, tumbled along the creek, and roads led not just to the Thames, but also to Guelph and Waterloo, and eventually to York.
Dundas was named for Sir Harry Dundas, secretary of war, though he never set eyes on the place. One who did was a Captain Coote, an avid hunter and member of the King’s Eighth Regiment. The new settlement retained the name Coote’s Paradise (the apostrophe has since been dropped) until 1814, when the post office opted for “Dundas.”
One of the settlement’s earliest colonists was Richard Hatt, an industrialist who had emigrated from England and originally settled in the Niagara region. In 1800 he moved to Dundas and built the area’s first mill. Even as early as 1804 he realized the need for better access between Dundas and Lake Ontario, and financed the deepening of Morden Creek through Burlington Heights to Burlington Bay. Hatt dredged the winding channel just wide enough and deep enough to allow for the passage of the shallow Durham boats. He died soon after.
Hatt’s business manager was another dreamer, a man named Pierre Desjardins. His vision was considerably more ambitious than that of Hatt, for Desjardins wished to build a canal that would link Dundas, not just with Lake Ontario, but with Lake Huron as well. But in 1833 he also died, and his nephew Alexis Begue assumed the grand project. Although the link to Huron was never realized, Begue succeeded in cutting through the looming Burlington Heights, and in 1837 the new Desjardins Canal was opened. By this time a canal had also been chopped through the sand spit separating Burlington Bay from Lake Ontario, and Dundas became the leading town at the lakehead. During his visit to Dundas in 1851, William Smith noted that the town “has a valuable supply of water power which is made use of to a considerable extent…. For some time the trade of the town had considerable difficulties to contend with having to be conveyed to Burlington Bay by land. The construction of the Desjardins Canal which is five miles in length enables the manufacturers and merchants to ship from their own doors.”5
Smith recorded that the town had three flour mills, a large foundry, a paper mill, plus the usual range of early Ontario industries. Early hotels included the Boggs Swan Inn, Cain’s Hotel, the Elgin Hotel, and the Collins Hotel. First opened in 1841, the latter survives today as Collins Brewhouse, its exterior largely unchanged since the late 1800s. It can be found at 33 King Street West. It was one of the few buildings to survive the extensive conflagration that consumed much of downtown Dundas in 1861, its owner distributing free beer afterward to those who helped save it from the flames.
The site of the Desjardins Canal is now in a peaceful setting.
During the 1830s and 40s Dundas glowed in its prosperity. Nearly five thousand dockings took place at the wharves during that period, bringing in coal, iron, and a wide assortment of dry goods while exporting more than five million board feet of lumber, as well as flour and farm produce. Three times each week steamers carried passengers from Toronto, taking two days to do so. But then another construction crew showed up in Cootes Paradise. These were the navvies of the Great Western Railway. In 1852 they hammered into place a high level bridge above the canal, and the following year trains started rolling with regular passenger service between Hamilton and Toronto.
It was along this route, and over the Desjardins Canal, that Canada’s first, and one of its worst, railway tragedies occurred. On March 12, 1857, a Hamilton-bound train, a small Oxford steam engine pulling a pair of passenger coaches, derailed as it approached the wooden bridge, twenty metres above the canal. As the heavy steel wheels bounced along the ties and onto the bridge, the wooden structure crumbled, hurtling the engine and its coaches into the ice-covered canal. The Illustrated Historical Atlas of the County of Wentworth described the accident:
The immense weight of the engine breaking through the bridge, the whole structure gave way and with one frightful crash, the engine tender, baggage car and two first-class passenger coaches leaped headlong into the yawning abyss below. The engine and tender crashed at once through the ice, carrying the engineer and fireman with them; the baggage car was thrown ten yards from the engine; the first passenger car came after and fell on its roof, breaking partly through the ice and being crushed to atoms, and the last car fell endways on the ice, and strange to say remained in that position.6
Fifty-nine people perished that day, either killed instantly or drowning in the ice-filled canal. Although an inquest blamed a broken axel for the derailment, speculation swirled around whether or not it was the cheaper and softer pine used in the bridge that caused the structure to crumble so easily. Sturdier oak was normally used for bridges. Today a steel bridge carries the freights and the VIA passenger trains over the canal. A few steps away, near the entrance to the Hamilton Cemetery, a stone monument commemorates the members of the train crew who died in the wreckage.
With the arrival of the railway age, the canal fell into disuse: “[T]he canal is now seldom used, except by raftsmen for the purpose of floating timber into Burlington Bay.”7 By 1890, railways were bypassing Dundas — to the north and east the Grand Trunk, and to the south the Toronto, Hamilton and Buffalo Railway. Subsequently, the community went into an economic decline.
Today the town is well within the Greater Hamilton Area, and malls, suburbs, and condos line the old Governor’s Road, stretching out from the ancient town centre. The core has managed to retain a reasonable collection of early heritage buildings, much of which remains near the historic heart of the town, the junction of the roads to York, Waterloo, Hamilton, and London.
The town hall, built in 1849, is considered to be Ontario’s oldest municipal building. It was begun immediately after the town received its municipal status. Designed by a local contractor named Francis Hawkins, the classic revival hall contained an opera hall on the second floor and the council chamber on the ground level, while the basement of this all-purpose structure contained Alfie Bennett’s Crystal Palace Saloon, across the hall from which, conveniently, stood the lockup.
Across the road stands the Merchants’ Exchange Hotel, dating from 1847, while to the east, at 30 York Street, a stone building with a date stone of 1833 has been described by some historians as having been a customs house. An even earlier building is that which housed a blacksmith shop. Built of stone, but with newer windows, it stands at the corner of Main and the Governor’s Road.
But one of most beguiling of Dundas’s historic structures is the “doctor’s house.” Originally located on Main Street, it was moved in 1974, and is now a private residence on Albert Street. Constructed of board and batten, this tiny office was built in 1848 for Dr. James Mitchell, but was more popularly known as the “Bates’ Office,” named for its last practitioner, Dr. Clarence Bates, who practised in the building from 1935 until 1974.
In the oldest section of town, that bounded by York, Dundas, and King, handsome old homes line the shady streets. Number 32 Cross Street is one of the more interesting. Built by lawyer William Notman, the house for many years contained the famous Notman cannon. This six-pounder, a gift from Lord Selkirk, was used during the 1837 rebellion. Notman faithfully fired the cannon each May 24, up until his death in 1865. Today the famous cannon has found a home in front of the town hall, and grand homes still dominate Cross and Victoria streets, marking an historic part of town that is now a designated heritage district.
The famous canal today is little more than a weedy ditch, its turning basin now filled in. Its route through the Burlington Heights beach ridge remains, though its entrance to Cootes Paradise is now barred to boats. A paved cycling and walking trail leads from beneath the bridges to the Pier 4 Park at Hamilton’s west end. Historic plaques recount the many historic chapters in the life of this early, yet often ignored, waterway. High overhead loom the bridges of CN Rail’s tracks, the McQuesten High Level Bridge, and the later Highway 403 bridge. Stairs lead from the ends of the McQuesten Bridge on busy York Street to the water, where, about halfway down, tucked into the overgrown hillside, lie the stone abutments that witnessed the horrific train wreck of 1857.
Marking the far west end of Lake Ontario is a wave-washed sandbar. This long spit of land separating the lake from Burlington Bay (Lake Geneva) evolved over thousands of years. As the creeks that flowed down the Niagara Escarpment emptied into the lake, they met with easterly currents that slowed the flow, depositing the silt and sand carried by the waters.
The sandbar was long an aboriginal trail that Simcoe incorporated into his network of military roads. To establish his presence, he ordered the construction of the King’s Head Inn, the first permanent building on the strip. In 1813 the invading Americans burned the building (although its sign survived and is displayed in the Brant Museum in Burlington). At this time, the Beach Strip was a wilderness, its dunes covered with beach grasses and shrubs. At the north end, waves would occasionally cut through the sand, enabling small vessels to pole their way through and proceed on to Cootes Paradise and the village of Dundas at its head.
In 1826, at the urging of a local industrialist, James Crooks, who operated mills at the now ghost town of Crooks Hollow, a more permanent canal was cut through the sandbar, a change that would alter the destinies of the new town of Hamilton and of the older Dundas. Up until then, any goods being exported from Dundas had to be lifted over the sandbar to ships waiting on the other side, or poled through whenever the gap opened. On July 1, 1826, Ontario’s lieutenant governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland, presided over the opening of the new channel. But it proved to be an inauspicious start. No sooner had the first vessel, the General Brock, navigated the new waterway, than it ran aground.
Vicious winter storms in 1829 and 1830 wrecked the piers and the first lighthouse. Finally, in 1832, the finishing touches were added, and the new canal, now properly constructed, opened. Two mast lights replaced the older light, but these proved inadequate, and in 1837 an octagonal wooden light tower was built on a sturdy stone foundation. A wooden ferry ushered any road traffic across the narrow channel.
But more devastation was to come. In 1856, the sparks from a passing steamer set fire to the new pier and lighthouse. Both were destroyed, and a new light tower had to be built the following year. Designed in the circular “imperial” style common on Lake Huron and Georgian Bay, the new tower could boast stone walls 2.2 metres thick. The keeper’s brick house was also rebuilt beside it. This time the lighthouse was constructed to withstand storms and ships, which it did, until a new light was placed in a more prominent position atop the canal lift bridge in 1961. Though now abandoned, the stone tower and keeper’s house still stand.
This historic lighthouse tower and keeper’s house still survive beside the Burlington Canal. The light was replaced by a new structure in 1969.
A few hotels were built to cater to residents of the increasingly industrialized Hamilton, including the Dynes Hotel in 1846, and the Baldry House soon after. Then, in 1875, the Hamilton and Northwestern Railway laid its tracks along the lake side of the beach, ending forever the natural oasis. Almost immediately more hotels began to appear. First the Ocean House, then the Brant House — located in the former home of Joseph Brant — and a few years later, the similarly named Brant Hotel opened nearby. One of the grandest buildings on the spit was that of the Royal Hamilton Yacht Club. Opened in 1891, the two-storey wooden structure boasted wraparound balconies elaborately decorated with fretwork. The club was located next to the lighthouse, but sadly was lost to fire in 1915.
The first bridge constructed over the canal was a swing bridge, the site of a rail accident in 1891 that was all too reminiscent of the Desjardins tragedy thirty-four years earlier. When a fierce gale reduced visibility along the beach, the engineer failed to see the red light signalling that the bridge was open. As the Hamilton Spectator of August 31, 1891, recounted:
An early view from the Illustrated Historical Atlas of Wentworth County shows the appearance of Hamilton’s beach strip in 1875.
[T]he night was dark and a gale was blowing from the east … with a tremendous plunge the engine shot over the brink and disappeared beneath the black water. The cars went tumbling in after it, crash after crash, the lights were extinguished and a terrible silence followed … the engine went down completely out of sight, and then cars popped over on top of it, one after the other until the wreck was piled as high as the top of the water.
Unlike the Desjardins disaster, no lives were lost — the train was a freight, and the engineer and fireman were able to jump to safety before the frightening and near-fatal plunge.
In 1896, a new swing bridge was constructed, this one on the west side of the strip that accommodated road and streetcar traffic. But by the 1950s the streetcars were gone, and a new lift bridge opened, merging rail and car traffic together. By then, traffic on the QEW was on the increase, resulting in major bottlenecks at the bridge. With thirty thousand cars using the highway daily, traffic jams several kilometres long were not uncommon. Clearly, another new bridge was needed. And it came. On October 30, 1958, Ontario premier Leslie Frost officially opened the Burlington Bay Skyway. At nearly seven kilometres long and forty metres high, it was the most ambitious bridge project ever undertaken by the province.
Prompted by the opening of the Beach Road from the east end of Hamilton, and the arrival of the streetcars, Hamiltonians began building summer homes, both simple and grand. Despite a recent intrusion of year-round homes and condos, many early beach homes still stand today. Among the more noteworthy and photogenic are: the 1898 “Sweetheart House” at 935 Beach Boulevard; “Cahill’s Castle,” built in 1891, at 957 Beach Boulevard; and one-time Hamilton mayor George Tuckett’s gothic revival villa at 1008 Beach Boulevard. However, the most acclaimed is the “Moorings.” Located at 913 Beach Boulevard, it was built by another Hamilton mayor, Francis Kilvert, in 1891. A designated heritage property, it is noted for its ornate veranda, fish-scale wood shingle siding, and variety of gables. Amongst these grand and glorious summer palaces run small lanes lined with the simpler summer homes of less affluent Hamiltonians.
The Canada Amusement Company opened The Canal Amusement Park in 1903, with a carousel, Ferris wheel, and a funhouse called the Crazy House. After the First World War, the Pier Ballroom opened, and throughout the 1930s and 40s featured the music of Duke Ellington, the Clooney Sisters, and Ozzie Nelson. The railway carried Hamilton’s workers to enjoy the amusement park, and made stops at the Beach Road Station, Dynes Hotel, a private mansion known as the “Elsinore,” and the Ocean House, as well as at the Brant House near Burlington. But in 1975 the City of Hamilton refused to renew the park’s licence. It closed in 1978, and all of its rides were auctioned off.
In 2007, amidst considerable controversy, the ancient Dynes Tavern was taken down, without a demolition permit, to make way for a condominium project. Until then, this beach hangout had been considered by many to be Ontario’s oldest surviving operating tavern.
Today, driving isn’t the only way to view this historic and much altered Beach Strip. The Hamilton Beach Recreation Trail now follows the route of the old railway right-of-way along the sandy beach. Information plaques recount the days of the amusement park as well as current projects to stabilize the dune formations with such vegetation as Indian grass, rye grass, beach grass, and burr oak. And while it may be a little ambitious to dream of the strip being restored to the condition in which Simcoe found it, at least the endless waves crashing against the grass-covered sand may enhance the illusion.
It’s hard these days to figure out just where Aldershot begins and ends. As part of the urban megalopolis known as the Golden Horseshoe, it is indistinguishable from Burlington to the east and Hamilton to the west. Still, it would be reasonable to demark its boundaries as the Queen Elizabeth Way to the east, the CN rail line to the north, Burlington Heights to the west, and Burlington Bay to the south.
The first settlers to arrive in the area, in 1791, were the Applegarth family, whose farmland lay on the north shore of the lake, west of what is today the La Salle Park. The Chisholm family arrived two years later and added gristmills on Grindstone Creek, which tumbles south from Waterdown and then follows an almost hidden valley westerly to Rock Bay. Today that wooded valley forms part of the Royal Botanical Gardens.
In 1806, Colonel Brown, an agent for the North West Company, arrived and established a wharf on Lake Geneva, giving the community its first name: Brown’s Wharf. When more settlers arrived, a resident by the name of Ebenezer Griffin built a series of mills around the tumbling water-power sites at Waterdown, a short distance north, and used the wharf to ship flour and wool. By 1823, Aldershot could claim nearly a dozen log homes, and two dozen more substantial dwellings of frame or brick. When the Burlington Canal was completed, larger ships were able to enter the protected waters of the bay more easily. During the 1840s the wharf was enlarged to accommodate steamers and the port was able to provide the ships with a supply of cordwood, used as fuel. By this time the little port was going by the name Port Flamborough.
In 1854, Brown’s grandson, Alexander, chose to honour his grandfather’s military service by naming the post office Aldershot, after a military base near London, England, where his grandfather had served. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a large brickyard operation took over Grindstone Valley, located west of the village and along the railway track. The large red kilns remained at the site for years, serving as a visual reminder of the location’s history, until they were removed in the 1990s.
But even after the arrival of the railway, and the erection of the Aldershot station, the community remained small, with only a few shops and taverns along Plains Road. The light and sandy soils in the area that had discouraged early wheat farming proved ideal for apples and melons, and Aldershot soon became famous for shipping these products. Hotels were built both by the wharf and along the new road, and included Fenton’s Valley Inn, Shorty Biggs’s hotel on the lake, and the popular Bayview Hotel.
Now an event venue, the historic La Salle Pavilion, situated in a park of the same name, is the only surviving building from the park’s days as an Aldershot pleasure ground.
The Bayview was set on a piece of land known as Carroll’s Point, overlooking Rock Bay, the point at which Morden Creek flows into the bay from Cootes Paradise. It was here, in 1836, that Peter Carroll built his baronial “Rock Bay Mansion,” and became one of the first farmers in Ontario to cultivate peaches out-of-doors. After his death, the mansion burned, and on this high point of land a man by the name of George Midwinter opened Bayview Park. Vacationers travelled by steamer from Hamilton to stay in the Bayview Hotel, or to ride the new merry-go-round at the park. Disembarking from steamers like the Lillie, the Shamrock, or the Maggie Mason, they could either climb the steep stairs or ride on a two-car incline railway to the summit.
However, by the 1920s, Bayview Park was silent, replaced by a larger park to the east, Wabasso Park. Established by the Hamilton Parks Board in 1912, Wabasso included a dance pavilion, a bathing house, a roller coaster, and a Ferris wheel. In 1923, the name was changed to La Salle Park, and not long after, the rides were removed. But the La Salle Park Pavilion continued to operate, featuring such local bandleaders as Pete Malloy and Eddie Mack.
Today La Salle Park is still a busy green space, now enjoyed largely by local residents. The 1917 pavilion remains, despite being gutted by fire in May 1995. It was rebuilt to its original condition the following year and is now a banquet and event facility called Geraldo’s. The site of the dock has been incorporated into a marina and a new park that extends into the bay, while scant ruins of the bathing pavilion lie beneath the underbrush.
Bayview Park and the site of Carroll’s mansion are now part of the Woodland Cemetery, although the view from Carroll’s Point remains the same as Carroll and the guests at the Bayview Hotel might remember. The site of the Valley Inn is remembered only in the name of the road leading to the location, Valley Inn Drive, which now dead-ends at the location of the former bridge that once spanned across Rock Bay.
