On Common Ground. Richard D. Merritt
Artillery stationed at Fort Mississauga.
In 1817, while on a good-will tour, the President of the United States, James Monroe was entertained with great civility by British officers somewhere in the historic Fort.[21]
By 1825, however, Fort George was reported to be “in ruins.”[22] The bodies of Brock and Macdonell, buried in 1812 with great ceremony in the Northeast Bastion (now known as the Brock bastion), were disinterred and reburied in the base of the first Brock’s Monument at Queenston Heights. British military headquarters were moved to York, much to the annoyance of the locals. By 1839, the remaining soldiers were using the rebuilt Navy Hall complex as their barracks while the old barracks within the fort were downgraded to stables. Some of the adjacent Military Reserve was granted to merchant James Crooks in exchange for his strategic lands at Mississauga Point (see chapter 12).
In November 1844, Lieutenant Colonel R.H. Bonnycastle of the Royal Engineers received an unusual request from Mr. Edward Campbell of Niagara to purchase a ten-foot square of land on the southwest bastion of Fort George. Campbell claimed that he was the eldest son of Donald Campbell who had served honorably as Fort Major of Fort George until his untimely death in December 1812. Apparently he had been buried near the southwest bastion and his son wanted to erect a memorial on the site. Although the Board of Ordnance approved the request it is not known whether the son ever erected a cairn.[23] He may have changed his mind, as a large memorial plaque for the Fort Major is situated inside St. Mark’s Church “Erected By His Eldest Son 1848.”
Bird’s-eye view of Fort George, 1880s, artist Tiffany Merritt, drawing, graphite on paper, 2011. By the 1880s the bastions were deteriorating as well as both powder magazines. The 1816 officers’ barracks was occupied by a custodian and some of the land both inside the fort and on the outer earthworks was being cultivated.
Drawing based on conjectural drawings in an unpublished report. Gouhar Shemdin, David Bouse, “A Report on Fort George” (Ottawa: Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, 1975). With permission of Parks Canada.
With the Fort no longer a military installation, the eight-acre parcel of land was leased intermittently to private citizens, including John Meneilly in the 1840s and ’50s and later the Wright family from 1882 until the eve of the Great War. Rent was sixteen dollars per annum. The small officers’ quarters (circa 1814) was incorporated into a larger farmhouse, while the esplanade was cultivated as a garden and used for grazing animals. The original stone powder magazine was intermittently occupied by squatters or used for the storing of hay. The townsfolk’s livestock grazed on the grassy bastions and youngsters played “fort” or dug for artifacts on the slowly eroding earthworks. One former student of schoolmistress Miss Janet Carnochan recalled being excused for “habitual tardiness or failure in [his] studies” by bringing in regimental buttons he had found while “ransacking the dust heaps of Fort George.” A found military cross-belt plate atoned for major truancies.[24]
In 1897 a Toronto newspaper reporter described the pastoral vista.
A visitor naturally asks on approaching the Commons from the town, where is Fort George? He is pointed to a grassy hillock surmounted by a grand old tree [the Lonely Sycamore]. A nearer approach shows the grassy depression compassing the old earth works that did service in the moat. Here, where once the murky cloud from cannon dulled the sunlight, a little streak of blue smoke rises from a small frame homestead nested in the heart of the old fortifications. The ruins of the magazine are there. Strong and massive in those days long ago; if the cow is out you can enter and look around.…[25]
The Wright Cottage, photo, circa 1910. For over one hundred years the interior of Fort George was intermittently leased to custodian-tenants, the Wright family being the longest occupants. The cottage incorporated the small 1814 officers’ barracks and was eventually restored as such in the 1930s. Private collection.
However, such a peaceful scene belied a major controversy. In the 1880s a golf club had laid out a nine-hole course on a portion of the ruins and adjacent Commons. By 1895 it had expanded to eighteen holes and a total distance of over five thousand yards. Janet Carnochan, herself a daughter of Scotland, described the unique course so eloquently:
… surely never had the players of the game such historic surroundings. The very names of these holes are suggestive of those days when, instead of a white sphere, the leaden bullet sped on its way of death or the deadly shell burst in fragments to kill and destroy. The terms used in describing the course — Rifle Pit, Magazine, Half-Moon Battery, Fort George, Barracks — tell the tale.[26]
The club, whose membership was predominately American summer residents, proposed cleaning up the old fort site and erecting a clubhouse within. Increasingly impassioned letters to the editor and editorials in the local and Toronto newspapers referred to the desecration of sacred heroic sites as a sellout to “Sabbath-breaking Americans,” while others countered “predatory bovines now wander at their sweet will through the bastions, the inner court is used as an oat field … A five minute ramble serves to cover one to the elbows with burs, and this is the place that patriotic ‘Canadian’ wishes to save from desecration!”[27] Surprised and bewildered by the opposition of the townsfolk, the golf club quietly abandoned its plans (see chapter 20).
In 1912 Robert Reid, a former local chief of police, was hired as caretaker of Fort George by the Department of National Defence. He undertook an aggressive cleanup of the site, and by the following spring the local newspaper exclaimed, “a wondrous change has taken place.”[28] The locals once again were enjoying the “ruins” on the Commons, but soon all would change. With the outbreak of war in 1914, Camp Niagara on the Commons was thrown into high gear (see chapter 14). The Wright’s lease was not renewed and the Fort George golf links were closed. The southern portion of the fort’s former esplanade was soon the site of a fifty-bed military hospital complete with one fully equipped operating room. It was officially opened by Lady Borden, wife of the Canadian Prime Minister. Several other auxiliary buildings were erected, including a mess, kitchens, guardhouse, and toilets.
With the end of the Great War the buildings within the ruins sat unused, but the site was finally beginning to attract some recognition from historians and politicians. The newly formed Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada dedicated a stone cairn on the site to recognize the importance of Fort George. To provide better public access to the site a road was built in 1931 from the Niagara Parkway’s intersection with John Street northwards along the river and then skirting the western edge of the ruins to connect with the end of Byron Street. (The portion skirting the fort was removed in 1990 and replaced by the Recreation Trail.) Seven years later the Parkway was also extended down to Navy Hall to connect with Ricardo Street.
In the mid 1930s, with Canada in the depths of the Depression, the federal and provincial governments were looking for make-work projects. The Niagara Parks Commission (NPC) proposed to the Department of National Defence that they would undertake the restoration/reconstruction of Forts George and Mississauga, as well as Navy Hall, if they were granted a ninety-nine-year lease for a nominal one dollar per annum. The offer was quickly accepted, but with some stipulations. To be eligible for federal funding preference would have to be given to workmen who were presently unemployed and married with dependants, they should be from the area, and the work should include as many workmen as possible. The Department of National Defence, mindful of past experience, also reserved the right to reclaim the lands with six months notice.
The two men who were instrumental in the eventual success of this ambitious undertaking were the Honourable Thomas McQuesten and Ronald Wray. McQuesten was chairman of the NPC as well as Minister of Public Works and Minister of Highways. An overachiever, this tireless visionary proposed and supervised many similar restoration projects and was the driving force behind the Queen Elizabeth Way superhighway and the Niagara River Parkway. Wray was the project historian and director of all the Niagara projects. Considered one of the historical restoration experts of the time, he was also in charge of the Fort Henry restoration in Kingston at the same time. Despite frequent commutes between