From Queenston to Kingston. Ron Brown
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