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• Lady Aberdeen 1857-1939
  A passionate advocate for social reform, Ishbel Maria Marjoribanks was born in London, England. Following her marriage in 1877 to John Gordon, 7th Earl of Aberdeen, she established several humanitarian associations in Great Britain. Widely respected for her firm public commitment and remarkable organizational skills, Lady Aberdeen served as president of the International Council of women from 1893-1939. During her husband's term as Governor General (1893-1898), she helped form the National Council of Women of...

• Carlsbad Springs
  In the 1860s, local innkeeper Daniel Eastman offered water from the natural mineral springs in this area for drinking and bathing. His inn was followed by larger hotels where guests were invited to "take the waters" for ailments such as rheumatism, nervousness and digestive disorders. Eastman's Springs was soon a fashionable meeting place for Ottawa society. Also known as Cathartic, it became Carlsbad Springs by the early twentieth century when the Boyd family, owners of...

• L'École Guigues and Regulation 17
  Erected as a school in 1904-05, this building became a centre for minority rights agitation in Ontario early in the twentieth century. In 1912, when the provincial government issued a directive restricting French-language education to the primary grades, heated controversy resulted. Opposition to this directive, commonly called Regulation 17, was widespread and particularly intense in Ottawa. Funds were withheld from the city's separate school board and in 1915, after it had closed the schools under...

• Home Children
  Beginning in 1869, British charitable societies removed children from slums and orphanages in congested industrial cities and brought them to Canada to serve as cheap farm and domestic labour. "Homes" were set up across the country to house the girls and boys until they were placed in service. Monitoring of the children after placement was superficial, leaving them susceptible to mistreatment. Child emigration was discontinued in the 1930s when the Great Depression created a labour...

• Long Island Mill, The
  An outstanding example of mill architecture in Ontario, this grist-mill was constructed by Thomas Langrell, an Ottawa contractor, for Moss K. Dickinson (1822-97) and Joseph M. Currier (1820-84), the owners of a nearby mill. The Long Island Mill began operation in 1860 with four sets of mill-stones driven by water-powered turbines manufactured in Ottawa. By the autumn of 1862, a woollen-mill had been added to this industrial complex, around which the community of Manotick developed...

• Thomas McKay 1792-1855
  Born in Scotland, McKay emigrated to Canada about 1817 and worked as a mason in Montreal until 1826, when he began building the entrance locks of the Rideau Canal and the first bridge across the Ottawa River joining present-day Ottawa and Hull. In 1829, McKay acquired land where the Rideau River met the Ottawa. Here he laid out the village of New Edinburgh, and established an industrial complex that, by 1848, included two sawmills, a...

• Nile Voyageurs 1884-85, The
  In 1884, the British Government decided to send a military expedition up to the Nile River to relieve Major-General Charles Gordon, who was besieged in Khartoum by Mahdist tribesmen. Appointed to command the relieving force, Lord Wolseley, who had led the expedition to the Red River in 1870, requested the recruitment of experienced Canadian voyageurs. Almost 400 volunteered, including many superb rivermen, and the largest group came from the Ottawa valley area. Commanded by Lieut.-Col...

• Founding of Osgoode Township, The
  Named for William Osgoode, the first Chief Justice of Upper Canada, Osgoode Township was established on lands the British acquired from the Mississaugas in the 1780s. Land for farming and a plentiful supply of white pine and white oak attracted the first non-native settlers, the families of Archibald and Catherine McDonell and William and Ann York, who arrived in 1827. They founded the new community's first industries and institutions, and they built the first two...

• University of Ottawa, The
  This institution was established in 1848 by Bishop Joseph-Eugène Guigues and placed under the direction of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Incorporated by Act of Parliament on May 30, 1849 as the College of Bytown, it occupied a three-storey frame building in the garden of the Episcopal Palace. Renamed "College of Ottawa" in 1861, it received university status five years later, and was decreed a pontifical university by Pope Leo XIII in 1889. The college...

• Alexander Cameron Rutherford 1857-1941
  The first premier of Alberta, Rutherford was born in Osgoode Township of Scottish parents and educated at McGill University. In 1895, after practicing law in Ottawa and Kemptville, he moved to Strathcona, near Edmonton. Elected to the territorial assembly seven years later, Rutherford achieved prominence as deputy speaker of the legislature. When the province of Alberta was created in 1905, he became premier, provincial treasurer and minister of education in the first government. Rutherford skillfully...

• Charlotte Elizabeth Whitton, O.C., C.B.E. 1896-1975
  The first woman mayor of Canada's capital, 1951-56 and 1961-64, Charlotte Whitton was born in Renfrew, educated there and at Queen's University. In 1920, she became secretary of the Canadian Council on Child Welfare (later the Canadian Welfare Council) and as its first executive director, 1926-1941, worked energetically to improve the condition of indigent mothers. Fiery and controversial, Charlotte Whitton represented Canada on the League of Nations Social Questions Committee and investigated Alberta welfare practices...

• Commissariat Building 1827
  This structure, the oldest existing stone building in Ottawa, was used as a storehouse, office and treasury during the construction of the Rideau Canal (1826-32) under the direction of Lieutenant-Colonel John By, R.E. Its superb masonry and solid construction are typical of the stonework done by Scottish masons along the Rideau Canal and, at a later date, on private homes in eastern Ontario. In 1864, the building was turned over to the Canadian government and, until 1951, was used successively by various departments concerned with the maintenance of the canal.

• Almanda Walker-Marchand and the Fédération des Femmes Canadiennes-Françaises
  Almanda Walker-Marchand was the founder and president of the Fédération des femmes canadiennes-françaises (FFCF). Born in Quebec City in 1868, she moved with her family first to Montreal and then to Ottawa. Her last home overlooked this park. In 1914, days after the declaration of the First World War, Walker-Marchand encouraged a group of more than 400 French-Canadian women to form an organization dedicated to helping French-Canadian soldiers and their families both during and after...

• Le Droit
  In 1912, members of the Association canadienne-française d'éducation de l'Ontario and the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate – a religious order of the Catholic Church – gathered in Ottawa to discuss the founding of a newspaper to protest Regulation 17, which – until it was no longer enforced in 1927 – severely restricted the teaching of French in Ontario schools. That initial meeting led to the establishment of Le Droit, a Catholic French-language daily newspaper...

• Marie-Rose Turcot 1887-1977
  Born in Laurierville, Quebec, Marie-Rose Turcot moved to Ottawa around the age of 20 to work in the civil service. Later, working as a journalist, Marie-Rose Turcot published in the daily newspaper Le Droit, as well as in several other weekly and daily publications in Ottawa and Montreal, sometimes using the pseudonym Constance Bayard. She also worked in broadcast journalism for the French radio station CKCH in Hull, Quebec. Turcot was the author of a...

• Elisabeth Bruyère 1818-1876
  In the 1840s, Bytown (Ottawa) was a growing timber-trade village with a substantial French-Canadian population but no Catholic schools and few social services. In February of 1845 the Sisters of Charity of Montreal (Grey Nuns) sent four nuns here. Led by Élisabeth Bruyère, a devout, well-educated young woman, the sisters quickly established a bilingual school for girls, a hospital and an orphanage. They helped the poor, the elderly and the sick, including hundreds of immigrants...

• Christ Church 1838
  This handsome stone church, in the style of the early Gothic revival, was built by A. Thomas Christie on land donated by John Cavanagh, one of Huntley township's earliest landholders. Aided by a substantial contribution from Colonel Arthur Lloyd, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who had settled in neighbouring March township, the building was completed in 1838. The earliest Anglican settlers were served by missionaries posted in Hull and subsequently in March. The union...

• Richmond Military Settlement 1818, The
  In August 1818, some thirty disbanded veterans of the 99th Regiment, led by Captain G.T. Burke, arrived in newly surveyed Goulbourn Township. These formed the advance party of a military settlement planned and supported by the quartermaster-general's department. Here, they laid out a town site named after the governor-general, the Duke of Richmond. Storehouses were built, settlers' cabins erected and the colonists provided with farm implements and rations. Under the general supervision of Lieutenant-Colonel Francis...

• Honourable Hamnet Kirks Pinhey 1784-1857, The
  A merchant and ship-owner in his native England, Pinhey came to Upper Canada in 1820. For his services as King's messenger during the Napoleonic Wars, he received a 1,000-acre land grant on the Ottawa River. Within a decade he had built up an estate which he named Horaceville after his elder son. In addition to a manor house and barns, it included mills, a store and a church. Pinhey took a leading part in township...

• St. John's Anglican Parish
  On this site stood the first church to be commenced in what is now Carleton County. Among the pioneers who formed the Richmond Military Settlement in 1818 were many Anglicans, and in 1822, the Rev. John Byrne was appointed to minister to the members of that communion in Richmond and March. The original St. John's Church, a frame and stone structure, was begun in 1823 and the following year Byrne established residence in Richmond, where...

• Mother Marie Thomas d'Aquin (1877-1963)
  Jeanne Lydia Branda grew up near Bordeaux, France. From a young age, she felt called to become a nun and teacher. In 1899, she joined the Dominican Sisters of Nancy, where she would teach and take the name Sister Marie Thomas d’Aquin. She left France and settled in Maine where she was deeply influenced by the freedom and openness of America. While visiting Ottawa in 1914, she agreed to head the Jeanne d'Arc Institute, a...