A fountain named Strathcona
Ken’s Bygone Sandy Hill
Ken Clavette
In 1909, the news in Ottawa was that Sandy Hill resident Henry Newell Bate, Chairman of the Ottawa Improvement Commission—the future National Capital Commission—had secured a donation of $2,500 from Lord Strathcona to erect a fountain in the new Sandy Hill Park along the Rideau River.
During the Boer War, the Dominion Government leased a swampy floodplain along the Rideau River from the city to open a rifle range, to train soldiers before shipping out to South Africa. In establishing the Commission in 1899, the Laurier government wanted to improve and beautify the city. It quickly began building parks, boulevards, and parkways. In 1904 work began to convert the range into one of those early parks. It would be named in honour of the prominent Canadian, Lord Strathcona. On Dominion Day 1910, Mayor Hopewell formally unveiled the fountain known as Strathcona Fountain.
The fountain has not always been treated well. In 1955, the Ottawa Citizen reported that the District Commission was not interested in “…repairing the fountain damaged by vandals.” It claimed that it had been repaired “… on previous occasions but each time teen-age gangs had damaged the equipment.” That lack of interest in spending money on the park was not new. The original design contained a canal that fed two ponds. Neglected during the 1930s Depression, they were filled in rather than repaired. When the gazebo felt the disrepair of aging, it was demolished. We are still waiting to have it replaced.
By 1987 the federal lease on the land had ended and the park and fountain were turned over to the City of Ottawa. It undertook a park renewal plan to deal with the poor state of the park and the fountain that had not been in operation for at least a decade. Finally on a night in July 1994, after years of work by Action Sandy Hill and residents, water once again began to flow in the fountain.
One Sandy Hiller who holds the fountain dearly is the architect Barry Padolsky. He has researched the history of the fountain that has been a landmark in the community for 115 years. Thanks to his research we know the creator was renowned French sculptor Mathurin Moreau (1822-1912). His works have been placed in many major public spaces, such as the Paris Opéra and Musée d’Orsay. For the four-hundredth anniversary of the City of Quebec in 2008, the City of Bordeaux gave Quebec his Fontaine de Tourny. Moreau was more than an artist. He had a head for business, involving himself in the operations of the Val d’Osne foundry in Paris which cast many of his works.
The date of the fountain’s manufacture is not known, but Padolsky believes it was sometime after 1866. He also discovered it is not the only one of its kind. In 1994 he stumbled across an identical twin in Buenos Aires, Argentina. On the hundredth anniversary, Padolsky wrote in the Citizen that Moreau “… may have given us a most remarkable, esoteric, romantic, archaic and almost all-forgotten, but worldly, allegorical gift.” The four cherubs holding a basin aloft represent Europe, Asia, America, and Africa — very fitting for an “international city.”
Padolsky continues to worry about the care the fountain gets, or more appropriately fails to get. This spring he wrote the City’s Built Heritage Committee reminding them that the fountain is recognized as a heritage attribute of the Wilbrod/Laurier Heritage Conservation District, therefor protected by Part V of the Ontario Heritage Act. As its custodian, the City, needs to take “… preventative conservation measures semi-annually without fail.” However, failure has been what the fountain has dealt with throughout its history.
Who was the first Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal of Glencoe?
Well before the fancy title, he was Donald Alexander Smith. While he has left his title all over Sandy Hill, and indeed Canada, the image most of us have of him is an 1885 photograph of a bearded man driving the last ceremonial spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway, CPR.
Born in Forres, Scotland in 1820, he set sail for Canada at the age of 18 with dreams of adventure in the fur trade. Shortly after his arrival he secured a position with the Hudson’s Bay Company, HBC. After 21 years working in Labrador, he began a climb that would lead him to head the company. He was the longest serving Hudson’s Bay Company officer, a business leader, politician, imperialist, and diplomat, and ended his life as a philanthropist supporting many causes including healthcare and women’s higher education.
While in Labrador he met Isabelle Sophia, who left her “bush marriage” to a fellow employee to marry Donald. Together they raised a daughter and her son, who took his name. It is said Isabella served the community as a doctor and had her own trap line. She was of independent mind, supporting her husband but also living her own life. He in return supported her —and protected her from discrimination and prejudice because of her mixed Indigenous-Scottish ancestry— as they climbed the society ladder to that title of Baron.
Smith was the only person in the history of the HBC to rise from clerk to head the organization. His duties led to an interest in western development and to investment in railway companies. That led him to investing in the much-troubled CPR construction. In addition to railways, he actively invested in financial services, telecommunications, textiles, life insurance, land, and newspapers, to name a few of his roles in business.
In politics he was appointed to a commission to negotiate with Louis Riel and the Red River colony to enter confederation. He became a member of Manitoba’s Legislature and a Manitoba Member of Parliament. In that role he helped defeat the Macdonald government during the 1873 Pacific Scandal, setting up a lifelong antagonism between the men. As a major investor in the CPR, the honour of driving the last spike may have been a way of sticking it to the Prime Minister. Styling himself an Independent Conservative he would go on to be elected an MP representing Montreal. When Prime Minister Sir Mackenzie Bowell stepped down, he wanted Smith to replace him. But he refused and instead Charles Tupper, another old political rival, became PM. Tupper in turn appointed Smith to replace him as Canada’s High Commissioner to London in 1896.
The Canadian government encouraged only European immigration to the west under the Minister of the Interior Clifford Sifton. Smith tried but failed in his efforts to have the government recruit settlers from Barbados. A rich man, Smith refused to accept a salary as High Commissioner. As an imperialist, he personally funded a regiment to go to South Africa to fight in the Boer War in 1900. Called the Strathcona Horse, it recruited heavily from the west and the Mounted Police.
As a young man he could not afford to attend university; now he became a prominent donor to education with many universities receiving endowments and gifts. Women were included in his plans. In 1883, he contributed to the Trafalgar Institute, a girl’s school in Montreal. The following year he funded an endowment at McGill University so that women could attend. These women became known as The Donalds. His efforts resulted in the founding of the Royal Victoria College for women at McGill in 1899.
He took an interest in healthcare, funding an endowment and building the McGill Medical School. He helped build the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal as a free public hospital. In Newfoundland and Labrador, he was the main supporter of Wilfred Grenfell’s medical missions to the outports. Grenfell named his hospital ship the Sir Donald, and its replacement the Strathcona. With his long list of generous donations, our beautiful Sandy Hill Strathcona Fountain was but a small one.
