Capital Builders: Ottawa’s original rock star — the man who chose the cornerstone of Parliament

[guest]

The Capital Builders​

Dr. Edward Van Cortlandt was one of many remarkable people who shaped Ottawa into
the capital it is today. During 2017, the 150th anniversary of Confederation, the Citizen will profile several more of this city’s “capital-builders.”
Look for the series in the new year.​

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As symbols of Canada’s foundations go, it’s hard to find one more expressive of the country’s bedrock sturdiness, its deep layers of history and its shining resilience than the white marble cornerstone of the Parliament Buildings.

During the country’s 150th anniversary year, when all eyes will be on the nation’s capital and its “noble Gothic pile” atop the bluff once known as Barrack Hill, the story of this massive block of crystallized limestone — where it’s from, how it came to occupy such a prime position in the national dreamscape, what it says about permanence, change and creative adaptation — merits special attention.

And as with so many other strands of Ottawa history, the figure at the centre of the cornerstone story — at the heart of this telling, anyway — is Dr. Edward Van Cortlandt. He was a pioneer physician who dabbled in such a diverse array of scientific sidelines and civic pursuits (archeology and zoology, libraries and museums among them) that his name pops up almost every time you find something significant occurring in old Bytown.

Who kickstarted the country’s first battle over industrial pollution in 1866 (the villain was sawdust) and perhaps deserves the title of Canada’s original environmentalist? Who was the founding physician of both the Civic and the General, twin predecessors of today’s Ottawa Hospital?

It was Dr. Van Cortlandt: family physician, surgeon and medical officer of health.

Who kept a renowned “cabinet of curiosities” that would go on to seed major museum collections in Ottawa and beyond — the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Redpath and McCord in Montreal, the Geological Survey of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Nature and the Canadian Museum of History?

It was EVC, curator extraordinaire.

Who — for good and for ill, with implications reaching right into this century — unearthed the capital’s most famous archeological site in 1843, a 5,000-year-old indigenous burial ground known as “Van Cortlandt’s Ossuary?” And who was on the case when Father of Confederation Thomas D’Arcy McGee was assassinated on Sparks Street in 1868, safeguarding the fatal bullet and shattered teeth from the victim of Canadian history’s most infamous murder?

Coroner Van Cortlandt, CSI.

Dr. Van is the Forrest Gump of 19th century Ottawa, a man who always seemed to find himself at the heart of the action in the backwoods timber town that was destined to become Canada’s seat of government 150 years ago. So it’s no surprise he’s integral to the story of the foundation stone of the national legislature, the ceremonial centrepiece of the building project that symbolized the birth of Ottawa as capital and the creation of the country itself.

Edward Van Cortlandt, renaissance man extraordinaire, the Forest Gump of Ottawa.

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At the moment, you can’t get there from here. Try to visit the fabled cornerstone of Parliament Hill and a stern-faced security guard will warn you away. The northeast section of Centre Block — in fact the whole back side of the Hill — has been cordoned off for a year, he says, and will remain off limits for three more.

This phase of Canada’s ultimate home reno, the multi-decade, zillion-dollar restoration and refurbishing of the Parliament Buildings, has barely begun, though some of these soaring stone walls have long been shrouded by cloth-covered scaffolds.

No complaints, really. Ottawa folks know the tradeoff: short-term pain, long-term gain. For most of the 1860s, the future Parliament Hill was construction chaos, too, and we can hardly regret it.

Barrack Hill, the woodsy military compound from the days of Colonel By, “is not now the picturesque and beautiful promenade our citizens were wont to resort to,” a Citizen scribe observed in February 1860, noting how the ground “lies hidden beneath immense heaps of building materials” or is elsewhere “upturned for foundation walls” yet to come. “So completely does confusion reign that it requires a stretch of fancy to imagine that out of the chaotic mass now spread over every available spot of its forty-three acres, the elegant architects’ picture will be realized.”

Residents of today’s capital, enduring not just the Hill’s modern makeover but LRT tunnelling, the LeBreton Flats redevelopment and countless other road rebuilds and condo upthrusts — not to mention the odd sinkhole — can relate rather well to the utter mess that was Upper Town in early 1860.

By the end of that summer, though, things were looking a lot better on the Hill. Enormous cost overruns? Sure. A commission of inquiry and hard questions for the builders? Eventually, yes. But the grand, neo-Gothic structures were actually starting to rise, the shape of things to come finally coming into view.

And coming to town soon to lay the ceremonial cornerstone of Parliament would be the Prince of Wales himself, the 18-year-old son of Queen Victoria, who’d made Ottawa her choice as Seat of Government of the Province of Canada — has any city ever been more grateful to any monarch? (A few years later, in 1867, this upstart city would be christened capital, too, of the new, larger Dominion of Canada, with the former provincial “Canada” split into Ontario and Quebec.)

Not that the Queen’s choice was universally popular. From the day her decision was made official on Dec. 31, 1857, until well into the 1860s, many leading Canadian and British politicians challenged the choice and pressed for a reversal in favour of Montreal or Toronto. One of the pre-Confederation governments of John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier even fell apart over the controversy, albeit very briefly, before the wily pair famously “double-shuffled” their way back to power. But that’s another story. . .

So when it became known in early 1860 that Prince Albert Edward — future King Edward VII — was coming to tour Her Majesty’s North American colonies, and especially to be the star of a cornerstone-laying ceremony in Ottawa, the capital rejoiced.

And then it wondered: What sort of stone would be worthy of the visitor’s regal touch?

All eyes, it seems, turned to Dr. Edward Van Cortlandt. He’d lived here since 1832, way back when Ottawa was barely even Bytown, and among the doctor’s numerous extracurricular passions was geology — particularly as it pertained to the Ottawa Valley’s supply of building stones.

From a 21st century perspective, the economic value of rock in a country with seemingly unlimited supplies of the stuff is a bit hard to fathom; but identifying rich, accessible deposits of construction-quality stone was a major obsession across Canada in the 19th century, when the phrase “nation-building” carried more literal connotations than it does today.

And Van Cortlandt, aware that construction of the Parliament Buildings would generate huge demand for attractive, durable stone blocks from sources within easy transport of downtown Ottawa, had undertaken an arduous inventory of supplies in the area on behalf of the local Silurian Society — yes, a club exclusively dedicated to the study of geological formations, fossiliferous outcrops and other subjects certain to produce a rockin’ good time whenever its members got together.

Van Cortlandt had delivered his findings at a landmark public lecture in November 1859 — the very month when the winning designs for the Parliament Buildings were to be announced.

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Despite the Citizen’s pre-talk plug that local readers should flock to the doctor’s presentation in droves, it regretfully reported afterwards that the address was “thinly attended” — even though “the discourse exhibited a vast amount of research and careful study on the part of the lecturer.”

The 54-year-old Van Cortlandt, who lived with his wife and six children in a stately, three-storey house on Wellington Street near the present-day Library and Archives Canada, had not only examined sites on foot or within the reach of his horse and carriage. He had even travelled by steamer, upriver and down, to inspect quarries and undisturbed rock exposures throughout the Ottawa Valley.

There was, as well, his 30-odd years of experience as a leading enthusiast for taking “tramps” around the region — field trips in which small groups of nature lovers collected specimens of plants, animals, rocks and minerals.

This was the golden age of natural history, when armies of Queen Victoria’s citizen-scientists were combing the wilds of British North America to take stock of its ample resources. They were not just revelling in the Empire’s bounty; they were also helping to establish a settlement culture’s rooted sense of place in a relatively new land — its indigenous inhabitants, dispossessed and marginalized a little more with each incursion.

In the opening lines of Van Cortlandt’s address, he lamented the crumbling evidence everywhere around young Ottawa — in its public and private buildings, in its bridges and tombstones — of “the evils incidental to an injudicious selection” of stone building material. The future capital, he seethed, was dotted with “perishable monuments of ignorance,” and there was an urgent need to improve the city’s use of stone, “particularly as we are about to build up a structure which is intended to serve as an enduring monument of man’s handicraft” — the Parliament Buildings.

The corner stone laid by Albert Edward the then Prince of Wales .

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Significantly, among Van Cortlandt’s observations on that night at Temperance Hall — a popular meeting spot near today’s National War Memorial — was a reference to the great deposits of marble at Portage-du-Fort, a village on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, about 100 kilometres northwest of Ottawa.

There, he said, “a limestone of primitive crystalline character and of a pure white colour is met with on the river edge.” He noted, too, that a handsome monument had been fashioned from this stone to honour Lady Head — wife of Gov. Gen. Sir Edmund Head — and could be seen at a prominent site in the town. “This marble, when chiselled and hammer-dressed, looks remarkably clean and handsome. . . . There is little doubt that ere long this material will be in considerable demand.”

Van Cortlandt’s poorly attended speech about the rocks of the Ottawa Valley, including his praise for Portage-du-Fort’s white marble, went viral — 1860s-style. The lecture was printed verbatim by the Citizen over several editions of the paper in November and December 1859. The newspaper’s editors had also urged that city council publish the talk separately as a monograph — “What say our city guardians?” they had pestered at one point — and were soon “pleased to learn that our suggestion … is to be acted on.” (The Citizen, it is only fair to note, got the printing contract, and revved up its steam presses in early 1860.)

The doctor’s pamphlet, “Observations on the Building Stone of the Ottawa Country” — published “By Order of The City Council,” its cover pronounced — quickly spread word of the Ottawa area’s geological riches, including its existing quarries and potential new ones.

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Van Cortlandt’s lecture and his earlier local geological research appear to have been a significant consideration when the men responsible for erecting the legislature, in the early weeks of 1860, made a fateful, 11th-hour decision: that sandstone — not limestone as originally planned — would be used for the walls of Parliament. It would be more expensive, they knew, but they had decided that limestone would be too grey and too sombre for the emerging country’s signature architectural project, and that the warmer tones of sandstone would be equally durable and far more attractive.

Sandstone hadn’t been Van Cortlandt’s first choice. In fact, he had likely influenced the original selection of limestone since he was known to have enthusiastically pointed to the plentiful, close-at-hand supplies as the best material for constructing the great buildings that would soon transform Ottawa’s landscape and destiny.

But when the project managers began having second thoughts in January 1860 — just as workers were preparing the site for construction — they evidently turned, again, to Van Cortlandt for direction.

The doctor, in an April 1858 edition of the Ottawa Banner, had first alerted government officials to the potential merits of local sandstone supplies and predicted they would soon be “in demand for the new Parliament Buildings.”

And in his November 1859 lecture — just weeks before the builders decided against limestone — Van Cortlandt had helpfully stated that sandstone “exists on both sides of the Ottawa in Templeton, Stony Swamp and other situations in inexhaustible quantities, and in some instances advantageously stratified.”

Two Ottawa-area sources of sandstone were eventually chosen for the Parliament Buildings: the buff-coloured, readily accessible supply from near Stony Swamp in Nepean, and a reddish-tinged strand of rock from Templeton Township on the Quebec side of the river.

Van Cortlandt, then, clearly deserves some portion of the credit for the overall look of Canada’s magnificent sandstone Parliament. But as for the ceremonial cornerstone upon which it would rest, a plan was fixed by August 1860 to exploit Portage-du-Fort’s exceptional white marble — and it was all thanks, it appears, to Van Cortlandt’s public endorsement of that “remarkably clean and handsome” stone.

With the Prince of Wales scheduled to arrive in Ottawa at the end of that month, there was much preparation to be done.

A metre-wide cube that must have weighed three metric tonnes was chiselled from Portage-du-Fort’s riverbank cache of marble and transported to Ottawa.

“The block that is to become the corner stone of a pile of buildings, which for extent and beauty will not be surpassed on the American Continent, arrived from the Portage-du-Fort quarries on Wednesday last,” the Citizen reported on Aug. 18, 1860, “and is now being wrought into shape by the skill of the workmen, for its important position in the Parliament Buildings of the United Canada.”

Describing the huge object as “beautifully crystallized and almost translucent,” the writer asserted that, “as a specimen of Canadian building stone, it is not unworthy of the Royal digits, and we daresay the Prince will admire its beauty.”

On the way eastward to Parliament Hill in a horse-drawn wagon, the rough-cut monolith was paraded purposefully past Van Cortlandt’s house — a site located within today’s Garden of the Provinces and Territories, on Wellington Street just west of Bay Street.

We can only imagine how the rock star of the Silurian Society must have felt about the touching tribute the workmen paid as they paused at his door: “On arriving at the residence of Doctor Van-Cortlandt,” the Citizen reported, “the cortege halted, and gave three hearty cheers. This compliment was well merited, inasmuch as the Dr. was the first person who called public attention to the article in question.”

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Laying of the cornerstone of the Parliament Buildings was the then Prince of Wales. It was one of the biggest events in the city’s history.


The Prince’s arrival in Ottawa on Aug. 31, 1860, just after 7 p.m., is the stuff of local legend. “The decoration of our city,” the Citizen observed, “and the general preparations for the Prince’s reception, progressed rapidly and favourably until the afternoon, when Ottawa appeared lovely and anxious as a bride awaiting the arrival of the bridegroom to complete her joy.”

The steamship that carried Albert Edward up the Ottawa was met by an escort of 150 lavishly decorated canoes paddled in formation by 1,000 lumbermen, all uniformly dressed in white trousers and red shirts. Tens of thousands of onlookers from the city and far beyond, who had waited for hours to catch sight of the Phoenix landing at the wharf near the entrance to the canal, gave a roar of welcome that was punctuated by a cannon salute.

And, perhaps most memorably, just after Mayor Alexander Workman welcomed the Prince “with the utmost delight” to the city so blessedly chosen by his “august mother” to be Canada’s capital, a sudden and exceptionally severe downpour drowned out the royal response, scattered the crowd and turned the extravagantly outfitted streets of Ottawa — “at no former time did so much bunting float over it” — into a sopping mess.

Never, indeed, did so much bunting float.

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But the main event the next day, Sept. 1, was favoured by perfect weather. The marble cornerstone, polished to perfection and duly inscribed for the momentous occasion, was suspended by pulleys at the centre of an elaborate scene befitting a prince’s presence: an enclosed platform where Albert Edward and other dignitaries would perform their duties was covered by a colossal, crown-shaped canopy festooned with flags and surrounded by raked seating for hundreds of privileged spectators.

We can assume that Dr. Van Cortlandt and his wife, Harriet, were among those seated comfortably with a good view, his geologic contribution to the grand occasion not quite worth a spot on the platform. We do know that the couple joined a celebratory levee attended by the Prince later in the day.

Noteworthy among the dignitaries on the main stage alongside His Royal Highness was Sir Allan MacNab, a former premier of Canada West who would become — through odd twists of fate — a great-great-great grandfather of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, the wife of the present Prince of Wales, Charles, a great-great grandson of Albert Edward. But that, too, is another story . . .

The great marble block had been etched as follows: “This corner stone of the building intended to receive The Legislature of Canada was laid by ALBERT EDWARD PRINCE OF WALES on the First day of September MDCCCLX.” Below it, in the hollowed space of another stone, were the contents of a time capsule: a glass bottle that held a rolled-up parchment bearing the names of Canada’s top legislators and all those leading the construction project, as well as a collection of gold, silver and copper coins of the day.

Ottawa’s biggest portrait of Queen Victoria, tastefully framed and positioned above the central platform, oversaw the proceedings as her young heir and the others, including Gov. Gen. Head, stepped forward.

There was moment of prayer, then a smearing of mortar with the “finishing touch” applied by the Prince, those “royal digits” grasping a silver trowel specially engraved with the architects’ image of the yet-unbuilt legislature. The block was lowered into place, given three taps by the Prince with a workman’s mallet and finally — after plumb and level were applied, and a further prayer spoken for “good government” to ensue in the place above the stone — it was declared “well and truly laid.”

After an eruption of cheers and trumpets, the ceremonial party walked to another platform that had been erected near the edge of the bluff. “They ascended,” wrote a contemporary chronicler of the Prince’s tour, “and for several minutes surveyed the glorious prospect there afforded of the brown Ottawa river, tumbling towards and over the Chaudière Falls, and expanding into a blue bay below them — of the city itself, of Hull village, of the lumber yards and saw mills, of the fields and forests and mountains in the distance beyond.”

From a 21st century vantage, there is much to compare and contrast in the view thus described — some of it preserved, some of it lost, with struggles still unfolding over the future of that shoreline, the state of the river and the fate of the falls.

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Van Cortlandt, as it happened, just a few months before the Prince surveyed the far shore, had been at Hull Landing — directly opposite Parliament Hill — digging up an ancient indigenous cemetery as old as Egypt’s pyramids. And six years later, only days before legislators would sit for the first time in the newly completed Parliament, he would look at that same brown water and all those lumber yards and saw mills, and spark Canada’s first serious environmental controversy — the battle over sawdust pollution.

All the while, he would continue combing the fields and forests that made up much of the Prince’s panorama, compiling the region’s earliest inventories of wildlife and natural resources. And chief among the testaments to his expertise and diligence is the cornerstone — formally set in place that sunny morning in 1860, and still with us today, more than 150 years later.

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Cornerstones of great public buildings, laid down amidst much pomp and ceremony, and meant to symbolize the solidity and durability of the state, don’t usually get a second act. But the tragic fire of February 1916 that destroyed the original House of Parliament and claimed seven lives gave Van Cortlandt’s marble block another turn at centre stage.

It had been recovered from the charred rubble, scrubbed clean and set aside as a symbol of now-supercharged significance — it was no longer just a foundational touchstone that stood for the birth of the capital and the country; it was also, in the very midst of a Great War in which tens of thousands of Canadian soldiers would die, an iconic representation of survival against terrible odds, of resilience in the face of adversity, of continuity of national purpose and a courageous Canadian spirit.

The Prince of Wales had come aboard the Phoenix to christen the cornerstone in 1860. And on another Sept. 1 in 1916, his younger brother, Prince Arthur — the 66-year-old Duke of Connaught, who also happened to be Canada’s governor general at the time — performed the “re-laying” of this phoenix-like totem, reborn from ashes and placed in a window-like frame of rock, during construction of the new “Centre Block” of Parliament. It, too, would be constructed of Nepean sandstone.

Below the original cornerstone inscription, in the same black lettering used 56 years earlier, was etched: “Relaid by his brother, ARTHUR DUKE OF CONNAUGHT, on the First day of September MDCCCCXVI.” The 1860 time capsule, recovered from the original site about 30 metres away, was repositioned and augmented with copies of the day’s newspapers, including the Citizen.

Before the trowel and the mallet did their work in the hands of the Duke, there were predictable but poignant speeches about the cornerstone-like “indestructibility” of Canada and its ties to the British throne, of the great “national progress” since the stone was originally laid, of the firm faith that the blessings of nationhood would “be continued in increasing proportions” for generations to come.

Van Cortlandt had been dead for more than 40 years by then. But his gift of a well-chosen cornerstone — a twice-laid block of brilliant marble, surrounded by walls of sandstone he’d also helped select — remains among his legacies.

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