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The Citizen asked Randy Boswell, a longtime Ottawa journalist and Carleton University professor, to reconstruct life in the capital on the day Canada was born. The history specialist dug into archives and old newspapers, unearthing a series of long-overlooked stories that shed fresh light on Confederation’s first 24 hours and some of the people whose lives were touched by the events of that landmark day 150 years ago. This is the first of those stories. The Citizen will publish the others is this week leading to July 1.
This tale begins where it ends, in a sense, at a Beechwood gravesite with a tombstone engraving: “Born 1867 Died 1921.”
The etched-in-granite lifespan of John William Graham only hints at the full story, but the Ottawa cemetery’s hand-written registry confirms it. Graham’s age when he died on May 27, 1921, was recorded as 53 years, 10 months and 26 days.
You can do the math, or plug the numbers into one of several online calculators and get the same result: John William Graham was born on July 1, 1867 — the same day the Dominion of Canada came into being, exactly 150 years ago next Saturday.
Graham is the only Ottawa child known to have arrived in the world on the very day that the BNA Act went into force, when Canada’s capital was in the thrall of celebrations marking the birth of the new Dominion.
The coincidence is interesting enough. But it’s what John Graham did with his life — despite early years of unimaginable loss and hardship — that is truly astounding. Charles Dickens couldn’t have concocted the plot and kept a straight face: tragedy heaped upon tragedy, uncanny twists of fate spanning generations, an impossibly poignant denouement.
John William Graham, the Dominion Day boy, would prove to have a profound influence on the city where he was born and lived all his life. And when he died suddenly in 1921 — at the age of 53 years, 10 months and 26 days — Ottawa was just as convulsed with grief as it had been seized with rejoicing on the day he was born.
The gravestone for Francis Graham at Beechwood cemetery.
A recent immigrant from Ireland, Francis “Frank” Graham had a well-earned reputation for public service and community leadership by the time Ottawa celebrated the birth of Confederation on July 1, 1867 — the day he and his wife, Mary Ann, also welcomed a son to the family: John.
A year earlier, Frank Graham and his crew of volunteer firefighters from the Central Hook & Ladder Company — which shared space in Ottawa’s original city hall at the north end of Elgin Street — had been the stars of the Victoria Day parade. The holiday was known then as the Queen’s Birthday, and was the annual highlight of community life in Ottawa and every other town and city throughout British North America.
Victorian-era cities were also tinderboxes. So it’s no wonder the local fire brigades were held in especially high regard at the time, and the gushing newspaper accounts of their parade through Ottawa on May 24, 1866, testify to the popularity of every captain and crewman — none of them formally employed by the city until Ottawa’s first professional fire department was formed in December 1874.
The Ottawa Times began its report on the firemen’s procession with a reminder of the great bravery of “these citizen soldiers,” and a few lines of the motto by which they served: “When duty calls we fly to save; And often meet an early grave.”
The four companies of uniformed men, each accompanied by horse-drawn fire wagons and lavishly decorated, hand-powered pumping “engines,” were “admired as the pride of the city.” And “there was but one expression from the public on the point of decorations, and that was that the Centrals were the central point of attraction” — “Capt. Frank Graham” and his 30 men took home “the much coveted prize” for their artfully outfitted wagon, “wreathed with evergreens and artificial flowers” and hailed as “the picture of Britannia.”
Capt. Graham was employed at the time as “turnkey in the county jail,” though it’s clear he was increasingly drawn to firefighting as his principal expression of civic duty. By the time the paid professional force was created in 1874, he’d already been put in charge of the famous “Conquerer” engine — the city’s first steam-powered firefighting pump — and was soon made full-time captain of No. 3 Fire Station in Sandy Hill.
On the home front, however, the Graham family was suffering through heartbreak and turmoil. John’s older sister, Edith, had died in 1872 of “chronic croup.” Then, devastatingly, his mother, Mary Ann Graham, died in childbirth in 1873, leaving John and a younger brother under the sole care of Frank, the busy fire captain.
The family lived during these years in the captain’s quarters upstairs in No. 3 station at Nicholas and Besserer streets. “His duty as a boy of seven years or so,” according to a Citizen story published in 1910, “was to close the doors of the station after the firemen had gone.”
Young John likely would have been there in June 1877 when his father returned one morning, exhausted from fighting a particularly destructive, overnight blaze at the sprawling Eddy lumber yard in Hull.
Capt. Graham was coughing and sputtering from the smoke he’d inhaled during a largely futile battle against roaring flames. Over the next few weeks, including the day John turned 10, his father’s condition deteriorated. Frank Graham finally succumbed to lung damage on July 25, 1877, age 37, becoming the first firefighter in Ottawa’s history to die in the line of duty — and leaving John and his brother orphaned.
“As a fireman, he had but few equals,” read the next day’s Citizen. “Full of energy and of an excitable turn of mind, he was happiest when in the midst of danger — in fact at times, he was perfectly reckless. . . . Many a sympathetic heart is beating for him today.”
The funeral of “Guardian Graham” was a landmark event in Ottawa’s history. Firefighters from as far away as Montreal attended the service, flags were flown at half-mast at all city fire houses, and the casket bearing Graham’s body was “covered in beautiful wreaths of flowers” before being laid in state at No. 3 station, which was “crowded with people all day.”
The funeral cortege “was one of the largest ever seen in the city,” the Citizen further reported, “and a large number of our most prominent citizens were in attendance. . . . The streets on the line of march were thronged with people, and the procession moved slowly along to the strains of the ‘Dead March.’”
Frank Graham’s trailblazing service — and sacrifice — for the people of Ottawa is remembered to this day. A tablet bearing his likeness and an inscription about the city’s “first Line of Duty Death” is displayed prominently at the Ottawa Fire Fighters Memorial in the plaza outside City Hall.
What became of the beloved fire captain’s sons in the years immediately after his death isn’t clear, but Frank Graham is known to have had three brothers in the city’s fire brigade; the boys may have lived with an uncle’s family.
In any case, it’s likely that John and his younger brother were warmly consoled by a community that had paid the highest possible tribute to their father on the day of his funeral and burial at Beechwood Cemetery.
Nearly a half-century later, key scenes from the story were destined play out again.
John Graham, who had literally grown up in his father’s fire station, always wanted to step into his shoes, as well.
“From the first, his great ambition was to someday become captain of his father’s old station,” the Ottawa Journal once reported. The Citizen likewise stated that “his one great desire” was to “fill the position his father had held.”
It was a dream nurtured, no doubt, by a city fire department aware of Frank Graham’s fatal devotion to duty, and how his death had left John without either parent.
By the late 1880s, John Graham was serving as a spare in various stations, working part-time in “relief duty” across the city. He was hired permanently in 1891, quickly rising through the ranks to become captain of No. 3 Fire Station in Sandy Hill in 1897 — 20 years after his father’s death.
Graham’s appointment to run the station he’d always dreamed of commanding came at the height of a crisis for Ottawa’s fire service; the city had been decimated by a series of catastrophic blazes — including one that severely damaged Parliament’s West Block in February 1897 — prompting a commission of inquiry and the forced retirement of fire chief William Young.
Peter Provost, a Montreal fire captain, was controversially hired as chief to reorganize Ottawa’s firefighting force. Graham’s appointment as No. 3 captain was one of the new chief’s first decisions.
Graham quickly became a high-profile face of the department, frequently singled out for praise of his courage, abilities and reformist ideas.
Ottawa fire chief John William Graham
In a July 1904 Journal profile of the No. 3 station commander, it was reported that Graham “has distinguished himself at fires in several ways, a notable instance being the rescue of an aged invalid named Turgeon from the Renaud hotel.”
The story also noted that, “Captain Graham celebrates the birth of Dominion as his own, being 37 years of age the first of this month,” adding: “He is an intrepid fire fighter, though he realizes that he may meet his death as his father did in fighting the flames.”
In February 1910, following Chief Provost’s sudden death, Graham was unanimously chosen by the 24 members of city council to become Ottawa’s new fire chief. They had little choice; a petition signed by thousands of citizens had already called for Graham’s elevation to the top job.
A front-page Citizen story applauded the appointment under the headline: “Future chief of brigade was born in fire station,” only slightly embellishing Graham’s backstory.
Chief Graham spearheaded an era of rapid modernization. He advocated reforms to building codes, household practices and other measures aimed at preventing fires, insisting this was “a far better thing” than rushing belatedly to a burning home.
At the same time, he pushed city council to build more fire stations — particularly in Ottawa’s original suburban fringe — to ensure equitable access to firefighting services across all areas of the city.
“He urged the system of inspection before he was chief,” noted one contemporary news account, which added that “he was completely successful, and two special inspectors were appointed to carry out his ideas in this respect.”
Alarm systems, engine and hose technology, firefighter training, the state of the city’s hydrants — nothing escaped Graham’s attention during his 11-year run as fire chief.
The city’s firefighting force of 74 would rise to 179 during Graham’s time as chief, and the number of motorized engines went from zero to 14.
And there were other measures of the man.
In September 1914, just weeks after the start of the First World War, 23-year-old Ottawa firefighter Bernard Thomas died from injuries suffered in the line of duty. His brother Ivan, bound for the front lines, was given leave to comfort his grieving mother, said to be “on the verge of collapse.”
Then, in what one military historian has described as a “heartrending” example of wartime compassion, Graham personally petitioned for Ivan Thomas — though “keenly anxious to fight his country’s battles” — to be “relieved of his military duties” for the remainder of the war. The surviving son, Graham wrote to Ivan’s commander, had been left “in a very trying and unenviable position” with no one else to care for his distraught mother. Graham’s request was granted.
Graham also proved to be a prescient forecaster of fire risk. He warned federal officials for years that the Parliament Buildings were a disaster waiting to happen, but the Ottawa chief’s appeals went unheeded until after the original Centre Block burned to the ground in February 1916.
He supported “all modern methods of fighting fires,” noted another summary of his reform agenda. Graham proved, among other things, that “motor trucks could be safely used in Ottawa in winter, (although) this was strongly disputed at the time.”
And Graham’s leadership in firefighting extended far beyond the capital. In 1915, he became the founding president of the Dominion Fire Chiefs Association, taking his zeal for prevention, inspections and other modernizing reforms to the national level.
“Some chiefs were good at acquiring men, stations and vehicles,” wrote Bernard Matheson and David Fitzsimons, authors of a 1988 history of the Ottawa Fire Department. “But Chief Graham excelled in all areas.”
All the while, as one of the best-liked and most recognizable public officials in Ottawa, Graham frequently served as a high-profile promoter of charitable causes, sports teams and a wide range of other community initiatives.
“A big-hearted man of a kindly, lovable and charitable disposition,” according to one portrait, “it is no exaggeration to say that Chief Graham counted his friends by the thousands.”
And so it struck the city like a lightning bolt when Graham died suddenly of a heart attack in May 1921. Headlines from the day’s newspapers, published just hours after word of Graham’s death had spread throughout the capital, captured the powerful sense of loss: “Death of popular official a severe shock to citizens,” blared the Journal’s front page; “Passing is regretted by whole city,” added the Citizen.
What followed was an outpouring of accolades for the departed chief that was unusual even for the era, a time when long-serving civic officials were easily lauded.
Graham was “one of Ottawa’s best known and most popular and beloved citizens, a man whose friends and admirers were legion,” stated a typical line from the day’s coverage.
“It is not departing from the truth to say that Fire Chief Graham was one of the outstanding men of his calling in North America,” added another story. “He was not only a firefighter, but he successfully studied and taught the gospel of fire prevention.”
The Citizen took special note of Graham’s date of birth — “Confederation Day” in 1867 — and stated that “he came into this world just as the guns were booming to announce that the Dominion of Canada had also come into being. On July 1 next, he would have been 54 years of age.”
The glowing words of personal tribute, the sense of a community’s loss and finally the crush of mourners at the chief’s funeral were all eerily reminiscent of Ottawa’s response to the death of another firefighting Graham, more than 40 years earlier. But the city’s tremendous growth between 1877 and 1921 only meant the size of the cortege, the honour guard and the crowd that lined the capital’s streets were all that much greater when John William Graham was laid to rest at Beechwood, not far from place where his mother and father had been buried.
The funeral procession for Ottawa fire chief John William Graham.
Legacies are always difficult to measure. But Graham’s enduring impact on the cityscape, on the lives of generations of local families, on Ottawa’s very personality when the young city was still finding itself as both a capital and a community, is incalculably far-reaching.
Legacies are also easily forgotten, given the limits of human memory and our fleeting attention to history. But there’s a vivid reminder in today’s Ottawa of a gift given long ago to the future by Confederation’s Son.
It’s an eye-catching building on Sunnyside Avenue in Old Ottawa South, designed by the renowned Ottawa-based architect W.E. Noffke. The place is distinctive for its Spanish Colonial flourishes — particularly the curvilinear gable that adorns a protruding front porch.
The Old Firehall community centre in Old Ottawa South.
The playful roofline is the building’s signature feature and today the de facto emblem of Old Ottawa South, instantly recognizable on the banner of the popular community newspaper, The OSCAR.
There’s a reason it’s officially called the “The Old Firehall” community centre: it served as a fire station for more than 50 years before becoming the workout hub and pottery studio and meeting space that it is today.
It was Chief Graham, in the months before he died, who “pressed for construction of a new fire station to serve the rapidly growing area of Ottawa South,” states a Heritage Ottawa summary of the building’s history. And “it was Graham who convinced city officials to hire Noffke to design a distinctive new station, in a style to suit the surrounding community.”
Graham died before the building was completed, but it was officially unveiled by city officials in September 1921 as “No. 10 Graham Station” — a state-of-the-art firehall, said to be “the most modern, ultra luxurious fire station in Canada,” and perhaps in all of North America.
“It was most fitting that it should be named after the late chief,” mayor Frank Plant said at the dedication ceremony, “although no monument was needed to keep green his memory.”
The station was decommissioned in 1974 — and promptly faced demolition — after a reorganization of city fire services led to the construction of a more advanced facility nearby, in the Glebe.
But the Old Firehall’s service to its neighbourhood, and all of Ottawa, was far from over. It became the flashpoint of a high-profile heritage battle that was eventually resolved in favour of the preservationists.
And the former No. 10 Graham Station was not merely saved, but transformed into a much-loved community centre, then a showcase example of heritage conservation and adaptation.
The building’s link to John William Graham isn’t immediately obvious today. And despite Mayor Plant’s rosy prediction, there are likely very few people in Ottawa who could identify the original namesake of the Old Firehall.
But a closer look at the outer wall between the old truck doors — telltale signs of the structure’s original use — reveals a white plaster cartouche with elaborately carved scrolls and a central inscription painted in fire-engine red: “Graham Station No. 10.”
A cartouche showing the original name of “Old Firehall.” Randy Boswell
Amid the flash and spectacle of Canada 150, the Old Firehall’s ornate tablet offers a small, silent, surprising link to the first Dominion Day — and a tribute to the Ottawa boy who not only shared his country’s birthday, but amply fulfilled Confederation’s promise.
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•••
This tale begins where it ends, in a sense, at a Beechwood gravesite with a tombstone engraving: “Born 1867 Died 1921.”
The etched-in-granite lifespan of John William Graham only hints at the full story, but the Ottawa cemetery’s hand-written registry confirms it. Graham’s age when he died on May 27, 1921, was recorded as 53 years, 10 months and 26 days.
You can do the math, or plug the numbers into one of several online calculators and get the same result: John William Graham was born on July 1, 1867 — the same day the Dominion of Canada came into being, exactly 150 years ago next Saturday.
Graham is the only Ottawa child known to have arrived in the world on the very day that the BNA Act went into force, when Canada’s capital was in the thrall of celebrations marking the birth of the new Dominion.
The coincidence is interesting enough. But it’s what John Graham did with his life — despite early years of unimaginable loss and hardship — that is truly astounding. Charles Dickens couldn’t have concocted the plot and kept a straight face: tragedy heaped upon tragedy, uncanny twists of fate spanning generations, an impossibly poignant denouement.
John William Graham, the Dominion Day boy, would prove to have a profound influence on the city where he was born and lived all his life. And when he died suddenly in 1921 — at the age of 53 years, 10 months and 26 days — Ottawa was just as convulsed with grief as it had been seized with rejoicing on the day he was born.
The gravestone for Francis Graham at Beechwood cemetery.
•••
A recent immigrant from Ireland, Francis “Frank” Graham had a well-earned reputation for public service and community leadership by the time Ottawa celebrated the birth of Confederation on July 1, 1867 — the day he and his wife, Mary Ann, also welcomed a son to the family: John.
A year earlier, Frank Graham and his crew of volunteer firefighters from the Central Hook & Ladder Company — which shared space in Ottawa’s original city hall at the north end of Elgin Street — had been the stars of the Victoria Day parade. The holiday was known then as the Queen’s Birthday, and was the annual highlight of community life in Ottawa and every other town and city throughout British North America.
Victorian-era cities were also tinderboxes. So it’s no wonder the local fire brigades were held in especially high regard at the time, and the gushing newspaper accounts of their parade through Ottawa on May 24, 1866, testify to the popularity of every captain and crewman — none of them formally employed by the city until Ottawa’s first professional fire department was formed in December 1874.
The Ottawa Times began its report on the firemen’s procession with a reminder of the great bravery of “these citizen soldiers,” and a few lines of the motto by which they served: “When duty calls we fly to save; And often meet an early grave.”
The four companies of uniformed men, each accompanied by horse-drawn fire wagons and lavishly decorated, hand-powered pumping “engines,” were “admired as the pride of the city.” And “there was but one expression from the public on the point of decorations, and that was that the Centrals were the central point of attraction” — “Capt. Frank Graham” and his 30 men took home “the much coveted prize” for their artfully outfitted wagon, “wreathed with evergreens and artificial flowers” and hailed as “the picture of Britannia.”
Capt. Graham was employed at the time as “turnkey in the county jail,” though it’s clear he was increasingly drawn to firefighting as his principal expression of civic duty. By the time the paid professional force was created in 1874, he’d already been put in charge of the famous “Conquerer” engine — the city’s first steam-powered firefighting pump — and was soon made full-time captain of No. 3 Fire Station in Sandy Hill.
On the home front, however, the Graham family was suffering through heartbreak and turmoil. John’s older sister, Edith, had died in 1872 of “chronic croup.” Then, devastatingly, his mother, Mary Ann Graham, died in childbirth in 1873, leaving John and a younger brother under the sole care of Frank, the busy fire captain.
The family lived during these years in the captain’s quarters upstairs in No. 3 station at Nicholas and Besserer streets. “His duty as a boy of seven years or so,” according to a Citizen story published in 1910, “was to close the doors of the station after the firemen had gone.”
Young John likely would have been there in June 1877 when his father returned one morning, exhausted from fighting a particularly destructive, overnight blaze at the sprawling Eddy lumber yard in Hull.
Capt. Graham was coughing and sputtering from the smoke he’d inhaled during a largely futile battle against roaring flames. Over the next few weeks, including the day John turned 10, his father’s condition deteriorated. Frank Graham finally succumbed to lung damage on July 25, 1877, age 37, becoming the first firefighter in Ottawa’s history to die in the line of duty — and leaving John and his brother orphaned.
“As a fireman, he had but few equals,” read the next day’s Citizen. “Full of energy and of an excitable turn of mind, he was happiest when in the midst of danger — in fact at times, he was perfectly reckless. . . . Many a sympathetic heart is beating for him today.”
The funeral of “Guardian Graham” was a landmark event in Ottawa’s history. Firefighters from as far away as Montreal attended the service, flags were flown at half-mast at all city fire houses, and the casket bearing Graham’s body was “covered in beautiful wreaths of flowers” before being laid in state at No. 3 station, which was “crowded with people all day.”
The funeral cortege “was one of the largest ever seen in the city,” the Citizen further reported, “and a large number of our most prominent citizens were in attendance. . . . The streets on the line of march were thronged with people, and the procession moved slowly along to the strains of the ‘Dead March.’”
Frank Graham’s trailblazing service — and sacrifice — for the people of Ottawa is remembered to this day. A tablet bearing his likeness and an inscription about the city’s “first Line of Duty Death” is displayed prominently at the Ottawa Fire Fighters Memorial in the plaza outside City Hall.
What became of the beloved fire captain’s sons in the years immediately after his death isn’t clear, but Frank Graham is known to have had three brothers in the city’s fire brigade; the boys may have lived with an uncle’s family.
In any case, it’s likely that John and his younger brother were warmly consoled by a community that had paid the highest possible tribute to their father on the day of his funeral and burial at Beechwood Cemetery.
Nearly a half-century later, key scenes from the story were destined play out again.
•••
John Graham, who had literally grown up in his father’s fire station, always wanted to step into his shoes, as well.
“From the first, his great ambition was to someday become captain of his father’s old station,” the Ottawa Journal once reported. The Citizen likewise stated that “his one great desire” was to “fill the position his father had held.”
It was a dream nurtured, no doubt, by a city fire department aware of Frank Graham’s fatal devotion to duty, and how his death had left John without either parent.
By the late 1880s, John Graham was serving as a spare in various stations, working part-time in “relief duty” across the city. He was hired permanently in 1891, quickly rising through the ranks to become captain of No. 3 Fire Station in Sandy Hill in 1897 — 20 years after his father’s death.
Graham’s appointment to run the station he’d always dreamed of commanding came at the height of a crisis for Ottawa’s fire service; the city had been decimated by a series of catastrophic blazes — including one that severely damaged Parliament’s West Block in February 1897 — prompting a commission of inquiry and the forced retirement of fire chief William Young.
Peter Provost, a Montreal fire captain, was controversially hired as chief to reorganize Ottawa’s firefighting force. Graham’s appointment as No. 3 captain was one of the new chief’s first decisions.
Graham quickly became a high-profile face of the department, frequently singled out for praise of his courage, abilities and reformist ideas.
Ottawa fire chief John William Graham
In a July 1904 Journal profile of the No. 3 station commander, it was reported that Graham “has distinguished himself at fires in several ways, a notable instance being the rescue of an aged invalid named Turgeon from the Renaud hotel.”
The story also noted that, “Captain Graham celebrates the birth of Dominion as his own, being 37 years of age the first of this month,” adding: “He is an intrepid fire fighter, though he realizes that he may meet his death as his father did in fighting the flames.”
In February 1910, following Chief Provost’s sudden death, Graham was unanimously chosen by the 24 members of city council to become Ottawa’s new fire chief. They had little choice; a petition signed by thousands of citizens had already called for Graham’s elevation to the top job.
A front-page Citizen story applauded the appointment under the headline: “Future chief of brigade was born in fire station,” only slightly embellishing Graham’s backstory.
Chief Graham spearheaded an era of rapid modernization. He advocated reforms to building codes, household practices and other measures aimed at preventing fires, insisting this was “a far better thing” than rushing belatedly to a burning home.
At the same time, he pushed city council to build more fire stations — particularly in Ottawa’s original suburban fringe — to ensure equitable access to firefighting services across all areas of the city.
“He urged the system of inspection before he was chief,” noted one contemporary news account, which added that “he was completely successful, and two special inspectors were appointed to carry out his ideas in this respect.”
Alarm systems, engine and hose technology, firefighter training, the state of the city’s hydrants — nothing escaped Graham’s attention during his 11-year run as fire chief.
The city’s firefighting force of 74 would rise to 179 during Graham’s time as chief, and the number of motorized engines went from zero to 14.
And there were other measures of the man.
In September 1914, just weeks after the start of the First World War, 23-year-old Ottawa firefighter Bernard Thomas died from injuries suffered in the line of duty. His brother Ivan, bound for the front lines, was given leave to comfort his grieving mother, said to be “on the verge of collapse.”
Then, in what one military historian has described as a “heartrending” example of wartime compassion, Graham personally petitioned for Ivan Thomas — though “keenly anxious to fight his country’s battles” — to be “relieved of his military duties” for the remainder of the war. The surviving son, Graham wrote to Ivan’s commander, had been left “in a very trying and unenviable position” with no one else to care for his distraught mother. Graham’s request was granted.
Graham also proved to be a prescient forecaster of fire risk. He warned federal officials for years that the Parliament Buildings were a disaster waiting to happen, but the Ottawa chief’s appeals went unheeded until after the original Centre Block burned to the ground in February 1916.
He supported “all modern methods of fighting fires,” noted another summary of his reform agenda. Graham proved, among other things, that “motor trucks could be safely used in Ottawa in winter, (although) this was strongly disputed at the time.”
And Graham’s leadership in firefighting extended far beyond the capital. In 1915, he became the founding president of the Dominion Fire Chiefs Association, taking his zeal for prevention, inspections and other modernizing reforms to the national level.
“Some chiefs were good at acquiring men, stations and vehicles,” wrote Bernard Matheson and David Fitzsimons, authors of a 1988 history of the Ottawa Fire Department. “But Chief Graham excelled in all areas.”
All the while, as one of the best-liked and most recognizable public officials in Ottawa, Graham frequently served as a high-profile promoter of charitable causes, sports teams and a wide range of other community initiatives.
“A big-hearted man of a kindly, lovable and charitable disposition,” according to one portrait, “it is no exaggeration to say that Chief Graham counted his friends by the thousands.”
And so it struck the city like a lightning bolt when Graham died suddenly of a heart attack in May 1921. Headlines from the day’s newspapers, published just hours after word of Graham’s death had spread throughout the capital, captured the powerful sense of loss: “Death of popular official a severe shock to citizens,” blared the Journal’s front page; “Passing is regretted by whole city,” added the Citizen.
What followed was an outpouring of accolades for the departed chief that was unusual even for the era, a time when long-serving civic officials were easily lauded.
Graham was “one of Ottawa’s best known and most popular and beloved citizens, a man whose friends and admirers were legion,” stated a typical line from the day’s coverage.
“It is not departing from the truth to say that Fire Chief Graham was one of the outstanding men of his calling in North America,” added another story. “He was not only a firefighter, but he successfully studied and taught the gospel of fire prevention.”
The Citizen took special note of Graham’s date of birth — “Confederation Day” in 1867 — and stated that “he came into this world just as the guns were booming to announce that the Dominion of Canada had also come into being. On July 1 next, he would have been 54 years of age.”
The glowing words of personal tribute, the sense of a community’s loss and finally the crush of mourners at the chief’s funeral were all eerily reminiscent of Ottawa’s response to the death of another firefighting Graham, more than 40 years earlier. But the city’s tremendous growth between 1877 and 1921 only meant the size of the cortege, the honour guard and the crowd that lined the capital’s streets were all that much greater when John William Graham was laid to rest at Beechwood, not far from place where his mother and father had been buried.
The funeral procession for Ottawa fire chief John William Graham.
•••
Legacies are always difficult to measure. But Graham’s enduring impact on the cityscape, on the lives of generations of local families, on Ottawa’s very personality when the young city was still finding itself as both a capital and a community, is incalculably far-reaching.
Legacies are also easily forgotten, given the limits of human memory and our fleeting attention to history. But there’s a vivid reminder in today’s Ottawa of a gift given long ago to the future by Confederation’s Son.
It’s an eye-catching building on Sunnyside Avenue in Old Ottawa South, designed by the renowned Ottawa-based architect W.E. Noffke. The place is distinctive for its Spanish Colonial flourishes — particularly the curvilinear gable that adorns a protruding front porch.
The Old Firehall community centre in Old Ottawa South.
The playful roofline is the building’s signature feature and today the de facto emblem of Old Ottawa South, instantly recognizable on the banner of the popular community newspaper, The OSCAR.
There’s a reason it’s officially called the “The Old Firehall” community centre: it served as a fire station for more than 50 years before becoming the workout hub and pottery studio and meeting space that it is today.
It was Chief Graham, in the months before he died, who “pressed for construction of a new fire station to serve the rapidly growing area of Ottawa South,” states a Heritage Ottawa summary of the building’s history. And “it was Graham who convinced city officials to hire Noffke to design a distinctive new station, in a style to suit the surrounding community.”
Graham died before the building was completed, but it was officially unveiled by city officials in September 1921 as “No. 10 Graham Station” — a state-of-the-art firehall, said to be “the most modern, ultra luxurious fire station in Canada,” and perhaps in all of North America.
“It was most fitting that it should be named after the late chief,” mayor Frank Plant said at the dedication ceremony, “although no monument was needed to keep green his memory.”
The station was decommissioned in 1974 — and promptly faced demolition — after a reorganization of city fire services led to the construction of a more advanced facility nearby, in the Glebe.
But the Old Firehall’s service to its neighbourhood, and all of Ottawa, was far from over. It became the flashpoint of a high-profile heritage battle that was eventually resolved in favour of the preservationists.
And the former No. 10 Graham Station was not merely saved, but transformed into a much-loved community centre, then a showcase example of heritage conservation and adaptation.
The building’s link to John William Graham isn’t immediately obvious today. And despite Mayor Plant’s rosy prediction, there are likely very few people in Ottawa who could identify the original namesake of the Old Firehall.
But a closer look at the outer wall between the old truck doors — telltale signs of the structure’s original use — reveals a white plaster cartouche with elaborately carved scrolls and a central inscription painted in fire-engine red: “Graham Station No. 10.”
A cartouche showing the original name of “Old Firehall.” Randy Boswell
Amid the flash and spectacle of Canada 150, the Old Firehall’s ornate tablet offers a small, silent, surprising link to the first Dominion Day — and a tribute to the Ottawa boy who not only shared his country’s birthday, but amply fulfilled Confederation’s promise.
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