A Partial History of Carlington.

[DavidD]

A Partial History of Carlington, Ottawa, Canada.

Compiled by Michael Kostiuk from Bruce S. Elliot's book, The City Beyond. (See full citation in the note at the end of the article.)

Carlington Community Association, April 13, 2009.

Holland Avenue and the West End Park. (Pages 178-179)

In the Nepean suburbs to the west of Ottawa the impact of the Ottawa Electric Railway (OER) was less immediate, but it was more dramatic in the long term. Already in 1890 residents as far west as the Anderson Estate were petitioning for a car line out the Richmond Road. The OER's agreement with the City of Ottawa required it to extend service in the direction of the Experimental Farm by 1895 to serve visitors to the capital.

The subdivision of Hintonburg was incorporated as a village in 1893 over objection of Nepean Council and this allowed the OER to lay tracks on its streets up to the Experimental farm.

The boundaries of Hintonburg were Ottawa Street [now Scott Street], Queen Street North and Queen Street South [now Parkdale], Harmer Avenue and Manotick Street [now Carling Avenue]. (Source: 1895 Map of Hintonburg, page 179, Elliot.)

In 1895 the Ottawa Land Association laid out the Hinton property in building lots both north and south of the village limits and opened Holland Avenue. Down the centre of this wide thoroughfare a double track with overhead cable ran to the Experimental Farm.

The OER devised a shrewd plan to capitalize further on construction of the required line to the Experimental Farm by opening up a park in Holland's Grove [bounded by Ruskin, Harmer, Hinton and Faraday] near the end of the Holland Avenue line, on land made over by the Ottawa Land Association. The West End Park opened in the spring of 1896 with a concert Pavilion. This park was a very popular summer time spot especially for evening events with the aid of the new electric lights.

Later on, larger OER parks at Rockcliffe and Britannia created a decline in the popularity of the West End Park and it was closed and later sold off for building lots. [The only section that remains today is occupied by the former OER electric building at Holland South and the Queensway/Highway 417.]

"Homes for the Worker": The Beginnings of Carlington.

As land prices on the outskirts of the city climbed in the years before World War I, development began to move out to Merivale Road. Some of [Nepean] township's oldest, richest and most highly-developed dairy farms were divided up for working class houses. It was here on the upper Merivale Road that the milk business, which had become such a vital part of Nepean agriculture had been born.

Much of the Archibald Stevenson farm had already been sold by his daughter Jessie Stewart to J.R. Booth, who installed piling grounds at Carling and Merivale. In the spring of 1911 Mrs. Stewart had the land adjoining the homestead at the corner of Fisher Avenue surveyed into lots as Stevenson Place. The new suburb was well situated, just west of the point where the Holland Avenue [streetcar] line swung east long Carling to the Experimental Farm [and the Civic Hospital].

The Ottawa real estate agents who marketed the property directed purchasers attention to the nearness of the car line [Holland streetcar line] and offered the 50 by 100 foot lots for between $300 and $1000 depending on location, 10 per cent down and the rest over three years. Moreover, they offered a 10 per cent discount for cash and a further 10 per cent rebate if the purchaser built within a year. This incentive may have done some good, for by 1916 there were about 50 houses on the property, mainly on Stevenson and Anna Avenue.

To the south a second prosperous dairy farm, Thomas Shillington's, was divided up. The owner himself had Shillington Avenue laid out in 1908, stretching from Merivale Road to Fisher. A few years later several members of Merivale's Hopper family began developing the subdivision of City Heights [north of the Experimental Farm and south of Shillington] on the former Shillington land. Young brother J.H. and W.J.E. Hooper became prominent contractors in later years building a number of homes and apartment buildings in Ottawa and Rockcliffe as partners in the firm Davidson and Hopper Brothers, with their aunt's husband J.G. Davidson.

In the closing months of 1911, the French-Canadian real estate firm Morisset and Morisset Limited registered plans for a suburb called Bellevue Park across Merivale Road from City Heights. The brokerage firm Lapierre and Lapierre was soon advertising lots within walking distance of the Experimental Farm [Holland] branch of the streetcar line and along the route of the projected Ottawa, Smith's Falls and Kingston Electric Railway (one of the many radial routes that was never built). Promoted as "the logical answer to the land problem' lots were offered at terms that appealed especially to those with very little capital: 10 per cent down, $5 per month, and no interest or taxes for a year. Lots were purchased by more than 300 French-Canadians living all over Quebec and northern Ontario and those who actually built on the lots brought a new francophone community into Nepean. [The current St. Bonaventure Catholic Church on Kirkwood Avenue is a result of this French Canadian settlement in Carlington.]

The greater part of the land between Bellevue and the Baseline Road formed the 300-acre farm of J. Ernest Caldwell, maternal uncle of the contractor Hopper Brothers and one of the directors of the McKellar Townsite Company. Though Caldwell sold the farm to an outfit called the Ottawa West Land Company, it was not built upon. The boom collapsed and the property reverted to him. Nonetheless, he retired from farming in 1919 to indulge a newly-discovered passion, golf. The federal government optioned the property in 1924 to extend the Experimental Farm, but bought the J.R. Booth farm just to the east instead. However, the Caldwell land was added to the farm after World War II.

Veterans Housing Projects. (pages 231-232)

In 1945 Nepean Council decided to offer lots for sale at 25 per cent of their value to men and women veterans who had lived in the township before entering the services. They were given five years to build, and this veterans' preference continued up to the annexation in 1950. However, the return of the troops caused a severe housing shortage, first felt in the city. A federal program to provide housing for veterans in cooperation with municipal government brought about the first annexations since 1911, again to serve needs outside Nepean.

The economic recession, housing shortage, and riots that had followed the end of World War I had taught a valuable lesson. The Dominion government was determined that the events of 1919-20 would not be repeated after the Second World War. As early as 1941 an Advisory Committee on Post-war Reconstruction was established. A report the next year described the housing shortage that already existed after a decade of depression and projected even worse shortages to come once servicemen began to return from overseas. During the war the federal government had entered the housing market, building homes for military personnel and war workers, using standard plans and prefabricated panels. The program was extended after the war to mass-produce houses for veterans and relieve the inevitable housing shortage.

Early in 1945 planning was begun for two developments in Nepean, one a rental community built by a Crown corporation, Wartime Housing Limited, the other a semi-rural community of freehold garden lots to be sold to servicemen under the Veterans Land Act. Because a suitable tract of land could not be obtained in Ottawa, Wartime Housing Limited bought the J.R. Booth lumber yard [i.e. Carlington], just outside the city limits at Merivale and Carling where it could readily be connected to city services. Wartime Housing signed an agreement with Ottawa to construct the houses and rent them to veterans and Ottawa undertook to fully service the properties. Nepean Council agreed to allow the annexation of the area to Ottawa for this purpose but was indignant to learn that only veterans living in the city would be eligible to live there. When Ottawa asked the township's consent to annex a second area to double the number of veterans' houses to 400, council replied that it would fight both the attempt and a petition by adjoining Stevenson Place residents to be included in the annexation. By the spring of 1946, however, council had been placated. They agreed to the annexation of Stevenson Place and both veteran's projects on the understanding that Nepean residents would not be barred from renting houses in the second one.

The Wartime Housing developments at Carling and Merivale were typical of many built across Canada in the late forties. The houses were small, plain frame structures built to only two plans, a bungalow and a storey and-a-half model. [In those days property taxes were in part based on floor levels of a home and a "half level" did not count as a extra floor and therefore, it was taxed at the same rate as a bungalow. That is no longer the case!] Neither had more than 1000 square feet of floor space and they lacked both dining rooms and entrance halls. If the buildings resembled "an endless row of sugar cubes" the street patterns were among the most innovative laid out in Nepean up to that time. The broad cul-de-sacs of Project I were not repeated again in the township until the 1970s and neither was the width of Harrold Place emulated, at more than a hundred feet dwarfing the little houses that lined it. But the curved, traffic-controlling roads of Project II were to become the standard street plan of the 1960s. Nonetheless, the attractiveness of the plan took time to be realized for the roads were alternately awash in mud and clogged with dust. The uniformity of the houses was only gradually mitigated by landscaping and by attempts to impose individuality with additions and finishes. In the early years, men returning from work frequently strode through the wrong door directly into a neighbour's living room. After several years it became possible for the tenants to buy their houses from the Crown, and the quest for individuality intensified.

The Carlton Heights project [our sister Veterans' Housing project to the south of Carlington] by contrast represented a "back-to-the-land" approach to veteran's housing, perhaps a last vestige of the old garden city ideal. Implicit in the concept was the idea that if a depression followed the war, as had been the case after World War I, the veterans would at least be able to grow their own food. To this end the act also permitted them to raise goats and chickens and to keep bees. [I wonder if that act is still is force?]
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Note: The information for this article was taken from Professor Bruce S. Elliot's book The City Beyond: A History of Nepean, published by the City of Nepean, 1991. This book is now "Out of Print". Additional information in [parenthesis] was provided by Michael Kostiuk, President, Carlington Community Association and life-time resident of Viscount Avenue.

Carlington Community Association 2009.