Hamilton Hall, Hawkesbury — Stormont Deanery

This gracious image, a small snapshot, shows Hamilton Hall—the elegant family home in which Charles Hamilton, the first Bishop of Ottawa, was raised at Hawkesbury, as photographed circa 1910 from across the street. The two women sitting on the steps have not been identified, and, yes, parked at the curb we see an early horseless carriage.

The first bishop’s father, George Hamilton (1781-1839) was born in Ireland of Scottish parents. By 1806, he had established a branch of the family trading business at Québec. In 1811, he together with his brothers William and Robert took over the Hawkesbury sawmills established by David Pattie and Thomas Mears and developed an integrated company. George Hamilton ran the Hawkesbury Mills, William operated in Québec, and Robert managed marketing in Liverpool.

The sawmill business was an appropriate enterprise for a family whose coat of arms featured a saw blade slicing through an oak tree and the word ‘Through’— elements that were replicated in the seal and coat of arms of the Diocese of Ottawa in 1896. The sawmills and the fortunes of the Hamilton family went from strength to strength in the early nineteenth century, resulting in the construction of this large comfortable masonry structure with basement kitchen.

A family calamity occurred in the 1820s when George Hamilton was horrified to witness three children drown when the canoe in which they were travelling with their mother capsized in the Ottawa River en route to Montreal. Many years later, Charles, the youngest son, had a Montreal silversmith fashion a chalice in memory of another brother who survived  until 1864—a chalice that ultimately ended up at Saint Bartholomew’s Church in Ottawa.

The Hamiltons were a prominent Anglican family at Hawkesbury. If they did not put up most of the money to build Holy Trinity Church in that village in 1844, they certainly underwrote Thomas Fuller’s refashioning of that house of worship in 1859 into a structure more in accordance with High Victorian Ecclesiastical Gothic Revival ideals being promoted by the Cambridge Camden Society and the Tractarians at Oxford.

That venture in church rebuilding was of a piece with Charles Hamilton’s future. He decided upon a career in the church, and he went from strength to strength, first building Saint Matthew’s Church at Québec, then becoming elected Bishop of Niagara, then Bishop of Ottawa, and eventually Archbishop of Ottawa.

In the closing decades of Queen Victoria’s reign, it was a truth universally acknowledged that a bishop in possession of $10,000 a year would want to manifest his good taste by building churches of impeccable good taste. We should not be surprised if Charles Hamilton used some of his family largesse to get his first bishopric established at Hamilton, Ontario (and named Niagara, not Hamilton), as he provided funds to get an ornate bishop’s crozier created.

Awaiting the day Ottawa was made a diocese, Hamilton as Bishop of Niagara returned many times to open and consecrate churches. Like other wealthy men, Charles Hamilton seems to have subscribed to the philosophy, “Waste not, want not.” The chalice he had made while at Québec, he brought back to Ottawa. When elected Bishop here, he brought his crozier from Hamilton, which explains why an enameled image of Niagara Falls appears on Ottawa’s crozier.

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