St. Stephen’s, Ottawa — Deanery of Central Ottawa

When we look at this photograph, we assume that we are looking at a new church under construction in an Ottawa suburb. That is to say, it appears to be in the process of being built from the ground up at some point in the 1960s and 1970s. And we would be wrong. For what does not immediately meet the eye is the fact that Saint Stephen’s Church, Britannia has a history stretching back to the late years of Queen Victoria’s reign. What we actually see here is today’s Saint Stephen’s Church, designed by parishioner Alan Hale, taking shape atop a ‘basement church’ that had served this parish as a house of worship from 1956.

There are two indications that this was a landmark building when construction resumed in the 1970s. First, there is the street sign indicating that this is the new location of a historic parish in the area. The second indication is the focal iron structure for the tower of the new church. Although new ideas about modern-looking buildings had been percolating since the late 1950s, the idea of a tower had a rather emphatic place in the larger history of Anglicanism.

To understand this, we must go back in time long before the idea of Anglicans worshipping at the summer resort of Britannia became popular, even back before the first churches were established in the Ottawa valley, to when the Church of England in England was contending with breakaway dissenting groups. Bound up as the Church of England was with the British state, it was the law of the land that no group of people meeting for worship, except for the established Church of England, could build a tower on their church. The idea was that one of the purposes of a church tower was to hold the bell (or bells) that rang on Sunday morning to remind local inhabitants to go to church. The same rule held true in Ireland with the Church of Ireland, in Scotland with the Church of Scotland, and in Wales with the Church of Wales.

When settlers from the British Isles arrived in the Ottawa valley in the early nineteenth century, they assumed that the Church of England (along with the Church of Scotland) was the established church in Canada. (The Quebec Act of 1774 guaranteed religious freedom to the Roman Catholic majority, effectively assuring them the right to have towers on their churches.) In fact, Anglicanism technically never was an established church of Canada, but in the grip of their assumptions, early clergy took pains to make sure that the churches they built featured towers. That idea obviously was still compelling for various reasons as late as the 1970s.

Early Anglican services were held at the summer resort of Britannia in a hall shared with various other denominations beginning in 1886. In 1890, Anglicans built a frame house of worship that came to be known as “the little church among the pines.” It was not consecrated until 1916, but among its claims to fame was that it provided the setting for shooting the silent film The Man from Glengarry in 1922.

When the original church was secularized on 9 February 1956, the bell was brought from its tower to this one. The need for having a bell tower in the new church was due to the bell itself having a history going back to the very roots of Britannia. It reputedly had been used on the estate of Judge William Cosgrove to summon workers from his vineyard at the end of the workday, only to end up calling parishioners at Saint Stephen’s to their weekly devotions.

The Diocesan Archives collects parish registers, vestry reports, service registers, minutes of groups and committees, financial documents, property records (including cemeteries and architectural plans), insurance policies, letters, pew bulletins, photographs and paintings, scrapbooks, parish newsletters and unusual items.