There’s More Here Than You Think There Is!  Artist Mary Pratt was renowned for her paintings whose subject matter focused on women’s work. In an interview, when asked about one painting of empty eggshells, she responded enigmatically, “Love me!  Love Me! There’s more here than you think there is!” In other words, look carefully.

We could say much the same about Saint Bede’s Church, Nolan’s Corners. It is shown here early in the 21st century, long after an addition was made a generation ago. At first glance, Saint Bede’s doesn’t seem to amount to much. It seems to be a very simple building. It certainly was small when built, being no larger than the red brick one room school nearby. Like it, it was built unassumingly of red brick. It was aligned with the forced road that ran past the front door, with no attempt at having its congregation face toward Jerusalem during their devotions.

There isn’t even any mystery as to the age of Saint Bede’s Church, as shown by the year 1886 on the date stone at the top of the narthex gable—a most unusual location, suggesting that it was altogether a last-minute notion to incorporate it. The side windows of Saint Bede’s Church did not have so much as a trace of stained glass in them when this photograph was taken, and the pews inside at that time were little more than benches with a back rail. Those who perceive that this is a very functional building indeed will not be surprised to see the very large, very practical burial ground extending out behind this small rural house of worship.

But once we understand the context in which Saint Bede’s was built, we see that something revolutionary was taking place with the building of this unpretentious house of worship. People from Nolan’s Corners went to Saint James’s Church, Franktown from the 1820s on. Saint James’s was a simple auditory box, with a Palladian window over the altar, and with a tower over the front door to proclaim that this was a church of the British establishment. When a church was built at nearby Smiths Falls in 1849, if larger, it too had the same temple form as the church at Franktown, albeit with pointed windows rather than round-headed ones, but still a tower over the entrance at the front to declare that it was a church of the British establishment.

Saint Bede’s was built 40 years after Saint John’s, Smiths Falls, and 60 years after Saint James’s, Franktown. It might as well have been 500 years. Unlike earlier churches, sharing a handful of traditional names—Christ Church, Saint James, Saint John and Saint Paul—Saint Bede’s stood out with the name of a major early English churchman. Whereas the earlier churches were built expensively in stone, Saint Bede’s was red brick in construction.

The towers signifying the British establishment had given way to a modest entrance porch, and the old temple form of earlier churches gave way here to steep gables and pointed windows proclaiming affinity with the mediaeval past. Where earlier churches featured a communion table on the same level as worshippers, there was a steep flight of steps up to the altar in Saint Bede’s, and the congregation looked up to a large chancel window high above the altar. The source for all this change was to be found in back issues of The Church Builder from 1866 to 1878 consulted by the local clergyman building Saint Bede’s.

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 documents.

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Over the course of its 150-year history, Saint James’s Church at Manotick faced the problems of growth, in particular the conundrum of responding to the pressures of owning a heritage building.

Saint James’s Church originally was built in 1876 on land donated by Moss Kent Dickinson, owner of the large stone village gristmill at Long Island, who was mayor of Ottawa for a time.

Saint James’s was built in a developing village and became one of the signature architectural features of the village. Its builders could not have anticipated the pressures of a growing congregation. Fortunately, there was nothing in its development to match the grisly event that happened at Dickinson’s Mill a mere 100 yards upstream 15 years earlier.

In early March of 1861, Joseph Merrill Currier and Moss Kent Dickinson organized a day of festivities to celebrate the first anniversary of their stone gristmill. Part of the day’s activities included a tour of inspection of the mill itself attended by Currier and his wife Anna. A smiling Anna, elegantly dressed and coiffed in the fashion of the day proudly took her husband’s arm and strolled through the building. All the machines were turned on to show friends and officials alike the power of the water turbines. No one could speak above the noise, and all marveled at the mill’s technology and delighted in its obvious success.

Then suddenly, as if out of a nightmare, Anna lost her balance. She fought to keep a hold on her husband’s arm, but her billowing crinoline was caught in one of the machines. Her friends and guests, standing only a few feet away, were powerless to help. Her screams were barely audible above the noise, and as her husband and guests watched in shocked horror, Anna was sucked into the machine, hurled against its post, and killed before the machine could be stopped.

Fifteen years later, Saint James’ Church was an essay in carpenter Gothic, with porch and vestry wings. Notably, it had no tower. From 1877, the congregation at Manotick was part of the Parish of North Gower with nearby congregations worshipping in churches located at Kars, North Gower and the 1st Concession of Osgoode Township.

Saint James’s Church grew. And steadily. So much so, that by 1887, it headed the Parish of Manotick, with churches at the outlying stations of Kars and Osgoode. It was at that time that the house of worship was raised on a new foundation. Fifteen years after that, in 1902, we are told that the church was “greatly improved” by enlarging the nave and building a bell tower with battlements on the front. By this point, the house of worship no longer bore much resemblance to the house of worship first put up just a quarter of a century earlier.

It is curious how parishes become inured, even accepting of change. What once seemed startling comes to be treasured and even taken for granted as having always existed. Change often is forgotten. The fiftieth anniversary of Saint James’s Church was celebrated in 1926, with many parishioners somehow assuming that the building had always existed in its then current form from the beginning. They came to assume that the tower had always been in place. As growth continued, in 1946 the basement was made into a parish hall.

In the black and white photograph shown here, Saint James’s Church was barely able to contain an AYPA (Anglican Young People’s Association) conference that took place in the village circa 1950. Indeed, by 1958, such was the growth of this congregation that Manotick had become a one-point parish, with Saint George’s Church, Hawthorne briefly serving as an out-station in 1978-1979.

Which brings us to the conundrum faced by parishioners at Saint James’s Church in the 1980s. For by then, the house of worship no longer could hold the congregation.  What were they to do?

Previously there had been four solutions to such a dilemma elsewhere across the Diocese of Ottawa. The first was to retain the old church and integrate it with a larger new worship space, as had been done at All Saints Church, Westboro and at Christ Church, Bells Corners.

A second option was to send their venerable house of worship to a heritage site such as Upper Canada Village, and build anew elsewhere, as Christ Church, Moulinette had done.

Yet a third option was to tear down the old church and put up a larger more modern building, as Saint John’s Church at Iroquois did. This was a controversial option, given the many ties to the old church, as in local minds it defined Manotick, much as did Watson’s Mill.

And fourth, the congregation could decide to abandon the old church and build at a new site, as had been the case when Saint John’s, Merivale was abandoned for Saint John the Divine, Nepean (long since burned down) in the 1960s.

None of these solutions precisely suited the good Anglicans of Manotick. To begin with, the congregation did not want to leave their site. There was the matter of strong local appreciation of built heritage that did not take kindly to tearing down a focal building from the past, especially as the author of the recently published The Architectural Heritage of the Rideau Corridor, Barbara Humphreys, was a member of the parish.

A compromise (which did not please heritage folk) was decided on. The decision was made to tear down the old church and design a larger building to look exactly like it, incorporating such architectural elements from the old such structure as the stained glass windows in the new.

Worship services were held in the Royal Canadian Legion hall for 10 months while the old church was taken down and the new one built. The colour photograph here shows a crane in place just before a wrecking ball levelled the old house of worship after various architectural components to be saved had been removed.

A new much larger church, capable of sustaining future growth, arose on the site of the old house of worship.  Curiously, it looked very much like the church that had stood on the site for a century, incorporating many of the features that had accumulated over the decades, such as the stained-glass windows.  Bishop Edwin Lackey conducted the dedication service in the new church on 10 March 1985, and 17 years later Saint James the Apostle Church was consecrated by Bishop John A. Baycroft on 24 October 1993.

And now, Saint James the Apostle Church at Manotick is celebrating its 150th anniversary as a centre of Anglican worship. Thanks to its much larger fabric, it is a dynamic parish of the Diocese of Ottawa.

If you would like to help the Archives preserve the records of the Diocese and its parishes, why not become a Friend of the Archives?  Your $20 membership brings you three issues of the lively, informative Newsletter, and you will receive a tax receipt for further donations above that amount. 

Diocesan Archives 51 M4 11

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One hundred and thirty years ago, on the 7th of April 1896, the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa emerged from the eastern section of the Diocese of Ontario. And seventy years after that, in 1966 the western section of the Diocese of Montreal was transferred to the Diocese of Ottawa, effectively doubling its territory in size. Just a month ago, Mayor Mark Sutcliffe of Ottawa marked the first of these anniversaries by proclaiming April 7, 2026, Anglican Diocese of Ottawa Historical Day.

Anglicanism locally was much older. Anglicans around Cornwall were beginning to organize missions some 240 years ago. As David Farr remarked in “The Daughter Church:  The Genesis of the Diocese of Ottawa,” ecclesiastical authority in the Ottawa Valley for most of the first century had always been remote. First administered from Halifax, then Quebec and, after 1839, Toronto, this region lay on the fringe of established religious order in Canada. In 1862, the region was given its own ecclesiastical format when the fifteen counties in Ontario east of the Trent River and south of the Ottawa River were carved out of the Diocese of Toronto.

All of this history is reflected in the west window of Christ Church Cathedral, Ottawa created in 1982 by Christopher Wallis of London, Ontario, as photographed by Brian Glenn.  Ostensibly created to mark the sesquicentennial of the first Christ Church being built in 1832, in this window Wallis was handed the challenge of graphically summarizing the place of this episcopal parish—and by extension the Diocese of Ottawa—in the history of Anglicanism in Canada, and more particularly in the general history of this region. Hence two-thirds of the way up the window we see the coats of arms of the Diocese of Nova Scotia, the Diocese of Quebec, the Diocese of Toronto, and the Diocese of Ontario based at Kingston.

The larger composition of this remarkable window is a cross, emblematic of Christianity.  The Celtic cross design recognizes the huge Anglo-Irish population that arrived in this region in the early nineteenth century.  In Canada’s first census (1871) that asked people what they considered their ethnic origin (as opposed to their country of birth) to be, in the five rural counties around Ottawa 42,000 more people claimed to be of Irish origin than did in Canada’s two largest cities of Montreal and Toronto combined.  Most of the early Anglican clergy serving the region in fact came from England, but it was only after Confederation that English-origin Anglicans began to predominate in the congregations spreading across the region.

At the centre circle of the cross is Christ the agnus dei from whom the parish of Christ’s Church, Bytown took its name. At the apex of the window Christ the King is shown sitting on a rainbow, while a satellite is depicted orbiting the heavens. Even as the window celebrated the region’s history, it was taking note of modern developments.

The cross arms of the larger cross featured wavy blue lines to represent the Ottawa River, a major east/west transportation route for both Indigenous inhabitants and early French explorers. The upright of the cross is comprised of the Gatineau River flowing from the north, and the Rideau flowing from the south, with the three rivers converging on the Lamb of God, to convey the idea of believers being “washed in the blood of the lamb.”

There is much subtlety to this design. Drawn to the range of colours across the larger window, we do not notice at first the silhouette of tall pine trees on either side of the windows.  They, of course, signify the huge impact of the timber industry across the Diocese over six generations from the 1780s to the early twentieth century. Tulips along the window’s base pay tribute to the Ottawa Tulip Festival, it in turn alluding to Canadian sacrifices in liberating the Netherlands during the Second World War. Also across the base of the window we see coats of arms of the Diocese of Ottawa, Christ Church Cathedral, the then City of Hull in 1982 and the City of Ottawa.

Four oval insets also allude to aspects of the long history that in time led to the establishment of the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa. First, the oval on the upper left of the main window includes images of explorers Jacques Cartier, Samuel de Champlain and Martin Frobisher. It was on the latter’s voyage west of Greenland in 1576 that a priest on the ship held the first Anglican service in what today is Canada.

The oval on the upper right shows a tall ship and a background of fur pelts and a codfish, indicating the economic basis of the fur trade and cod fisheries that supported settlements in the eastern provinces, eventually leading to Anglican settlers heading west to the Ottawa country.

A third oval on the lower left provides an image of people gathering at the 1832 Christ’s Church in Bytown—the first Anglican house of worship in Ottawa. We also see an image of Philemon Wright’s Hull settlement where the first Anglican worship services took place—in the first house of worship of the denomination built in what today is the National Capital Region.

The fourth oval on the lower right shows the Centre Block of Parliament, viewed from Gatineau. In front of it are the flags of France and Great Britain, reflecting the passage of time when Canada moved from being a colony of one to the other.  A small red roundel featuring Sir John A. Macdonald, if intended to mark his role in bringing about Confederation, more recently marks his notorious role in establishing residential schools for Indigenous children. [Much of that terrible history has come to light since the window was created in 1982. Archbishop Michael Peers’ 1993 apology on behalf of the Anglican Church of Canada for its role in running schools was the beginning of Anglicans’ ongoing work toward truth and reconciliation with Indigenous people.]

The middle of the lower window shows a great stream of people, framed by an Indigenous person and an African-Canadian standing prominently in the foreground, and encompassing various people from the diocese and Ottawa’s history. They include: Joseph Montferrand, a legendary lumberjack; Philemon Wright, a prominent settler at Gatineau and pioneer of the regional timber industry; Lord Dalhousie who secured the site to build the Rideau Canal entrance locks and Lieutenant-Colonel John By who oversaw Rideau Canal construction, built bridges between Hull and Bytown, and laid out the original site for Bytown.

Others portrayed here include Nicholas Sparks (the image is really his son, Nicholas Sparks Junior) who donated the site of Christ’s Church in Bytown; the Rev. Adam Hood Burwell, the Rev. Samuel S. Strong and Dean John Strutt Lauder—the first three rectors who presided over the parish as it moved from being a pioneer worship community to cathedral; Bishop Guigues, the first Roman Catholic bishop of Ottawa; Mère Elisabeth Brûyère who opened the first community hospital; and Charles Hamilton—the first Anglican bishop of Ottawa.

The sole identifiable Anglican woman portrayed in this group was Roberta Tilton, who organized the Woman’s Auxiliary nationally, with members in churches across the Diocese of Ottawa sending funds and bales to support Indigenous communities across western and northern Canada from the nineteenth to the 21st centuries.

We celebrated our 130th anniversary just a couple of weeks after the first woman was installed as Archbishop of Canterbury and one month before Bishop-elect Kathryn Otley is to be seated as the 11th Bishop of Ottawa, the first woman to become bishop in this diocese.

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In 1878, Chelsea was served from Ottawa by the Rev. F.R. Smith. From 1879 to 1885, the mission was vacant and served only in summer in 1882 and 1883 by Mr. N.A.F. Bourne, a student from Montreal. By 1886, the mission consisted of one church, Saint Mary Magdalene, Chelsea and two outstations—schoolhouses at Templeton and Ironsides. In 1900, services were held every week at Chelsea and Ironsides and on alternate Sundays at Kingsmere and Kirk’s Ferry. At Kingsmere, the congregation met at the country house of a Mr. Bryson.

By 1910, Chelsea consisted of one church, Saint Mary Magdalene, Chelsea, and five outstations: a house chapel at Ironsides; the Union Mission Hall at Kirk’s Ferry; a schoolhouse at Cascades; another schoolhouse at Meech’s Lake (as it was then called) and cottages at Kingsmere. By 1924, the mission consisted of one church and outstations of Union Church, Kirk’s Ferry; Union Church, Cascades; and a house at Ironsides. The 1926 Synod Journal noted the effect of the Gatineau Valley power developments on local congregations.  The old settlement at Kirk’s Ferry was swept away by the flooding; however, there were hopes for a strong summer settlement to develop there, requiring priestly services.

In 1928, the mission included Saint Mary Magdalene’s, Chelsea; Saint George’s, Gatineau, a Union church at Cascades and a Union church at Kirk’s Ferry.  In 1929, controversy arose over whether the reopened church at Kirk’s Ferry would be a Union Hall or an Anglican Church. From 1935 to 1940, the Mission of Chelsea was a three-point mission consisting of Chelsea, Gatineau and Kirk’s Ferry, served from Ottawa by the Rev. W.B. Morgan. In 1935, the Union church at Cascades was transferred to Wakefield. In 1940, the mission of Chelsea consisted of Chelsea and Gatineau and an arrangement began where Chelsea was served from Hull, and Gatineau was served from Buckingham.

In the autumn of 1943, old Saint Mary Magdalene Church was demolished, partly because an error caused the old church to be built on two feet of land sold along with the rectory.  The congregation met in the school. In 1944, Gatineau was served from Aylmer. In 1947, Kirk’s Ferry became an outstation of Gatineau, also served from Aylmer. From 1950 to 1956, the congregation of Saint Mary Magdalene met in the United Church at Chelsea. On 24 May 1957, the cornerstone for a new church at Chelsea built of ashlar concrete blocks was laid by Bishop John H. Dixon of Montreal. From 1963 to 1965, the Mission of Chelsea & Portland was established, until Clarendon Deanery was transferred from Montreal’s oversight to the Diocese of Ottawa. In 1971, the mission became vacant, and Chelsea was separated from Portland.

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 documents.

Brian Glenn fonds CL06 E100

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Stewart previously was a volunteer, summer student and contractor with the Diocesan Archives between 2008 and 2015. Since then, she worked at the Provincial Archives of Alberta before moving back to Ottawa and working for Health Canada in regulatory affairs for medical devices.

She says she “has been a church-mouse of all trades at the Cathedral since 2005.” She loves a records treasure hunt and reading, especially memoirs and biographies.

The post Staff news — April 2026 appeared first on Perspective.

Less than a generation after Canadians celebrated the centennial of Confederation, members of Christ Church Cathedral approached their 150th anniversary. They sought a meaningful way to commemorate the building of Christ’s Church, Bytown in 1832, the first Anglican church to be built in the future capital some 35 years before Confederation.

The answer soon became apparent. The west window dating from 1872 was beginning to show its age. Its large surface was filled with clear glass laid out in diamond-panes, with a thin band of gold and blue outlining the tracery. After 110 years of weathering, the lead holding glass panes in place and the larger wooden frame were greatly in need of renewing.

It was decided to commission a new west window. Its design would be a visual summary of the history of the parish within the region. A great fundraising campaign was carried out, and a design commissioned from Christopher Wallis of London, Ontario. Other startling proposals including stark modern abstract designs were also considered, but Wallis was entrusted with the commission based on memorial windows he designed for Trinity Church, Cornwall and Saint Bartholomew’s, Ottawa. We see him here assembling the cartoon for this composition, to form the basis for selecting and cutting stained glass for the new west window. This commission was a big deal, and Christopher Wallis did not disappoint.

As traditional stained-glass iconography goes, Christopher Wallis was attempting nothing less than a summary of the history of the parish and its place in the City of Ottawa within the larger setting of the Ottawa Valley and global Anglicanism. To take on such a commission must have made him feel like Michelangelo when he set out to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  It would take Naomi Jackson Groves, niece of Group of Seven artist A.Y. Jackson, 60 pages to explain all of the details that Wallis incorporated in his composition. In a future issue of Perspective we will summarize some of the major details, but for now we must confine ourselves to just a few parts of the larger composition of Wallis’s masterpiece.

The larger composition shows a Celtic cross. The cross, of course, is emblematic of Christianity, symbolizing our Saviour’s sacrifice to redeem mankind. The Celtic cross recognizes the huge Anglo-Irish population that constituted much of the Anglican population of the larger Ottawa region in the nineteenth century. In the first census of Canada (1871) that asked people what they considered their ethnic origin (as opposed to their country of birth) to be, in the five counties around Ottawa 42,000 more people claimed to be of Irish origin than did in the cities of Montreal and Toronto combined. At the centre circle of the cross is Christ, the agnus dei, from whom the parish took its name. At the apex of the window Christ the King is shown sitting on a rainbow, while a satellite is shown orbiting the heavens.

The cross arms of the cross represent the Ottawa River, the major east/west route of transportation for both Indigenous inhabitants and early French explorers. The upright of the cross shows the Gatineau River flowing from the north, and the Rideau River flowing from the south, while the tall silhouettes of pine trees across the window signify the huge economic impact of the timber industry in the larger Ottawa Valley over the course of six generations.

If you would like to help the Archives preserve the records of the Diocese and its parishes, why not become a Friend of the Archives?  Your $20 membership brings you three issues of the lively, informative Newsletter, and you will receive a tax receipt for further donations above that amount.  

The post Cathedral Deanery — Wallis sketching Christ Church Cathedral West Window Cartoon appeared first on Perspective.

A Presbyterian minister at Perth, the Rev. William Bell, in his 1824 book Hints to Emigrants stated: “The church of England claims an establishment here and meets with a decided preference from the members of government.” While this was certainly the aim of Archdeacon John Strachan at York (Toronto), and although Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Colborne endowed a number of rectories in the 1830s (local examples being at Franktown and Carleton Place), by and large the number of Anglican clergy and churches fell behind various other denominations during the first half of the nineteenth century.

So, although the Westmeath area was visited as early as the 1820s by Governor General Dalhousie (who favoured the Church of Scotland) and his retinue, it was not until the end of the century that Anglicans managed to build a house of worship on this remote frontier across the Ottawa River from the Province of Quebec. As early as 1855, Henry Bromley of Westmeath was enlisted as a pillar of the church by the Rev. E.H.M. Baker in the larger Pembroke vicinity.

Westmeath is first mentioned as an outstation of the Mission of Beachburg in 1869, but the going proved tough on the Calumet Island frontier in that generation, and it was removed from the list of stations in that mission from 1877 to 1879. In 1881, the Mission of Beachburg was dissolved, and Westmeath seems not to have received any services from an Anglican clergyman until 1884 when the Mission of Beachburg was recreated. Hope for a new beginning was planted in 1897 when Thomas Monsel donated the site for an Anglican house of worship.

A church of faultless lines was built of local grey limestone at Westmeath in 1898, doubtless partly subsidized by the still-new Anglican Diocese of Ottawa, and Saint Mary’s Church was duly consecrated by Bishop Charles Hamilton on 8 January 1899. Had the church been built half a century earlier, it seems likely that its name would have been selected from eight or so favoured Anglican choices: Christ Church, Saint James, Saint John’s, Saint Paul’s, Saint George’s, Saint Thomas’s, Trinity and Holy Trinity.

If the choice of the name of Saint Mary’s was chosen by the bishop over the objections of the church, at the time it was said to be a scandal that one week after the new house of worship was consecrated, it was practically deserted because parishioners refused to attend services. That did not last, but the years of struggle were by no means over. Half a century later, from 1944 to 1946 the Mission of Beachburg was an outstation of the Parish of Cobden. By 1968, Westmeath was an outstation of the Parish of Beachburg-Cobden. Saint Mary’s Church, Westmeath celebrated a century of worship on 13 December 1998. In the 2010s, Bishop John H. Chapman secularized this house of worship.

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

The post Saint Mary’s Church, Westmeath — Deanery of the Northwest appeared first on Perspective.

The legacy of slavery haunted Blacks in Canada, as their immigration here was proscribed in the early 20th century, and “science” harnessed to prove that hierarchical relationships were natural and right. This led to widespread segregating of Black citizens, whether in theatres or hotels into the 1940s. As late as the inter-war period, Blacks were concentrated in low wage corners of the economy: men as waiters, janitors, barbers and labourers, and women as domestic servants, laundresses and waitresses. The federal government permitted racial restriction in its hiring and promotion policies.

By 1940, most Blacks were born here. Elsewhere in Canada, Blacks were organizing, protesting limitations on employment and where they could socialize. The revelation of Nazi atrocities at the end of the Second World War produced a major shift in attitude. This led to new expressions of international opinion through the United Nations charters to create a more liberal intellectual climate. Researchers were discrediting the claims of “scientific” racism. The federal Bill of Rights in 1960 refuted personal limitations by reason of race, religion or sex.

In 1962, Ontario consolidated its anti-discrimination legislation in a code, to be implemented by a Human Rights Commission with a mandate to promote equal opportunity as well as to administer existing laws accordingly. In 1962, new Canadian immigration regulations made individual skills the chief criterion for admission and ended race or national origin as reasons for exclusion. Further regulations in 1967 established a “points” system, whereby all who accumulated sufficient points were automatically admitted to Canada.

The effect was immediate in the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa. With artificial barriers removed, highly qualified applicants from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean flocked to Canada. West Indians so swelled Ottawa’s Anglican population that in 1985 Christ Church Cathedral was twinned with Saint George’s Cathedral in Georgetown, Guyana. A significant number of Anglicans among the new arrivals led to pressure for more Blacks to be ordained. Twenty years after Blair Dixon became a priest, (the year the cathedrals were twinned), The Rev. Frederick December (1912-2004), originally from Agricola, Guyana, came to serve in the Diocese of Ottawa.

The struggle over race relations in the United States from mid-century, including the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior in 1968, rivetted attention north of the border. Violence visited on peaceful non-violent Blacks demanding American civil rights was one side of the news reports, while Black achievements in sports, music and various mainstream fields of endeavour spoke of hard-won achievements.

The improving climate for Blacks in Canada contrasted with the apartheid policies of the government of South Africa, another country in the British Commonwealth.  The attention of Anglicans in the Diocese of Ottawa was drawn to the words of a Black cleric—and eventual Nobel laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. In his polemics, he wrote against the racist regime:

No matter how long and how repressive this unjust and undemocratic rule turns out to be, the urge for freedom remains as a subversive element threatening the overthrow of rigid repression. The tyrant is on a road to nowhere even though he may survive for an unconscionably long time and even though he may turn his country into a huge prison riddled with informers.

These words of hope eventually brought South African apartheid to an end, and it did so by encompassing the goal of “Truth and Reconciliation”—a phrase that eventually moved Canadians to confront their sordid history with Indigenous inhabitants.

Another 20 years would pass by after the reception of the Rev. Fred December before a number of Blacks were ordained Anglican clergy in the Diocese of Ottawa. They included receiving the Rev. Manassé Maniragaba (2007), the Rev. Naomi Kabugi (2008), the Rev. George Kwari (2008), ordaining the Rev. Hilary Murray (2012), receiving the Rev. Nash Smith (2014), ordaining Deacon Elizabeth December (2015), receiving the Rev. E. Julian Campbell (2019), the Rev. Felix Longdon (2023), and the Rev. Dr. Sony Jabouin (2025).

Despite growing numbers of Black clergy, the Rev. Julian Campbell in 2022 wrote about the longstanding negative impact of colonialism. Although slavery was abolished in his native Bahamas in 1838, Campbell noted how Blacks affected a British accent, and they were not allowed to serve at royal functions until the late 1960s. Plantation owners became dominant, possessed land, and owned Black bodies. Blacks suffered from misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia and colouration long after. Under slavery, British people saw money flowing into their coffers without witnessing the price in blood paid by Blacks in the West Indies.

Forgiveness, concluded Campbell, doesn’t mean forgetting the past. Today, as anti-Black bigotry again is stoked in the United States, note William Faulkner’s warning: “The past isn’t dead.  It isn’t even past.”

Based on the writing of James W. St.G. Walker and The Rev. E. Julian Campbell

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Depend on it, gentle reader. This is NOT Saint Paul’s Church, Dunrobin. This is apparent for a number of reasons. First, it is much too large a building. Second, there is a tower showing in this image where there never was a tower on the house of worship at Dunrobin. Third, there never were eyebrow windows on the roof of Saint Paul’s Church. Fourth, we remind ourselves that Saint Paul’s Church at Dunrobin was built in 1896. Even at that late date, it accorded with the precepts promoted by the Tractarians. It must have seemed the latest word in the Tractarian canon. At least it must have so seemed in the Ottawa valley. In that respect, it was in decided contrast with the two other rather old-fashioned churches in the then Parish of March—Old Saint Mary’s Church at Pinhey’s Point on the Ottawa River (built 1827) and Saint John’s, South March (built 1842).

The two older churches in the Parish of March were rectangular auditory boxes, one of them fronted by a central tower on the front façade, while the other simply had a centrally located front entrance porch and boasted no tower.

Saint Paul’s, by contrast, was built according to a rubric whereby the external features were emblematic of the internal functions. A bell-cote for a sacral bell was located midway along the roof ridge, just like at Saint Albans in the Sandy Hill area of Ottawa, as an external indicator of the boundary between the congregation and the chancel indoors. There is no evidence of that bell-cote in this photograph. The notation on the back of the photograph notwithstanding, we repeat, this is NOT Saint Paul’s Church at Dunrobin.

But, then, where is it? There is a certain whimsy to the gable above the main entrance and the chancel gable, suggesting timber and plaster work of an earlier time as reimagined by some backward-looking Edwardian architect.

There is whimsy as well in the rather fine details of the belfry at the top of the tower—apparently designed so that the sound of the bell calling parishioners to worship will sound as far and wide as possible over the surrounding countryside.

Wait a minute! There is something eerily familiar about the tower, with the four pylons of stone at the corners supporting the belfry—the unmistakable hallmark of J.W.H. Watts who designed and built churches churches at Port Elmsley (1900), Renfrew (1900), Galetta (1902), Holy Trinity, Riverside (1902), Saint Mary’s, North March (1908), Saint John’s, Innisville (1911), Saint Thomas’s, Woodlawn (started 1913) and Christ Church, Ashton (1915).

Come to think of it, is what we see here not the same design of belfry that we see on New Saint Mary’s Church, North March? And are those not the same timbered gables we see on new Saint Mary’s Church, North March?  Why do they look so similar?

And yet, it is demonstrably clear that this is NOT Saint Mary’s Church, North March any more than it is Saint Paul’s, Dunrobin. Something here is tied up in the internal politics of the Parish of March.

It is only when we look more closely that we realized that not only is this NOT the church at Dunrobin, NOR is it Saint Mary’s, North March. Small wonder that someone in the past trying to identify this obviously Anglican house of worship from the Ottawa valley somehow perceived it to be designed by J.W.H. Watts, but had difficulty in placing this building.  After all, we today have our own difficulty placing the church.

A crazy idea strikes us. Is it possible that it doesn’t exist anywhere? Indeed, is it possible that it isn’t even a photograph?  Or, to put it another way, perhaps we should say that it is a photograph but not an actual building.

Instead, it is a cleverly taken photograph of an artist or architect’s (probably Watts) sketch for a large new church that was proposed to combine the congregations of Old Saint Mary’s and the more recently built Saint Paul’s, Dunrobin in an enlarged building either at Dunrobin or halfway between Pinhey’s Point and Dunrobin?

So cleverly has the sketch been done, and the photographer has complied to keep the image small, so as to convince the viewer that he or she is beholding an actual building that exists, not simply a sketch of a proposed building. Artists refer to this as ‘trompe l’oeil’ which is a French expression that means “deceive the eye.” A well-known example of ‘trompe l’oeil’ in Ottawa can be found in the fantastic marble pillars in Notre Dame Basilica which, in fact, are pine pillars cleverly painted to give the impression of rare, imported marble.

At a time when Anglican clergy still remained in short supply in the larger Ottawa region, this sketch was part of an attempt to reduce the number of places where the parish priest would be obliged to hold service on Sunday morning. This seemingly logical solution came up smack against the pride of the Pinhey family descendants whose ancestor had built and paid for the building of the original Old Saint Mary’s on the Pinhey property—right down to the remarkable masonry of the ogee-arched windows.

The Pinheys refused to let the name of the church they had built and funded lapse by being merged in some new larger building at Dunrobin—the building proposed here. They were willing to compromise only in allowing the New Saint Mary’s to be built in a more central place in the concessions of northern March Township.

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