OTTAWA’S ‘RIVER OF SAWDUST’
Waterway defiled by mills was nation’s first industrial-pollution controversy
When the renowned Irish poet and essayist Oscar Wilde gave a public lecture in Ottawa in May 1882, about a decade before his rise to further heights of fame as a novelist and playwright, the controversial esthete diverted from his prepared remarks on the decorative arts to denounce the sorry state of the sawdust-choked Ottawa River.
“This is an outrage,” Wilde lectured the locals, the reaction likely muted in a national capital ruled not by legislators but lumber kings, and where thousands of families depended for their livelihoods on Ottawa Valley forests and the sawmills of Chaudière Falls.
“No one has a right to pollute the air and water, which are the common inheritance of all,” Wilde went on, gamely. “We should leave them to our children as we have received them.” Oh, Oscar. This was Ottawa. As if. The Citizen responded the next day by acknowledging that the sawdust problem “has long been admitted,” and that the city’s smokefilled skies “might also be a pity,” but insisted that “Mr. Wilde goes too far when he advocates that no man should be allowed to carry on a business which produces either of these results.”
Wilde’s futile condemnation came about halfway through a 40-year debate on the dumping of wood waste into the river that ran past Parliament Hill — its own colossal buildings framed with boards cut at J.R. Booth’s mill just upstream. It was the contract that put him on a path to becoming Canada’s richest man for a time, the so-called “Monarch of the Ottawa.”
The sawdust issue flared up and died down in each of the past four decades of the 19th century, and the ever-present “menace” or “evil,” as it was sometimes called, wasn’t officially dealt with until the pulp-and-paper industry overtook sawmilling as Ottawa-Hull’s economic mainstay in the early 20th century. Even then, mill owners still sometimes dumped huge quantities of sawdust, chips, bark and other “offal” into the river without penalty, as a 1907 Citizen investigation showed.
The Ottawa River “sawdust question” is remembered among environmental historians as Canada’s first industrial-pollution controversy. Researchers such as Jamie Benidickson, David Lee and the late R. Peter Gillis — who wrote a landmark 1986 essay on the capital’s “river of sawdust” — have documented the steep ecological cost of Ottawa’s forest-products fortune. And they’ve chronicled how the lumber barons immortalized in local street names (Booth, Bronson, Eddy) resisted serious regulation for decades by successfully arguing — or bluffing — that a prohibition on sawdust dumping would force them to relocate to another city or even put them out of business.
Recent research has shown that the word “pollution” itself, which acquired its modern environmental meaning in the mid-19th century, was first popularized in Canada as a result of the Ottawa River sawdust debate.
As early as 1866, Ottawa’s medical officer of health, Dr. Edward Van Cortlandt, was alerting city council and top colonial officials to the “insalubrious effects on the water of the Ottawa resulting from sawdust and other recrements of sawmills.”
Van Cortlandt warned that sawdust suspended in the downstream flow and accumulating in massive amounts on the river bottom threatened navigation, fish life and human health — a multi-pronged critique that historians have highlighted as the precedent for all subsequent industrial-pollution battles in Canada.
But in October 1866, a bemused Globe correspondent watching the sawdust controversy unfold in Ottawa reported wryly to his Toronto readers: “The people in the vicinity think more of lumber and pine logs than they do of fish, for the very natural reason that the former are deeply concerned with their pockets. … Nearly everyone here is on the side of sawdust.”
It was an insight that would elude Oscar Wilde in 1882. By then, a special commission of the new Dominion of Canada had studied the matter and concluded that grinding all blocks and edgings before dumping them into the river would be best — a solution that served the lumber barons well and actually increased the amount of sawdust drifting or dumped into the water below the Chaudière mills.
And while anti-sawdust regulations were sometimes enforced in other parts of the country, the Ottawa lumber giants were given exemptions from strict standards because their operations were deemed too important to the national economy for any bureaucratic meddling.
Meanwhile, local citizens were deprived of a decent river for swimming, fishing and many other potential uses. Supplies of clean drinking water, eventually secured with the installation of a municipal waterworks system in the mid1870s, were initially a challenge to obtain. And shoals of sawdust filled every bay and inlet downstream of the big mills as the stuff piled up relentlessly on the river bottom.
In 1901, after the Alexandra Bridge had been built between Ottawa and Hull, engineers recorded their amazement at the “heavy deposit of sawdust, slabs, etc., at the bottom of the Ottawa River,” which ran “shore to shore, the greatest depth found being 60 ft., with 20 ft. of water above it.”
Lee, a former Parks Canada historian, likewise documented how engineers in the 1960s, who were building the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge a little farther downstream, encountered sawdust accumulations on the riverbed three metres thick.
On at least one occasion, the sawdust problem proved fatal. In 1897, not long after another concerted effort in Parliament in the mid-1890s had failed to curb the dumping of sawdust into the river, a Montebello-area farmer named John Kemp was killed after two massive methane explosions flipped his boat and left him to drown.
Rotting sawdust, probably mixed with sewage, was blamed for the deadly blast. The same volatile deposit was sometimes known to blow winter ice to smithereens in dramatic, dangerous burps.
Kemp’s death helped spur action, though it would take several more years — and a final negotiation between Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the recalcitrant Booth in 1902 — to put an end to a half-century of non-stop dumping of sawdust into the Ottawa River.
A Tory senator from Ottawa, Francis Clemow, deserves credit for pushing the cause in Parliament. There’s some justice in the fact that he, too, has a local street named after him. And it was a federal fisheries official, Fred Vieth, who appears to have built the winning case, at last, for serious sawdust legislation — though even with prompting from his internal report in 1895, along with Kemp’s death in 1897, it wasn’t until 1903 that decisionmakers took definitive steps.
“I feel constrained to record my opinion,” Vieth had concluded after a thorough investigation of the issue, “that if the Ottawa River is to be saved as one of the great waterways of the country, some immediate and effective remedial measures are absolutely necessary. Otherwise, judging from the present condition of the river, its ultimate destruction can only be a question of time.” Randy Boswell is a former Citizen reporter who teaches journalism at Carleton University. He researched the 19th-century sawdust controversy for a 2014 environmental history conference in P.E.I. and for a forthcoming journal article.