The mysteries of Thomas McKay
Thomas McKay is largely an enigma, lost to history
One of the most important men in Ottawa’s history has no proper biography. Very few of his personal papers are available. Some of his buildings and accomplishments have been bulldozed and lost to time. Even his burial plot lacks a properly dignified marker.
Yet you probably know Thomas McKay’s major accomplishments.
The entrance locks to the Rideau Canal. Rideau Hall, where the Governor General lives. Earnscliffe, where the British High Commissioner lives. The building where the Bytown Museum is housed. He built a state-of-the-art flour mill with his earnings from building the canal. Ever the ambitious entrepreneur, McKay and his sonin-law, John MacKinnon, built the first railway in the region, the Bytown and Prescott Railway, though it failed, and the partnership fell apart in 1852.
But who was Thomas McKay? (His name was also sometimes spelled MacKay.) The details of his life are surprisingly sparse. It’s hard to know what he thought of people or events, and what his relationships were like. Many of his papers, his receipts and letters and correspondence, are thought to be lost to history. This poses a major logistical problem for historians of Ottawa. It also means that we know a lot about what McKay did, but don’t know very much about the man himself.
“Despite his fame, he’s somewhat enigmatic. There’s no private letters, no correspondence, to plumb the inner man,” said Martha Edmond, an Ottawa historian and author of a history of Rockcliffe Park.
The mysteries of McKay have needled historians for decades. Back in 1932, Francis J. Audet wrote that it was “almost inconceivable that such a man should have found no biographer so far.
“The extraordinary success of his ventures (is) a striking proof of what may be done in Canada by an enterprising man who applies himself diligently to his task,” wrote Audet. “If he became a rich man, it was not by chance, but by dint of hard work intelligently pursued. It is by such men that empires are built.”
And in New Edinburgh, he built his own little empire, starting in 1833.
While the other major contractors working on the Rideau Canal left when their work was finished, McKay made Bytown his home. “He saw potential when nobody else did,” Edmond said. In the neighbourhood, he built the flour mill, not to mention a curling rink, a distillery and a schoolhouse — something Edmond suspects stems from a possible devotion to socialist Robert Owen, who experimented with building ideal communities.
But let’s back up a bit. McKay’s story actually begins in Scotland. Born in 1792, McKay was an accomplished stonemason and architect, trained in Perth. In 1813, he married Ann Crichton, with whom he had 16 children over the course of 30 years. Alas, the two were struck by tragedy after tragedy — only three of their 16 children outlived Crichton, who died in 1878, and only eight made it to adulthood.
By 1817, McKay was in Montreal. Along with another Scottish stonemason, John Redpath, he got to work on the Lachine Canal. “(McKay) brought with him no capital, save his integrity of character and energy in the prosecution of his business interests,” said a history of the Scottish Presbyterian Church in Montreal.
For the building of the Rideau Canal, he formed a consortium with Thomas Phillips, Andrew White and Redpath, and the four men divided the profits. McKay’s most significant contribution, as an associate of Col. John By who oversaw the building of the canal, was the entrance locks to the Ottawa River.
With the money McKay earned from this work — some 30,000 pounds, possibly paid out in Mexican silver dollars — he began buying up large swaths of land, eventually more than 1,100 acres that encompassed what’s now New Edinburgh, Lindenlea, Manor Park and portions of both Vanier and Rockcliffe. It seems he may have made such a pretty penny because he found a limestone repository for the canal locks that was closer to the building site than what others were planning to use.
“It was partly luck, partly Scottish canniness, I think,” said Janet Uren, who’s working with Edmond on a history of New Edinburgh.
To this day, you can see his legacy: the streets laid out in a grid and the roads named after his family and friends. Crichton, for his wife’s maiden name. Union, referring, said Edmond, to the unification of Upper and Lower Canada (McKay was a member of the Legislative Assembly for seven years, representing Russell County, then a member of the Legislative Council of the Province of Canada for 15). And, of course, Rideau Hall, which was completed by 1838 and where he lived until his death.
“He built it right here in New Edinburgh, I argue, in the true tradition of a mill owner, so he could see and be seen by his workers,” Edmond said.
In New Edinburgh, residents have, over the past several months, been feuding with city hall about a new sewer line, and an excavation point that’s going to be in Stanley Park; there are concerns it could damage this old Ottawa community. McKay, said Joan Mason, a former president of the New Edinburgh Community Alliance, is a reminder to care about community.
“I think we’ve lost something, and Thomas is there to remind us, and to be an inspiration — if not a mentor — to us,” she said. “Part of keeping the heritage conservation district protected has been to let people walk down streets, get a different feel, actually feel the spirit of McKay, or of all the people (from) 1834 to now.”
McKay died of stomach cancer on Oct. 9, 1855. But, Edmond said, were he to come back today, he’d find much of what he built is still around.
“I often think if McKay came back to New Edinburgh, I think he would recognize a lot of things about the community,” Edmond said.