Landlady was more than a witness to murder
Mary Ann Trotter lived a full life beyond McGee’s assassination, writes Randy Boswell.
Even pinning down her first name is an archival chore, 150 years later.
Women in 19th century Canada were particularly prone to the identity-erasing conventions of the day, so she was known almost exclusively as “Mrs. Trotter” or even “the Widow Trotter” when mentioned in public documents during her life — and consequently by most historians.
But Mary Ann Trotter — the “proprietress” of Toronto House, a Sparks Street hotel, restaurant and tavern that was popular with Confederation-era parliamentarians — deserves to be remembered for more than the single, sorrowful event in April 1868 that has made her a familiar footnote in Canadian history.
And July 1, 1867, happens to be the day that offers a more textured, intriguing picture of the woman who’s been frozen in time, until now, as a caricature: traumatized landlady, witness to murder.
We might see her, instead, as a model of patriotic pride and entrepreneurial chutzpah.
Trotter was the Irish-born hotelkeeper, lately arrived in the burgeoning capital from Toronto, who rented a room to the Irish-born Montreal MP and Father of Confederation Thomas D’Arcy McGee.
In welcoming McGee to her boarding house, Trotter nearly became a collateral victim of his assassination.
McGee, a reformed Irish radical, had been targeted as a traitor by Fenian extremists bent on securing Ireland’s independence from Britain through attacks in British North America.
On the night he was killed, McGee had left Parliament Hill at 2 a.m. after a marathon session in the House of Commons. He briskly walked the few hundred metres to Toronto House, better known as “Mrs. Trotter’s boarding house,” where he’d been renting a room for about a month.
Trotter later recalled in court that she was still up waiting for McGee, as well as her 13-year-old son, William, who worked as a parliamentary page. The 51-year-old Trotter was reclining on a couch in a room close to the entrance of 71 Sparks St. in case her famous boarder required some service when he finally got in.
She heard someone fumbling outside, but when she came to the door to help either McGee or young William manage the lock, there was a “flash” across her face and a sharp sound — Trotter “thought it was a firecracker,” then “the smell of powder.” McGee had been shot dead, the bullet passing through his head and lodging in the heavy door of the boarding house, inches from Trotter’s face.
Her role in the public drama that ensued, as a key Crown witness in the trial that convicted Fenian sympathizer Patrick James Whelan of McGee’s murder, made Trotter’s boarding house one of the best known crime scenes in Canadian history.
But what do we really know of the woman herself ?
The first Dominion Day, which took place 10 months before The Widow’s name became linked to McGee’s for eternity, offers a glance at another Mary Ann Trotter: the savvy businesswoman and heart-on-sleeve patriot.
The July 1, 1867 Ottawa Times carried a new advertisement placed by “Mrs. Trotter” detailing renovations at Toronto House to add rooms and amenities on the cusp of Canada’s birth. It was, by any measure, a smart investment given the influx of MPs, Senators and senior bureaucrats, many in need of convenient, short-term lodgings as the new federal government got into gear.
Word that Trotter had added new rooms in “superior style” even attracted news coverage — “earned media” in today’s marketing parlance — in the midst of Dominion Day hoopla: “The Toronto House is patronized by some of the first gentlemen in the country,” the Times reported, “none of whom fail to speak of the establishment in terms of high commendation.”
Trotter’s business was one of only a handful of private buildings praised in the press for their nighttime “illuminations,” or festive lighting, celebrating Dominion Day. We might see it as the day Mary Ann Trotter gave the new nation’s capital a lesson in entrepreneurship and female empowerment, 19th century style.
Trotter’s next moment in the spotlight, at Canada’s trial of the century in September 1868, was followed soon after by another terrible setback.
A catastrophic fire on Jan. 21, 1869 consumed the entire Desbarats Block of buildings on Sparks Street, including Toronto House, where a memorial tablet had lately been placed to mark the scene of McGee’s assassination. The Toronto Globe reported that Trotter’s insurance, purchased from an Irish firm, “is not looked upon here of any value, and her savings for many years are therefore swept away.” The Globe added that “she broke her arm by falling, in leaving the building hurriedly when she was only partially dressed.”
Yet an upbeat advertisement in Ottawa’s 1870 city directory shows the hotelkeeper had re-established her business nearby at the corner of Bank and Sparks streets, and was eagerly inviting her former customers to patronize the newly resurrected Toronto House.
The business appears to have struggled, however; Trotter had given up on Ottawa by mid-1870 and returned to Toronto. Sporadic references in newspapers there indicate she was again running a boarding house and bar, but court reports about a “Mrs. Trotter” being fined for failing to pay wages owed to domestic help suggest she may have faced financial difficulties.
In September 1873, a Globe announcement of the forthcoming sale of Mrs. Trotter’s “hotel furniture, bar fittings, &c.” — with the explanation that “she is retiring from business” — seemed to close out the colourful career of a noteworthy Canadian businesswoman.
Yet by 1876, Trotter was running the Marlborough House hotel next to Union Station. That year, she was forced to publicly defend herself and her son against a fabricated report published across Canada and the U.S. that the two of them had conspired to assassinate McGee, and that the executed Whelan may have been an accomplice but not the triggerman.
The startling accusation was first printed in Montreal, but quickly spread to other newspapers, including the Globe and New York World. The story — soon dismissed as pure fiction — stated that William Trotter, a former House of Commons page, was now on death row in New York City for a recent murder, and that before heading to the gallows he had confessed to assassinating McGee in 1868 with help from his mother and Whelan.
In a letter signed “M.A. Trotter” that was promptly published by the Globe, she confronted the fake news squarely and coolly: “I beg to state that my son was the page alluded to, there not being to my knowledge anyone else of that name connected with the House, and he is now in Toronto with me, and therefore the statements in the paragraph are erroneous.”
Within a few years, though, she’d moved to the U.S. and opened a boarding house in Chicago.
“Mrs. M.A. Trotter, late of Marlborough House, Toronto, Ont., has vacancies for several gentlemen or married couples,” stated a May 1883 notice in the Chicago Tribune. “To her old patrons from the Dominion — who are numerous in Chicago — Mrs. T. makes this announcement, relying on a well established reputation as hotel caterer for a patronage always generously bestowed.”
At the age of 67, Trotter had started up a new enterprise in a new country, again leveraging her track record for top-notch customer service.
Trotter died in 1888 at age 72. A Chicago obituary described the Dublin native as a “woman of high character and business ability” who was “well-known in Toronto and Ottawa, Canada.”
The Globe printed a short item, too, under the headline: “Death of an Old Toronto Hotelkeeper,” recording the fact that Trotter’s body was being transported from Chicago to Toronto for burial.
“It was on the threshold of the door of her house in Ottawa,” the news brief added, chiselling the inevitable epitaph, “that Thomas D’Arcy McGee was shot.”
Looking back at that heady Dominion Day holiday 150 years ago, as the Toronto House hotelier presided over her newly expanded business — a place dressed in decorative lights to welcome Confederation — the moment seemed to signal even better things to come for Mary Ann Trotter in the capital of a newborn nation.
Instead, unexpected setbacks and disruptions followed: a shocking murder, a calamitous fire, apparent financial hardship, a scurrilous libel, unstable work and living arrangements — even a few brushes with the law.
Yet she persisted — through two challenging decades after the terrible tragedy that thrust her into history’s spotlight. Her business acumen and reputation for good service evidently remained intact through an eventful life — and career — that are worth remembering on their own merits.