Photo captures a capital that no longer exists
The Citizen asked Randy Boswell, a longtime Ottawa journalist and Carleton University professor, to reconstruct life in the capital on the day Canada was born. The history specialist dug into archives and old newspapers, unearthing a series of long-overlooked stories that shed fresh light on Confederation’s first 24 hours and some of the people whose lives were touched by the events of that landmark day 150 years ago.
Here’s one thing we can say with reasonable certainty about July 1, 1867: At about the height of noon, 49-year-old Elihu Spencer — a selfdescribed “photographic artist” and owner of a studio on Sparks Street with five employees — stood on the south side of Wellington Street at the present site of the Langevin Block and took a picture of the Dominion Day crowds gathered on Parliament Hill.
If there are other photographs of Canada’s capital on the day Confederation took effect, archivists don’t know of them. That makes the scene captured exactly 150 years ago by Spencer — one of the city’s first established portrait photographers, a trailblazer for such Ottawa-based masters of the genre as William J. Topley and Yousuf Karsh — both a prized Bytown Museum artifact and arguably a national treasure.
The southwest entrance to East Block can just be seen on the right side of Spencer’s photograph — a glimpse of the building where the day’s key constitutional transactions, including the oath-taking by governor general Viscount Monck and prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald, had just taken place.
But the House of Parliament and its busy foreground were the artist’s main subjects, including “the thousands of lookers-on” whom the Citizen reported had thronged the Hill to watch the midday military exercises. Puffs of smoke can be seen rising above the rifle brigade lined up closest to Victoria Tower (predecessor of today’s Peace Tower), evidently from the noon-hour salute known to have been fired by the assembled regiments.
A blurred white horse, its rider barely visible against the backdrop of a rickety wooden fence that’s been braced in several spots to keep it upright, gallops westward along Wellington.
Spencer’s photo captured a fleeting moment in Canadian history — a metaphorical horse on the run — and the photographer’s gift to the future was all the more precious because it preserved both an image of Confederation’s first day and Parliament’s doomed original Centre Block, which would be destroyed by fire in 1916.
Grant Vogl, the museum’s collections and exhibitions manager, says Spencer’s image shows the feu de joie — “fire of joy” — being discharged by an honour guard that included members of the Carleton Blazers. The photograph, touched up with some hand-painted details, was apparently a gift from Spencer to fellow Ottawa photographer Samuel Jarvis, eventually making its way to the Bytown Museum’s collection.
“Precious few images of that first Dominion Day exist,” notes Vogl, adding that the Spencer original was recently loaned to the Canadian Museum of History for its special exhibition 1867: Rebellion and Confederation.
Born in Dundee, Que., in 1818, Spencer was living in nearby Hawkesbury, Ont., by the early 1850s, billing himself as a daguerreotype artist — practitioner of the earliest commercially successful photographic technique, in which images were captured on silver-coated copper plates.
Spencer set up shop on in Ottawa in 1859, operating the city ’s second known photography business (after Joseph Lockwood) for the next decade. He captured the likenesses of various Ottawa notables: Canada’s first Confederation-era governor general, Monck, city clerk W.P. Lett — chief organizer of the capital’s Dominion Day celebrations — with his rifle and hunting dog, and Bishop Joseph-Bruno Guigues, founder of the University of Ottawa.
He produced many landscapes of the city, including pre-1867 Sparks Street (then still a dirt road) and the Parliament Buildings at various stages of construction.
What doesn’t seem to have survived from the 19th century is a portrait of the man himself.
Spencer’s arrival in Ottawa was no mere coincidence; the 1857 selection of the city as Canada’s capital was fuelling rapid growth and attracting many businesses and would-be entrepreneurs, eventually guaranteeing a steady flow of well-heeled subjects and marketable scenes for Spencer. His pictures of the capital’s natural beauty and evolving streetscapes won awards at provincial exhibitions and were, in turn, sometimes given as prizes.
A collection of Spencer’s scenic shots of Ottawa were, for example, awarded to one of the top marksmen in a shooting competition held at the city’s new rifle range — today’s Strathcona Park in Sandy Hill — in September 1867.
There is evidence that Spencer left Ottawa in 1869 to seek his fortune in the United States. In November 1867, he had been granted the U.S. patent for a rotating nameplate he’d invented to improve the identification of railway station stops for passengers aboard trains. Other inventions, with patents filed in the 1870s in Chicago and New Jersey, proposed improvements for paddle-wheel steamboats and other devices.
But by the 1890s he and his wife, Nancy, had returned to Ottawa, where a married daughter was still living. When Spencer died at age 80 in 1898, his estate (according to a brief notice in the Ottawa Journal) was valued at $2,400. His entrepreneurial adventures in America, evidently, had not been hugely enriching.
News reports of his death did not reference his groundbreaking role in Ottawa photography, but a published collection of Beechwood Cemetery biographies counts Spencer among the noteworthy people buried there, describing him as a “photographic pioneer” for the capital.
Vogl agrees, crediting Spencer for documenting “an Ottawa that no longer exists to be seen” — and citing the Confederation Day picture as a showcase example of his priceless legacy.