A handsome brick cottage overlooking Burlington Heights
Below Burlington Heights on the shores of Burlington Bay in 1777, Richard Beasley built a shanty, a house, a wharf and a storehouse.
Sometime between 1800 and 1812, he built a brick house and erected barns and outbuildings at the top of the heights.
Earlier, Beasley built a stone storehouse on the heights — probably for his furs. This storehouse became one of the outbuildings for his brick house.
Beasley, as with many Loyalists, was land poor and frequently in financial difficulties. In 1833, his Burlington Heights was bought by his trading partner and cousin Richard Cartwright of Kingston. Shortly thereafter, the house and holdings were sold to a rising lawyer in the village of Hamilton. This man, in 1833, advertised the house for rent as follows: “DWELLING HOUSE TO LET” “The handsome and commodious brick cottage on Burlington Heights lately occupied by Col. Beasley will be let for two years to a respectable tenant. It is beautifully situated at the edge of Burlington Bay, commands an extensive view on all sides, and is very roomy, being 50 feet long by 40 wide with two wings each 20 feet square, frame kitchen 18-by-30, with cellarage under the main body of the building. On the premises there are a good ice house, wash house, smoke house, an excellent garden stocked with superior fruit trees, and an extensive peach orchard said to be the best in the province. For further particulars, apply to the subscriber.” Hamilton, March 25, 1833, A.N. MacNab Allan Napier MacNab did not get his “respectable tenant,” and the next year in 1834, he started to erect Dundurn: a mansion designed by Hamilton architect Robert Wetherell, built around the Beasley house in a style of architecture never seen before in North America.
Dundurn was fashioned in the Italian Villa style, or as it was earlier called, the Tuscan Villa. This style based its appeal on a romantic silhouette, light-coloured stucco and ground floor doors opening into the garden from every room. The Tuscan Villa was the reaction to the dark brick, rigidly symmetrical plan and “dull” classicism of the Georgian style.
It took considerable skill to design the great mansion around Beasley’s storey-and-a-half cottage. Wetherell’s elevation of Dundurn from the bay side shows what was called the “covered wing,” a wall enclosing Beasley’s domestic outbuildings now assembled around a kitchen court.
It was the biggest house ever built in Upper Canada — and MacNab’s most expensive hobby
ALLAN MACNAB also erected extensive stables and barns around a stable court. The stables were made of wood but replaced later with stone.
Dundurn was immense. It was by far the biggest house ever built in Upper Canada.
Constantly in and out of debt, MacNab’s first love was always Dundurn, on which he spent to the limit of his means. Dundurn is Gaelic for “Fort on the Water.” So large was his house and his stables that it came to assume the name Dundurn Castle.
All his life, he added to and altered his beloved house. When he died in 1862, Dundurn was seized by the bailiffs.
For a year or so, it was vacant. It was then used as an asylum for 60 deaf mutes who destroyed most of the mansion’s interior character.
It was vacant again until bought by Sen. Donald MacInnes in 1874. The senator added some bathrooms, rearranged some room partitions, built a billiard room, turned a long tool shed into a bowling alley and built new stables.
The senator had his financial troubles, too, and there was always talk of subdividing the land of what is now Dundurn and Harvey Parks. In 1898, the ratepayers of Hamilton voted to buy the house and grounds.
From 1898 to 1964, it was a museum under the parks board and was, in effect, Hamilton’s corporate attic. To Dundurn came the curiosa and memorabilia of the citizens: collections of fossils and bird’s eggs, china and pictures and articles from foreign travel.
In 1964, it was declared a centennial project and restoration began in 1965.
THE GROUNDS contain an octagonal porticoed building which once had a shallow pit in the floor. A plan exists which, in MacNab’s hand, marks this as a building for “the chickens” — fighting cocks. It has been transformed into an open air theatre as part of the Dundurn restoration.
There is also Battery Lodge, a gate lodge erected by Sir Allan on an 1813 earthwork. Two gates still stand.
His private burial yard with its stone wall has vanished, and his body and those of his two wives, his only son, his brother and other relatives were eventually moved elsewhere.
It was then used as an asylum for 60 deaf mutes who destroyed most of the mansion’s interior character.