The story of Auchmar and man who built it
The big house on the hill has always fascinated Bill King.
He remembers as a boy coming upon the sprawling Auchmar mansion on Fennell Avenue West and West 5th Street and wondering how such an extraordinary multi-gabled, seven-chimney mansion could have ended up in a middle-class neighbourhood.
“I remember asking myself, ‘What is this place?’”
Shortly after, the 12-year-old needed an essay topic for his local history class at George L. Armstrong Elementary School, and thought it would be the perfect opportunity to expand his knowledge.
“I still have the essay,” the 55-year-old local history writer says. “And I have been accumulating notes about it ever since.”
Now, more than four decades later, King has produced another piece of writing on his favourite topic. Only this time it is a 232page, self-published book called “Buchanan of Auchmar.” It looks at both the mansion as well as Isaac Buchanan, the man who had it built in the 1850s.
Buchanan, who lived from 1810 to 1883, “was a significant player in just about everything in Hamilton during his life,” says King.
“He was a protege of Sir John A. Macdonald and was our MP during one of our biggest periods of growth during the 1850s and then through the crash of the early 1860s,” he said. “If you want to understand the period of time leading up to Confederation, then Buchanan was a significant player at that time and is worth knowing.”
The book will be officially launched April 25 at the Hamilton Club, which was one of the institutions that Buchanan had a hand in founding in the city.
Others include the Hamilton Board of Trade, which became the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce, and the 13th Battalion, which became the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry.
King writes about Buchanan’s older brother Peter being the “financial genius” in the family who compensated for Isaac’s lapses in managing certain things. Tragically, Peter died after a hunting accident in Scotland when Isaac’s son, also named Peter, shot him in 1860.
Isaac Buchanan was also a key player, along with Sir Allan MacNab, in bringing the Great Western Railway to Hamilton.
“Without the Great Western Railway, Hamilton would have been a country town. By bringing trains through Hamilton, it put Hamilton on the map — first into a trading centre and then into an industrial centre,” King says.
Noted McMaster University historian John Weaver concurs with King’s assessment about Buchanan’s importance.
“Buchanan was very clever and a visionary in terms of his ideas about finance and perceptions about the economic potential of what became southern Ontario ... he was a real entrepreneur and I mean that in a positive sense.”
King’s book comes at a time that the City of Hamilton has been trying to find a use for the vacant Auchmar mansion, which has required numerous costly restorations and maintenance projects over the past several years.
The estate ended up in the city’s hands through a 1999 property swap with a local developer, who wanted to tear it down to build a subdivision.
“Unfortunately, with Auchmar, the city didn’t know what to do with it,” says King, who is a member of the Friends of Auchmar, a group dedicated to preserving the estate.“I wish they looked at Auchmar as an opportunity rather than a liability.”
One proposal still on the table is to have it run by an RHLI Trust, which would create a regimental museum along with other facilities that could include a restaurant and event spaces. Others have talked about it being used for a Hamilton Civic Museum.
“I’m in favour of anything that puts some people into it and leaves the grounds open to the public,” said King. “Just get some people in there doing something that is not intrusive to the building.”
An Auchmar on the Mountain with doors open to the public would create an interesting counterbalance to Dundurn Castle, which was built by MacNab (1798-1862) and opened in 1835.
Both Buchanan and MacNab were expatriate Scots who built their dream houses out of inspiration from their homeland,
and both went into financial ruin late in life.
While Auchmar relatively recently came into civic hands, Dundurn has been owned by the City of Hamilton since 1900.
Auchmar has needed a purpose for several decades, while Dundurn has been used as a Hamilton museum, a zoo and an aviary, before a 1967 Centennial grant transformed it into a salute to its first owner.
King says it is also interesting to consider how public debate about rail travel — with GO Transit improvements and LRT plans — has come back into vogue.
“There are amazing parallels between the discussion today and the discussion in Buchanan’s time,” says King.
“Before the Great Western opened in the 1850s, it took four hours to get Toronto by stage
coach. With the Great Western it took about 70 minutes, and it takes GO Transit 70 minutes to get there today.”