A walk through Aylmer
Ihad a momentary spot of trouble deciding where to start my walk down the rue Principale in Aylmer. The obvious place to begin was where the lower Aylmer Road, after its journey parallel to the Ottawa River, rose up to meet Aylmer’s main street.
But I settled on the starting point the Aylmer council had clearly chosen — namely where the faux gas lamp posts commenced to appear, one intersection to the east. The lamp posts are of a style favoured by smaller towns doing a main street restoration/renovation, the kind that appear in Hollywood movies about foggy London town.
Thus, the walk began with a stone church on my left hand and a stoneclad coffee shop on my right. The church was originally Methodist, built by them in 1858, rebuilt in 1912 — and then it ascended again after a major fire in February of 1959. All this is carved on stone on the front wall, but there is no mention of when the transfer, to use a sporting analogy, was made from Methodist to United, which the church now is. There is a United Methodist Church formed in the 1960s, so I remain confused.
Aylmer had a post office and a land registration office by 1831, several years before Ottawa could make the claim.
The coffee shop, a cross-country franchise from which there is no escape, had obviously been told to blend in with the Redemptionist monastery in whose former grounds it now stood.
It didn’t take me long, as I proceeded towards the river at the far end of the street, to bump into Mr. John Egan, who died in 1857. The aforementioned monastery is a large rambling stone affair with wings and an integrated house, now incorporating a Montessori school and an upmarket retirement home. The school was in the integrated house and this was the former residence of John Egan, built way back in 1840 and conjoined with the monastery almost a century later.
Egan was the first mayor of Aylmer, presiding between 1847 and 1855, and then making the step into higher tier politics. He left Ireland in 1830 and by the time he married a Bytown girl in 1839, he had opened a shop in Aylmer; followed the trend by going into the lumber business; fought a duel with a Bytown barrister (those were the days); and founded Eganville on his day off.
A small woodclad building just west of the monastery also claimed to be an Egan home, perhaps his first effort before he began moving up the societal ladder and into a stone affair.
Soon enough thereafter I came level with a pleasant coffee shop, labelled as the former Maison de G. Mulligan, built around 1908, and bearing the name, in his time, of Glasnevin Hall. (As Glasnevin is a district of Dublin I’m going go out on a limb and declare Mr. Mulligan an Irish immigrant.)
It was here that I realized that I had lost all feeling in my exposed cheeks, and that putting a hot brown liquid in them was not a bad idea. I had chosen the coldest day in a decade to visit Aylmer and, furthermore, had selected to proceed into the wind.
With my cheeks re-pinked I trudged forward and made a note to complement the Aylmer historical society on the comprehensiveness of its heritage labelling of many of the buildings on the main street and nearby.
Aylmer had a post office and a land registration office by 1831, several years before Ottawa could make the claim. I suspect some of the plaques went up after the tornado that spun through the town in August 1994, damaging hundreds of homes and completely wrecking a dozen.
The small commemorative park a little further west on the north side — with its central, plain, effective monument to those Aylmerites who fell in the contagious insanity that is war — also clearly once performed the vital function of a village green, and the row of bijou heritage homes on the east side confirmed it as such.
A handsome stone building opposite the park and set well back from the road declared itself in French to be the Cultural Centre of old Aylmer. This explained the bench out front fashioned in metal and wood and snow which was also an art piece.
Aylmer’s main street has a pleasant helping of public art and a couple of small parks like the one dedicated to Frank Robinson that I intend to make better use of in warmer times.
Escaping the now blood-freezing cold once more, I went in, past a well-weathered bronze plaque telling me that this was the former Palais de Justice, built in 1852. Before becoming the centre of cultural life in the town, the building had also been the town hall, a fire station and a library.
I felt at home in the lobby, and wondered how many other court houses across Canada had converted to palaces of culture.
After touring the current art exhibition there — a fun, inspired collection of metal assemblage sculptures and coffee tables by Michael Kinghorn, a Wakefieldian — I fell into conversation with an engaging woman who worked there. Interesting facts emerged from our chat; hangings had taken place in the building; visiting the dungeons below, used as storerooms, was an unpleasant thing to do; and Aylmer had once been considered a possible spot for a capital city.
In a way, I was glad it has escaped that fate as, in recent years, it has regained its core charm and has a small town feel, more of which we shall encounter next week.