Fountain to be reborn after lifetime buried
Memorial to wife of 19th-century industrialist found at LeBreton Flats
There’s a happy future for the little fountain that was pushed around and chased out of downtown a century ago.
The little fountain in honour of Lilias W. Fleck was ostracized and physically beaten up while bigger, stronger monuments took over Parliament Hill.
Queen Victoria, Sir. John A., and even Sir Galahad dominate Parliament Hill in stone and bronze.
The Fleck fountain was evicted from its first home, then vandalized, and finally buried in LeBreton Flats like last week’s trash.
But you can’t keep a good fountain down. The National Capital Commission hopes to fix it up and install it at the corner of Booth Street and the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway.
After finding the remains of the stone fountain at LeBreton during soil cleanup last year, the National Capital Commission brought in a private firm, Past Recovery Archaeological Services, to study the fountain and its story.
It discovered that 88 per cent of the fountain is still there. There’s a bell-shaped pedestal, a wide stone bowl that sat on it, and a cylinder and cap stone above that. There are also remains of a low, U-shaped wall that used to go part of the way around the fountain.
All the pieces are red or grey granite. There are motifs of water plants: cattails carved all around the upper section, and water-lilies around the bowl — as well as a water lily in copper alloy that con- tained the fountain’s water spout. (The name Lilias is related to the Latin word for lily.)
The lettering shows remains of gold paint. It says: “IN LOVING MEMORY OF LILIAS W. FLECK + ERECTED BY HER CHILDREN.”
The existing pieces stand 1.57 metres high, but the original base is missing. The granite bowl is a little more than a metre wide.
The fountain wraps up the story of one of Ottawa’s leading families
… To pass it pedestrians have to go around the fountain and off the crossing into the mud.
of the late 1800s. It tells indirectly of troubles, and how families pull together to overcome them.
There were two Lilias Flecks, a mother (Lilias W. Fleck) and daughter (Lilias M.). Lilias W. married Alexander Fleck, a wealthy businessman and founder of the Vulcan Iron Works in Ottawa, in 1844.
They had six children, and one of them — Lilias Mackay Fleck — married Thomas Ahearn, the man who brought electricity to Ottawa.
Lilias M. died in childbirth four years later, in 1888. Ahearn and his two young children moved closer to the Fleck family, and his wife’s sister Margaret took care of the children. She married Ahearn a few years later.
In the meantime, Lilias W. Fleck also died (in 1890), and the executors of her estate decided to donate a fountain to the city in her memory. The NCC says documents show it was meant to give water to an eclectic, though possibly not sanitary, mix of “man, horse, (and) dog.” It went badly. They installed the fountain on the south side of Wellington Street at Bridge Street in 1892, but it blocked the sidewalk.
Residents immediately complained that “to pass it pedestrians have to go around the fountain and off the crossing into the mud.”
After two years, the city moved it to a triangle of land bounded by Commissioner, Albert and Slater Streets.
It had a worse time there. The NCC found a letter to the Ottawa Journal in 1926 that complained about ” ... a so called ‘park’ between Bronson avenue and Commissioner street, which had at one time a fountain with a base. The fountain was long ago broken down by vandal boys ...”
The letter writer said mosquitoes bred in the rainwater that collected in the bowl and wrote that the “unsightly basin might easily be turned into a flower garden.”
It wasn’t. Somehow — so far the records are silent, though NCC spokesman Mario Tremblay says research is continuing — it became simpler just to bury the damage.
Now, however, the future might be smiling on the fountain’s surviving pieces.
The NCC has held open houses to display ideas to revitalize LeBreton Flats, and “according to the vast majority of those who attended, the late 19th century Lilias W. Fleck Fountain ... should also find a significant place on the LeBreton Flats site,” likely near the corner of Booth and the parkway.
Tremblay notes that Thomas Ahearn, son-in-law of Lilias W., went on to become the first chairman of the Federal District Commission, the predecessor of the NCC. History is a thing of strange connections.