THIS OLD HOUSE
Joseph Merrill Currier gave us 24 Sussex Drive, which has been home to prime ministers since 1950, writes Kady O’Malley.
It seems distinctly unlikely that Joseph Merrill Currier would ever have predicted that more than a century after his death, he would be remembered not for his exploits in business or politics, but for the house he built as a wedding gift for his bride-to-be — and not even the house itself so much as the address: 24 Sussex Drive, which has been on the calling cards of Canada’s prime ministers since 1950.
There’s not much left of the original Victorian-style villa that Currier christened Gorffwysfa — Welsh for “place of rest” — and the few pictures from that era show the house from a distance, making it difficult to imagine how it must have looked when it was completed in 1868.
Since then, it has undergone both minor and major renovations, including a near-complete gutting when the federal government officially took possession of the property in the 1940s. The view, however, is just as spectacular, even if it may not hold the same significance for its subsequent occupants as it did for the American-born lumber magnate turned impassioned Confederation-era politician who first resided there.
“(Currier) wanted to build a house on the river and overlooking the hills that had made his fortune, so I assume that had something to do with it,” says Maureen McTeer, who lived in the house for several months during husband Joe Clark’s brief tenure as prime minister, and has since written a book on Canada’s official residences, including 24 Sussex.
“He found it very peaceful there, and he had had a tumultuous life.”
Born in rural Vermont in 1820, Currier was just 17 when he headed north to seek his fortune in the burgeoning lumber business, first working in the camps and eventually co-founding a saw mill in Manotick.
He wed his first wife, Christina, along the way, and the couple had four children, three of whom would die from scarlet fever in the fall of 1855, with Christina passing away three years later.
In 1861, he married Anne Crosby following a whirlwind courtship that began at her family’s hotel in New York. But just a few months later, during a visit to the newly opened Manotick mill, Crosby was killed in a freak accident when her skirts became entangled in the machinery. A grief-stricken Currier sold his shares in the business soon after. (According to local legend, Anne’s ghost still haunts the mill, which is now a museum and community centre.)
Seven years later, he married Hannah Wright – who, as a descendant of Hull founder Philemon Wright, was basically Bytown royalty – and the couple remained together until his death in 1884.
As for the esthetics of the villa itself, National Capital Commission architect Steve Robertson believes that Currier — who worked with his brother James, an architect, on the design — may well have been influenced by a particularly ambitious construction project unfolding just a few miles away.
“At that time, what was being built? Parliament Hill — Centre Block, West Block,” Robertson points out. “What’s their style? Gothic revival. What’s the style that (Currier) built in? Gothic revival. That’s not what’s there today, but that’s how it was built, and that house, as it was, stayed like that until the turn of the century.”
Even before he broke ground on the Sussex Drive house where he and his wife, Hannah, would live for the rest of their lives, there’s little doubt Currier was keeping a watchful eye on the progress on Parliament Hill.
While serving as Ottawa’s representative to the pre-Confederation legislative assembly in 1863, he put forward a motion to have the House “take the earliest opportunity” to “express (its) opinion that the public interests will be best served by the completion, with all necessary speed, of the Government Buildings at the City of Ottawa, which Her Majesty has been graciously pleased to select as the Metropolis of Canada.”
A few years later, Currier, who had become a staunch Conservative, would secure a seat in those very same buildings as a member of the First Parliament, a post he would hold for the next 15 years. But he was never able to make it onto Sir John A. Macdonald’s front bench, and was instead obliged to content himself with his status as a founding member of the Standing Committee on Railways, Canals and Telegraph Lines.
In 1877, his otherwise unbroken record of parliamentary service was interrupted by a brief — but doubtless personally distressing — involuntary hiatus when he was forced to resign after inadvertently (or so he claimed) violating the fledgling legislature’s conflict of interest rules, which barred MPs from doing business with the government. The oversight was initially brought to his attention by a rookie Quebec Liberal MP by the name of Wilfrid Laurier, who advised him that he would be raising the matter in the House.
“Until the receipt of that communication, I was not aware that the business transaction therein referred to had taken place,” Currier told the House on April 16. But “on enquiry into the circumstances,” he went on to explain, he confirmed that T.W. Currier & Co., “of which I was at that time a partner, though not an active one,” did indeed supply $4,717.10 worth of lumber to the St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary in 1874.
He also revealed that a second firm in which he held an interest “fulfilled several small orders for lumber for the Library of Parliament” over the same time period — “in each case,” he assured his colleagues, “without my personal cognizance.”
Despite that caveat, Currier acknowledged that, as a result of these business transactions, he might have “unwittingly vacated his seat” and submitted his resignation to the speaker.
The ensuing debate reads, quite literally, like a Who’s Who of Canadian political history: Not only was his decision to step down triggered by Laurier, but his act of pre-emptive penance set off a burst of bickering between thenprime minister Alexander Mackenzie and Macdonald, who was at the time cooling his heels on the other side of the House.
There’s even a cameo appearance by Mackenzie’s justice minister, Edward Blake, who would eventually go on to become the only Liberal leader not to eventually serve as prime minister (until Stéphane Dion took the party helm in 2007).
In any case, less than four months later, Currier was back in the Chamber after successfully recapturing the riding in the resulting byelection, and again in the 1878 general election, which also saw the Conservatives — and Sir John A. — returned to power.
He declined to run for re-election in 1882, and was promptly installed as Postmaster for Ottawa, a position he held until his death two years later. Despite his earlier affluence, he almost certainly needed the stipend.
Over the course of his decadeand-a-half in the House, what had once been a thriving business empire that had extended well beyond lumber to include railways, banking and insurance (and even a stake in the company that controlled the local newspaper, the Ottawa Daily Citizen) had fallen on hard times, leaving him effectively bankrupt by 1878.
He did, however, manage to hold on to 24 Sussex, which passed to his wife upon his death, and was eventually sold to an outside buyer.
Although he died in New York, he was laid to rest in the then-newly established cemetery at Beechwood — which was, fittingly, yet another Ottawa institution in which he had an influential early role as a founding shareholder.