Historian at Work, 1927 edition
A look at F.H. Dobbin’s reflection on the Peterborough of 1867
Francis Hincks Dobbin (1850-1932) was Peterborough’s outstanding historian of his era. Except for a few years in Lindsay, he spent most of his life here, and from the age of 14 he was first and foremost a journalist. His first job was with Robert Romaine’s newspaper, the Review, and Dobbin worked his way to the chief executive of the company. By 1914, he was reading all the bound newspapers that had been accumulated during his career. He wrote extensive book-length reports on the fire department, the medical profession, and a significant chronology of Peterborough that inspired my own book, Peterborough Journal.
Throughout the 1920s he wrote occasional newspaper columns, a few of which were gathered by his son
Ross Dobbin for the 1944 book, Our
Old Home Town. Also in retirement, he ran the soldier resettlement after World War I, sat on town council, and organized Old Boys’ Week, in which former Peterburians returned for a week of meeting old friends and reminiscing.
Dobbin wrote a column comparing the Peterborough of 1927 with the old town of 1867. This appeared in the special edition of the Peterborough Examiner celebrating the silver jubilee of Confederation. Canada had missed celebrating 50 years of Confederation in 1917 because of our complete commitment to the war effort.
Given what is known about F.H. Dobbin, it was interesting to consider what he felt was most important about 1867, when he was 17, that he could recall in 1927 for readers, nearly all of whom had no recollection of 1867.
This might be similar for us to imagine recalling 1958, the year that John G. Diefenbaker’s Conservatives won 208 seats in the election. What would we consider important in Peterborough in 1958 that was worth recalling for a big celebration this year?
For Dobbin, newspapers were a major source for information and inspiration. His dozens of bound volumes of newspapers from the years when Peterborough, a town of say 10,000, had three daily newspapers were a veritable archives. He commented in 1927 that since 1850, Peterborough’s newspapers reported the “doing and progress” and were in Dobbin’s view, “faithful and surprisingly accurate chroniclers of the days, weeks and years as they fly.”
From the 1850s to the 1870s the town’s people longed for a railway. “The lumber business and the timber export were, so to write, the apple of its eye. Along the river were located 10 immense saw mills; the waters of the stream was black with floating logs.” For the kids, the big sport was riding logs. They would swim out to the logs, straddle them and float with the current. When they became stranded in a bend of the river they waited to be rescued “by peevey, pike pole or cant-hook.”
The impact of timber was huge. Dobbin observed, “From 1834 to 1838 the streets were thronged with wagons, hauled by big spotted Percheron horses, bringing the lumber to the wharves along the river, to be barged along the stream and across the lake and trucked to Cobourg for export.” In its heyday, “Work was aplenty and he who would not go to it had to do without eating or put in time at the vicarious stone pile.” The intense lumber activity slowed over time, and although Peterborough had lots of manufacturers the market was mostly local.
Municipally, Dobbin noted, there were many changes over the 60 years. After incorporation, the town spilled over its boundaries into the town lots of North Monaghan, the southern and river portions of Smith, past Auburn Woolen Mills in Douro and in 1903 added Ashburnham. But there were also rising expectations about what municipal governments should do; “for as the community grew it outgrew its conveniences and asked for larger and better.” For awhile, it seemed sufficient to find money to replace the nine bridges. The unwillingness of North Monaghan to help build the downtown bridge over the Otonabee in the 1840s “culminated in the incorporation of the town” in 1850.
At the local level, in 1867, military activity was a consequence of Confederation. “The excitement over that great adventure, the Fenian Raid, had cooled down but the volunteer movement, at the time a very vital thing, demanded a drill hall, and one it should have.”
What was known as Central Park in 1927, but now Confederation Square, “was a rather desolate appearing piece of property…” Dobbin missteps on the details here, but rightly notes that this conveniently situated property was owned by both the town and the county and “could be had for nothing.” The new drill hall, funded by a government grant and “those who would contribute” and formally opened on Nov. 12, 1867. “What memories centre around that old structure! The soul of comradeship. The meeting place of hearty and virile men.” Dobbin’s world was a man’s world!
During the last part of this jubilee column, Dobbin did a whirlwind then-and-now tour of the local landmarks. The site of the public library was the former axe factory of William Mocock. George Street United Church was in 1867 the site of William Cluxton’s home; the George Street “congregation worshipped in the old and venerable building across the street” until 1874.
In 1867, “the entire education requirements of the town were met when Murray Street School was put up and opened in 1861.” This is a reference to what we knew as Central School; within a few years, the local Roman Catholics had a Murray Street School on the far end of the former burial grounds. Dobbin contrasted the new school to the former Union School: “Its inside convenience and bright, cheery appearance almost bewildered the scholars, accustomed to the dreary walls of the old and decrepit church, at the corner of Hunter and Sheridan Streets.”
Dobbin makes interesting comments about George Street south of Charlotte. Except for the Peter Hamilton Agricultural Foundry there was little development. There was an old stone hotel on the west side. He also said that Thomas Leonard, who ran a boot and shoe store in the downtown part of the street, lived in a house “perched over the river near Dalhousie street.” More details would have helped in both cases.
There was a swamp over large parts of the town south of Charlotte. Where the CPR station was built in 1883, was a “veritable swamp”; the station itself was built over “a cavity, needing much filling.” On the site of Ackerman’s harness factory the town in 1867 had “a sort of corporation storage yard, where they put the snow ploughs in summer and wagons in winter, and any old plank and debris.”
The Hunter Street Bridge of 1867 was the Howe truss bridge “made of the very best of timber and plank.” The area west of the Court House hill, later the site of Quaker Oats, was home to “many factories and flour mills” all lost to fire.
Dobbin noted the least change in 60 years occurred with the local churches. St. Andrew’s was a new church on the same block. St. Peter’s was changed in the 1880s by the addition of a transept. St. John’s Church, he said quite contrary to my view, “looked just the same” except for the addition of the parish hall and “some changes.”
He added details about Murray Street Baptist Church that surprised me. In 1874, the Baptists moved from Aylmer Street to the former Bible Christian site on Murray Street that became the Canadian Legion in the 1920s. In 1911, Murray Street Baptist Church moved to its current site closer to George Street. Dobbin commented, “The old Bible Christian, a frame and plaster structure … has been moved across the lot and gently lowered to the level of Aylmer Street, and rejuvenated into two commodious dwellings.” I did not know that.
Martha Kidd’s Peterborough’s Architectural Heritage description of 458-456 Aylmer Street North might be a match. “Sometime in the mid-1880s after the demolition of the Whyte & Davis Foundry, William J. Hall had this brick clad double tenement erected. A verandah, with treillage trim, connects the two bay windows on the main façade.” Even Martha Kidd had not known that the building was the former Bible Christian Church.
New things are constantly discovered about our distant past!
Many of the landmarks in Dobbin’s whirlwind tour around town need to be described as then, then and now, or perhaps with more thens. Amazingly, his look at two years, 1867 and 1927, was easily expanded to include the earlier and the intervening years.
Dobbin’s clever and accurate phrasing of sometimes complex ideas spread over many years drew confidently upon the comfort of a life time experiencing the local scene.