added another 250 hectares and comprises the largest freshwater marsh restoration project in Canada. Today, visitors can hike, drive, or board a shuttle bus to see the seven garden areas that make up the Royal Botanical Gardens.
Geographically and historically, Dundas is the true head of the lake. To John Graves Simcoe, the site was critical. As noted earlier, anxious to relocate the colony’s capital away from the vulnerable Newark, he ordered the surveying and clearing of a road to lead from the head of the bay, or Coote’s Paradise, to the forks of the Thames River, where he would locate the new town.
Landing at the head of Coote’s Paradise, the site of an earlier aboriginal landing, Simcoe named it the King’s Landing. From this point he instructed his surveyor, Augustus Jones, to lay a road west to the forks of the Thames River. The road became known as the Governor’s Road. However, when Lord Dorchester rejected Simcoe’s site, he chose instead a protected bay on the north shore of Lake Ontario, and laid out the town of York. The road, never fully cleared, grew over, and would remain so for another twenty years. But the Dundas location still had its attractions. Water, potential power for mills, tumbled along the creek, and roads led not just to the Thames, but also to Guelph and Waterloo, and eventually to York.
Dundas was named for Sir Harry Dundas, secretary of war, though he never set eyes on the place. One who did was a Captain Coote, an avid hunter and member of the King’s Eighth Regiment. The new settlement retained the name Coote’s Paradise (the apostrophe has since been dropped) until 1814, when the post office opted for “Dundas.”
One of the settlement’s earliest colonists was Richard Hatt, an industrialist who had emigrated from England and originally settled in the Niagara region. In 1800 he moved to Dundas and built the area’s first mill. Even as early as 1804 he realized the need for better access between Dundas and Lake Ontario, and financed the deepening of Morden Creek through Burlington Heights to Burlington Bay. Hatt dredged the winding channel just wide enough and deep enough to allow for the passage of the shallow Durham boats. He died soon after.
Hatt’s business manager was another dreamer, a man named Pierre Desjardins. His vision was considerably more ambitious than that of Hatt, for Desjardins wished to build a canal that would link Dundas, not just with Lake Ontario, but with Lake Huron as well. But in 1833 he also died, and his nephew Alexis Begue assumed the grand project. Although the link to Huron was never realized, Begue succeeded in cutting through the looming Burlington Heights, and in 1837 the new Desjardins Canal was opened. By this time a canal had also been chopped through the sand spit separating Burlington Bay from Lake Ontario, and Dundas became the leading town at the lakehead. During his visit to Dundas in 1851, William Smith noted that the town “has a valuable supply of water power which is made use of to a considerable extent…. For some time the trade of the town had considerable difficulties to contend with having to be conveyed to Burlington Bay by land. The construction of the Desjardins Canal which is five miles in length enables the manufacturers and merchants to ship from their own doors.”5
Smith recorded that the town had three flour mills, a large foundry, a paper mill, plus the usual range of early Ontario industries. Early hotels included the Boggs Swan Inn, Cain’s Hotel, the Elgin Hotel, and the Collins Hotel. First opened in 1841, the latter survives today as Collins Brewhouse, its exterior largely unchanged since the late 1800s. It can be found at 33 King Street West. It was one of the few buildings to survive the extensive conflagration that consumed much of downtown Dundas in 1861, its owner distributing free beer afterward to those who helped save it from the flames.
The site of the Desjardins Canal is now in a peaceful setting.
During the 1830s and 40s Dundas glowed in its prosperity. Nearly five thousand dockings took place at the wharves during that period, bringing in coal, iron, and a wide assortment of dry goods while exporting more than five million board feet of lumber, as well as flour and farm produce. Three times each week steamers carried passengers from Toronto, taking two days to do so. But then another construction crew showed up in Cootes Paradise. These were the navvies of the Great Western Railway. In 1852 they hammered into place a high level bridge above the canal, and the following year trains started rolling with regular passenger service between Hamilton and Toronto.
It was along this route, and over the Desjardins Canal, that Canada’s first, and one of its worst, railway tragedies occurred. On March 12, 1857, a Hamilton-bound train, a small Oxford steam engine pulling a pair of passenger coaches, derailed as it approached the wooden bridge, twenty metres above the canal. As the heavy steel wheels bounced along the ties and onto the bridge, the wooden structure crumbled, hurtling the engine and its coaches into the ice-covered canal. The Illustrated Historical Atlas of the County of Wentworth described the accident:
The immense weight of the engine breaking through the bridge, the whole structure gave way and with one frightful crash, the engine tender, baggage car and two first-class passenger coaches leaped headlong into the yawning abyss below. The engine and tender crashed at once through the ice, carrying the engineer and fireman with them; the baggage car was thrown ten yards from the engine; the first passenger car came after and fell on its roof, breaking partly through the ice and being crushed to atoms, and the last car fell endways on the ice, and strange to say remained in that position.6
Fifty-nine people perished that day, either killed instantly or drowning in the ice-filled canal. Although an inquest blamed a broken axel for the derailment, speculation swirled around whether or not it was the cheaper and softer pine used in the bridge that caused the structure to crumble so easily. Sturdier oak was normally used for bridges. Today a steel bridge carries the freights and the VIA passenger trains over the canal. A few steps away, near the entrance to the Hamilton Cemetery, a stone monument commemorates the members of the train crew who died in the wreckage.
With the arrival of the railway age, the canal fell into disuse: “[T]he canal is now seldom used, except by raftsmen for the purpose of floating timber into Burlington Bay.”7 By 1890, railways were bypassing Dundas — to the north and east the Grand Trunk, and to the south the Toronto, Hamilton and Buffalo Railway. Subsequently, the community went into an economic decline.
Today the town is well within the Greater Hamilton Area, and malls, suburbs, and condos line the old Governor’s Road, stretching out from the ancient town centre. The core has managed to retain a reasonable collection of early heritage buildings, much of which remains near the historic heart of the town, the junction of the roads to York, Waterloo, Hamilton, and London.
The town hall, built in 1849, is considered to be Ontario’s oldest municipal building. It was begun immediately after the town received its municipal status. Designed by a local contractor named Francis Hawkins, the classic revival hall contained an opera hall on the second floor and the council chamber on the ground level, while the basement of this all-purpose structure contained Alfie Bennett’s Crystal Palace Saloon, across the hall from which, conveniently, stood the lockup.
Across the road stands the Merchants’ Exchange Hotel, dating from 1847, while to the east, at 30 York Street, a stone building with a date stone of 1833 has been described by some historians as having been a customs house. An even earlier building is that which housed a blacksmith shop. Built of stone, but with newer windows, it stands at the corner of Main and the Governor’s Road.
But one of most beguiling of Dundas’s historic structures is the “doctor’s house.” Originally located on Main Street, it was moved in 1974, and is now a private residence on Albert Street. Constructed of board and batten, this tiny office was built in 1848 for Dr. James Mitchell, but was more popularly
