in the late 1700s. In 1841 he ran for the Parliament of Upper Canada to represent the united counties of Durham and Northumberland. His campaign met with success, and one of his first acts as a member was to introduce the first copyright for published books in Canada. This bill was passed and became law. Mr. Williams held office until 1848, and in 1850 became the first mayor of Port Hope. He died four years later at the age of 65.
The railway arrived in 1856, when the Grand Trunk Line was opened between Montreal and Toronto via Port Hope. Thereafter, four passenger trains per day stopped at Port Hope.
One of the oldest private schools for boys in Canada, Trinity College School, relocated from the village of Weston to Port Hope, in 1868. The buildings were provided free of rent for three years. The reverend C.H. Badgley was then headmaster and was assisted by a staff of nine instructors. Known in some circles as the “Eton of Canada,” it offered old-school traditions and associations, which rendered this nickname appropriate.
In 1870 Reverend Charles J.S. Bethune was appointed as the new headmaster. He was instrumental in creating a permanent institution. As a first step, in 1871, he purchased the 10 acres of land where the school still stands today. The central portion of the school was soon constructed. By an act of the Legislature of Ontario, passed during the session of 1871–72, Trinity College School was constituted a corporate body. The next year 96 boys attended there. That same year the Chapel and Dining Hall were completed. The following year the western wing of the old school was ready. The finished structure had a 90-metre (300 foot) southern face and extended 24 metres (80 feet) to the west, all at a cost of $62,000. In 1875 an additional 10 acres was purchased to ensure ample room for sports of all kinds.
Port Hope’s scenic main street circa 1880s.
Library and Archives Canada
Fire struck the school on April 27, 1893. It began about noon in the upper storey. Firemen, schoolboys, and townspeople fought the fire and successfully saved the building, but within a week another fire threatened to destroy the school. This fire was also extinguished before any serious damage happened. What are the odds that a fire would strike a third time in so short a time span? On Sunday morning, February 16, 1895, not quite two years later, the entire building was consumed by fire at a loss of $80,000.
School officials, with great faith in life and in tradition, set about to raise the money to rebuild. A new $90,000 structure was constructed on the same site as the old school. It was the same length as the original building but greater in breadth and height. Trinity College School still flourishes in Port Hope today.
Crime has given many communities notoriety. So too, Port Hope. On the morning of October 6, 1893, a crowd gathered outside the residence of Joseph Hooper. Three men emerged from the house. One was Chief of Police John Douglas, the second, Constable Jarvis, and the third was John Reginald Hooper, son of Joseph Hooper. John was handcuffed and escorted to a carriage. Despite his pallor John gave a military salute to the crowd with his free hand.
Two weeks earlier, sensational stories had begun to circulate regarding the death of his wife. She had apparently been taken off a CPR train at Terrebonne, Quebec, in a terrible condition and had died in the train station. Her husband had been travelling with her and returned to Port Hope on September 20th. He hurriedly buried his wife in the cemetery at Welcome.
John was well-known in town; he had been born in Port Hope and learned the trade of a printer in the newspaper office of the Guide. He subsequently served for some years in the military, “A” Battery, first in Kingston and then in Quebec. While in Quebec, he met and married a French-Canadian girl named Georgiana Leblanc. The couple went to live in Ottawa, where John entered the civil service in 1887 as a clerk in the Post Office Department. There was no record to indicate that his wife suffered from mental problems, yet on October 14, 1891, he committed her to the Rockwood Asylum in Kingston.
In the spring of 1893, John developed an interest in a young woman by the name of Alice Stapley. Unwilling to expose his true marital status, he posed as a widower. He even placed a fake notice of his wife’s death in a newspaper in Quebec, which stated that she had died in Lille, France, but no date of death was given. A few weeks later he placed a second death notice in another newspaper, stating that she had died in Savannah, Florida. What did Hooper have in mind for his wife?
On September 10, 1893, he arrived in Kingston and removed his wife from the asylum. The reason he gave was that he was taking her back to her parents’ home at St. Ambroise de Kildare, Quebec. During the journey, at Louiseville, Quebec, he removed her from the train and attempted to drown her in a river. Georgiana fought back and escaped to a neighbouring house. Somehow John Hooper found her and convinced her to continue on their journey to St. Ambroise. John returned to Montreal alone. There he purchased prussic acid, ostensibly to dispose of a troublesome dog. He headed back to St. Ambroise with the intention of placing his wife in an asylum in Montreal. On the way to Montreal, she became ill and died.
After the funeral, John returned to Ottawa. He had, at some point, seen Miss Stapley in Montreal and had proposed marriage to her. John seemed confident that all was well.
It was the telegraph operator at a CPR station near Montreal who changed John’s plans. Upon hearing of the death, he recalled that the woman’s male companion had called himself Hooper, and that a man of that same name had recently sent a telegram from his office to the agent at Louisville, asking him to look out for a “crazy woman.” After talking with the conductor of the train, he took his story to the police to say that he thought the death should be investigated. A Montreal newspaper scooped the sensational story and ran it in the September 22 issue. Other papers picked up the story and it became the scandal of the day. Silas Carpenter, a government detective, was assigned to the case.
Hooper, in the meantime, made a suspicious move when, on September 29, he returned to Port Hope to have his wife’s body exhumed, with the intention of having it embalmed. The opening of the grave was in progress when the undertaker, J.T. George, put a stop to it, pointing out that it was illegal without a coroner’s order. Hooper then requested Dr. Corbett, the coroner, to hold an inquest. He agreed to this once he had the approval of the County Crown Attorney.
Community interest peaked after it was announced that there would be a coroner’s inquest. The jury was composed of 20 well-known Port Hope citizens of the day; crowds gathered at the railway station to catch sight of the witnesses arriving from Montreal and elsewhere; people clamoured to get into the opera house, where the inquest was being held.
During the early stages of the inquest, a number of Port Hope residents were interviewed, and interest and speculation grew after testimony from Dr. Clarke, superintendent of the Rockwood Asylum; the conductor of the train on which the alleged crime was committed; the druggist who sold Hooper the prussic acid; and Miss Stapley, the other woman in the case. Dr. W.J. Douglas of Cobourg had conducted the post-mortem examination and found the death had resulted from unnatural causes. Professor Ellis of Toronto, who had analyzed the contents of the stomach, could find no cause of death there; it was a healthy stomach. However, he admitted that from the symptoms death could have been caused by prussic acid.
The inquest concluded on the night of October 20th, and the jury returned at 2 a.m. on the 21st. At 4 a.m. they delivered this verdict: “We find that the said Georgiana Hooper came to her death at Terrebonne station under suspicious circumstances and from causes unknown to the jury.”
Hooper was arrested on a warrant that charged him with the murder of his wife through the administration of prussic acid. He was escorted to Joliette, Quebec, and placed on trial on January 3, 1894. The trail lasted until January 19 and resulted in his acquittal, largely because of the contradictory nature of the medical evidence, on which he was given the benefit
