TPL On The Road： Kingston's Heritage ft Peter Gower
Episode Stats
Summary
Kingston, Ontario was the first capital of Canada and was home to the first Prime Minister of Canada, John A. MacDonald. Peter Gower, past president of the Kingston Historical Society, talks about the founding of the society and the history of the city.
Transcript
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today i'm lucky enough to have peter gower with me and he is the past and present president of
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the kingston historical society good morning peter good morning yeah welcome to kingston
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thank you brother thank you brother and i really enjoyed i got here last night we went around we
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took pictures through the c the cp rail and john a mcdonald train and uh we've been here my wife and
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I had been here a couple times in the past because I had a construction project up in
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Also, I was going back and forth between Toronto and Ottawa, train and plane and car.
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And we would stay here periodically with our youngest son, who loves Kingston.
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And so he always wanted us to come and go out on the water.
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Tell us a little bit, and this was before the show started, you started and you were
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talking about which i wanted to hit on talk about the historical society and sort of the history of
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just the society because i really think that's interesting and where it is today yeah well the
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society is one of the oldest ones in ontario we were founded in 1893 mainly by queen's professors
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and religious leaders is interesting and i think it was because of the interest that was raised by
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the deaths and then the burial here of sir john a mcdonald he uh some of those people they were
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older almost all men i hate to say um but they were more elderly and they would have been brought
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up in a kingston where they saw mcdonald as first of all a councillor in in this building then as
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their member of parliament right behind it right there yup then as their member of parliament
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then as the federal member of parliament and then as their prime minister for so many years
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And the funeral, of course, the funeral itself was in Ottawa, but the burial was out at our
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And I think that got a lot of people thinking, you know, when I was young, I remember Sir
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John, when I was young, I met people who'd been slaves when they came up.
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I met people who were here, in fact, my mom was here when we were bombarded by the Americans
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This sort of interest, I think, got people together.
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And the two old wars, of course, slowed things down.
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And coming up, I was actually reading the history.
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and we're going to see a number from New Brunswick
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to Halifax. We're heading into St. John's. We're going to go into Montreal. So we got a really
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full list of shows coming up. And I said to the guys, I said, you know what? Kingston,
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because I learned this on my trips here. Kingston was the first capital of the province of Canada,
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right? And so I said, what a great way to start it off is talk about sort of the formation of
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Canada. Yeah. It's an interesting choice as to what happened. And in looking at what happened,
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elsewhere the fact that we didn't stay as capital really wasn't surprising i think you have to take
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yourself back to 19th century british politicians who were about to start an empire and it wasn't
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planned but they knew what they wanted to do and what and amongst the things they wanted was
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their colonies had to be english-speaking their colonies had to be reasonably democratic because
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and there were probably some other things as well.
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And when he came forward with some suggestions,
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and I lived there for long enough that, you know,
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sorry, the end of the American colonists leaving us,
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the dividing line between the colonists was quote,
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And they looked on the map and well, there's Halifax,
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there's Quebec City, there's Montreal, there's Kingston.
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So they knew that because there was a naval base here.
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Hamilton's a little place that's starting to thrive.
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And there's no thought by the way that there's a winter here
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Toronto has just had this rebellion, this Mackenzie guy, quite a bit of support in the
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city and then crossed over to the new United States and invaded at least as far as Niagara.
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Montreal, well Montreal and Quebec spoke French and we're Catholic.
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And there is a land border into Montreal, so the various groups in the US, particularly
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hunters lodges very pro-republic anti-royalty looked as though they might be able to get over
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which they did actually in 1838 so montreal is is questionable um what are you left with
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you're left with this strange little town which sort of answers all the check marks but only
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because all the others didn't okay so kingston in um in 1840 and actually in 1840 it had suffered a
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major fire this area was burned oh six blocks there was an explosion on a ship in the harbor
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six blocks here because everywhere was built of wood oh yeah outside those six blocks is
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where you get the stone houses which you could see still standing some of them um so uh charles
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dickens probably summed it up best he came through here in 1842 on a lecture tour and he said well
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Kingston as a city which is half burned down and the other half not built up.
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That didn't, that was an exaggeration. And in fact, if they had thought long enough,
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they would have realized there was a great opportunity because what happened, it took
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city council five years, but they then said, everything is built in stone.
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And that is why this whole downtown area, stone or brick, this whole downtown area is so beautiful
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now because there are no, I won't, I would just say no wooden buildings and the old ones have
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survived. So the possibility was there, but the negatives, there were the other possibilities.
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We had a naval dockyard right on site in case of invasion. We had an army and a British army
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in Fort Henry. Now they were not looking out over the lake. They were looking inland over the road,
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which is now highway two in case there was another invasion like the 1838 one which went across the
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river at Prescott and was planning on coming down so Kingston and that way so far to uh going uh
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west so Kingston was reasonably safe and in the 1838 rebellion there was a militia from Kingston
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who by themselves went across and helped get rid of the the invaders so they knew that there was
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a military here they knew it was pretty well defensible and they also got rather cleverly
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got rid of the one other problem they as I mentioned at the start they wanted a democratic
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place and Lord Durham in his report had bluntly said we need to break the family compact the
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family compact was a group then of all the leading people and that included church leaders
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business leaders any other leader you can think of who were all very friendly with each other
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so when my business ran into legal problems i simply went to my friend the judge and said can
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you take over this case in court and you know what to do with it and here our our member of parliament
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Christopher Hageman was very much a member of that that group pro-conservative loyalist
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he was also a lawyer so they appointed him to the court of Queen's Bench and that got him right out
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of any political legal and so the the family combat disappeared from here so it looks as
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though it's it's pretty good you've got a town which is in the middle um militarily defended
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loyal we have a strong anglican church um what they didn't look at
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really was commerce and business what was going to keep kingston going
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um it basically was a town for the trans shipment of goods goods coming from