True Patriot Love - TPL On The Road： Kingston's Heritage ft Peter Gower

00:00:00.000 today i'm lucky enough to have peter gower with me and he is the past and present president of

00:00:12.080 the kingston historical society good morning peter good morning yeah welcome to kingston

00:00:16.960 thank you brother thank you brother and i really enjoyed i got here last night we went around we

00:00:21.040 took pictures through the c the cp rail and john a mcdonald train and uh we've been here my wife and

00:00:28.560 I had been here a couple times in the past because I had a construction project up in

00:00:34.220 Ottawa.

00:00:35.220 Also, I was going back and forth between Toronto and Ottawa, train and plane and car.

00:00:40.080 And we would stay here periodically with our youngest son, who loves Kingston.

00:00:44.880 And so he always wanted us to come and go out on the water.

00:00:48.740 So it was really a pleasure to come back.

00:00:50.400 Good.

00:00:51.400 I haven't been here in a number of years.

00:00:53.280 Tell us a little bit, and this was before the show started, you started and you were

00:00:57.060 talking about which i wanted to hit on talk about the historical society and sort of the history of

00:01:02.580 just the society because i really think that's interesting and where it is today yeah well the

00:01:06.740 society is one of the oldest ones in ontario we were founded in 1893 mainly by queen's professors

00:01:14.660 and religious leaders is interesting and i think it was because of the interest that was raised by

00:01:22.500 the deaths and then the burial here of sir john a mcdonald he uh some of those people they were

00:01:28.100 older almost all men i hate to say um but they were more elderly and they would have been brought

00:01:34.580 up in a kingston where they saw mcdonald as first of all a councillor in in this building then as

00:01:41.780 their member of parliament right behind it right there yup then as their member of parliament

00:01:46.420 then as the federal member of parliament and then as their prime minister for so many years

00:01:50.180 And the funeral, of course, the funeral itself was in Ottawa, but the burial was out at our

00:01:56.980 Cataraqui Cemetery.

00:01:58.440 And I think that got a lot of people thinking, you know, when I was young, I remember Sir

00:02:02.780 John, when I was young, I met people who'd been slaves when they came up.

00:02:08.020 I met people who were here, in fact, my mom was here when we were bombarded by the Americans

00:02:14.700 in 1812.

00:02:16.300 This sort of interest, I think, got people together.

00:02:19.900 And the society has been doing pretty well

00:02:22.240 continuously since then.

00:02:23.320 It had its ups and downs.

00:02:24.940 And the two old wars, of course, slowed things down.

00:02:27.700 But now it's a pretty thriving group.

00:02:30.340 Yeah, yeah.

00:02:31.180 Well, I think it's so important.

00:02:32.800 And coming up, I was actually reading the history.

00:02:35.980 And one of the things that we wanted

00:02:37.520 to get you on the show right away,

00:02:39.300 because we're doing a cross-East Coast tour.

00:02:41.920 So we're going across the East tour,

00:02:43.180 and we're going to see a number from New Brunswick

00:02:45.880 to Halifax. We're heading into St. John's. We're going to go into Montreal. So we got a really

00:02:51.220 full list of shows coming up. And I said to the guys, I said, you know what? Kingston,

00:02:56.760 because I learned this on my trips here. Kingston was the first capital of the province of Canada,

00:03:02.400 right? And so I said, what a great way to start it off is talk about sort of the formation of

00:03:08.060 Canada. Yeah. It's an interesting choice as to what happened. And in looking at what happened,

00:03:15.680 elsewhere the fact that we didn't stay as capital really wasn't surprising i think you have to take

00:03:21.200 yourself back to 19th century british politicians who were about to start an empire and it wasn't

00:03:30.320 planned but they knew what they wanted to do and what and amongst the things they wanted was

00:03:35.280 their colonies had to be english-speaking their colonies had to be reasonably democratic because

00:03:41.600 because that's what they felt England was.

00:03:43.700 Their colonists had to be Anglican

00:03:47.040 and there were probably some other things as well.

00:03:49.140 So when they realized there was sort of a mess

00:03:52.660 that we got into here, and as you know,

00:03:54.260 they asked Lord Durham to do a survey

00:03:57.880 to find out just what the problem was.

00:04:00.100 And when he came forward with some suggestions,

00:04:02.740 I think that those were the three main things

00:04:05.960 that they wanted.

00:04:07.500 And so then they had the problem,

00:04:09.380 well, where will the capital city be?

00:04:12.520 And when you're sitting in London, England

00:04:15.060 in reasonably nice weather,

00:04:17.120 and I lived there for long enough that, you know,

00:04:19.560 we don't get Canadian extremes.

00:04:21.060 We don't get equatorial extremes in London.

00:04:24.220 You have a river which runs through it,

00:04:26.300 which, you know, you can put a dividing line

00:04:29.160 down the middle of all these things.

00:04:30.840 They have no idea of what Canada was like.

00:04:35.680 And that was shown a few years before

00:04:38.620 when at the end of the war of 1812,

00:04:41.020 sorry, the end of the American colonists leaving us,

00:04:46.260 the dividing line between the colonists was quote,

00:04:48.960 down the middle of the St. Lawrence.

00:04:51.300 Well, you know that once you get to Brotville,

00:04:53.200 the St. Lawrence is a thousand islands.

00:04:55.740 Totally impossible.

00:04:57.040 And this was the sort of thing

00:04:58.240 that I think they had difficulty with.

00:05:00.740 So they then had to look and say,

00:05:02.480 well, where are the possibilities for capital?

00:05:04.780 And they looked on the map and well, there's Halifax,

00:05:07.480 there's Quebec City, there's Montreal, there's Kingston.

00:05:11.780 So they knew that because there was a naval base here.

00:05:13.820 There's Toronto, there's London.

00:05:16.040 Hamilton's a little place that's starting to thrive.

00:05:18.080 There's Newark, now Niagara on the lake.

00:05:19.820 Which one of those?

00:05:20.980 Well, the two in ones were out

00:05:22.240 because that meant too much traveling.

00:05:24.860 And there's no thought by the way that there's a winter here

00:05:27.860 where you can hardly travel anyway.

00:05:31.920 We also want somewhere that is loyal.

00:05:34.520 Toronto has just had this rebellion, this Mackenzie guy, quite a bit of support in the

00:05:42.400 city and then crossed over to the new United States and invaded at least as far as Niagara.

00:05:50.280 Can we trust Toronto?

00:05:52.280 Montreal, well Montreal and Quebec spoke French and we're Catholic.

00:05:55.320 So it's a big problem there.

00:05:57.620 And there is a land border into Montreal, so the various groups in the US, particularly

00:06:03.680 hunters lodges very pro-republic anti-royalty looked as though they might be able to get over

00:06:09.200 which they did actually in 1838 so montreal is is questionable um what are you left with

00:06:16.880 you're left with this strange little town which sort of answers all the check marks but only

00:06:24.160 because all the others didn't okay so kingston in um in 1840 and actually in 1840 it had suffered a

00:06:32.880 major fire this area was burned oh six blocks there was an explosion on a ship in the harbor

00:06:38.960 six blocks here because everywhere was built of wood oh yeah outside those six blocks is

00:06:45.280 where you get the stone houses which you could see still standing some of them um so uh charles

00:06:51.440 dickens probably summed it up best he came through here in 1842 on a lecture tour and he said well

00:06:57.680 Kingston as a city which is half burned down and the other half not built up.

00:07:03.440 That didn't, that was an exaggeration. And in fact, if they had thought long enough,

00:07:08.800 they would have realized there was a great opportunity because what happened, it took

00:07:12.160 city council five years, but they then said, everything is built in stone.

00:07:17.360 And that is why this whole downtown area, stone or brick, this whole downtown area is so beautiful

00:07:23.040 now because there are no, I won't, I would just say no wooden buildings and the old ones have

00:07:30.240 survived. So the possibility was there, but the negatives, there were the other possibilities.

00:07:34.320 We had a naval dockyard right on site in case of invasion. We had an army and a British army

00:07:42.000 in Fort Henry. Now they were not looking out over the lake. They were looking inland over the road,

00:07:48.160 which is now highway two in case there was another invasion like the 1838 one which went across the

00:07:53.600 river at Prescott and was planning on coming down so Kingston and that way so far to uh going uh

00:08:00.240 west so Kingston was reasonably safe and in the 1838 rebellion there was a militia from Kingston

00:08:09.520 who by themselves went across and helped get rid of the the invaders so they knew that there was

00:08:16.000 a military here they knew it was pretty well defensible and they also got rather cleverly

00:08:26.800 got rid of the one other problem they as I mentioned at the start they wanted a democratic

00:08:33.360 place and Lord Durham in his report had bluntly said we need to break the family compact the

00:08:40.880 family compact was a group then of all the leading people and that included church leaders

00:08:48.800 business leaders any other leader you can think of who were all very friendly with each other

00:08:54.480 so when my business ran into legal problems i simply went to my friend the judge and said can

00:09:00.640 you take over this case in court and you know what to do with it and here our our member of parliament

00:09:09.120 Christopher Hageman was very much a member of that that group pro-conservative loyalist

00:09:16.880 he was also a lawyer so they appointed him to the court of Queen's Bench and that got him right out

00:09:23.680 of any political legal and so the the family combat disappeared from here so it looks as

00:09:32.400 though it's it's pretty good you've got a town which is in the middle um militarily defended

00:09:39.760 loyal we have a strong anglican church um what they didn't look at

00:09:48.240 really was commerce and business what was going to keep kingston going

00:09:52.640 um it basically was a town for the trans shipment of goods goods coming from

00:10:02.400 We'll be right back.

True Patriot Love - July 15, 2026

TPL On The Road： Kingston's Heritage ft Peter Gower

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