Ottawa History Hub

The episode examines the rise of the Shiners, an Irish-dominated criminal gang led by Peter Aylin Following the completion of the Rideau Canal in 1832, thousands of unemployed Irish labourers were left desperate for work. Aylin exploited this situation by hiring Irish lumbermen and forging a tight group called the Shiners. Aylin and his followers eventually extended their influence into civic institutions through intimidation and election rigging, culminating in attempted murder ...

In early Bytown, public safety emerged long before formal civic institutions. Responsibility for order initially fell to Lt. Col. John By, overseeing canal construction. His sappers acted as de facto police and firefighters, reflecting a time when military, police, and fire duties overlapped and professional forces were rare. Bytown had only one constable in 1827, and even major cities had yet to adopt modern policing.

The episode examines the fur trade’s continued role in the early 19th‑century Ottawa Valley. Though dominated by lumber, the region still relied on furs as a seasonal income source for settlers and Indigenous hunters. After the fall of New France, the Hudson Bay Company held a monopoly, challenged by the North West Company until their forced 1821 merger. Bytown’s rise during the Rideau Canal project created a new hub for independent and Indigenous traders. American traders, bringing cash and ...

This episode walks through Bytown in its first decade. Starting in Wrightstown, we cross the Union Bridge to Richmond Landing, then into Upper Bytown, the military precinct, Lowertown, New Edinburgh, and Janeville, looking at the early town as it first developed.

Timberrrrrrrr! Lumber was the first industry in the Ottawa area after the fur trade and agriculture. How the different trees were used and brought to port was an integral part of the development of Bytown as a town, without which the Rideau Canal labour camp would have simply dispersed on at the project's conclusion.

In this episode, we review a diary of a traveller from Bytown going on a trip south to Kingston, through the Rideau Valley. Along the way, he and his companions meet some of the characters who call the area home.

The Rideau Waterway runs more than 200 kms from Lake Ontario to the Ottawa River, bypassing the Saint Laurence River, and allowing the British to access the Great Lakes without the dangers posed by the River’s chokepoint. This UNESCO site contains 47 locks at 24 stations, and was a marvel of the age. Learn more about it here.

In this episode, we conclude the war part of the War of 1812, setting up the diminished status of the Indigenous allies, despite their heroic participation in the war, and establishing the justification for the Rideau Canal.

Philemon Wright was the founder of Hull, the first settlement in the Ottawa area that could be called "urban". Migrating from Massachusetts in the winter of 1800, he and his family migrated the shoals of the Lower Canada and Upper Canada bureaucracies, as well as crown agents and Algonquin neighbours.

The Constitution of 1791 divided the great province of Quebec in two. Upriver was the creation of Upper Canada, and downriver was the new province of Lower Canada. There were new systems of governance and voting, that would influence the way the south shore of the Ottawa River would grow, in comparison to the path chosen on the north shore.

United Empire Loyalists were on the move. To England, to Florida and the Caribbean, but also northward to the Loyalist colonies of Nova Scotia and Quebec. They were to come in such numbers that two new provinces would end up being invented just to administer them! Ontario would begin its trek to eventually become the centre for the British presence in the Americas.

This episode looks at the Quebec Act and the political administration of Peak Quebec, and why it became known as one of the "Intolerable Acts" that justified the American Revolutionary War.

Season 2 continues the introduction to the world into which Ottawa would be born. This starts with the shift from French to English Imperialism, and the Crown finds itself in the middle of relations between Indigenous nations and American Rebels, and then gradual settlement of eastern Ontario until the roots of Bytown take permanent hold.