It’s like a historical novel where all the characters are from real life, but the story is made up.
We have good reasons to choose Canadian vacation destinations these days. And we have great destinations to visit – especially if you’re interested in architecture. This is one of a series of blogs meant to shine a light on some of our built treasures
The first thing you have to realize about Upper Canada Village is that it’s not, and never was, a village. It’s a collection of historic buildings from a bunch of nearby villages that have been placed on a site by the St. Lawrence River about 90 kilometres south-east of Ottawa. There were two goals. One was to preserve the buildings, many of which were destined for imminent demolition and flooding thanks to the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The other goal was to recreate an eastern Ontario town – not any particular town, more a Platonic ideal of a town – as it would have appeared in 1866, just prior to confederation. It was to be a time machine; a walk-in history lesson built of wood (and a bit of brick, stone and mortar).
The result is a consummate work of historical fiction, in which the major characters are buildings. Almost every building is a genuine historical artefact, with its own story and provenance. But the story they tell collectively as a ‘village’ is a fiction – inspired by actual events, to be sure, but not literally true.
So it’s not like, say, Lunenburg, where the collective story of the buildings is so much more than the sum of its parts. But many of the individual buildings at Upper Canada Village – the ‘characters’ of the story – are absolutely wonderful. Here are three of my favourites:
Most of the homes in a village this size would have been pretty unpretentious, but this one has genuine ambition. It was built by a guy named Jeremiah French in the early 19th century, who sold it to his son-in-law George Robertson in 1812. The architectural ambition on display here comes from Robertson, who tripled the footprint of the house and added a second story (mainly for storage).
Robertson didn’t just make the house bigger. He turned it into a Neo-Classical extravaganza (by rural Ontario standards of the day), with almost perfect bilateral symmetry, tranquil proportions, and some pretty decent Classical ornamentation like cornices and fluted pilasters. In a mid-nineteenth-century village such as this, it would have appeared quite imposing.
Imposing it may have been, but it’s also rather charming to see that Robertson’s reach somewhat exceeded his grasp. The ornament is lovely, but it is of course wood carved in imitation of stone. And features like the arch leading from the central hall (below) are beautifully conceived but haltingly executed – the way the ceiling squats right on top of the keystone would have given any Classical purist conniptions. As always, it’s when we glimpse the human behind the forms, flaws and all, that architecture becomes really engaging.
The building serving as Upper Canada Village’s Anglican parish church was built in 1837. In keeping with the Village’s theme, it’s shown as it would have appeared in the 1860s. It is, by a country mile, the most picturesque building in the Village, and the site’s designers made sure to include several romantic vistas of the church. Its simple but beautiful clarity adds an important element of aspiration to the ensemble at Upper Canada Village – just as it would have done for the town for which it was originally built.
That said, I’ve studied a lot of 19th-century churches, and I have a few nits to pick with this one. Or at least, some unanswered questions. There’s the windows and their ‘Y-tracery’ (as it’s known), which are what I’d expect in the 1830s, but not what I’d expect by the 1860s. Likewise, I’d expect a chancel to have been added by that time. And two historic photos on display show just the kind of windows and chancel I would expect in the ‘60s. When were those changes made, and why were they changed back at Upper Canada Village? That’s one of the drawbacks of this kind of historical recreation – the desire to create a convincing illusion makes it hard to peek behind the curtain and disentangle the full architectural history of the buildings. But it’s probably just architectural nerds like me who worry about such things.
Unlike Robertson House and Christ Church, Beach’s Sawmill has no aesthetic pretensions whatsoever. But as a piece of pure utility and ingenuity, it is sublime.
A sawmill was a necessity for any rural community. Towns (and most of what filled them) were made of wood, and wood had to be cut into boards if you wanted to make anything other than a log cabin. This work was incredibly slow and onerous if done by hand, but a machine could vastly increase speed and efficiency. The sawmill building is essentially a shed that covers the machine and the people who operated it.
And what a machine. There are two interconnected mechanisms: the massive blade that thrusts up and down and rips the log into planks, and the conveyor that incrementally inches the log toward the blade.
The raw kinetic power of this machinery is awe-inspiring. Most amazing of all is the source of that power. There is no electricity, no fossil fuels, no coal and no steam. To drive this behemoth you needed just two things: water and gravity. If you’re near a river (the St. Lawrence will do), you’ll have plenty of the former, and if you’re on earth, the latter is inexhaustible.
Two reliable premises are at the root of the sawmill: water is heavy, and it flows downward. If you gather water in reservoirs (millponds), control its flow downward, transfer that energy to wheels that push levers that push a saw blade and a log in synchronicity, then you can turn logs into boards 24/7. Of course, you have to get everything just right. The relative elevations of the water and machinery, the flow of the water, the lengths of the levers that will (or won’t) keep the blade and the conveyor in synch – everything has to interact in just the right way or it won’t work. The intelligence and precision of the sawmill is breathtaking. Seeing it in action, in real time, at Upper Canada Village really brings that point home.
Upper Canada Village is unlike any of the other historical towns I’ve written about in this series. Lunenburg was and is a living town that evokes another age. No one lives in Barkerville any more, but it was an actual town and most of the buildings are original. Upper Canada Village is pure make-believe. There’s nothing wrong with that. The buildings are so interesting, and so well researched and interpreted, that the village manages to be truthful even though the story it tells is not, strictly speaking, a true one. All you have to do is suspend disbelief and step into the time machine.
Peter Coffman, History & Theory of Architecture program
peter.coffman@carleton.ca
@petercoffman.bsky.social
Fort Macleod, Alberta
Haines Junction, Yukon
St. John’s, Newfoundland
The Exchange District, Winnipeg, Manitoba
Getting to Know Us
The Promise of the Train
Dorothy, Alberta
Lunenburg, Nova Scotia
Barkerville, British Columbia
North Pacific Cannery, British Columbia
Carleton University acknowledges the location of its campus on the traditional, unceded territories of the Algonquin Anishinà beg nation
Contact us by phone or email
1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6, Canada
This site uses cookies to offer you a better browsing experience. Find out more on how we use cookies and how you can change your settings.