By Kelly Egan,
Ottawa Citizen, Friday, February 13, 2004
Have we no pride?
Scarcely anyone stands taller in the early history of Ottawa than Col. John By and Braddish Billings; one gave us our most distinctive manmade feature, the other cleared the way for civilization.
Without them, hard and plain, the city as we know it would not exist. Today, the Billings estate, the grand home the pioneer eventually lived in, stands as the oldest house in Ottawa, built in 1827. A miracle we still have it.
And while Col. By's house is gone, his former Commissariat — the city's oldest stone building (also 1827)—still stands along the Rideau Canal's signature locks beside the Chateau Laurier.
Both properties house museums supported by the city of Ottawa. In its draft budget released Wednesday, the funding would stop, the doors would close and the artifacts locked up.
Some budget cuts in the city's eight-page summary look lamentable, others are in the realm of inconvenience, others are a mean-spirited swipe at seniors and children.
This one is an utter disgrace. Have we no pride?
We are not a poor city in a poor country. This is not Haiti. We have $2 billion a year to run this place. We can't afford to run Canada's capital like this.
As a citizenry, we are not married to a policy of zero tax increases for the rest of recorded time.
And I don't recall any candidate last November campaigning on a promise to make the city a worse place to live.
It's not even about taxes, for pete's sake. You just can't dishonour our forefathers in such a crass way.
"There's a stewardship responsibility here," said Richard Strong, president of the Association of Friends of the Billings Estate Museum. Amen, brother. "People have entrusted our heritage to the city fathers, and I believe that trust is being broken."
In 1812, Braddish Billings came up the Rideau River and settled on a hill, the first white settler in what was then Gloucester Township, just him and trees with six-foot-wide trunks. Remember, Col. By wouldn't arrive for 14 years.
"There was nobody between where they were in Gloucester Township and Fitzroy Harbour. Nobody. You want to talk about real Canadian pioneers?" asked Mr. Strong.
He would soon marry a woman named Lamira Dow and they went on to have nine children, including several who had esteemed careers in fields such as botany and geology.
The original Braddish erected a shanty and began to amass and clear land.
He eventually had 1,400 acres. In 1841, he had 400 under cultivation, ran a sawmill, a ferry and took out a tavern licence. He is said to have taken his turn at every post in local government.
When the first pavement hit Bank Street, a Billings had a hand in things. Their story goes on and on.
For five generations, the family lived in the same house on what is now Cabot Street.
But by the 1960s, Charles Billings (1894-1975) had his hands full. A cemetery on the property was repeatedly being vandalized, a century-old barn was ruined by arson and upkeep became a serious problem.
In 1975, the city bought the property and 24,000 artifacts. It now sits on 8.4 acres, employs two full-time staff and requires $328,000 in municipal funds annually. Typically, it has 12,000 visitors a year. I asked Mr. Strong to think of a more important local heritage site than the Billings estate.
"There's isn't any. If you start tearing down or selling off or getting rid of the properties of the pioneers of Canada, why consider ourselves to have any history at all?"
The Bytown Museum draws about that many visitors as well. It operates on an annual budget of about $175,000, with about $124,000 coming from the city.
Director Christina Tessier is quite sure that Col. By would have darkened the door there on an almost daily basis, as the Commissariat held the gold and stores and even whisky for the canal builders.
The museum, which has on permanent display Col. By's desk, probably has more of his artifacts than anyone else, including a worn travelling trunk.
It has two staff members and has operated continuously since 1917.
It has artifacts pertaining to Sir John A. Macdonald and Thomas Darcy McGee. Neat stuff.
Ms. Tessier said she was anticipating a cut in city revenue of 12 per cent, not 100.
The municipal funds normally come in February, meaning the Bytown is tapped out.
"Can you believe that Heritage Day is Monday?" she asked. Isn't that precious? Maybe we could get our ancestors to grave-roll in unison.
What a poisonous week in politics this has been in the capital. Bandits at the federal treasury; name-calling, finger-pointing, rhetoric run amok, and a municipal budget full of threats and bitter pills. Hurry up, Monday.
At bedtime the other night, my young son picked up an illustrated copy of In Flanders Fields from his bookshelf, a funny, odd choice, and we proceeded to read it and talk about what it meant.
He was curious about the line, "If ye break faith with us who die ...," and I tried to explain the importance of safeguarding important things from the past, how one generation, then another and another, is entrusted with preserving feelings and memory; how we can't let our ancestors down because they died for important reasons.
I think he got it. And he's eight years old.
Contact Kelly Egan at 596-8496 or by e-mail, kegan@thecitizen.canwest.com .
