In
the year 1849, the congregation of St. Mary’s cathedral wanted to purchase from
the city cemetery five acres for a special burial place for Roman Catholics. There
was much opposition in the City council to the selling of the cemetery to any
religious body, as it might have a tendency to cause a jealous feeling, but a
small majority was favorable to the sale, and it was finally decided to let St.
Mary’s congregation have the five acres for $2,000.
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When it was proposed in the fall of
1849 that Hamilton be lighted with gas, a company asking a contract to make the
building of the works reasonably profitable, there was strong opposition in the
council, one member advancing the argument that recent discoveries respecting
public lighting gave promise that something better than gas might be expected
in the near future. All the gas company asked was that the city should contract
for sixty street lamps, at an annual cost of $1,000, promising at the same time
that the cost to private consumers would be as low as charged in the city of
Toronto. The company guaranteed that the works should be completed by June 1,
1850, and that the streets be lighted. The newspapers did not take kindly to
the innovation of gas lamps, probably because the grandfathers of the editors
got along with a lantern to light their way through the dark streets and tallow
candles to light up their homes at night. They looked upon the annual expense
of $1,000 for street lighting as an extravagant waste of good money that might
be better expended in building sewers and making decent roadways. It was a long
and determined fight in the council, but the progressives prevailed and in the
year 1850, gas was first introduced into the city. The street lamps were few
and far between, but in time the council had so far progressed as to have a
light on the corner of every block in the centre of town, the people in the
outer districts being left to grope along in the darkness. The merchants were
slow in introducing the new light into their stores, and it was several years
before some of them abandoned the campfire fluid and fish oil lamps to gas in
Hamilton in 1850, but how much greater when the streets were lighted with
electricity.
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In October, 1849, the citizens of
Montreal met in convention and set forth to Canada a manifesto declaring for
annexation with the United States. The proposed union would render would render
Canada a field for American capital, said the annexationists, resulting in
doubling the value of property in Canada and increasing the commerce of the
country. It would supply for Canadian manufacturers the most extensive market
in the world without the intervention of a custom house officer. The value of
agricultural would be raised at once to a par with that of the United States,
and Canada would get agricultural implements and many of the necessaries of
life, such as tea, coffee and sugar, at greatly reduced prices. Annexation was
to be a song of peace and amity between Canada and The United States, and under
free trade, everything would be lovely.
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Robert Smiley, the editor of the
Spectator, read the manifesto with disgust, that there were 325 Canadians who
were willing to sell their birthright for a mass of pottage. He sharpened up
the points of his quill pen, and the way he sailed into the annexationists was certainly
gratifying to every native Canadian who was loyal to the land of his birth!
Read a part of what he wrote, it has been an inspiration even 54 years after it
was written : “But does Canada really occupy the humiliating position which 325
gentlemen in Montreal assert? We say fearlessly that it does not. We possess a
soil equal to the most favored state of the union; we have lakes and rivers,
creeks and streams, which the world beside cannot equal; we have vast mineral
resources; we have a population enterprising and industrious; we have all the
elements of wealth and prosperity at our hand. What, then, do we stand in need
of to make these immense advantages and resources fully available? Simply a
proper commercial system; protection in the mother country; reciprocal
relations with the citizens of the neighboring republic, or a protective tariff
of our own, which will make a home market for our productions, and building up
and encouraging the manufactories we require.” Had the sturdy Robert Smiley
lived to this day he would have seen the realization of his prophesies of the
future of his native country, although he hardly dreamed that Hamilton should
become the great manufacturing city of Canada. When he wrote his reply to the manifesto
of the disloyal Montrealers, Hamilton had a population of only 10,000, and now,
54 years later, one manufacturing company alone expects to employ no less than
5,000 men in the making of agricultural implements that the annexationists
wanted to buy at greatly reduced prices. Today there are twice as many men and
women employed in the factories as the entire population 0f the city was in
1849. The Spectator was started in Hamilton in 1846, and from the first issue
down to the present day, it has always sounded the keynote of loyalty to Canada
and loyalty to Hamilton.
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There was a bit of scandal connected
with the management of the Desjardins canal away back in 1849, which was
thoroughly aired in the courts. It appears from the history that the directors
of the company, instead of using the earnings of the canal for the payment of
debts, loaned it among themselves, and when the day of accounting came, there
was nothing forthcoming. It will be remembered as a matter of recent history
that the government was about to begin foreclosure proceedings on what was in
the early days, Peter Hamilton’s farm which embraced the territory from James
over to Bay streets, for money the government loaned to construct the canal.
The canal was a paying investment that it had been honestly managed, and the
government would have received back the amount advanced were it not that the
directors pocketed the proceeds. Old Hamiltonians can remember when there was
quite a business done by the canal, and when a small steamboat made frequent trips
daily to carry freight to and from Dundas. After the accident at the Desjardins
bridge in 1857, when the Great Western did away with the swing bridge and
substituted a permanent one, the navigation of the canal became a past memory.
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“A tea meeting will be held in the
Wesleyan Methodist church on John street this evening. The object is to liquidate
a debt on the lecture and school room belonging to that denomination and the
meeting deserves to be well-attended.”
The above notice appeared in the
Spectator on November 21, 1849. Count up for the past fifty-four years the
number of appeals to pay off debts and one will wonder if ever there was a time
in the history of Hamilton when there was not a demand for more money from
those who attended church. Tomorrow Rev. J. H. Hazlewood, the pastor of Wesley,
will make another appeal for $500, and the congregation will plank it down as
cheerfully as they drank tea to pay debts away back in the forties.
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