Dundurn National Historic Site

Inside Hamilton's Museums

John Goddard

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781459737327
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Museumswissenschaft

Inside Hamilton's Museums helps to satisfy a growing curiosity about Canada's steel capital as it evolves into a post-industrial city and cultural destination. In this special excerpt we visit Dundurn Castle, which once stood as the biggest house in British North America and reflected the outsized personality of its builder, Sir Allan Napier MacNab. Of Hamilton's museums, Dundurn Castle ranks as the biggest and most famous. The grounds host the Hamilton Military Museum, which specializes in the War of 1812. John Goddard takes us on a detailed tour of the historic home, providing fascinating historical background and insight.

DUNDURN NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

(AND HAMILTON MILITARY MUSEUM)

To express his outsized personality, Allan MacNab built an Italianate villa modelled after the sprawling farmhouses of Tuscany. “Hamilton’s House,” senior curator Ken Heaman calls it.
Photo by John Goddard

SIR ALLAN OF DUNDURN, THE MAN HERO

Allan MacNab arrived in Hamilton with almost nothing more to lose. His life had hit a low point. He had three small children, three adult sisters lived with him as dependents, his assets totalled $8, and his wife was dying. Less severe circumstances might have defeated an ordinary man, but MacNab could never be called ordinary. At twenty-eight years old, he possessed a buoyant enthusiasm for life. He was energetic and handsome. He stood taller than average, with a large chest tapering to the waist, and he possessed a rare physical courage, distinguishing himself at fifteen as the “Boy Hero” of the War of 1812. He was outgoing and convivial. He liked people and people liked him. In almost everything he tackled he showed dynamism and talent, although his biographers say he could be more of a doer than a thinker. “Surprisingly little capacity for quiet reflection,” writes Donald R. Beer in Sir Allan Napier MacNab. “Not much given to the processes of abstract thought,” writes Marion MacRae in MacNab of Dundurn. He could also be underhanded and devious. “I am devilish cunning,” he once boasted, “and it is seldom I am caught.” Most of all he possessed a burning ambition. He fancied himself a descendant of the chiefs of Scotland’s Clan MacNab, destined to play the role of landed aristocrat in the New World, with all the responsibilities that came with such a station, and all the rewards and entitlements. Within a decade of arriving nearly penniless in Hamilton, MacNab would emerge as a central figure in the town’s social and economic life and build the largest house in British North America.

Sir Allan Napier MacNab sports furry mutton chops and a high lawyer’s collar in an undated portrait hanging in the front entrance hall of Dundurn Castle. He possessed a buoyant enthusiasm for life and a rare physical courage.
Photo by John Goddard courtesy of Dundurn National Historic Site

“He had dreamed of it, hoped for it, perhaps at times despaired of achieving it,” biographer MacRae says of the mansion, Dundurn, meaning “Fort on the Hill.” For him, she says, the house was “not so much an economic symbol as an extension of personality.”

Allan Napier MacNab was born in 1798 at Niagara-on-the-Lake, then called Newark, capital of the British colony of Upper Canada. His father was a former aide-de-camp to John Graves Simcoe, a British military commander appointed as the colony’s first lieutenant governor. Simcoe moved the capital to Toronto, which he called York. The MacNabs soon followed, and young Allan grew up there with three sisters and a brother, and he attended the village’s first pioneer school. In 1813, when he was fifteen, an American naval fleet landed at York as part of an attempt to conquer British North America in the War of 1812. Young MacNab rushed to the capital’s defence. “I volunteered,” he later recalled, “[and] accompanied the grenadier company of the Eighth Regiment to prevent the landing of the Americans.”

Despite the regiment’s best efforts, the invaders overran York and set fire to the British barracks, naval docks, and Parliament Buildings. The British Army fled and MacNab went with them. At Kingston, British naval commander James Yeo hired him as a midshipman for an attack on the American base across the lake at Sackets Harbor, New York, and when the attack failed, MacNab returned to his Niagara birthplace to join the 100th Regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel John Murray.

In those days, troops generally restricted their fighting to the battlefields. By late 1813, however, the war had turned nasty. As the American militia retreated over the border, they burned Newark to the ground. It was December. The weather was cold. Ninety-eight houses, barns, and stables went up in flames, as did all the public buildings, including the jail, courthouse, and library. Four hundred people were left homeless in the snow, the majority of them women and children. Most of the men were either serving in the Canadian militia or sitting imprisoned across the border in upper New York State.

One week later, at around midnight, Colonel Murray led a stealth revenge attack. A force of 562 men, including MacNab, overran Fort Niagara. The British killed sixty-five American soldiers and sustained six dead of their own. The retaliation did not end there. Over the next ten days a separate British force set fire to Lewiston, Youngstown, and Manchester, now called Niagara Falls, New York. The rampage opened the road to the villages of Black Rock and Buffalo, and MacNab fought with the British force that laid waste to both. In Buffalo the British left only three structures standing, including the jail and blacksmith shop, both fireproof.

Through it all MacNab showed exceptional valour. He displayed “great bravery and zeal” at Fort Niagara, Colonel Murray wrote, praising the boy as being “amongst the foremost during the attack of the picquets [forward line] and the assault of the works.” Murray recommended a commission, and MacNab sewed a gold epaulette onto his shoulder to mark his rank as ensign with the 49th Regiment stationed in Montreal. In 1814, shortly after his sixteenth birthday, he commanded an advance guard at the Saranac Bridge as part of a British march on Plattsburgh, New York. The British aborted the attack, but MacNab had more than proven himself. Later that year he returned to York nicknamed “the Boy Hero.”

The next several years proved restless ones for MacNab. He tried a variety of jobs. He worked as a carpenter, a miller, a pedlar, a distiller, and an actor. In 1821 he got married. He and Elizabeth Brooke began their life together in rented rooms on downtown King Street and had two children, Robert and Anne Jane. Seeking to advance himself, MacNab undertook to study law, a profession that promised an entrée into the colony’s highest echelons.

In Upper Canada the British colonial government encouraged the development of a type of local aristocracy, a governing class of gentlemen, who with their ladies also occupied the top social circles. The government promoted a class system and suppressed American-style democracy. Power in Upper Canada rested with the lieutenant governor, who represented the British Crown. He took advice from two bodies: an appointed executive council of permanent members and an appointed legislative council whose members sat for fixed terms. An elected assembly also existed, but the lieutenant governor could ignore its debates and legislation, and, by extension, the wishes of the people.

Such a system encouraged favouritism and nepotism. Blood ties and marriage counted for everything among the oligarchy, later nicknamed the “Family Compact,” and MacNab sought to develop the right connections. He worked briefly as a land agent with Henry John Boulton, who was to become attorney general, and acquired a patron in Henry John’s father, D’Arcy Boulton, a former attorney general and a first-generation member of the Family Compact. Boulton Senior accepted MacNab as a law student, and although the protégé took twice as long as usual to complete his legal studies, complete them he did, and in 1826 MacNab departed for Hamilton and his fresh start.

The MacNab family crest carved into the exterior of the pigeon house features the head of an ancestral enemy and the date of Dundurn’s construction, 1835. The words “Gun Eagal” come from a phrase meaning “fear not.”
Photo by John Goddard

Hamilton at the time amounted to a settlement of barely forty buildings. Neighbouring Dundas and Ancaster were bigger and more important. MacNab had almost no money. Some accounts say that his wife, Elizabeth, died while giving birth to their second child, Anne Jane, in 1825, but biographer Donald R. Beer cites primary sources to show that in 1826 the couple had a third child, Elizabeth. The baby died after ten months in 1827 and MacNab’s wife died a few months later the same year, meaning that when MacNab first took up residence in a wooden building on Hamilton’s downtown James Street he did so with three children, three unmarried sisters, and an ailing wife.

He opened a law practice in Hamilton but built his fortune by speculating in land. The town might have been small but it was growing. Money could be made by acquiring land cheaply, subdividing it into lots, and selling the lots to newcomers. Sometimes MacNab developed the lots before selling them. In 1831, a year when land prices in Hamilton tripled, he built twelve stores with residences and sold thirty-eight lots at auction. The following year he advertised the sale of more than forty lots of undeveloped land in the Gore, Home, Niagara, and London districts, along with a two-hundred-acre farm in Woolwich and another one hundred acres of half-cleared land on the Grand River near Galt. Profits could be substantial. “On a single transaction involving an outlay of £2,500,” Beer writes of one instance, “MacNab expected to clear between £10,000 and £15,000.”

By then the lawyer and land speculator had also become a politician. Upper Canada’s elected assembly might have lacked genuine political clout, but membership brought social standing and recognition. An assembly seat conferred a sense of importance. In 1830, MacNab ran successfully in Wentwo...