1838 – Rideau Hall, Ottawa, Ontario
The residence was built in 1838 to house Scottish stone mason Thomas McKay and his family, who occupied the residence until 1855.
Ottawa is the capital of Canada and the country’s fourth largest city and was known as Bytown, named after a Colonel By until it was renamed Ottawa in 1855. The Ottawa region was long home to First Nations peoples who were part of the Algonquin. The Algonquin called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning “Great River”. The first European settlement in the Ottawa region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible and Ottawa was soon a boom town based on the timber industry. Government backed sponsored immigration schemes brought many poor Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants to settle farm land in and around present day Ottawa, beginning in 1817 which began a steady stream of Irish immigration to the area over the next few decades. On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for Canada East and Canada West (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa.
The residence was built in 1838 to house Scottish stone mason Thomas McKay and his family, who occupied the residence until 1855.
In May 1859 proposals were invited for Ottawa’s intended parliamentary and departmental buildings and governor general’s residence.
In 1859, The Legislative Assembly in Ottawa voted the sum of £75,000 for the erection of a “Parliament House”
Ottawa’s oldest surviving church building and was designed by Thomas Fuller, who also designed Canada’s original Parliament Buildings.
Located in a quiet residential neighbourhood close to Parliament Hill, Laurier House is a National Historic Site. It was built in 1878 in the Second Empire Style,
The first plan dates from 1839 but the work on the building’s structure was conducted between 1841 and 1865,
Architect: Band, Burritt & Meredith