On September 25, 1826, hoping to obtain vice-regal confirmation of his chosen route for the Rideau Canal, Lt.-Col. John By led the Governor-in-Chief of British North America, Lord Dalhousie, on an arduous 13-km hike through the then tangle of forests and swamps that we have come to know today as Centretown, the Glebe and Old Ottawa South, quite likely reaching the point where the Rideau Canal would eventually meet up with the Rideau River at what we know today as Mooney’s Bay.
At one point during their round-trip trek back to that morning's starting point at Sleigh Bay (today’s Ottawa Locks), By and Dalhousie were graciously welcomed into the log cabin home of one of Old Ottawa South’s earliest settlers, Lewis Williams.
“After feasting on his potatoes,” Dalhousie wrote in his journal, “after our hot walk we asked for a little rum, but he had none. We drank water from his well as cold as any ice. I need not say that our visit gave the old man unbounded joy, tho’ we left without giving the least hint who we were.”
The following day, September 26, 1826, Lord Dalhousie recorded in an official letter that he had met with Colonel By at Sleigh Bay, below the future Parliament Hill, and confirmed that site’s selection to be the northern starting point of the Rideau Canal at the Ottawa River.
In that same meeting, the letter stated, plans were also approved for the town site for the future Bytown, divided by the intended canal into Lower Town and Upper Town; for a series of bridges across the Ottawa River to connect Upper and Lower Canada; and, at the request of the region’s fledgling logging industry, a dredged canal at Richmond Landing to ease the passage of timber rafts around the turbulent Chaudière Falls.
In this comprehensive and fascinating new essay, Carleton University professor and longtime Ottawa journalist Randy Boswell, a former HSO board member and HSO newsletter editor, chronicles these and more of the extraordinary events surrounding the “birth” of Bytown and the Rideau Canal two centuries ago this past month, including detailing long-overlooked interactions with the Indigenous people at the time, and the long-term impact of this uninvited settlement on the future of the Anishinaabe Algonquin:
Bytown 200 – The Birth of Bytown
An abridged version of this essay appeared as an article in the September 26, 2026 edition of the Ottawa Citizen and is also featured in a new book by Randy Boswell and Ottawa photographer John McQuarrie, “Ottawa, Spirit of Place — 200th Anniversary Edition”.
