A Century Standing By
4/4 Fourth tale of Pattersons of Canada origins
In 1832 the population of York (Toronto) was 5,000, Kingston was 4,200 and Bytown (Ottawa), which didn’t exist six years earlier, was 3,200. It was the beginning of urban society in Ontario but not yet an urban economy. As one merchant wrote, “No one here can do business and obtain payment short of a year’s credit.” Almost all sales to farmers were on credit. They had no cash until the crops were harvested. Some debts were settled by a merchant buying land and having debtors supply labour or materials to erect a house or building.
William (Pammy) Fleming, the first lockmaster at Chaffey’s on the just-completed Rideau Canal and his bride Elizabeth had little time to consider their circumstances in the first months after the military had departed and the ceremonial passage had passed through the lock, en route from Kingston to Bytown (Ottawa’s original name). Lt. Colonel By and his family were joined by aides and dignitaries aboard the canal tug Pumper, renamed Rideau for the journey, greeted all along the great waterway he had built with rousing cheers that fell not far short of adulation. In this place and time he had made a wonder of the modern world. The people along the Rideau corridor, some who had been his soldiers and many who had worked at building the canal, sensed greatness. Sadly, he was to fall victim to bureaucrats and petty politics on his return to England, his world-class achievement never celebrated by those whose taxes had paid for it.
Pammy, who built a log house when he got to Chaffey’s, was paid the lockmaster’s wage of $0.80 per day. The days were long, sometimes stretching through the nights and into new days. A lot of labour and time went to stretching the salary. There was a plot to grow vegetables. The potato was a staple of the diet, which made for hardship in the mid 1840s when blight struck. Ireland was being devastated at the same time by this crop failure but the famine that prevailed there was in no way repeated here. Canadians were survivors in the toughest climate of the new world. They kept a cow, pigs and chickens. Fish were plentiful as were venison, ducks, muskrat. Drowned logs or trees from the surrounding forest were fuel for winter fires.
In the country the Rideau Canal was about to become an economic lifeline. It would get busier and busier, day and night, week after week, month on month until ice checked the flow. As a commercial route it was ultimately overtaken by the onset of rail and a navigable St. Lawrence. But for a century the canal was “crowded with boats carrying the produce of the country and bringing in such goods as were needed and the growing prosperity of the country could afford,” an anonymous observer wrote at Newboro (quoted in Rideau Waterway by Robert Legget). ”City of Ottawa, Rideau King and Rideau Queen were some of the boats that carried passengers and freight and looked in their day like monsters of marine architecture. Tugs were towing 2, 3 and 4 barges; about 40 sailing scows carried out wood, lumber, pressed hay, grain, horses, cheese, whatever the country had to sell, and brought in goods the merchants sold, the implements that were needed, the foodstuffs not grown in this climate and furnished employment to hundreds of men. Rafts of squared timber and of rough logs running up to hundreds of lock bands, built up with cook and bunk houses, stables for horses gouged by 20 or 30 men made their slow way to mills and market every year and left behind a fire menace. I have seen the men at work without a break for over sixty hours. They slept on the grass while the locks were filling and ate their meals that were brought to them sitting on a swing bar. They worked 24 hours a day, slept when they could. At first the lockmen were paid 60 cents a day for 71/2 months each year. Later their pay was raised to $1 a day and there never was a time when there was any trouble getting men to work on the lock.”
It was non-stop “when the horn blew we’d lock ’em through” twenty four hours a day, seven days a week until 1871, after which Sunday was allowed off. The biggest problem were the “blue barges” of logs, huge flotillas of lumber that had to be passed through the lock bit-by-bit, hour-after-hour. Sleep between lockages was often snatched on a cot on the lockmaster’s porch.
For more than seven months a year there was no shortage of activity or company at the station. But in the winter it was thoroughly isolated. Distances to Kingston or even Elgin, a few miles away, were over trails rather than roads. The few people in the area had to make do with one another’s company. Pammy’s house, the largest around, was often the centre for euchre games, Christmas parties and impromptu dancing.
“One of the high spots during the winter,” Melinda Warren writes in Hearth and Heritage: History of Chaffey’s Lock and Area, “would be when the carpentry crew came. The crew of about twelve members would camp at the station, sleeping on bunks in the storehouse. This work force was provided with their own cook, for a crew could live at the lock site sometimes for two months, building a new set of gates or a new dock. Because of their long stay they would become temporary members of the small communities. They provided a friendly diversion from long winter boredom. At night when the day’s work was done the crew, lockmen and families would sit around the wood stove; stories and homemade bread in abundance. When the families retired for the evening, more stories and other ‘refreshments’ would be in greater abundance!
“It was a special time for the lockstation when this crew came. The empty space which the crew left in the community when they moved on, would soon be filled by hard work to prepare for the new navigation season; and later new faces to relate the past winter’s tales to. . .”
Lockstations were susceptible to attack and were strengthened in 1837–38 in response to rebellion troubles in both provinces (Upper and Lower Canada at that time, to become Canada West and East in 1841 and Ontario and Quebec in 1867). Government durham boats loaded with ammunition and troops were passing through. Lock workers were called out to train with the militia. A report in Pammy’s hand describes “the loyal men who turned out to defend the lock and other works at Chaffey’s, Rideau Canal, on the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th of July, 1838,” when the lock was menaced by sympathizers with the rebellion in Upper Canada. Under Pammy’s command twenty seven volunteers, including fifteen-year-old stepson James Simmons Jr., mounted sentries and patrolled the area to deter aggression.
A one storey, defensible lockmaster’s house was built in 1844 and after a dozen years in the log house Pammy and family were finally able to move in. It was completely renovated in 1894–85 for their grandson Henry, who was the third lockmaster at Chaffey’s. A second storey was added and a wood frame back-kitchen. This house is now The Lockmaster’s Museum at Chaffey’s.
In the meantime Pammy and Elizabeth had a son William in 1833. As a boy he became a lake sailor and earned his captain’s papers at an early age. As word spread of employment possibilities, good farmland and wondrous fishing at Chaffey’s, some families arrived fleeing the famine in Ireland. Among these were the Doyles, who came from near Dublin in 1830 with an infant daughter. Billy Fleming and Margaret Doyle grew up together and just before Christmas 1854 they eloped and married. Elopement was necessary because the English Protestant Flemings and Irish Catholic Doyles were not ready mixers. They had to get over it eventually though because Billy and his bride made passionate use of the long winters over the next two decades to produce five sons and three daughters, most born in that original log cabin that Pammy built. Catharine (Kate) born there in 1859, was my great-grandmother. She had thirteen children and lived to be ninety nine, when I was twenty, oldest of my generation in that family line (Fleming-O’Brien-Foster) and also in this other (Sauvé-Patterson-Foster).
Billy would be the first master of the Rideau Queen, one of the passenger steamers owned by his son-in-law Dan Noonan, who married first-born daughter and Kate’s sister Mary. He would become widely known along the Rideau as Captain Billy and be succeeded at this post by his son Edward (Ned), Pammy’s grandson. For many years the Rideau King and Rideau Queen, with their musical steam whistles that could be heard for miles, provided a luxurious cruise along the beautifully crafted waterway. Ned also captained the most famous of the maintenance tugs on the canal, Loretta, into the 1930s. Known as the ‘poet laureate’ within the family, the sweet sound of Captain Ned’s violin would often swell from Loretta’s deck and fill the summer evening all around when she was tied up overnight at a station along the waterway.
The log cabin they were born and raised in had long outlived its comfort level by the time Captain Billy got around to building a proper home for his fast growing brood. Margaret would reminisce years later about the day in 1870 when the house was ready and what a pleasure it had been “to walk down the hill carrying baby Charles and take my family into our new home.”
It was “the nicest and largest farm house in the community” with an iron roof, room to house a three-generation family of ten and an annex with a winter kitchen. It was still in use more than a hundred years after going up and may be still.
Pammy had died a dozen years before but his memory lived strong in the neighbourhood where there were many old friends and much family
It was in this context that he got the name he was universally known by, and which has descended to a property at Chaffey’s still referred to as Pammy’s Farm. Pammy Fleming had only the one natural son, Billy. But he had eight grandchildren, all born at Chaffey’s, all within hailing distance for most of his life. It was these kids who called him Pammy, an easy childish mangling of Papa or Grandpa. One after another they made it stick. Only they would have been innocent enough, and well enough loved, to have dared. For Pammy was far from a figure of fun. He had an aristocratic bent and, according to family account, in retirement “always dressed in a swallow tail coat, wore a high silk hat and carried a cane.”
Chaffey’s was a family fief for almost a century. After retiring in 1856, Pammy was succeeded as lockmaster by his stepson, Jim Simmons, who served until 1894. There was some fuss when grandson Henry got the next appointment. Patronage was alleged. Henry was dismissed in December 1896 but rehired three months later. He’d hold the job for more than three decades.
As Ed Bebee writes in Invisible Army: Hard Times, Heartbreak and Heritage, his masterful tribute to the legions of workers who have maintained the canal so diligently over two centuries that today it is a UN-certified World Heritage Site, “An affable lockmaster with thirty-five years service at a popular station met a lot of people. When his family is there for generations, then relationships run deep.” Henry Fleming was such a person.
A combination of age (65 in 1922) and years of service (39) meant that Henry would most likely retire in the early 1920s. Knowing he’d have to move from the lockmaster’s house (now a museum), he planned to acquire a property nearby where he could build a home. He wanted to get it at a good price and avoid an auction that might increase it, particularly since the CNR had built a station at Chaffey’s and local land prices had soared. So he wrote his good acquaintance, George Buskard, private secretary to the prime minister of the day, Arthur Meighen, enquiring casually after family members and enclosing a sketch of the land he wanted. Within a day, enquiries on Henry’s behalf were dispatched on prime ministerial letterhead. The sale transpired as he had wished, helped by an order-in-council that designated him the buyer, thereby sidetracking any other potential bidder. Perhaps most remarkably, the government had changed in the interim. Mr. Meighen, a Conservative, had been replaced as prime minister by William Lyon Mackenzie King, a Liberal. But the change hadn’t bothered Henry. Rather, he lobbied again to have his retirement postponed. He wasn’t finally succeeded as lockmaster until 1929. The Fleming family had held the job just three years shy of a century from the day Pammy got it from Colonel By.
1/4 First tale of Pattersons of Canada origins, Ab Ovo, is available at Cannections on MEDIUM.
