Archeologists dig up LeBreton Flats for traces of Ottawa’s first railyard and a historic French school.
As hundreds of cars pass by on Booth Street and apartments start to grow out of the earth, archaeologists on LeBreton Flats study the remains of a small French school frozen in time.
“There’s been so many jewels on LeBreton Flats,” says Nicole Brandon, an archaeologist who has worked on various LeBreton sites since 2002. “There were inns, and taverns, hardware stores, farms, and cows and pigs.”
The first building on LeBreton Flats was the Firth tavern built in 1818, writes Phil Jenkins in his book An Acre of Time. A thriving lumber industry had attracted many French and Irish Canadians.
As the LeBreton Flats community grew, the Ste-Famille French separate school first opened its doors some time in the 1880s.
The two-story school was probably quite small, with no more than 50 to 60 students, says Jeff Earl, leader of the excavations on the site of the old school. He adds that only one or two schools were found on LeBreton Flats, so he says they were lucky Ste-Famille was found almost intact.
Like most of the buildings on LeBreton Flats, Ste-Famille burned to the ground in the fire of 1900. The very next day, writes Jenkins, the community was back to work. And it didn’t take long for the community to rebuild the school on the original foundations.
Then, in the 1960s, the school was reduced once more to its stone foundations and a small red brick wall. The LeBretoners were expropriated by the National Capital Commission and forced to find a new home and school.
Standing on what was the sidewalk of Sherwood Street you can almost imagine the school bell ringing. Children playing games outside pick up their belongings and race to class. But while filling up the wooden stairs leading to the door, someone drops a marble. It slips between the cracks and disappears for several decades.
Many artifacts were found this way, in front of what would have been the entrance, says Brandon.
Toys, pieces of rosaries, inkwells, crucifix, broken writing slates and other objects of daily school life were also found outside the walls of the old school.
“Most people just threw out any waste out the back door,” Earl explains. Little did they know, this would help archaeologists understand our past.
“The whole LeBreton Flats experience . . . added immensely to our knowledge of this part of Ottawa,” says Earl. It isn’t often that an urban area is left untouched by development, he says.
As a result, archaeologists have been able to uncover volumes of everyday objects.
For Earl, the interesting finds are the objects that add a personal touch, like a pocket knife with initials. “It almost feels like you’re beginning to know the people."
A few artifacts found on LeBreton Flats in earlier excavations such as bottles, smoking pipes and syringes are already on display at the Bytown Museum. These objects represent Ottawa’s more violent past says Christina Tessier, director of the Bytown Museum.
But most of the artifacts in the Bytown Museum were collected at the end of the 19 th century as relics of the elite society in Ottawa. The “average persons’ history,” says Tessier, “didn’t seem to matter.”
She says she hopes some of the everyday objects from sites like Ste-Famille will find their way to museums like the Bytown.
As the major excavations on LeBreton Flats come to an end, Earl and the other archaeologists will soon be wrapping up their tools. The artifacts will then go to laboratories in Kanata, says Earl, where they will continue to piece back together the lives of the people who lived on LeBreton Flats.