Hidden Ontario (23 page)

Port Hope's scenic main street circa 1880s.

Library and Archives Canada

Fire struck the school on April 27, 1893. It began about noon in the upper storey. Firemen, schoolboys, and townspeople fought the fire and successfully saved the building, but within a week another fire threatened to destroy the school. This fire was also extinguished before any serious damage happened. What are the odds that a fire would strike a third time in so short a time span? On Sunday morning, February 16, 1895, not quite two years later, the entire building was consumed by fire at a loss of $80,000.

School officials, with great faith in life and in tradition, set about to raise the money to rebuild. A new $90,000 structure was constructed on the same site as the old school. It was the same length as the original building but greater in breadth and height. Trinity College School still flourishes in Port Hope today.

Crime has given many communities notoriety. So too, Port Hope. On the morning of October 6, 1893, a crowd gathered outside the residence of Joseph Hooper. Three men emerged from the house. One was Chief of Police John Douglas, the second, Constable Jarvis, and the third was John Reginald Hooper, son of Joseph Hooper. John was handcuffed and escorted to a carriage. Despite his pallor John gave a military salute to the crowd with his free hand.

Two weeks earlier, sensational stories had begun to circulate regarding the death of his wife. She had apparently been taken off a CPR train at Terrebonne, Quebec, in a terrible condition and had died in the train station. Her husband had been travelling with her and returned to Port Hope on September 20th. He hurriedly buried his wife in the cemetery at Welcome.

John was well-known in town; he had been born in Port Hope and learned the trade of a printer in the newspaper office of the
Guide
. He subsequently served for some years in the military, “A” Battery, first in Kingston and then in Quebec. While in Quebec, he met and married a French-Canadian girl named Georgiana Leblanc. The couple went to live in Ottawa, where John entered the civil service in 1887 as a clerk in the Post Office Department. There was no record to indicate that his wife suffered from mental problems, yet on October 14, 1891, he committed her to the Rockwood Asylum in Kingston.

In the spring of 1893, John developed an interest in a young woman by the name of Alice Stapley. Unwilling to expose his true marital status, he posed as a widower. He even placed a fake notice of his wife's death in a newspaper in Quebec, which stated that she had died in Lille, France, but no date of death was given. A few weeks later he placed a second death notice in another newspaper, stating that she had died in Savannah, Florida. What did Hooper have in mind for his wife?

On September 10, 1893, he arrived in Kingston and removed his wife from the asylum. The reason he gave was that he was taking her back to her parents' home at St. Ambroise de Kildare, Quebec. During the journey, at Louiseville, Quebec, he removed her from the train and attempted to drown her in a river. Georgiana fought back and escaped to a neighbouring house. Somehow John Hooper found her and convinced her to continue on their journey to St. Ambroise. John returned to Montreal alone. There he purchased prussic acid, ostensibly to dispose of a troublesome dog. He headed back to St. Ambroise with the intention of placing his wife in an asylum in Montreal. On the way to Montreal, she became ill and died.

After the funeral, John returned to Ottawa. He had, at some point, seen Miss Stapley in Montreal and had proposed marriage to her. John seemed confident that all was well.

It was the telegraph operator at a CPR station near Montreal who changed John's plans. Upon hearing of the death, he recalled that the woman's male companion had called himself Hooper, and that a man of that same name had recently sent a telegram from his office to the agent at Louisville, asking him to look out for a “crazy woman.” After talking with the conductor of the train, he took his story to the police to say that he thought the death should be investigated. A Montreal newspaper scooped the sensational story and ran it in the September 22 issue. Other papers picked up the story and it became the scandal of the day. Silas Carpenter, a government detective, was assigned to the case.

Hooper, in the meantime, made a suspicious move when, on September 29, he returned to Port Hope to have his wife's body exhumed, with the intention of having it embalmed. The opening of the grave was in progress when the undertaker, J.T. George, put a stop to it, pointing out that it was illegal without a coroner's order. Hooper then requested Dr. Corbett, the coroner, to hold an inquest. He agreed to this once he had the approval of the County Crown Attorney.

Community interest peaked after it was announced that there would be a coroner's inquest. The jury was composed of 20 well-known Port Hope citizens of the day; crowds gathered at the railway station to catch sight of the witnesses arriving from Montreal and elsewhere; people clamoured to get into the opera house, where the inquest was being held.

During the early stages of the inquest, a number of Port Hope residents were interviewed, and interest and speculation grew after testimony from Dr. Clarke, superintendent of the Rockwood Asylum; the conductor of the train on which the alleged crime was committed; the druggist who sold Hooper the prussic acid; and Miss Stapley, the other woman in the case. Dr. W.J. Douglas of Cobourg had conducted the post-mortem examination and found the death had resulted from unnatural causes. Professor Ellis of Toronto, who had analyzed the contents of the stomach, could find no cause of death there; it was a healthy stomach. However, he admitted that from the symptoms death could have been caused by prussic acid.

The inquest concluded on the night of October 20th, and the jury returned at 2 a.m. on the 21st. At 4 a.m. they delivered this verdict: “We find that the said Georgiana Hooper came to her death at Terrebonne station under suspicious circumstances and from causes unknown to the jury.”

Hooper was arrested on a warrant that charged him with the murder of his wife through the administration of prussic acid. He was escorted to Joliette, Quebec, and placed on trial on January 3, 1894. The trail lasted until January 19 and resulted in his acquittal, largely because of the contradictory nature of the medical evidence, on which he was given the benefit of the doubt. However, he was not permitted to go free. He was re-arrested and this time charged with the attempted murder of his wife by drowning. He was tried on this charge at Three Rivers, Quebec, in June 1894, found guilty and sentenced to 25 years. After 10 years of imprisonment he was released on parole and went to live in Winnipeg. Presumably, he never did get together with the comely Alice Stapley.

Since the 1970s Port Hope has become a major tourist centre with historic buildings such as the John David Smith house, 1834 Bluestone House, and St. Mark's Church, which dates back to 1822. It is a well-known fact that the main street of Port Hope is one of the best-preserved examples of late 19th century Ontario. Many beautiful specialty stores attract shoppers from all parts of the province. This is a long way from the simplicity of a trading post, and yet it is, perhaps, a natural progression from the early vision of Peter Smith. The whispering pines haven't disappeared, and the call to settle there can still be heard today.

 

The settlers of Port Perry must have wondered what they could have possibly done to deserve such devastation when two fires in less than a year (1883–1884) almost destroyed their downtown area.

Powerless to rebuild, as there was not a pound of nails to be had, and hammers and saws were in scarce supply, a public meeting was held. There, the townspeople discussed the situation. The end result was the passing of a bylaw that forbade the construction of wooden buildings within the business section. The building regulations also required that the stores be given a uniform line of frontage. The previous buildings had been erected to suit the fancy of the owner, and the resulting street had been very irregular. The new plan did away with this, and now the stores lined up neatly; few towns the size of Port Perry made such a creditable showing in their business section.

Rebuilding was a busy time. Masons and bricklayers came in from all directions, and in less than a year, the business area was re-established. A steam fire-engine was purchased, and the residents breathed a sigh of relief; Port Perry prospered.

The town of Port Perry had originally been the site of a Native village. In 1821, the first recorded settler, Reuben Crandell, arrived. Others followed. Abner Hurd settled here in 1824. In 1833 Elias Williams purchased Lot 19 in Concession 6, and here he built the first home at the actual site of the future village.

Peter Perry arrived in the district shortly thereafter and eventually surveyed and divided the land into lots. His involvement in the organization of the settlement was reason enough to name the place after him. In 1854 a plank road was built to connect Port Whitby and Lake Scugog. It was originally intended to pass through Prince Albert, but Abner Hurd refused to grant a right-of-way through his property and the road was built closer to Port Perry. As a result Port Perry continued to develop and Prince Albert declined.

The settlers of Port Perry were no strangers to the destructive power of fire.

Courtesy of Scugog Shores Museum

New building regulations after the fires forbade the construction of wooden buildings within the business district. The regulations also required that the stores be given a uniform line of frontage.

Courtesy of Scugog Shores Museum

Joseph Bigelow and Thomas Paxton spearheaded a project in 1867 to build a railway from Port Whitby to Port Perry. The railway was completed in 1871, and a train station was constructed by Lake Scugog.

Those were the days when 25 steamboats sailed the waters of Lake Scugog. They transported timber, the likes of which could not be found in these parts today. Some trees were used for telegraph poles, while some for tan bark went to Fran A. Cutting at Boston, and some for paving timber was sent to Godson's in Toronto. These paving timbers were made of cedar cut into 15.25 centimetre and 20.25 centimetre (six and eight inch) blocks, and set endwise on the surface of the streets of Toronto.

The price of whiskey at that time was 25 cents a gallon, retail, and 10 cents wholesale. If you felt dry while in town, all you had to do was go to the back of the store, where there would be a pail of whiskey and a tin cup. It was estimated that there were 25 hotels between Manilla and Oshawa in those days.

Port Perry certainly was prosperous, and much of that was due to one man, a visionary with a practical bent, Joseph Bigelow. Joseph and his twin brother Joel left Lindsay in 1851to go to Port Perry. There, they opened a general store under the name “J & J Bigelow.” The next year Joseph became the first postmaster of Port Perry. Then he bought a woollen factory and a planing mill. At the mill he also manufactured barrel staves. The factory remained in operation until 1870, when the railway expropriated his land. When the Royal Canadian Bank opened a branch in Port Perry in 1862, Joseph Bigelow became the manager and held the position for six years.

After the building of a three-storey commercial emporium called The Royal Arcade, Bigelow's next project was to promote the construction of the railway. In 1872 he became reeve, and continued to serve in office until 1874. In 1877 he became a justice of the peace and the new owner of an elaborate Italianate house designed and built by H.R. Barber of Oshawa. Joseph planned to build a number of fireplaces with marbleized slate mantelpieces throughout this home, but his wife put her foot down. She felt that fireplaces dirtied, rather than heated, a home! When Joseph died in 1917, at the age of 89, flags flew at half-mast in tribute to a man whose insight and spirit gave reality to his dreams.

Scugog Island, across the lake from Port Perry, extends 16 kilometres (10 miles) in length and measures four kilometres (2.5 miles) wide. The name
Scugog
is a Native word pronounced Scu-a-gog, meaning “submerged or flooded land.” Peter Jones, a Native missionary who worked among the Mississauga tribe on the island, called it Whu-yoy-wus-ki-wuh-gog, meaning “shallow muddy lake.”