A City of Ottawa plaque next to the front door of 77 Gloucester Street dates this house to 1872 and reads...
NAGLE HOUSE
Thought to be the oldest house in Centretown,
this house was built for Richard Nagle,
a successful dealer in timber limits.
Some six years after its purported date of construction, Goad (sheet 37, block 224) depicted the house as part of a neighbourhood being built up for the first time.
 |
| after Charles Goad, 1878 |
Goad showed "77-79" as a solid brick building with a square footprint, projecting front entrance bay, brick rear summer-kitchen and attached rear sheds including a stable. Goad's "2" indicates a 2-storey house, though by 1888 he'd be calling it a two-and-a-half. The 77-79 numbering seemed to have been a function of lot numbers and not any indication of a duplex. Again, by 1888, Goad had struck off the 79, leaving only the 77.
Notice the sizeable vacant lot to the east of the Nagle House. This would soon be occupied by St. George's Anglican Church (now St. Peter and St. Paul's, 152 Metcalfe). You can see part of the church in the photo at the top of this post. Although the house is older, the church looks much older, thanks to an adherence to revival architecture (notably neo-Gothic) which prevailed in Ottawa (as elsewhere) well into the early 20th century. After that, modernism (think First Church of Springfield on the Simpsons) became the rule.
Directly cross Metcalfe, more vacancies straddle the block. These will soon be taken up by the YWCA on the north corner and the "Raquet Court" Dance Academy to the south. The latter would eventually be replaced by the (now defunct) London Arms Apartments (remember, "Maria" is now Laurier West).
As to Richard Nagle, the man — what would we do without obituaries? This notice appeared in the Ottawa Evening Journal on November 30 1896.
"[H]e was withal manly and straightforward" — thus is posterity well-served. Personality aside, we learn some salient facts about Mr. Nagle — of his career in the timber trade, his sideline as a hotelier, and his association by marriage to the Friel family. "Still under seventy" suggests a birth-date in the 1820s, though we're not told where.
One detail mentioned in this piece brings us back to the Nagle House plaque. Having learned the timber trade from the forest floor up, we're told that "... it was not in this line that he made the greater portion of the considerable fortune he died possessed of, but in buying and selling limits, in which branch of business, many fortunes have during the last twenty years been made." Or as the plaque more simply states, he was "a successful dealer in timber limits."
"Timber limits" are a function of the fact that the timber barons of old didn't typically own the land they logged on. Rather these were "Crown Lands" for which "limits" or harvesting rights were granted. The excellent website "Outaouais' Forest History" explains the idea thus...
The system of timber limits of public forests was very old. It went back to the mid-19th century. Holding a timber limit granted the right to harvest the timber that grows within the limit, subject to the payment of premiums and stumpage fees and the discharge of certain obligations to ensure the sustainability of the resource. The revenues from the timber limits were the most important source of income for the Government of Quebec in the 19th century. In the second half of the 20th century, 151 limit holders controlled over 215 000 km2 of forest area in Quebec. This was an area equal to more than one and a half times that of England. In the Outaouais, 20 companies had such rights on public forests.Or more simply...
timber limit noun (Canadian)...gotta love those Canadian nouns, eh?
1. the area to which rights of cutting timber, granted by government licence, are limited.
(Collins English Dictionary)
The upshot being that while Nagle may have known the timber trade like the back of his hand, in the end, he made his money trading logging rights.
