By Clarissa Fortin and Jakob Kuzyk
In the 1950s, the place students today know as Carleton University looked very different— in fact, it was a swamp.
Indeed, Canada’s “Capital University” might have had humble beginnings, but a tightly-knit community gave it the foundation it needed to grow and expand to the sprawling campus of today.
History
Former history professor David Farr was there at the very beginning. Farr’s experience with the school started when he began to teach at the school’s original site in the Glebe, a renovated former women’s college.
“I joined in 1947,” he said. “We were a very small group in ’47, about 12 persons, and that included Dr. Tory.” Henry Tory, a retired professor and former head of the national research council became Carleton’s first true president, Farr said.
According to Farr, the school was seen as an opportunity for two specific groups within Ottawa to interact. “There were quite a few former university professors working for the government during the war — they were based here,” he said.
“And then there were also students or people who had been students or wanted university [education] and they were doing war work also, so the idea was at nighttime they could bring these two groups together.”
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The school was the brainchild of Tory, along with other prominent individuals and businessmen, Carleton history professor Bruce Elliott said.
“Carleton was part of the planning that took place during the Second World War for how to cope with the returning veterans at wars end,” Elliott said.
“During the First World War this had been a big problem because there hadn’t been enough advance planning and at the end of the war there was massive unemployment,” he said, adding Carleton was meant to prevent such events from reccurring.
Farr was part of a central group of 12 permanent staff members. This original staff took on multiple roles. They contributed to the administrative and financial work as well as the teaching.
The school functioned well enough for its early years in the Glebe, but by the late 1950s the burgeoning student population made a change of location necessary, he said.
Elliott said this land was a large swampy expanse, cut off from the Nepean area by the canal and too far from central Ottawa to be provided with any sewer or water services. “It was basically a vacant piece of land hemmed in by urban development and by suburban development,” Elliott said.
The land was purchased by a group of entrepreneurs and businessmen. The publisher of the Ottawa Citizen at the time, Harry Southam, donated a portion of it to the university as an incentive to buy the property. According to Carleton’s archives and research head Patti Harper, Southam donated half the land and Carleton purchased the other half “for a reasonable price.”
Buildings
In its first location at the women’s college Carleton was initially very small. But it grew rapidly, providing those who worked there with some unique challenges. Farr recalled how the staff, crammed into their small offices, came up with an ingenious method to share the telephone.
“There were limited communications, so they cut a hole in the wall between our office and economics and political science — the phone would be passed through a hole in the wall,” he said.
“Primitive by modern standards” is how Farr describes Carleton’s first permanent headquarters on First Avenue. Besides punching holes in the wall to pass the phone through, in the event of a blaze Farr said the staff were equipped to stifle the flames with buckets of sand kept in the hallways.
When the campus moved to its current location in 1952, the institution found itself, at least at first, short on space.
“While these buildings were under construction, those of us who had automobiles used to drive out and park near the construction, and the students used to come and we would have an office hour in our automobile,” Farr said.
The first three buildings on campus, built simultaneously, Harper said, were Tory Building, MacOdrum Library, and Paterson Hall.
MacOdrum was built to two storeys in the late ‘50s, with steel columns to support the three additional storeys to come. It was dedicated in 1958 to Carleton’s second president, Murdoch Maxwell MacOdrum. The Tory Building was dedicated to Carleton’s first president, Henry Marshall Tory. After a career that included presidential positions with the National Research Council, the Royal Society of Canada, and the University of Alberta, he took the unpaid position of becoming Carleton’s founding president in 1942.
Former Canadian senator and grain merchant Norman McLeod Paterson bestowed his name to the third original building which, Elliott points out, might be the most recognizable of the trio. “The other two have been dramatically altered over the years, but really the least change has been made to Paterson,” he said.
Harper said that apart from a T-shaped addition to the rear, the structure, which looked at from the right angle in the quad may appear floating, is largely unchanged.
The three relics are not, however, the oldest structures on campus. On the way to Robertson Hall, after paying homage to the Gandhi statue and crossing Campus Avenue directly across, pause and look up as you pass beneath the O-Train tracks. 1926 will be the year written in the concrete. This O-Train underpass, less used perhaps than the one by the station, Harper and Elliott confirm as the oldest human-built structure on campus.
Its existence, to Harper and Elliott, was a mystery for a long time. “A few year ago [Elliott] was like ‘ nobody knows why it was built,’” Harper said. “And then I found out.”
While researching CN rails, Harper said she found that a small rail line used to pass underneath the tracks, allowing farmers to pass grain from their fields to the main tracks on the other side.
Now, bushels and kernels of knowledge pass underneath.
People
It was the end of the war in 1945 and the great boom in demand for education that followed pushed Carleton out of its modest Glebe buildings and onto the banks of the Rideau River.
“During the First World-War there hadn’t been enough advance planning, and at the end of the war there was massive unemployment and riots and so forth,” Elliott said. “So the government wanted to develop plans for integrating veterans back into society.”
“The government was offering incentives for veterans to return to school,” Harper said. She said that because of this, “our enrolment rate exceeded all expectations in a really short period of time. Carleton grew beyond anyone’s expectations.”
But before Carleton’s bursting student population could assume its new home, another population had to be removed.
“There were a lot of squatters on the land at the time,” Harper said. “We had to actually go around and ask people to leave this property before we could start building.”
Once evicted, the grounds became inhabited by a set of people completely different from both the squatters, and even from today’s student body.
“The students back in those days, I don’t know what they’d think of our students nowadays,” Harper said.
“The males often had a hat on, a tie, crisp shirt, crisp pants, dress shoes . . . the women had a skirt or a blouse or a dress. They were very crisply dressed for school,” she said. And now?
“People roll out of res in their pajamas and slippers and they roll right into class. It was very different attire for school than it is now.”
Given the university’s original purpose, to educate returning soldiers, Harper said it wasn’t unusual to see students wear bits of the uniform on campus. She said because the students were returning from war, they were also much older than they are now, even older than some of their professors.
The faculty and students were made close because of this, she said. The university would hold dances, and both faculty and students would go.
Farr said he remembers the monthly “Saturday night social occasions” with the faculty members and their wives, as most of the faculty was male, as well as humourous plays and spelling bees held at the school.
“It was a very well-knit group,” he said. “We were all together in the same sort of situation and we wanted Carleton to grow and become well regarded.”
When Carleton began to grow, Farr said they began to lose some of the close associations. “That’s something that’s inevitable,” he said. “You’re sorry for the change, but you realize that it’s something that is bound to come.”
