The week Ottawa was born: how September 26, 1826 shaped the capital

Ottawa's founding is often summed up in a single meeting: Lt.-Col. John By, an English military engineer, and Lord Dalhousie, the Scottish-born Governor-in-Chief of British North America, deciding on September 26, 1826 that a gully with trickling water between limestone bluffs on the Ottawa River's southern shoreline would be the site of the future capital. But the true genesis of Bytown—later Ottawa—unfolded over more than a week in late September 1826, and parts of that seminal moment have gone untold.

After the War of 1812, a secure inland waterway connecting Kingston and Montreal made military sense. The Rideau Canal, eventually a 202-kilometre UNESCO World Heritage–designated waterway connecting Lake Ontario to the Ottawa River via the Cataraqui and Rideau systems, was intended to move troops and supplies away from the U.S. border. By and Dalhousie's task was to locate its headlocks and establish a settlement on both sides of the waterway.

Dalhousie, who had purchased the lands in 1823 for government purposes, wrote and delivered a letter by hand to Col. By on September 26, 1826—often called the "birth certificate" of Canada's capital. In it, he formally approved the locale for the Ottawa River headlocks and authorized the construction of a two-sided village on lands to the east and west of the waterway's entrance. Those lands became Ottawa's Lower Town and Upper Town, including Parliament Hill.

The source consulted for understanding that watershed week is Dalhousie's own private journal, supplemented by archival documents and old newspapers, many now digitized. Historians note that the conventional retelling has previously ignored some of those present at the founding. The story of Ottawa's origins, as the city marks its 200th anniversary this weekend, remains one with layers yet fully uncovered.