By Meredith Boerchers, Graduate Student, Curatorial Studies
From September to December of 2019, I had the opportunity to work in the CDCC as the centre’s first curatorial student intern. During this time, I researched the social history of the centre, hoping to collect a number of “fun facts” that could easily be delivered to the public through a collection of tweets, Instagram posts, and Facebook updates. For the first few weeks, I explored the buildings’ nooks and crannies, snapping pictures of architectural features and hidden treasures found behind locked doors. I read about Dominion-Chalmers online, then read through the church’s previous publications about its own history (2002, 2008). Ultimately, the CDCC’s archives became my greatest source of inspiration—here, I rummaged through boxes, reading newspaper clippings and marvelling over historic photographs.
While this journey into the CDCC’s past was incredibly enriching, it also revealed a serious problem with my project: I couldn’t possibly hope to do justice to the centre’s past by reducing its stories to a few short social media snippets. It had become clear, almost from the very beginning of my research, that the history of Dominion-Chalmers is intimately connected to the broader history of Ottawa. The congregation traces its roots back to the years prior to Ottawa’s settlement and the building of the canal, when Methodist circuit riders established house meetings on the North side of the Ottawa River. The Rideau Canal itself can be considered a distant cousin of Dominion-Chalmers: an engineer on the canal, John Burrows, and the head of the canal’s stonemasons, Thomas McKay, each had a significant hand in establishing the churches within Ottawa from which the DC congregation hails. Even the building itself, if we were to disregard the vibrant social life within its walls, is intimately tied to Canadian architectural heritage: the architect, Alexander Cowper Hutchison, is a renowned Canadian architect well-known for designing many of the buildings in Old Montreal and supervising the masonry of the Parliament buildings.
Listening Through the Archive is my attempt to capture just a few of the stories from the CDCC’s past. Most of these episodes have been stored through the years in the centre’s archives, and my hope is that by retelling them here, online, they would live once more.
