The ByWard Market and Aviation Pioneers

There is a link between the market and the birthplace of aviation in Ottawa.
By Michel Rossignol
William Slattery left Ireland and arrived in what was then called Bytown around 1850. He was married in the Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica and became one of the numerous ByWard market butchers, not to mention one of the many Slatterys with shops or stalls in the market. Despite a major fire in 1862, which destroyed his and other butcher shops, William Slattery became a successful businessman and bought a house and many other properties on Clarence Street. In the 1870s, he bought big empty fields (today the area near the corner of Riverdale Avenue and Main Street) on the other side of the canal of Lansdowne Park. He moved his family from Lowertown to a house on the land, but kept an outside stall on Clarence Street on the ByWard Market. William died in 1885 and one of his sons, Bernard, also became a successful butcher with shops in the ByWard Market and other locations in Ottawa.

In the early 1900s, the large field where cattle and sheep grazed near Lansdowne Park was still called Slattery’s Field by people in the area. In September 1911, Slattery’s Field became the birthplace of aviation in Ottawa when Lee Hammond took off and landed there to make the first flights by aircraft in the city over Lansdowne Park. It was used again as an airfield on October 8, 1913, when William C. Robinson, an American, landed there in his small biplane seven hours after leaving Montreal.

The editor of a new Montreal newspaper had hired Robinson to make the first flight between Montreal and Ottawa as a publicity stunt. Some plaques and websites state that Robinson’s flight was the first between two Canadian cities, but two Canadian aviation pioneers, J.A.D. McCurdy and Charles F. Willard flew between Toronto and Hamilton in 1911. Nevertheless, Robinson’s flight was a major accomplishment in the early days of flight. After staying overnight at the Chateau Laurier, Robinson tried to make the first flight from Ottawa to Montreal, but his plane crashed on takeoff when the engine failed. A slightly bruised Robinson left Ottawa soon after the crash – not by air.as indicated on the sign on the awning.