Andre E. Lamirande and Gilles L. Seguin. A Foregone Fleet: A Pictorial History of Steam-Driven Paddleboats on the Ottawa River, Highway Book Shop, Cobalt, ON (Jan. 1 1982), 160 pages
This book recounts many stories about the heyday of steam boating on the Ottawa River and the boats that transported people, mail, and products on this great waterway. And it has multiple Lowertown connections. Andre Lamirande, one of the authors, spent his young years on Bolton Street at the Sussex end near the Ottawa River. It was probably no surprise that he became a diver collecting artifacts for the Wheelhouse Maritime Museum on Cumberland Street, where he was the president and director for over a decade.
As the introduction states, the book is intended primarily as a pictorial record of the steam-driven paddleboats that once travelled on the Ottawa River. But the secondary goal of providing brief historical accounts of “the era of thriving, boisterous commercial navigation on the Ottawa” is immensely fascinating. For example, the Shannon owned by the Ottawa Steamboat Company, ran from 1830 to 1845 and during this time carried hundreds of passengers, some with cholera, and survived a potentially destructive attack by a gang of Shiners (a gang of Irish immigrants active during this time). The Peerless of the Ottawa River Navigational Company was launched in 1872 from the Queen’s Wharf just below the Sussex Street house of its captain, Alexander Bowie. Described as palatial, this luxury passenger steamer survived a major fire in 1885 and was re-launched as the Empress.
The book was intended to be the first volume in a series issued by the Wheelhouse Maritime Museum. This museum was founded in 1963 and opened officially upstairs at 218 Cumberland Street in 1965. The Underwater Society of Ottawa had amassed more than 1000 artifacts and had researched, cleaned and labelled more than 400 items for display. After the museum closed in 1976, the collection was stored at the Canadian Museum of Science and Technology and in 1990, moved to the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes in Kingston.