Nobody Wanted This Land

Before it was a lake, this land had a much less appealing name: Dow's Great Swamp. It's named after Abraham Dow, an American-born settler who took up land in Gloucester Township around 1814, in a stretch of mosquito-infested wetland running between the Rideau and Ottawa Rivers. It wasn't the kind of property anyone was fighting over.

Flooded on Purpose

When Colonel John By's crews started building the Rideau Canal in 1826, the swamp was directly in the way so they turned it into part of the canal instead of working around it. Irish and French-Canadian labourers built two embankments to flood the land: one finished by Philemon Wright & Sons, and a second, the St. Louis Dam, built by pioneer Jean St. Louis to block a creek running north. Between them, the swamp was flooded into a navigable lake roughly twenty feet deep.

The work was brutal. Standing water, heat, and swarms of mosquitoes meant many of the workers building those embankments came down with malaria. The lake that exists today was built, quite literally, at the cost of the health of the people who dug it.

From Remote Swampland to Prime Waterfront

For most of the 1800s, Dow's Lake stayed quiet and out of the way. That changed once the Central Experimental Farm opened nearby in 1886 and the electric streetcar reached the area in 1896, turning it into a popular recreation spot. A diagonal causeway even crossed the lake from 1904 until 1928, when it was torn out and the lake restored to its full size.

Today, the same water that was once a mosquito-breeding swamp anchors one of Ottawa's most scenic pockets. Commissioners Park puts on a display of roughly 300,000 tulips every May, the lake becomes a Winterlude skating destination in winter, and a lakeside pavilion offers restaurants and boat rentals. Condo towers now line the shore along Preston and Bronson, commanding some of the best lake views in the city, with Carleton University and the Central Experimental Farm as neighbours.

Those tulips have a story of their own. During the Second World War, the Dutch royal family took refuge in Ottawa, and Princess Juliana gave birth to Princess Margriet at the Ottawa Civic Hospital in January 1943, delivered by Dr. John Puddicombe, the hospital's chief of obstetrics. Canada temporarily declared the delivery room international territory so the birth wouldn't complicate Margriet's place in the Dutch line of succession. After the Netherlands was liberated, Juliana thanked Canada with a gift of 100,000 tulip bulbs, and the Dutch royal family has sent bulbs every year since. That gesture grew into the Canadian Tulip Festival in 1953, and Commissioners Park on Dow's Lake became one of its signature backdrops.

The Takeaway

It's easy to look at a property today and assume its value was always obvious. Dow's Lake is proof that it almost never is. Two hundred years ago this was a swamp nobody wanted, named after a settler who happened to own the least desirable land around. Give it the right infrastructure, in this case, an entire canal and even the land everyone wrote off can end up being some of the most sought-after waterfront in the city.

Ready to start your home buying journey in Ottawa? We'd love to be part of it. Reach out to us at OttawaSelect.ca — we work with first-time buyers regularly and know how to make a process that can feel overwhelming feel completely manageable.