Blackburn Hamlet
Blackburn Hamlet
Named After a Favour, Not a Founder
Most Ottawa neighbourhoods named after a person are named after whoever settled or built there. Blackburn Hamlet is the exception. The area started out as "Green's Creek," after a sawmill owner named Robert Green, then became "Daggsville" once settler Richard Dagg donated land for a school around 1850.
It only became "Blackburn" when the community needed a post office in the 1870s and asked Robert Blackburn a local lumberman, former Reeve of Gloucester Township, and sitting Member of Parliament to help make it happen. He did, and in gratitude, the post office was named after him. Blackburn never lived there or farmed the land. He just did the community a favour at the right moment, and the name stuck for good.
A Close Call With the Greenbelt
Blackburn Hamlet almost didn't survive to become a neighbourhood at all. In 1958, the federal government gave the National Capital Commission the authority to establish the Greenbelt around Ottawa the same ring of protected land that came out of the Gréber Plan. By the mid-1950s, the NCC had already acquired most of the land in the area, and many longtime residents were forced to relocate.
A small group of homeowners wasn't ready to let the community disappear. Working with Costain Developments, they negotiated with the NCC to hold onto their properties, and developer Michael Budd and Costain Estates Ltd. built a planned subdivision on what land remained. The first families moved into the new Blackburn Hamlet in the spring of 1967, and most of today's homes went up through the 1960s and '70s.
Built as a Complete Community
When Costain Developments built Blackburn Hamlet through the late 1960s and '70s, it wasn't just rows of houses it was planned from day one as a complete, self-contained community, with schools, parks, and shopping built in alongside the homes. Residents organized the Blackburn Community Association as early as 1968, while the subdivision was still going up, and pushed hard for the parks and amenities that followed. For its time, it was one of the more thoughtfully planned new communities Ottawa had seen, and it quickly became one of the most desirable places in the east end to put down roots.
That planning still shows in how The Hamlet is laid out today. A network of treed parks and bike paths connects the neighbourhood end to end, and schools, shopping, and recreation all sit within about a 10-minute walk of most homes English and French, public and Catholic schools, the Blackburn Shoppes plaza for groceries and everyday errands, and an arena, community pool, ball diamonds, and tennis courts. It's the kind of complete, walkable design that today's planners are still trying to recreate in brand-new subdivisions.
Today, Blackburn Hamlet is home to about 8,173 people across roughly 3,200 homes. It's about a 10-minute drive to downtown, and backs onto more than 250 kilometres of trails across the Greenbelt and former RCMP lands giving it a small-town, tucked-away feel that belies how close it actually is to the core.
The Takeaway
Blackburn Hamlet is a reminder that even the biggest planning decisions leave room for negotiation. The Greenbelt that swallowed up so much of the farmland around it could easily have taken this community too, but a handful of determined homeowners and one developer turned a close call into a highly desirable neighbourhood proud of its small-town roots & feel nearly 60 years later.
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