The woods at the north end of Champlain Park have always been a fun place to explore, as many traces of the past lie beneath and even partially exposed in some areas. Though fairly thickly wooded today, this wasn’t always the case.
Prior to the arrival of the Parkway in the 1960s, the streets of Champlain Park extended all the way north to the Ottawa River shoreline, with many houses and cottages sprinkled throughout this space.
One unique structure stood within these woods, and part of its foundation can still be seen today. This long lost piece of history in fact played a key role in a major development of the west end in the 1930s – the arrival of water and sewers.
At the time, Nepean Township began at Ottawa’s city limits on Western Avenue, and thus still included Champlain Park, Westboro and other neighbourhoods. What had largely been farmland only 30 years prior had become quite developed. However, in an increasingly industrialized and modernized world, the Township still lagged behind in basic services such as water and sewers. Homes all across the west end still used wells or the River for water, or even a home water delivery service, while using outhouses and creeks for its sewers. It was a problem that needed to be addressed.
It was also a challenging time, as the Great Depression had set in, and unemployment rates were high.
To combat both issues, Nepean Township Council took the daring decision to borrow heavily against the future and build these critical pieces of infrastructure while reliable, affordable labour was available.
In the fall of 1930, Nepean Township announced a $650,000 sewers and waterworks project for parts of the township ($11.6M in 2025 money), which would benefit parts of Westboro, Laurentian View (Hilson Avenue area), and Champlain Park. The Township received grant money under the federal Unemployment Relief Act to help. The project stipulated that at least 75 per cent of the workers hired to perform the labour be residents of Nepean.
The sewer system brought new costs
All property owners served by the new system would pay additional taxes at $0.15 per foot of frontage per year, in thirty annual installments.
The project was done in partnership with the City of Ottawa, who would provide the linkages to the existing city infrastructure.
To prepare, the City built a 16” water main in 1931 which extended the existing Ottawa system west from the corner of Gladstone and Parkdale, up Parkdale to Tyndall, west to Holland, north to Byron, then west to the city limits at Granville Avenue. At this spot, in the centre of Byron Avenue, large meters were installed to measure the amount of water going to Nepean. The agreement stated that Ottawa would supply a maximum of 1,000,000 imperial gallons of water per 24 hours, and Nepean would pay 16 cents per 1,000 gallons for unfiltered water. (When filtered water would arrive in Ottawa in 1932, the rate to Nepean residents would increase proportionally to what Ottawa residents would pay). The city paid $35,000 for the construction of the main and meters, and added a 12” main connection at Clarendon and a 6” main connection at Holland to benefit its own residents in Wellington Village.
For sewage services, Champlain Park would play a pivotal role.
Prior to 1931, a significant amount of sewage from Nepean flowed north by gravitation through long-established ditches and underground channels through the middle of Champlain Park, and east through Tunney’s Pasture. So a strategic location was selected at the northwest corner of Keyworth Avenue and Pontiac Street to construct a sewage pumping station. Cast iron pipes would then carry the sewage pumped from Champlain Park along Pontiac Street, across onto Tunney’s Pasture, south at what is today Goldenrod Driveway, then travelled east in a direct line to Burnside Avenue to a connection made into the Ottawa system around Laroche Park. It would then travel to the outfall sewer on Slidell Street by the Lemieux Island Bridge, and deposit into the Ottawa River – untreated.
Contracts were awarded in late 1930 for the construction of the water mains and sewer pipes. Progress was fast, but there were many Nepean Township neighbourhoods and streets that needed services, stretching out as far as McKellar Park and Carling Avenue. Projects were planned in batches of streets throughout the early 1930s.
At the same time, the contractors like Grant Bros. were laying the sanitary sewer trunks and water mains.
Most homes had not been built with these services in mind, so home owners were responsible for renovating their own homes for plumbing and bathrooms, and then required the township to connect to the main lines within their street. This was a costly and complex renovation to perform, which would keep many homeowners from connecting to the new services for many years. In April 1931, Nepean awarded the contract for construction of the sewage pumphouse on Keyworth to Grant Bros. for $17,644. The contract for the pumps went to well-known Hamilton firm Smart Turner Ltd., for $2,683.
Work on the pumphouse started almost immediately. It was a small one-storey structure, constructed of concrete blocks, approximately 20 by 20 feet in size, and situated near Keyworth and Pontiac. A large concrete tank, 40 by 30 feet, was constructed underneath.
Despite the lack of information, it is presumed the station started opening in the summer or fall of 1931.
The new system came with unwanted challenges
But it was a flawed system, one which west end residents would be stuck with for the next 20 years. In his self-published book “Memories of West Ottawa”, long-time neighbourhood resident Lorne Parker recalled: “When the Ottawa [River] rose for any reason, the back pressure forced the raw sewage up the sewer lines and through the manhole covers…was a common site to see human excreta, paper and used condoms spurting up through the holes from the sewer covers.Some residents were unlucky enough to have this occur in their basements if the backwater valves in their sewers were unable to withstand the pressure from the mains…The people responsible for such an inadequate and marred design likely never knew that the Ottawa rises in the Spring. I remember the ongoing maintenance of replacing pumps and motors due to overloading of an inadequate system.”
On June 5 , the city completed installation of the meters at Byron Avenue, and water flowed into Nepean for the first time. The line ran for about 1,500 feet west of Granville. Within a week, another section opened up, including part of Westboro and Champlain Park.
With all the streets being dug up, the Township realized it would need to grade the streets upon completion, and made plans to begin paving some of them as well.
Proctor & Redfern was the Toronto-based engineering firm responsible for the oversight of the project, and their report in November 1931 noted that, just under a year after the project had begun, 10 miles of sewers and waterworks had been laid, at a cost of $525,000. A further two miles of work on sidestreets was to be finished at a cost of another $50-60 thousand, bringing the total project cost well under budget of the original $650,000 estimate.
The little sewage pumphouse on Keyworth Avenue continued to operate into the 1950s, keeping the sewage flowing east into Ottawa despite all of the aforementioned issues.
However, in August 1949, the City of Ottawa announced a massive $22,852,000 ($310M in 2025 money) program of water and sewers that would upgrade existing infrastructure and add services for those still without it. This was important, particularly as a large portion of Nepean was about to be annexed to Ottawa in 1950.
As part of this program, the West Nepean Collector, running from Britannia to Booth and Wellington, was constructed at a cost of $3.7M. At 23,500 feet, it would leave the Keyworth pumping station redundant.