In the early 1900s, the waterfront of Champlain Park to Britannia Beach looked vastly different. Rows of cottages and camping parks lined the Ottawa River, providing a summer reprieve for those looking to get away from the big city
With the arrival of the streetcar line west from Holland Avenue to Britannia in 1900, land along the Ottawa River soared in value. For $100 or $200, a person could purchase an idyllic lot and have a spot for the summer to enjoy the cool breezes off the Ottawa River and the shade offered by clusters of mature trees. Due to the lack of water and sewage services, electricity, and the annual threat of spring flooding, year-round residents were rare for a long time.
These small communities sprung up all along the Ottawa River, from “Riverside Park” (now Champlain Park), and out to Britannia. Each small community saw a big uptick of new residents each year.
There were various recreational activities to partake in, but inevitably, organized sports developed as quickly as the resort community itself. The eventual popularity of these sports led to the development of relationships with other neighbouring cottage communities through friendly competitions, and led to a growth of pride in representing your home resort. These little communities were largely self-contained, and travelling to another park for a sports match was a big deal.
This was also an era where organized sports were still in their infancy. Professional sports barely existed. Though baseball and football had their earliest beginnings as sports in the mid-19th century in Canada, competitive team sport was still a novelty. Small local leagues developed, and would change how sports were enjoyed.
Spectator sports emerged with community members cheering on their team, travelling by streetcar, horse, bicycle or on foot to watch a “road” game.
With the popularity of baseball surging in Canada, and the game an easy sport to play during warm weather, kids – and even more so adults – were having increasingly competitive games. Soon, exhibition games between parks became big events for the community. Teams adopted nicknames and colours, and would show up for games “fully decorated” in the uniforms they had made.
The visiting team would arrive, often accompanied by a small group of musicians including buglers, to dramatically announce their arrival.
There are few records of women playing, and as you might expect for the era, their role fell to organizing the many post-game festivities. The games became almost a full-day carnival for residents. A large dinner would be held on one of the nearby cottage properties, often numbering over one hundred attendees, and the musicians of both parks would combine to play music for dancing and celebrating. A bonfire would often be held, and the party would run well into the night.
By 1911, the games became a major event, pulling in everyone from both the home and visiting resort. For one game, it was reported that River Park arrived in Champlain Park with a contingent of 200 residents, led by a fife and drum band, and a well-rehearsed “rooters’ club.” A number of major league scouts from the United States were also reportedly on hand to see an over-confident Riverside Park (who, before the game, talked about the need to play games against an “all-star team” from neighbouring resorts, as they felt too strong to play against any single resort) lose 16-5 to River Park. It was reported that by the end of the eighth inning, half of the 500 Riverside Park spectators had “left in disgust”!
Finally, in May 1912, after several years of discussion, a Britannia Line Baseball League was officially organized, with clubs representing the small resort communities along the streetcar line. Six teams joined this inaugural “Trolley League” association: Riverside Park, Westboro, River Park, Woodroffe, Springfield and Britannia.
The friendly nature of the exhibition games appears to be somewhat lost with the arrival of a trophy and an organized league in 1912. Management of the league was serious business, with a president and executive board with representatives from each park involved. Strict rules were implemented to ensure fairness, but loopholes in the rules were plenty.
The main issues centered around player eligibility. At the start of each season, all clubs submitted to the league a list of twenty players who would be eligible for the season and who had to be bona-fide residents of the resort. But what determines residency? Teams would recruit top city, Gatineau or even more distant players, and might set up a tent by the water which was their “home” for the summer. Did they sleep there? It was a grey area.
It was initially decided that the league would be strictly amateur, in that any player who had ever played a single game of the competitive Ottawa City League ball was ineligible to participate in the Britannia Line League. This was intended to help keep competition honest and modest, but it upset players who legitimately spent their summers at the resorts but were now ineligible. Similarly, residents were cheated out of seeing one of their own play. The amateur rule was relaxed two years after the launch of the league, and the league began to be filled with some of Ottawa’s top athletes.
The 1915 championship team from Woodroffe even featured two future Ottawa Senators hockey players, Morley Bruce and future hockey hall-of-famer George Boucher.
League rules also included the requirement of matching coloured uniforms. Champlain Park was dark blue and white, Westboro was maroon and white.
Some parks did not have their own diamonds. Champlain Park had space set aside for recreational activities, so when ball games began in the park around 1905, this area became permanently reserved for baseball, a space which remains today. Another popular diamond was by what is today Westboro Beach, but was then still the remains of the former Skead’s Mills.
Games were always held on Saturdays, and timed for the end of the game to coincide with the dinner hour, even though games would have been played at the hottest time of the day.
The competition was intense and winter recruitment became critical, so that when parks began to open in May, practices would be held with near all-star teams of city and local athletes.
Teams also began operating ice cream booths at their games, which generated money to help defray team costs for the year. Some teams also saw their female supporters make and sell popular “booster badges” for which the revenue would help cover some of the team’s expenses.
The league grew steadily in popularity, leading the Ottawa Electric Railway to add special cars on Saturday afternoons to handle the extra fans. Newspapers began running boxscores and game summaries.
The inaugural champion is unclear, but in 1913, Westboro won the league crown. They received a banquet in Nepean Town Hall on Richmond Road, where each player was awarded watch fobs. Dinner was served at midnight, with the party breaking up at 3 a.m.
During the WWI war years, play was largely suspended as almost all of the young men of the parks had gone to the front. There was some talk of organizing a league of female players, led by Champlain Park, but it never came to fruition.
After the war, the league returned in full force, and had even gained a connection to the Central Canada Association, which meant that the league was linked to other leagues in the district, and would compete for a national championship. The league was as popular as ever through the roaring twenties.
By the late 1920s, the league outgrew its humble beginnings, and with the proliferation of the automobile, there was no longer a dependency on proximity to the streetcar line to enable the league. The Trolley Line league morphed into the West End Suburban League. Most of the parks continue to compete in this expanded league, as baseball’s popularity continued to grow into the mid-century.