Mapping it out.
Carleton architecture student Lee Bushey, left, meets with Greely Community Association member Howard Crerar to discuss the toll booth project they are planning near Meadow Drive and Bank Street.
Emma Jackson
The Greely Community Association has teamed up with an architecture student to give their village the historical pizzazz it’s been waiting for.
Association executive member Howard Crerar and several volunteers are working with Lee Bushey, a master’s student in Carleton University’s architecture department, to commemorate the Victorian-era toll booth that led to Greely’s permanent settlement in the late 19th century.
The town itself was established in 1832, but was in the middle of an undeveloped swamp serviced by poor dirt roads, and very few people lived there. In the late 1870s, however, authorities decided a new road was necessary to create a viable route to Ottawa from the St. Lawrence River and the United States. In order to pay for the new six-mile road, the manufacturer installed a toll booth at the corner of what is now Bank Street and Meadow Drive, the north-eastern entrance to the village.
It cost five cents per horse to cross the toll booth on route to Ottawa, and again going back – 20 cents total if you had a pair of horses.
“What we would like to do is build a replica or some sort of a historic site to commemorate this toll booth so people can go to where it was,” explained Crerar, who heads the transportation committee for the association.
He said that Greely lacks the personality of other rural villages, and this project would help residents connect with their past and better appreciate their village.
“There’s no charm to this town, it’s just subdivisions. But there is some history, and if we could start bringing out the history we could maybe add a little charm to the town,” Crerar said.
The spot where they want to build is currently a publicly-owned road allowance, so building there would require a rezoning or special permission from the city of Ottawa. Osgoode Councillor Doug Thompson has already put his support behind the project, but there is a considerable amount of red tape to cut through before the project can go ahead.
This is all part of the experience for Bushey, who contacted more than 20 community groups in Ottawa to see if they would like to collaborate on a community project before choosing Greely as her thesis project.
“The Greely Community Association was very energetic and excited about creating something new for their community,” she said, noting she chose to work with the Orleans Community Garden group as well.
Bushey said she is more of an advisor than a traditional architect while the group figures out what they want to do.
“It’s my role to facilitate and basically help along with the process, to ask a lot of questions but not necessary direct the design per se,” she said.
Crerar said they’re starting to realize that a physical toll booth may not have existed, and was instead simply manned by the woman who ran the nearby hotel.
The structure would likely be an information pavilion using photos, maps and information to show visitors what the village looked like in the 1850s. Bushey said she would love to have the project finished by spring, but there are too many factors to predict a timeline. “Since the project has kind of taken on a life of its own and there’s more interest than we thought, it will probably be much bigger than that,” she said.