On the Map

The limestone double house raised in 1843 by the hardware merchants Samuel Muckleston and John Watkins, when Kingston was capital of the Canadas. The anchor of the whole book — and of the real inscription, Alfred, cut into the lane wall.

Still standing, still a private residence, 183 years later. The carving is real, and visible from the lane. Without it, there is no book.

Built in 1845 as the bank’s first branch in what became Ontario, with staff housed above the banking floor — Henry’s window on Muckleston House directly opposite, and the vault where the journal is found in 1906.

The bank moved in 1906; the limestone building became the Frontenac Club — a private men’s club — then apartments and an inn, and since 2020 a boutique hotel of the same name. The original vault survives inside.

Kingston’s Anglican mother church — the parish, founded 1792, was the first church in Kingston — built 1825–28 and, from 1862, the cathedral and seat of the new Anglican Diocese of Ontario. Lord Sydenham, the Governor General who made Kingston the capital, lies in a vault beneath the nave, buried there after his riding death in 1841. In Henry’s 1875 it stood without its dome — a Georgian church of tower and portico. Dean Lyster’s pulpit; the Muckleston pew.

Enlarged with transepts and the great dome in 1891–94, gutted by fire on New Year’s Day 1899, and restored by 1901 — the cathedral of today’s skyline, its dome one of Kingston’s three. Still the active cathedral of the Diocese of Ontario; designated under the Ontario Heritage Act in 1975, with a provincial heritage easement held by the Ontario Heritage Trust since 1981.

The family firm, in its third hand by the diary’s day — founded by John Watkins, whose Kingston hardware house dated to 1818 and was for a time said to be the only one in what is now Ontario; carried on from 1853 by Samuel Muckleston, Watkins’s Shrewsbury clerk risen to partner, ‘at the old stand’ under his own name; and passed at Samuel’s death in 1873 to his son as John Muckleston & Co. The trade that built the house on King Street, with Emily at the counter in the book. The 1875 McAlpine’s lists it at 41 and 43 Princess, under both Hardware and Coal Dealers, opposite S. Chown & Son at 46.

The lower Princess block survives as the spine of the shopping street — but the old numbers do not: Kingston renumbered Princess Street in April 1908, and the shift was substantial, so 1875’s 41–43 is not today’s 41–43 and no modern storefront is claimed. The 1886 Whig’s walking description fixes the store’s true position: a few doors up from the King Street corner — the stretch occupied today by the Royal Block, the office building that houses the city’s RBC branch.

Begun as the Ontario Foundry in 1848, it turned out its first steam locomotive in December 1854 for the new Grand Trunk, passed through James Morton’s hands in the boom years, and was reorganized after his fall as the Canadian Engine & Machinery Company in 1865. By the diary’s day it is the industrial heart of the waterfront — the seven-o’clock whistle that opens the book, and the Works where Doyle and Gorman laboured.

As the Canadian Locomotive Company the Works ran until 1969; the plant was demolished in the early 1970s and the site — ‘Block D’ — sat vacant for thirty-five years before becoming waterfront residences, a hotel, and the small municipal Battery Park, opened 2010. The engine displayed at Confederation Park by the old K&P station — CPR 1095, ‘The Spirit of Sir John A.,’ built here in 1913 — is the Works’ own survivor, standing a few blocks from where it was made.

A tavern from 1851 on a property once owned by John A. Macdonald, who sold it to the Grimason family in 1856. Under the widowed Eliza it was the city’s working-class parliament and Macdonald’s unofficial election headquarters.

The Royal Tavern since 1971, reopened in 2022 as Royal Tavern 2.0 — live music, darts, and billiards under the old stone. Heritage-designated, and reckoned by the Kingston Historical Society among the oldest pubs in the province.

Alfred’s institution. Kingston women organized the Orphans’ Home and Widows’ Friend Society in 1857, taking in its first children from the House of Industry — the Female Benevolent Society’s refuge for the town’s poor. Mrs. Ann Muckleston was a genuine founder. Its large purpose-built home rose at Union and Gordon in 1862 — and in the book it keeps the register with the blank ‘Discharged’ column at the story’s heart.

The building passed to Queen’s in 1927 to become the Students’ Memorial Union; the John Deutsch University Centre now holds the ground at the same corner — Gordon Street having become University Avenue. The charity carried on as ‘Sunnyside’ — the Chown home it bought farther west on Union Street in 1927 — turning after the war to children’s mental-health work, and served under the Sunnyside name until its dissolution in the late 1990s.

Archdeacon George Okill Stuart’s grand limestone villa of 1839 — ‘Okill’s Folly’ — which housed the members of the first Parliament while it sat in the hospital across the road (1841–44), and in 1853 was bought by Queen’s College, the young university chartered by Queen Victoria in 1841, to be for years its only building — in Henry’s 1875 a college still small and Presbyterian, two years shy of the Grant era that would make it national. Henry’s alma mater: Annie reading Tennyson on the path near Summerhill.

The oldest building at Queen’s, the Principal’s official residence since the 1860s (today its east wing), standing at the heart of the campus that grew around it — the lawn before it formally designated, since 1999, the Snodgrass Arboretum — a catalogued collection of some fifty trees rather than a fenced or signposted garden, easy to walk through unawares — on the slope that held Canada’s first botanical garden, planted in 1861 by the Botanical Society of Canada. Queen’s itself is commemorated as a National Historic Event: the earliest degree-granting liberal arts college of the united Province of Canada, its first classes held in March 1842.

The paper of Henry’s Kingston — founded in 1834 by Dr. Edward John Barker, its press attacked in the troubles of 1837–38, and from January 1849 the first successful daily in Upper Canada. By the diary’s 1875 the aging Barker had passed its management to his grandson, E. J. B. Pense — the very man who, in the book’s frame, serializes the recovered journal in 1906. Pense’s name stood as publisher on every front page of Henry’s year, over the paper’s Bagot Street office — the old Athenaeum building, its home since 1834, which the Whig left for 79 Brock Street in the course of Henry’s year.

Pense built the paper its landmark home in 1894–95 — the Ontario Bank and Daily Whig buildings by architect Joseph Power, facing City Hall — and there the Whig-Standard (merged 1926 under W. Rupert Davies, the book’s 1941 voice) was published until the 1990s. Restored in the 2000s, the building was bought by the City of Kingston in 2011 for municipal offices. The paper itself continues under Postmedia, four days a week — Canada’s oldest continuously published newspaper, since 2020 without a building at all.

George Browne’s domed hall of 1844, built to the scale of a capital. The Police Office and its steps; the market behind; the Battery on the slope below.

Still the seat of the city and a National Historic Site. The market wing behind burned in 1865 and was rebuilt at part of its size, its clock moving to the main dome. The dome itself burned in 1908 and was rebuilt with a new clock — and when the square was excavated for its 2000s revitalization, archaeologists found the original wing’s foundations, the old weigh house, and traces of Fort Frontenac’s western battery still underfoot. The Kingston Public Market — established 1801, the oldest public market in Ontario — still runs three days a week.

The Market Battery: raised by the British in 1846–48, together with the city’s four Martello towers, when the Oregon boundary dispute threatened war with the United States — a gun line at City Hall’s front door, guarding the harbour, the naval dockyard, and the canal entrance. It never fired a shot in anger, was obsolete within two decades, and in 1875 — the very year of the diary — was being dismantled.

The site is now Confederation Park and the marina basin; a relic of low stone wall remains, and the Kingston Historical Society’s 1955 plaque reads ‘from 1875 this was a public park’ — while some of the Battery’s own stone is said to have entered the fabric of the K&P station that displaced it, the little station that survives today as the visitor information centre.

The limestone courthouse of 1855–58, raised of stone quarried on the site itself, on ground acquired in 1840 for a house of parliament, when Kingston stood among the candidate capitals of the new Province of Canada. Under repair through the whole book after the fire of 1874 — the dome Henry watches John Power raising is the one there today. The gaol behind; site of the execution in the book.

Still a working courthouse and a National Historic Site (designated 1980), its dome one of Kingston’s three. A second fire in 1931 and interior renovations in 1965 left the exterior composition intact; the gaol and its yard walls were demolished in 1973–74, and the 1858 gaoler’s house still stands directly behind the courthouse, beside the parking lot that covers the old gaol yard.

Built in 1825, in the Loyalist style, by the shipwright turned steamboat pioneer Henry Gildersleeve — the man who helped build the Frontenac, the first Canadian steamship on Lake Ontario — and in the book the house of the soirée Henry watches from the street: ‘limestone, like almost every house on this street.’

Still standing, one of the oldest houses in Kingston, in the family until 1909 and long since converted to professional offices — with the original hitching post and carriage stone still at the curb — the same stone at which the guests Henry watches from the street once stepped down.

Kingston’s oldest hostelry — the Whig’s fire-day report of 1963 dated the first hotel here to 1806, though other accounts run it back to a 1791 Royce Inn — rebuilt and enlarged down the generations until, in 1866, it took the name British American. Charles Dickens, who passed through Kingston in 1842, was remembered in that same report as its most famous guest. The white-cloth dining room where Henry sees Burrows with Doyle, then with Irwin.

The old hotel burned on March 19, 1963, and for thirty-six years the corner was a parking lot — opened in 1965 by the hotel’s own former owner, run in later years as the Brewers Retail lot, and known by the end simply as ‘the Hendin Hole’ — until a nine-storey hotel rose on the site in 1999, opening in January 2000 as the Four Points by Sheraton; it was reborn in December 2024 as the Kingston Marriott. The original building is gone, but the hotel function persists on the same strategic corner — over two centuries of innkeeping at King and Clarence.

The marshalling ground levelled before the Tête du Pont barracks in the 1820s, where the garrison formed up — and, in the diary, the ground of the temporary Kingston & Pembroke railway’s station, whose whistle is heard in the book.

Now the street of the same name — and at its foot, the excavated and partly reconstructed northwest bastion of the 1673 French fort, exposed on the traffic island since the 1984 dig, steps from the city’s downtown arena: the only piece of Fort Frontenac a passer-by can see.

The Drill Shed raised off Union Street in 1864, in the alarm years as the British regulars withdrew and the volunteer militia took their place — a bare, barn-like hall, some 250 feet by 80, where Kingston’s own volunteers, the 14th Battalion Volunteer Militia Rifles, later the Princess of Wales’ Own Rifles, could store arms, muster, and drill under a roof through the winter. The long, barn-like shed Henry passes by the parade ground on the November 7 walk.

The shed stood where Queen’s Nicol Hall stands today, immediately east of the Orphans’ Home corner; by the regiment’s own history it later served briefly as a Queen’s skating rink, and collapsed under snow loads in 1896. The open remnant of the old parade-ground lands behind the drill shed survives directly between Kingston Hall and Kingston General Hospital as Nixon Field — Kingston Field until a 2012 renaming.

Two of Kingston’s four Martello towers thrown up in 1846–47, when the Oregon Crisis made war with the United States seem near — squat round gun-towers guarding the harbour, the dockyard, and the mouth of the Rideau, with Fort Henry and the Market Battery completing the ring. They never fired a shot in anger and were obsolete within twenty years. In the diary, the tower on Murney Point is the ‘squat and permanent’ fixture of Henry’s meditation on a city seriously made and seriously kept; Shoal, rising straight from the water, is the watcher on the waterline of the November 23 wharf scene — and the back cover’s vignette.

Both stand. Shoal keeps its offshore post opposite City Hall; Murney, garrisoned to 1885 and unroofed by a storm in 1921, has been the Kingston Historical Society’s museum since 1925 — the city’s first and oldest — and above its door the carved name still reads MURNAY. The tower was to be Murray, for the Master-General of the Ordnance, but the town had called it Murney from the first, after Henry Murney, whose point it stood on — and the stone-cut MURRAY was altered with a leaden N into the hybrid it wears still. With the Kingston fortifications, both towers are part of the Rideau Canal UNESCO World Heritage Site of 2007, Ontario’s first.

Built 1833–35 but standing empty for want of operating funds — its first patients, in November 1838, were twenty wounded American prisoners from the Battle of the Windmill — the limestone hospital was borrowed as the first Parliament of the united Canadas (1841–44), opened seasonally from 1845 under the volunteer women of the Female Benevolent Society, and ran year-round from 1849. By Henry’s day it had its Watkins Wing, opened in January 1863 to house smallpox patients — the gift of John Watkins, the same hardware merchant who built Muckleston House and others with Samuel Muckleston. Henry points it out on the walk to Rockwood.

The oldest public hospital in Canada still operating, its original buildings intact and a National Historic Site — the 1835 Main Building and the Watkins Wing still facing Stuart Street inside the modern campus. A Queen’s teaching hospital and the major medical hub between Toronto and Ottawa, it is slated to be succeeded in time by a new hospital campus planned for the city’s west end.

The one place here that was gone before the diary opens. The Famine ships ended their crossing at quarantine on Grosse Île; those still fit to travel came on by barge, and in the summer of 1847 a town of ten thousand took thousands off its wharves. Lord Elgin directed the port towns that June to build or acquire sheds; by September Kingston’s stood at the hospital, the brewery wharf, and Emily Street. The nursing fell to the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph, the laywomen of the Female Benevolent Society, and householders who took the sick in. Some three hundred Kingstonians died with them. Doyle, Nolan and the Gormans came off one of those ships.

An Gorta Mór Park stands on the waterfront by the hospital, near the shed ground and the mass grave; its Celtic Cross records more than fifteen hundred Irish dead ‘along with compassionate citizens of many faiths who cared for them.’ The Emily Street sheds lay further west, by Murney Tower. The graves are still on hospital ground: some remains went to St. Mary’s in 1966 and Cataraqui in 1990, but archaeologists confirmed in 2020 that most had never been moved, and excavation began in 2021 ahead of the hospital’s redevelopment. A second cross, raised in 2002, stands in McBurney (Skeleton) Park — the old Upper Cemetery, where Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians lie together.

Completed in 1832 for Charles Grant, Baron de Longueuil, and enlarged in 1841 to be Government House — the viceregal residence of the capital years, home to three Governors General: Lord Sydenham (who died there in 1841), Sir Charles Bagot (who died there in 1843), and Sir Charles Metcalfe. When the capital left in 1844 the house went back to the Baron, and by the diary’s day it was ‘Reverend Allen’s’ — the Rev. J. A. Allen, father of the novelist Grant Allen — a faded remnant of the years when, as Henry has it, Kingston had nearly been the centre of British North America. Queen’s own first campus was to rise on the fifty acres directly opposite — bought by the trustees in 1840, hence College Street — but the money to build never came, and the land went off in parcels.

Badly damaged by fire in 1958 and demolished the following year; the Alwington Place subdivision rose on the single great property. One house on the grounds threads back to the book itself: Llynlea, built in 1963 on the estate’s former back terrace by Arthur Davies — son of W. Rupert Davies, the Whig-Standard editor whose 1941 note returns Henry’s journal to print. Fragments of the estate’s stonework survive in the home’s landscaping, and a provincial plaque marks the site.

Opened June 1, 1835 as the Provincial Penitentiary of Upper Canada — older than the country itself — and built of its own quarried limestone, largely by the convicts it held. It confined men, women, and children (an eight-year-old stands on its early punishment books), drew Dickens in 1842 (‘an admirable jail,’ he wrote, too charitably), and by 1849 had earned the Brown Commission’s scathing inquiry into its floggings. It became the model for the federal penitentiaries that followed. By Henry’s 1875 it was already forty years notorious: the ‘vast, pale, sheer’ walls he passes on the road to Rockwood.

Closed on September 30, 2013 after 178 years — at its closing among the oldest prisons in continuous use in the world — and now, walls and towers intact, one of the city’s major heritage attractions, open for public tours — with a second career on screen: Alias Grace (whose real Grace Marks served her sentence here), Star Trek: Discovery, Titans, and Mayor of Kingstown have all filmed within its walls.

The purpose-built lakeshore asylum, begun in 1859 — raised with convict labour marched over from the Penitentiary — and receiving its first patients in 1862, its great limestone building completed over the following decade — the institution Henry walks to and recoils from.

Renamed down the century — Rockwood Hospital, then the Ontario Hospital, Kingston (1920), then the Kingston Psychiatric Hospital (1965) — the institution passed to Providence Care in 2001, whose new hospital opened nearby in 2017. The patients left the original limestone building for newer wards in 1959; as the Penrose Building it served people with disabilities until it closed in 2000, and it has stood shuttered on the lakeshore since — intact, empty, and all the more Gothic for it.

One of the named saloons of a city whose drinking-houses clustered along Princess, Ontario, and King Streets and about the Market Square — a room fronting the square’s corner where drink, billiards, dock talk, and police talk circulated after dark.

The saloon — H. J. Douglass, proprietor, at ‘King, cor Brock’ in the 1873–74 directory — kept its room in the 1837 Garrett row, the block that held the Brock corner until the Canadian Bank of Commerce replaced it in 1911. The row’s own record counts saloon-keeping among its trades, and its traces remain: the surviving western pair at 324–326 King, and the row’s re-set cornerstone — W.G. 1837 — still reading from the bank’s Brock Street flank.

The walled stone barracks of 1821–24, raised on the ground of the French Fort Frontenac of 1673. From 1871 the home of the new Dominion’s ‘A’ Battery and its School of Gunnery — Major Irwin’s own post in the book.

Still soldiers’ ground after three and a half centuries — and the barracks were never demolished: the stone blocks of 1821–24 are the buildings standing within the walls today. Renamed Fort Frontenac in 1939, the post has housed Canadian Army staff training since 1948 and today holds the Canadian Army Command and Staff College. An active military installation.

Opened 1856 as one of the Grand Trunk’s finest, and Kingston’s door to the wider world — the main line to Toronto and Montreal, the connections to Ottawa, and every point beyond. It stood a good mile and more north of the harbour, so that every journey — to cities near or far — began and ended with a hackney cab or carriage ride up Montreal Street.

Passenger service ended when the present VIA station opened in 1974; fire and neglect reduced the landmark to a stabilised ruin, and in March 2026 CN dismantled two of the three linked structures — the baggage building and the breezeway. The 1855 limestone station, given its Second Empire roof in the 1870s, remained at this writing, its future uncertain. The ruin had its royal days: George VI and Queen Elizabeth stepped down here on 21 May 1939, and Elizabeth II arrived at the same platform on 27 June 1973, come for the city’s tercentenary.

The wooden toll bridge of 1829 — a penny to cross, hence the name — with a swing section for vessels. The tolls were abolished at the close of 1874 — the Whig of December 14 reported the settlement under the heading ‘Free Roads and No Tolls’ — making 1875, the diary’s year, the first year of free crossing; Henry crosses to Barriefield on the November 22 walk with the abolition notice still pinned to the toll booth.

Replaced in 1917 by the causeway — named for René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who oversaw the building of Fort Frontenac in 1673 at its western end — and its historic Strauss bascule lift bridge, which, damaged during maintenance on the 100-year-old structure, was itself demolished in June 2024. A temporary modular bridge has carried the crossing since October 2024, awaiting a permanent replacement. Three bridges deep, the crossing itself endures.

The Royal Navy dockyard that built the great lake fleet of the War of 1812, closed for good in 1853 and chosen as the ground of Canada’s first military college, established by Parliament in 1874. Henry watches workmen at ‘the conversion for the new military college’ — the Stone Frigate of 1820, the dockyard’s great stone storehouse, built to hold the gear of warships laid up under the Rush–Bagot agreement, being fitted as the college’s first building.

The college opened seven months after the diary closes — June 1, 1876, with eighteen cadets, the Old Eighteen — and became Royal by Queen Victoria’s grant in 1878. Its graduates formed the nucleus of Canada’s officer corps in the First World War and filled its senior commands in the Second; the college closed in 1942 for the duration, its colours laid up in St. George’s Cathedral, and reopened in 1948 as a tri-service institution — in 1959 the first military college in the British Commonwealth empowered to grant degrees, and from 1980 open to women cadets. RMC holds Point Frederick still — the old dockyard ground and its stone buildings a National Historic Site — and the Stone Frigate remains a cadet dormitory, in continuous service for two centuries.

The great limestone fort of 1832–37 on Point Henry, replacing its War of 1812 predecessor to guard the Lake Ontario entrance of the new Rideau Canal, the naval dockyard below, and the town across the water — the principal fortress of Upper Canada, and its largest. British regulars held it until the withdrawal of 1870; by the diary’s day the young Dominion’s own gunners — ‘A’ Battery and its School of Gunnery, forerunner of the Royal Canadian Artillery — kept the fort. In the book, the fort where Patrick Nolan served as a gunner, on its height across the water through Henry’s autumn.

Garrisoned by Canadian gunners to 1891, then left to ruin — superficially repaired to serve as an internment camp in the First World War — until the Depression brought it back: restored in 1936–38 as a million-dollar federal–provincial works project under Kingston’s own Ronald Way, and opened on August 1, 1938 as a living-history museum garrisoned by the Fort Henry Guard. It served once more in earnest — a German prisoner-of-war camp through the Second World War, reopening to visitors in 1948 — and the Guard keeps it still. With the Martello towers and the Canal, the fort anchors the Kingston fortifications within the Rideau Canal UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Laid out in 1814, at the height of the war, by the Hon. Richard Cartwright on his Loyalist grant, and settled by the officers, armourers, boat-builders, and tradesmen of the Naval Dockyard and Fort Henry — its streets named for the military men of 1812, and the village itself named in 1820 for Commodore Robert Barrie, Commissioner of the dockyard. By mid-century a village of some sixty houses, taverns, and boatyards. In the book: Mrs. Hazeltine’s Barriefield sittings, and the church crowning the hill at the end of Henry’s crossing.

The village’s twentieth-century decline left its nineteenth-century streetscape largely untouched, and when development pressure mounted in the 1970s, Pittsburgh Township answered by designating it, in 1980, the first heritage conservation district in Ontario — a village remarkably intact on its hillside, St. Mark’s church still anchoring the view from the water.

The shops Henry passes were real doors on real streets, standing in the pages of the 1875 city directory and the columns of the British Whig.

The Bajus Family

The family behind the Kingston Brewery on Wellington Street, by the 1870s one of the principal houses in the city; Jacob Bajus had taken the business over in 1861. Henry’s beer of choice at the Grimason House. And the building endures: it stands on Wellington Street still, converted to condominiums that carry the Bajus name, with oak beer barrels built prominently into its stone walls.

James Morton (1808–1864)

Irish-born brewer and distiller whose Kingston Brewery and Distillery, lumber yards, lake ships, and locomotive works made him one of the great Kingston industrialists of the mid-century, before his empire collapsed in the early 1860s. By Henry’s day his malthouses stood shut, as the diarist records on his walk to Rockwood. One range of the complex still stands on King Street West, on that very walk — expropriated for military use in 1918 and reopened in 2015 as the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning, its Malting Tower still carrying the name of Morton’s old trade.

Francis Nisbet: Bookseller

The diary’s ‘Nisbet’s,’ the Brock Street bookseller. Francis Nisbet kept his Corner Bookstore for decades — advertising second-hand books in the British Whig by January 1876, selling Queen’s textbooks and college requisites at Brock and Wellington, and finishing at 94 Princess Street, his imprint surviving on the picture postcards of Edwardian Kingston.

Campbell’s: Grocer

R. & M. Campbell kept a grocery at 254 Princess Street, entered in the 1875 directory under Grocers and Liquors alike — the double listing that marked a licensed grocer, the sort of shop that supplied a household’s tea and its whisky over the same counter.

Cummings’s: Baker

Hugh Cummings, baker and victualler, at 16 and 18 Market Square — the city’s bread baked on the square where it was sold.

Bailie Bros.: Printers and Stationers

Henry and Isaac Bailie’s printing office stood at 114 Wellington Street. The 1875 directory lists the brothers as job printers — and in the trade of the day, the printing office kept the counter where a town bought its paper, its account books, and its cards.

Beaupré’s: Brock Street

A name Brock Street carried twice over in 1875: Beaupré’s Hotel at 15 to 19 Brock, kept that year by its proprietress Mrs. Ann Aston, and Remi Beaupré’s grocery and liquor shop a few doors along at No. 27.

Lanning’s: Barber

The barber Henry visits for a shave. Eugene C. Lanning kept a hairdresser’s shop at 113 King Street in 1875 — on the Mucklestons’ own street, a few doors from the world the diary watches.

The Prince Arthur Saloon appears above as entry 22, where its corner and its history are traced in full.