Much excitement has been stirring in Ottawa around the sale of a privately owned 37-acre site on Chaudière Island and the nearby Quebec shoreline. This unique piece of real estate is in close proximity to the downtown core and within sight of Parliament Hill. The area played a key role in the development of Canada and was an important site before European contact in North America.

The magnificence and potential of the falls was apparent to settlers, and, in 1800, the first families of European ancestry capitalized on the falls’ natural power and began to develop Chaudière Island with mills. In 1900, a fire destroyed the mills and flattened much of the city. After the devastation, the mills were rebuilt, and a shanty town of simple wooden homes sprang up around them. To the chagrin of politicians on Parliament Hill, Chaudière Island and Lebreton Flats, an area south of the island on the shores of Ontario where many of the lumbermen lived, became increasingly unsightly—a stark contrast to the picturesque landscape and neo-Gothic federal architecture of parliament. The government began to take steps to improve the capital, hiring a series of landscape architects, planners, and architects to provide …

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