Named for a soldier, built on a racetrack, Mutchmor Public School has served Ottawa children in three centuries. It is the city’s oldest elementary school, and one of the last monuments to a premiere architect of the gaslight era.
It is named for the family of John Mutchmor, an Upper Canada homesteader and veteran of the War of 1812. Descendents of pioneering Mutchmors included the club secretary of the 1904 Stanley Cup champion Ottawa Silver Sevens, and a 1964 moderator of the United Church of Canada.
Mutchmor School was built on what was then Mutchmor Avenue at the site of Mutchmor Trotting Park, a 1.5-mile horse track that hosted the Queen’s Plate in 1872 and 1880.
The original four classrooms were completed in 1895. The little red schoolhouse was the first of seven elementary schools constructed that decade by the Ottawa School Board. Land comprised of four lots cost $1,500 at 5%; the school was another $10,490. The builder was John Lyon, “a good citizen and a kindly gentleman,” a newspaperman recalled; “the people of Ottawa will revere his memory.” Lyon was instrumental in financing completion of nearby Blessed Sacrament Church in 1932, and was chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Ottawa Civic Hospital from 1920 to his death in 1940.
The school architect was Edgar Horwood, “one who stands at the very top of Colonial architecture,” an author wrote in 1904. Horwood was chief architect for the Department of Public Works and Victorian Order of Nurses. His monuments were legion. Horwood designed the first public library in Ottawa, the six-story Carnegie Library, in 1906; the city’s Sun Life building; St. Luke’s Hospital; St. George’s Society headquarters; Gilmour Hotel; and the mansion of press baron William Southam. All were lost to demolition. Of Horwood’s works in the capital, two survive – Mutchmor School and the Laurier Avenue home of railway executive George Goodwin, now headquarters of Amnesty International.
Mutchmor Public School opened on December 23, 1895. The surrounding Glebe district was then mainly farmland, swamp and a fairground at Lansdowne Park. A student in Mutchmor’s class of 1912, Gwen Marshall, recalled: “We walked on a wooden sidewalk and the road was not paved.”
“You will hardly believe this,” Marshall wrote in 1995, “but there were no toilets in the school, but a covered walkway led to a washroom heated by a big, round coal-heated stove.”
Neighbouring Glebe lots remained undeveloped for years after Mutchmor was built. Students of the 1910s and ‘20s enjoyed the quiet of the countryside with Bank Street trolleys and the whistle of canal boats bound for Montreal. A 1933 travelogue noted, “The motorist entering Ottawa from the south…passes Dow’s Lake and rolls in upon the Driveway under a hardly broken avenue of trees, wondering when he will reach the city that lately seemed so close ahead. The city is all about him, but he sees grass and flowers and trees and the ribbon of quiet water” – the Rideau Canal.
Ice skating at Mutchmor predates World War Two. Former student John R. Smith recalled a large circular rink was a Mutchmor fixture by the time of his arrival in 1942: “I can still smell and see the skate shack and its wood stove.”
Smith remembered war bond drives and Victory Gardens – “It fascinated me,” he wrote – and later served as president of the Ontario Horticultural Association, in 1967.
Tradition thrived at Mutchmor; one principal, J.E. Miller, served 17 years to his retirement in 1921. Yet the school faced inevitable change. From its opening with 115 students, Mutchmor grew to 171 pupils by 1896. The school population expanded to 815 in 1930 before settling at 431 pupils in 1950.
A student of the Fifties, Bruce McCallan, recalled the debut of a technological wonder at Mutchmor: “One thing I remember was watching the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 on a TV at school, in the area now called the ‘small gym.’ TV was relatively new in Ottawa at that time. I don’t recall many people having TVs in their homes.”
Attendance in 1960 numbered 414 pupils. Jack Livingstone, a student of that era, wrote of an unforgettable Mutchmor exercise in 1962: “During the Cuban Missile Crisis we used to go down to the basement and crouch with our head between our knees as part of an air raid drill.”
Through successive decades the Mutchmor community ranged from 553 students in 1970, to 453 in 1980, to an average 400 per year into the new century.
Mutchmor survives and thrives as a Victorian architectural gem; a living memorial of city life from its early days; and a second home to generations of Ottawans as the capital’s longest-serving elementary school.