Mapping the Swamp Ward
When I started the Swamp Ward and Inner Harbour History Project in 2015, I undertook to explore the history of an area of Kingston, Ontario north of Princess Street up to Stephen Street, from Division east to the Great Cataraqui River. This area has an integrity in terms of its cultural and built heritage, and it makes sense as a neighbourhood from today’s perspective. But the term “Swamp Ward” is not on any map, and in so in some ways the very object of study was as much a question as a statement. When I moved to the area in 1996 I noticed older neighbours using the term, and it was my curiosity about where and what the “Swamp Ward” was that inspired me to start the project.
“Swamp Ward” is a vernacular or local name for the area of Kingston north of Princess Street that abuts the “Inner Harbour” — that is, the industrialized west shore of the Great Cataraqui River south of Belle Island. The name’s specific origins are unclear although indeed the area was quite swampy, more so in the past before fill (often garbage) evened out the wetter areas. Montreal Street was built along the stable shoreline of the river, and everything east of it was (and is) on the floodplain. Historian Jennifer McKendry has found newspaper mention of the term “Swamp Ward” as early as 1871, where it was used as a synonym for the Cataraqui Ward – an electoral district. But SWIHHP interviews revealed that in living memory, the term has been more clearly identified with particular cultural and community traits and locations than with specific official boundaries. At least until the 1970s when the Inner Harbour deindustrialized, the Swamp Ward had a strong working class culture and was the first point of arrival for most immigrants from other countries. Montreal Street between Raglan Road and Charles Street was an important commercial area. Robert Meek & St. John’s Schools (both now closed) were hubs of the neighbourhood. “Swamp Warders” had to cross Princess Street for high school, to go to the cathedral, or sometimes to work, but they often defined themselves in distinction from people and neighbourhoods south of Princess. People who lived south of Princess did the opposite. By the 1980s, interviews suggest, younger people in the area no longer seemed to be using the term “Swamp Ward”; the more common name was “North of Princess.” When some members of St. Paul’s Church started up the Swamp Ward Festival in the 1980s, the name was chosen deliberately to renew pride in a name and a neighbourhood they understood to be stigmatized.
In contributing to the resuscitation of the name “Swamp Ward” in the twenty-first century, I may have contributed to muddying the waters (as it were) about the part of town it applies to. My improved understanding of the topography and cultural history of the area from many interviews and archival research now leads me to suggest now that properly speaking the Swamp Ward only refers to the area east of and including Montreal Street. After all, for example, the height of land at Sydenham Street or McBurney (Skeleton) Park could hardly be called swampy. But SWIHHP will continue to explore the larger area as defined at its inception in 2015.
To hear people talking about what the term “Swamp Ward” means to them, listen to the first episode of Stories of the Swamp Ward.
In 1875, the Cataraqui Ward took Montreal Street as its western boundary, and Princess as its southern boundary. John C. Innes, Plan of Kingston, 1875, courtesy Queen’s University Library
The close-up reveals industry, wharves, and train tracks along the river. The tracks marked “proposed” and running through the water were never built, but indeed today’s Douglas Fluhrer Park is essentially infill between the train track and what was then the shore. Note too the marshes in which a tannery was later built north of River Street.
By 1966, the ward boundaries have changed. Cataraqui Ward now goes west to Division, and the St. Lawrence Ward has been carved out of the bottom of it. (Today’s district, King’s Town [link to https://www.cityofkingston.ca/documents/10180/8026536/ED11_Kings_Town.pdf/7e48847e-6101-4761-a91f-109914ce6ad4], goes all the way to John Counter Boulevard in the north and extends south of Princess along the water.)
In interviews conducted from 2015 to 2017, only Princess Street and the River appeared as consistent boundaries of the Swamp Ward; the north and west boundaries were understood in various ways. Only a couple of people I interviewed identified “Swamp Ward” as merely a synonym of “Cataraqui Ward.” To represent the ways people interviewed understood or used the term, I asked Queen’s map librarian Francine Berish to make a map. Interestingly, the mapping program Francine used could not easily cope with gradations of colour – it wanted a hard boundary. But the darker orange is if you will the “heart” of the Swamp Ward, and beyond that fewer people tended to apply the term. The dark orange area does match fairly well with the ward boundaries of 1875.