The Communities of Rideau
Unless otherwise noted, all content is the property of, and used courtesy of the Rideau Branch, City of Ottawa Archives, North Gower.
Malakoff
5981 Malakoff Rd. circa late 1850s. Home of Dr. Howard McCordick
Malakoff School. Original log school built 1841.
Malakoff United Church. Built 1894
SS#4 Marlborough (Malakoff)
Pierces Corners and the Malakoff Post Office
By Stuart Clarkson for the Rideau Branch, City of Ottawa Archives, North Gower. 2020
Since 2009, the community of Malakoff has had its own Wikipedia page but with little data attached. In 2013, a helpful user quoted information from an 1866-7 directory of Ottawa City and the Counties of Carleton and Russell, that “Malakoff was a post office in the Township of Marlborough 26 miles from Ottawa, and 3 miles from North Gower; the postmaster was John Pierce.” This simple comment is exactly accurate, but perhaps not in the way one would expect, as we shall see.
W. John Pierce can be confirmed as the postmaster at the Malakoff post office by the late 1850s, as attested by The Canada Directory for 1857-58 (p. 906), The New World; Or, The United States and Canada: Illustrated and Described (p. 8), and The British American Guide-book: Being a Condensed Gazetteer, Directory and Guide, to Canada, the Western States, and Principal Cities on the Seaboard (p. 60).
But the post office under his management was surely operational sometime fairly soon after 1855, when the Battle of Malakoff, for which it was named, occurred during the Crimean War. Commemoration of this event was swift in Canada, as names for new communities were much in demand in the expansive 1850s. Hastings Township in Quebec was briefly renamed Malakoff the next year, 1856. So we can reasonably assuming the Malakoff post office received its name and began operations around that time. And indeed, appendices to the Journal of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada confirm this guess, showing that the post office at Malakoff started 1 Sept 1856, with Pierce receiving the annual salary as postmaster.
A report on mail transportation further indicated that there was mail carried between North Gower and Richmond, serving Malakoff, for which J. Johnston was paid, for three trips per week by horse or vehicle for ten months during Sept 1857-58. This changed when a new contract was entered into, rerouting from Osgoode Station to Malakoff, with the same James Johnson travelling the twelve-mile route, making three trips per week, as required to connect with trains on the Ottawa & Prescott Railway, with a four-year contract. There were several James Johnson/Johnstons between Osgoode and Malakoff, making it difficult to ascertain which manthis actually was. Indeed, the previously mentioned 1866 directory mentions two of that name in North Gower alone, one a hotel keeper and the other a fifth division court bailiff, but it also mentions George R. Johnston as postmaster there. His eldest son, James Waterbury Johnston, seems a most likely candidate. This family was from Scotland.
But across the road to the south, in the west half Lot 6, Concession 5, lived the first postmaster, W.J. Pierce, on land which his father John Pierce had acquired 1839. It would have been unusual for a postmaster to have his post office outside his own land in those days, so it is reasonable to assume that Pierce had maintained the post office at Pierces Corners, where his house was located, on the southern side of his property. When the postmaster job was taken up by Thomas Johnston, the post office would have moved from there up to his home, around the mid-point of the Sixth Concession. This is corroborated by The Ottawa Citizen of 2 Jul 1932, which included a column relating that the post office at Malakoff had started in the 1850s and had in fact been at Pierce’s Corners till it moved to what is now the location called Malakoff.
But the intriguing thing is that the Malakoff Post Office bore this very name years before it moved, while still located at Pierces Corners during W.J. Pierce’s tenure as postmaster. So the 1866 directory stated quite correctly that Malakoff was a post office -- but it was at Pierces Corners then, not the place we now call Malakoff. Was not just the post office but the entire community of Pierces Corners called Malakoff prior to 1876? This is an intriguing questionwhich must here go unanswered.
Assisting in the research for this article were the online resources of Canadiana, a group of institutions wanting to improve access to Canada's historical documents formed in 1978, acquired by Canadian Research Knowledge Network in 2018 with the aim of eliminating the subscription formerly charged. While Rideau Archives has reopened for research, by appointment only, the excellent resources at canadiana.org are now available to researchers online free of charge and are well worth a visit themselves.