Jackson Park – Peterborough’s Very Own Amusement & Heritage Site

“Jackson Park is one of the prettiest natural parks in Canada. It affords ample shade, and has a murmuring stream coursing through it, in which the children can play and wade to their heart’s content. It also has abundance of walks and seats and is in every respect an ideal spot.”

– Peterborough Weekly Review, June 23, 1905, p.3.

“The stream that glides o’er silver sand/Knows not its gift of song

Until it meets a pebbled strand/And swiftly flows along.

So life that leads through pleasure’s way/Then turns to grief’s abode,

Oft finds the richest harmony/Along the roughened road.”

— Alma Frances McCollum, “The Pebbled Stream,” Examiner, Jan. 27, 1905, p.5.

[Alma Frances McCollum (1879—1906) was a Canadian poet and composer who lived in Peterborough from her childhood until 1905. This poem appeared in The Varsity, along with a photogravure reproduction of a scene in Jackson Park.]

TODAY, SOON TO BE DESIGNATED AS A HERITAGE SITE

and then . . . WELL OVER A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

*Examiner*, Sept. 24, 1906, p.3.
For the story of the motion pictures in the park, 1905—08, see “Lives of the Theatres, Under the Pines.”

City rails and the making of an amusement park

In the long evening summers of 1905 to 1908, Peterboronians could catch a trolley and head up to Jackson Park to see motion pictures.

In those years Jackson Park — with its nicely rolling creek, rambling paths, picnic spots, special events, splendid band concerts, and motion pictures — was the city’s prime “amusement park.” It was so not just in summer, but in winter too: in the cold months you could go skating and tobogganing there.

“Jackson Park,” *Examiner*, June 30, 1905, p.14.

The park’s special activities in the early twentieth century were largely the inspiration of the Peterborough Radial Railway Company. Established in 1903 after the failure of a previous street-railway company, the Railway Company at first operated trolley cars that went north and south through the middle of town and west along Charlotte Street.

In summer 1904 it expanded its service to a line going north on Park Street, west along McDonnel, and eventually making its way north to the park on Monaghan Road, which was the city’s western boundary road. From Charlotte Street north to Smith Street (now Parkhill Road), the east side of Monaghan was almost entirely “vacant lots.”

The first railway trips made their way to Jackson Park in mid-November 1904. In December 1904 the street railway company launched a “big open air rink” on the edge of the park — with upwards of a hundred lights, each covered by a Chinese lantern.

By 1911 the city rail service as a whole operated five miles of tracks, eight passenger coaches, and five miscellaneous cars.

Sometimes in Peterborough people would simply hop onto the streetcar and ride around for an hour or so just for amusement.

In her diary entry for Sept. 10, 1908, Cathleen McCarthy, then age eighteen, wrote that after going to a motion picture downtown at the Crystal with her sister, Mamie, and others: “We all went round for the hour’s ride on the car, at nine o’clock.”

The northwestern end of the line: “Peterborough’s Pleasure Resort”

The company’s Charlotte Street line turned both south (to the CGE plant) and north on Park Street. The terminus for the northern branch was the then-remote (and forested) southeast corner of Monaghan and Smith (or Parkhill), with a small oval turnaround spot – about 150 by 350 feet – on that same corner, opposite the rather rugged entrance to Jackson Park. The trolley line made that area, said even thirty years later to be “on the outskirts of the city,” more accessible than ever before. (Even in January 1949, when that same streetcar turnaround point was suggested as a site for a plan new hockey arena, an alderman objected: “That would put the Memorial Centre out in the woods.”)

This detail from a larger photo shows Smith Street (now Parkhill), the main entrance to the park, and the railway line circling around to its turnaround point, 1904. The larger photo is from: no.115 car at jackson park peterborough ont 1904, from John Fairbairn Anderson Collection, picyrl.com. I originally saw it in a Facebook posting by Colleen Biss Jarvis, Sept. 14, 2021, with an image from Ontario Genealogy.com.

For decades the southern part of the park had served as a quarry, a source of much of the limestone that was used for the solid old nineteenth-century buildings of the town, including the historic Court House, Hutchison House, St. John’s church, and others.

A complaint about the difficulties of the stroll from Park Street along Smith Street to Jackson Park: it seems that negotiating the wooden planks could be a hazardous affair — yet, despite the poor lighting, it was a walk taken by hundreds nightly. Better to take the trolley, perhaps. *Examiner*, Aug. 4, 1905, p.8.

The park, described as “a natural wooded and hilly space of considerable extent” and bisected by the rambling (and sometimes rapid) Jackson Creek, had been purchased for the city by the Nicholls Trust in 1893, the result of a legacy left by the estates of, first, Robert Nicholls and later his wife, Charlotte Nicholls.

Visitors to the park in the early years might well have strolled across the park’s marvelous pagoda, built in 1895 (and still there today, reconstructed). They might have walked across a little wooden bridge that crossed the creek not far from the Pagoda, or used another bridge on the narrow, dirt Smith St. – a bridge also constructed in the 1890s (much later replaced by the high concrete structure on today’s Parkhill Road).

As a way of bolstering traffic, and keeping it going year-round, the combination power and street railway concern helped to transform Jackson Park into a summer amusement area for the growing city population – indeed, as an Examiner writer would put it, “Peterborough’s pleasure resort.”

Jackson Park — a cheap date for a “youthful swain” and his “lady love” — but do make sure you have five cents to spend on Billy Bowman’s peanuts! *Review*, Aug. 11, 1905, p.5.

The trolley cars took passengers to an oval turnaround or loop at Monaghan and Smith – you can, today, still see the vague outline of the oval there, growing fainter over the years. The railway company bought that vacant piece of land on the corner in early 1905, building the loop soon after and announcing “many attractions” to come the following summer, including band concerts to be held near the streetcar terminus.

Skating and tobogganing to the fore

In October 1905 the railway company announced that it would “conduct” an “open-air rink and toboggan slide” at the Jackson Park terminus — and spend about a thousand dollars in “furnishing the necessary conveniences.” There would be a changing room; there might even be hot coffee. Anyone paying the trolley fare (of five cents) would get free access to the rink and toboggan slide. The company would have about thirty toboggans “placed at the disposal of the public for a small fee.”

*Examiner*, Jan. 23, 1907, p.7. The caption seems to indicate that the photo was taken on the previous day, but that is not necessarily true.

One account mentions that the toboggan run ran down through the hole created by the quarrying of stone for city buildings, which would have been in what is now Hamilton Park (to the south of Jackson Park and below Parkhill Road). Another writer, more specifically, said that it started “from the height out at the Jackson Park corner” and ran “southeasterly toward the site of Dominion Woollens and Worsteds where the creek crosses McDonnel street.”

The same 1907 photo of the toboggan slide, with three chutes. Roy Studio photo, Vintage Peterborough website.

At that time Bonaccord Street was not a through street — it stopped on each side of the creek — which allowed the slide to pass through its middle, closed section. This was also before the Bonner-Worth textile plant had established itself on McDonnel Street and along the creek. (The slide apparently traversed private property, because a few years later, in December 1908, the street railway was trying to get permission to use the land, without success.)

In his book The Peterborough Story, long-time Examiner editor Wilson Craw told how “the skating rink was formed by the oval inside the circle where the cars turned [before heading back downtown]. The skaters stepped from the streetcar right onto the ice.” In time the street railway added a refreshment booth and a large cloakroom and “colored globes” to light everything up; the effect, a newspaper writer pointed out, was to “make a pleasant picture as one approaches on the car.” In a photo taken in those early years, you can see the beginning of the toboggan run sticking up just behind the skaters.

Problems: *Examiner*, Dec. 29, 1908, p.10.

In August 1906 the Evening Examiner exclaimed: “The park is the only summer resort that a large number of the citizens ever see, and it would be greatly missed if the amusements were done away with. . . . [The] problem of how to spend the summer evenings in the city has been solved, and Jackson Park is the answer.” The park became known as a place to “escape the stifling heat.”

*The Billboard* (Cincinnati), Feb. 5, 1910, p.53. Jackson Park amusements as an integral part of the Peterborough scene — and reporting “good attendance.”

In November of that same year the street railway announced further improvements for the coming winter: enlarging the toboggan slide (with three more chutes) and adding a “new gentlemen’s waiting room” to the skating rink. Those seeking intense thrills might have been disappointed by the attention to safety: “The sides will be built up all along the slide, so that there will be no more danger of collisions towards the end of the slide, as was the case last season.”

Like much else, the Radial Railway Company’s “pleasure business” played an important role, but only for a time. Much fun and amusement were to be had (amidst a pushing of boundaries); and as the Examiner put it: “The street car was the omnibus of equality before the automobile rolled on to the scene to change the way of life and push the horizons of accustomed boundaries all the way back from sea to sea.”

In 1914 the Radial Railway Company sold its operations to Ontario Hydro. The street railway business had always experienced a “stormy career,” suffering from financial trouble “on numerous occasions.” By 1925 its loss on operations was $27,000. In 1926 Hydro reorganized the service, removing street cars from several lines and replacing them with buses; the system switched completely to buses in spring 1927.

The heritage site over the years, in photos

The bridge crossing Jackson Creek on what is now called Parkhill Road, c.1950s. If you look closely, you can see the CNR train just about to cross the road, going south. The eastern gate of the park is up the hill to the left. Photo courtesy of Jerry Allen.

The historic site plaque’s coverage of activities does not mention motion pictures — and the terminus for the cars was completed in late May 1905, not 1906. Reports indicate that construction of the Jackson Park line began in August 1904; the rails had been laid to the vicinity of Mount St. Joseph by September 1904; the first trip by cars to the Jackson Park corner took place on Saturday evening, Nov. 19; and cars were carrying skaters to the park by December. The railway company purchased the vacant land at the end of the car tracks around March 1905 and completed the oval terminus around the end of May that year. The line was so busy that two more cars were added to the route in April 1905; and in the summer of 1905, with band concerts and motion pictures and more, the crowds travelling by trolley to the park were immense.