Figure 6: Part of Guelph, 1829. Clearly evident is the overlay that company officials placed on the plan in April. 1829. The symmetry of "Priory Place" was destroyed by the enclosure of public space. Streets now connect rather awkwardly with the focal point. The dotted Iines of the attempted enclosure of the market ground are only faintly seen. Source: Baldwin Room, Metropolitan Toronto Public Library.

But the plan in Figure 6 is primarily an overlay dated April, 1829. When this overlay is lifted up, as shown in Figure 7, an earlier, more symmetrical version is revealed. This earlier version looks remarkably like the plan in Figure 1 and was drawn by John McDonald in 1828, probably with Tiffany's original sketch as his model. As for the 1829 overlay, it reflected the company's less than benevolent attitude to the community after Galt was recalled early in 1829.

Figure 7: Part of Guelph, 1828. Shown is "Priory Place," the earliest focal point, at the bend of the Speed River. Note the Priory - the immigrant reception house - and the stump of the maple tree, from which all the streets radiate symmetrically. This plan was drawn by John McDonald in 1828 from George Tiffany's1827 original. An 1829 overlay, which hid this plan from view for more than 150 years, can be seen at the top. Source: Baldwin Room, Metropolitan Toronto Public Library.

Several features of Galt's plan are noteworthy and require further elaboration. First, the radial street pattern focused on the ceremonial tree stump in what will be referred to as "Priory Place" (although that name may not have been used at the time). In some respects the fan-shaped design was a sensible solution to the problem of developing the peninsular site bounded by the Speed River. And the crossing of the river, on the route from York, provided a grand entrance past the company's buildings in Priory Place, which included the company's offices and the large immigration reception building known as the Priory. This design provided what might be termed the "motion pattern" of the plan, for the streets radiate out from the visual proof of their reason for being there. The radial concept was related directly to every other feature, including the market ground and the sites for the three main churches. The aesthetic quality of Priory Place and its connection to the rest of the townsite were effectively destroyed early in 1829 when the company redesignated public space as land for their private use or sale.

A second feature was the triangular market ground, which was to act as the focal point for early commercial and social activity. While unusual in North America, this triangular shape was common in mediaeval towns. Galt would have known the very attractive example in the town of Haddington, near Edinburgh. In Guelph, the space Galt reserved for this purpose seemed enormous for a little frontier town. Samuel Strickland, who was hired by Galt in 1828 to supervise Guelph's continued development, later wrote that he felt the "town-plot was laid out on too large a scale - especially the marketplace, which is large enough for a city containing fifty thousand inhabitants".29 The point to be made is simply that Galt believed Guelph would become a large town and would eventually require a large market. The company later tried to reduce the amount of public space in the market ground, but eventually lost a court case with the town in 1854. The company surveyor, John McDonald, admitted that he had pencilled in dotted lines that enclosed the interior of the ground and that later company officials had simply changed the dotted lines to more definite boundary lines.30

Another feature of the plan was the granting of symbolically important sites to several churches. Although Galt was not fervently religious, he seemed to believe that churches were an essential element of a civilized community. At the very least he attached symbolic value to a church and its spire. In recalling a Greek town he had visited, he concluded that "no town can pretend to be respectable that wants that feature; indeed, without a steeple, a town is like a face without a nose".31 In the town that he created, therefore, three sites were reserved for churches. The Catholics received "a beautiful central hill" as a reward for the help of Alexander McDonell, Bishop of Upper Canada, in the formation of the Canada Company. To this day the Catholic church connects visually with the original focal point via the street appropriately named McDonell Street. The Anglicans were granted a somewhat lesser site in St. George's Square, but it was nevertheless symbolically connected to Priory Place via Quebec Street (presumably named in honour of the diocese of Quebec, in which Guelph was located). The Presbyterians were granted "another rising ground", which was rather awkwardly set in the market ground where today's City Hall is located.32

In evaluating the plan as a whole, several characteristics must be assessed. On the one hand, an essential feature is design contrast, that is, the contrast between the scale, proportion, and placement of significant buildings and vistas and those of the collectivity of anonymous buildings. On the other, the connection between the radiating pattern and the grid organization of the rest of the site was very awkward indeed, leading to some very difficult corners and unusually shaped blocks. It also leads to confusion, as any newcomer to the downtown can testify. It reveals, of course, that Galt was an amateur planner, as he himself recognized, for his imagination was not matched by experience, especially when dealing with a rough, heavily treed wilderness site. This is also evident in the over-all conception of the plan, which in some respects was only half a plan and ignored the possible development of the other side of the river. It may seem surprising that Galt did not make the river more central to his plan, especially as water power was crucial to any industrial development. But the practice of locating a town site on only one side of a river also applied to other local towns such as Galt, Paris, Elora, and Fergus. In Guelph, the town's elite began to develop "Brunswick Hill", as Galt called it, during the 1840s as an exclusive residential suburb (see Figure 8).

Figure 8: Guelph in 1847. Source: Public Archives of Ontario.

Like the Guelph plan, the Goderich plan, which followed a few months later, also had a dramatic flair but was a more successful merging of radial and grid patterns (see Figure 9). It too was laid out under Galt's supervision, but perhaps was not his creation. The design itself may have been sent from London, for Galt refers to a "Proforma Diagram" of the town of Goderich in a letter in April,1828.33

Figure 9: Goderich in 1829. Galt may have designed this town. Its radical pattern is effectively combined with the surrounding grid. Source: Joseph Bouchette, The British Dominions in North America (London:1831), vol.1. p. 120.

In either case, the question is, what town planning traditions were represented by these plans? As was suggested earlier, the British eighteenth-century concepts as applied in Canada had resulted in a succession of Georgian new towns - definitely bounded grids with central squares. But Guelph's radial plan was obviously not in that tradition. In fact, Galt's conception of an ideal town plan reflected an early nineteenth-century reaction against Georgian grids as exemplified by the best known example, Edinburgh's New Town, planned in the 1760s as a regular grid with two symmetrical squares. Galt had written rather disparagingly of the "hollow silence of the new town" in some of his fiction, referring to the rigidity of the plan with its "houses grown up as if they were sown in the seed time with the corn by.a drill machine, or dibbled in rigs and furrows like beans and potatoes".34 (see Figure 10)The decision-makers in Edinburgh obviously would have agreed with Galt's description. Between 1813 and the 1820s a competition for an extension of the New Town north of Calton Hill resulted in a variety of proposals.The final decision of the city corporation was to accept William Playfair's proposal, which had several streets diverging from a central point, a principle, Playfair argued, that had long been effective "particularly in the Piazza del Popolo at Rome".35 Playfair's reference was to Rome's northern entrance, where three great streets radiated into the city from an obelisk.

Figure 10: Portion of Edinburgh New Town, built in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with its uniform architecture, and rather dour looking stone. Source: Gilbert A. Stelter.

This baroque concept was also exemplified in several American examples familiar to Galt. The great prototype was Washington, D.C., planned in the 1790s by Pierre L'Enfant, but the more immediate example was the western New York State town of Buffalo, built by the Holland Land Company as the site for its land office (see Figure 11). Buffalo's planner, Joseph Ellicott, was a brother of Andrew Ellicott, who had replaced L'Enfant as the planner of Washington. Galt visited the land company's operation several times and was enthusiastic about its town building programs.36 He regarded Buffalo, founded about twenty years before Guelph, as a "very prosperous and handsome town".37 Like Guelph., Buffalo's focal point was not at the centre but at one side. Buffalo was not an isolated example, of course, for designs of this type were used in many places, including Detroit.38

Figure 11: Buffalo in 1851, with inset from 1804. Source: John Reps, Town Planning in Frontier America, (Princeton University Press, 1969), p.352.

Building the Company Town

For the actual building of Guelph, Galt hired as superintendent of operations a young Englishman with surveying and farming experience, Charles Prior. Prior's detailed report of the first year's activities are one of the most comprehensive sources available on the construction of a Canadian pioneer community.39 Three large projects represented the company's contribution to town building during the first year. One was road building, with roads northeast to Eramosa town-ship and another northwest to Woolwich-Nichol township. The most ambitious road was the Waterloo Road, seven miles long and exceptionally wide (130 feet of clearing). In terms that would rival those of any town booster anywhere, Galt proudly described the road as "the glory of Guelph ... an avenue, with trees on each side far exceeding in height the most stupendous in England ... the high road to the town lay along the middle of this Babylonian approach".40

A second large project was clearing part of the generously sized town site. By mid-May Prior was employing one hundred men in "Chopping, Burning, Levelling Ground, Cutting House Logs, ... quarrying stone, burning lime, cutting the Road from Waterloo", and so on. According to Prior his workers were "men of all Countries, Irish, Scotch, Americans, Dutch, Germans, Indian and Negroes, all strangers to the place and to each other, having only one object in common, to obtain as much money and to do as little for it as possible".41 Visitors were amazed at the large-scale activity of felling and burning of trees. One wrote to his wife in June about the giant trees "crumbling into ashes or blazing into flames. I thought more of the smoking ruins of Moscow than of the rising importance of Guelph".42 By the summer some of the central area had. been cleared. After this the company left lots to be cleared by those purchasing them, concentrating instead on opening the principal streets.

A third activity of the company was the construction of several public buildings. The centrepiece was the Priory, a large log house or caravansarai jokingly named after Prior (see Figure 12). The original function of this house was to accommodate settlers while their houses in or near the town were being built. Occasionally it held almost one hundred persons at a time; in 1828 it was converted to a residence for Galt and his family. The Priory was built of "round logs,the bark untouched", with the main body fifty-four feet long and forty-two feet wide with kitchens at each end of thirty-eight by twenty feet.43 Galt later admitted that the house was "constructed better, and cost more money, than I would have sanctioned, had I been on the spot",44 but in 1828, when it was his residence, he wrote his friend David Moir:

Our house, it is true is but a log one, the first that was erected in the Town: but it is not without some pretensions to elegance. It has a rustic portico formed with the trunk of trees in which parts of the Ionic order are really somewhat intelligently displayed. Inside we have a handsome suite of public rooms, a library, &c.45

Figure 12: Guelph in 1830, with the Priory as the large building in the foreground. The market house is in the centre of the cleared ground, and the site of the Catholic church is marked by the clearing on the far hill. Source: Fraser's Magazine, vol 2 (November, 1830), pp. 455-57.

In 1831 the Priory passed to private hands as a residence. It was eventually to serve as a station for the Guelph Junction Railway and was not to be demolished until 1926.46

The company also built a Market House in the centre of the market ground, which was described by the editor of Fraser's Magazine in London as "a rude copy of a Greek temple. The ingenious may see that, in a certain sense, it resembles the Bourse of Paris".47 This building served at one time as temporary shelter for a group of Scottish refugees (who had come via South America) and later as a community centre for fairs and festivals.48 As a company office, Galt designed a stone building also in classical style, but he was horrified by his lack of influence over the design of a tavern. He had given a "house-carpenter instructions to make a plan and elevation ... delivering to him, like a Sir Oracle, my ideas as to the fitness of- indicating, by the appearance of the building, the particular uses to which it was destined". The result, in Galt's inimitable words, was something of a disaster:

My drawing was of course very classical, but his "beat all", as the Yankees say, "to immortal smash." It represented a two-story common-place house, with a pediment; but on every corner and cornice, "coin and vantage", were rows of glasses, bottles, punch-bowls, and wine-decanters. Such an exhibition as did not require a man to be a god to tell it was an inn. In short, no rule was ever more unequivocally illustrated, and cannot even yet be thought of with sobriety.49

Galt's equating of the classical style with the introduction of civilization into the wilderness was typical, of course, of most British immigrants involved in Canadian town building during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In particular, public buildings such as those in Halifax became a standard administrative type to be followed all over British North America. Galt's travels to Greece and Asia Minor between 1808 and 1811 had given him the opportunity to appreciate classical architecture at first hand, and he later claimed that in "architecture,more than in any other of the fine arts, we still acknowledge the ancients as our masters".50 But he was critical of the increased use of the Greek temple style, which was very popular in the United States, for its use "in any other appropriation than that of a temple, is among the clumsiest styles extant".51 He saved some of his most vigorous condemnation, however, for the contemporary practice of constructing elegant terrace houses, such as those in Regent's Park and Carlton House in London, where "individuality is sacrificed to general effect - superb colonnaded rows of private houses, suggest the magnificence of palaces, as if its edifices had been originally intended for the mansions of kings". His objection was not to the use of the classical order, although he felt the "columnar mania" had gone too far. Rather, the problems were that it was impossible to distinguish between public and private buildings, and moreover,that the proper differences between classes were not being maintained. "But how," he asked, "shall these distinctions be preserved - distinctions which good taste imperiously requires - if all varieties of the people inhabit the same sort of structures?"52 In Guelph, Galt understandably did not introduce the British terrace house into his urban design; the company-assisted housing was all of the single-house type on fairly large lots. He probably would have been horrified by the introduction for the very motives he despised, of the elegant terrace houses to Montreal in the 1840's. As he said, he didn't "object to rows of houses being erected ... but only to the palazial character which is given them".53

Galt's increasing difficulty with the Canada Company's directors led to his recall in early 1829. His successors were to take far less interest in the town's development, particularly because most of the agricultural land in the vicinity had already been sold and further profits were unlikely. Galt spent the remaining decade of his life trying to justify his Guelph activities, making them the central feature of his novel Bogle Corbet (1831), for example. His main character reflected Galt's own experience, which had persuaded him "that the first effectual step in colonization is to plant a village ... for we see it is from towns in all countries that cultivation proceeds".54 Jane Jacobs could not have said it better.His autobiography, dictated in 1833, was also largely a recollection of his Guelph experiences and deserves wider recognition as a Canadian classic on the practice of town planning and building.

Galt's imaginative town plan for Guelph has only partially survived. The later company officials and local leaders did not have the ability to understand the purpose of a baroque design that would have required an important public building in Priory Place. This would have terminated the vista of each radiating street. Galt himself does not appear to have taken any steps in that direction.The first serious blow to the integrity of his plan came almost immediately after his dismissal, when company officials changed the character of Priory Place. A second blow came when the Grand Trunk Railway cut through Priory Place and the market ground, thereby obliterating one of the radiating streets. The final blow was the recent closing of Quebec Street as part of the Eaton Centre redevelopment project. While Galt's large-scale organizing principle has thus been destroyed, individual elements remain that raise Guelph's townscape above the merely mundane so characteristic of many early Canadian towns.

Galt's plan for Guelph did not inspire imitation by other town builders of the region. Even"his friend and relative, William Gilkison, chose a dull and simple grid design when he founded the neighbouring village of Elora in 1833.55 And Adam Fergusson's nearby village of Fergus, begun in 1834, represented the quintessential Georgian new town of the eighteenth century, with a central square and an elaborate setting for the Presbyterian church. During the Victorian era that followed, the predominant type of urban form became the grid, which could be extended relentlessly. The grid required only the simplest surveying techniques and was ideally suited to towns whose primary function often seemed to be to make money quickly for its land speculators. It was not until the coming of the City Beautiful movement at the turn of the century, and the Garden City movement which succeeded it, that some of the principles introduced by John Galt in Guelph became a central element in the practice of Canadian town planning.