05/13/2024
We’re not going to lie, our favourite “mother” around the Bytown has got to be Mother McGinty!
Sarah “Mother McGinty” Ritchie was born in Ireland about 1803 and became a somewhat legendary figure in early Bytown. Family history recounts that Sarah was born into a well-to-do Protestant family, fell in love with the family’s Catholic stable hand John McGinty, and eloped to New York in about 1823.
After a brief period on the Erie Canal works where John was employed as a navvy and Sarah operated a makeshift tavern, word of plans for a new and significant British military canal in the Ottawa Valley began to spread. The couple relocated to what would become Bytown where Lt.-Col. John By was leading one of the largest engineering projects in the British Empire. John would again find work on the canal while Sarah would do what she did best, cater to the navvies.
In Corktown, a shanty settlement of Irish navvies built up along the Deep Cut of the Rideau Canal (above the Ottawa Locks near today’s Laurier Avenue Bridge), Mother McGinty, as Sarah came to be known, ruled. McGinty was known as a formidable matron who could more than hold her own against unruly patrons under the influence of the bottle. Said to have been armed with a winning smile and backed by a potent right hook which she was reputed to have swung with great potency, Mother McGinty ensured that the beer, shrub (citrus juice, sugar, vinegar, and rum – useful for keeping scurvy at bay at least!), and poitín flowed freely. Woe betide the unfortunate patron who didn’t pay his tab!
After the completion of the Rideau Canal in 1832, Sarah, John, and their children relocated to the Wabash Canal works to set up shop. Sarah had passed away sometime between 1850 and 1856 in Iowa and in 1874, was immortalized by Ottawa City Clerk William Pittman Lett in his pseudo epic ode to Bytown, Recollections of Bytown. Mother McGinty’s story is still a popular one in the collective conscious of the nation’s capital. To this day, her exploits are fondly remembered in local lore, history, and in pubs.
A more fulsome account of the life and exploits of Mother McGinty, written by our curator Grant, will be published in the near future in “Fifty Irish Lives in Canada,” a publication created by the Irish Embassy, Ambassador Dr. Eamonn McKee, and Professor Mark McGowan. Stay tuned!
