Dundurn Castle

Dundurn Castle sits on Burlington Heights in Hamilton, Ontario, on ground the British army fortified in 1813 and where eight men convicted at the Ancaster Bloody Assize were hanged in July 1814. Sir Allan Napier MacNab built his Italianate villa over it between 1834 and 1835, and the museum restores the rooms to 1855 — not, as is often written, a year of decline, but the year he was Premier of the United Canadas and added the great portico for his daughter Sophia's wedding to Viscount Bury. The ruin came afterwards: he resigned in 1856 and died at Dundurn in August 1862 a penniless debtor, hours after a deathbed conversion that set two churches quarrelling in the newspapers over his body. The City of Hamilton, which has owned the house since 1899, never mentions a ghost; commercial tours have been selling one inside it since about 1999. The stories they tell — a chill outside the room where Lady MacNab died in 1846, a woman singing where no one is singing — have no named witness on record before the ghost-tour trade arrived.

Dundurn was not built on empty ground. It stands on Burlington Heights, the 2.5-kilometre isthmus between Hamilton Harbour and Cootes Paradise that the British army fortified in 1813 as the supply depot for the defence of the Niagara peninsula; the Heights were designated a national historic site in their own right on 17 May 1929, and the defensive earthworks and a powder magazine are still visible in the park around the house. On 20 July 1814, after the treason trials known as the Ancaster Bloody Assize, eight men — Dayton Lindsey, Noah Payne Hopkins, John Dunham, Aaron Stevens, Benjamin Simmons, George Peacock Jr., Isaiah Brink and Adam Crysler — were hanged at Burlington Heights and buried near the gallows. People were being buried on this hill twenty years before there was a house on it. Allan Napier MacNab, born at Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) on 19 February 1798, bought the property from J. S. Cartwright in November 1832 for £2,500 — five hundred pounds more than he had meant to pay, according to Peter Baskerville's biography of him in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Robert Charles Wetherell designed the Italianate villa that went up over the foundations of an earlier brick house between 1834 and 1835. Parks Canada calls the result "a rare surviving example of a picturesque estate in Canada exhibiting a remarkable degree of integrity": not just the villa but a whole scenographic estate, with a dovecot, a gardener's cottage, a gatehouse called Battery Lodge, stables and a two-storey pavilion built for cockfighting, the Cockpit. The room count is not agreed: the museum and most popular accounts say forty, while Baskerville and Edward Smith's illustrated study of the house both say seventy-two. MacNab married twice. Elizabeth Brooke died in January 1825 giving birth to their second child; Mary Stuart, whom he married in September 1831, died at Dundurn in 1846 after a long illness. Their elder daughter Sophia, then thirteen, kept a diary through that year in which most entries turn on "dearest Mamma's" health; it was published in Hamilton in 1968 and is the closest thing the house has to a contemporary interior voice. In 1855 the pillars and portico that dominate the south front were added for Sophia's wedding to William Coutts Keppel, Viscount Bury, celebrated at Dundurn on 15 November of that year. That is why the museum restores the rooms to 1855 — the year MacNab was Premier of the United Canadas, married his daughter into an English earldom and rebuilt his own façade to do it. The fall came afterwards and it was steep. Baskerville records that MacNab's political control "began to slip in 1855 and 1856", that gout kept him out of the assembly, and that he resigned in May 1856, whereupon John A. Macdonald formed a new ministry with most of the old members and without him. He returned to public life in 1860 and raised $20,000 from a land sale, "but it was not enough to satisfy his many creditors". "In August 1862 the laird of Dundurn died, a penniless debtor." His death produced the strangest documented episode in the history of the house. On Thursday 7 August 1862, between ten and noon, Bishop John Farrell received MacNab into the Roman Catholic Church at Dundurn; MacNab died there the next afternoon at four o'clock. The Anglican rector of Hamilton, the Rev. J. Gamble Geddes, publicly disputed the conversion — his letter ran in the Toronto Globe on 15 August 1862 — and Farrell answered in the Hamilton Evening Times on 16 August. Brother Alfred (Dooner) reconstructed the quarrel from the newspapers for the Canadian Catholic Historical Association in 1942-43 and records that at the funeral several eminent Protestant friends, including Chief Justices Draper and McLean, withdrew when they learned it would be a Catholic rite, leaving too few pallbearers. After MacNab the house filled up with children. John Barrett McGann, an Irish-born educator who had opened Canada's first school for Deaf pupils in Toronto in 1858, moved his institution to Hamilton in 1864; according to the marker the City of Hamilton and the Ontario Deaf Foundation unveiled on the site in 2024, eighty-one Deaf and ten blind pupils moved into the mansion in 1867, McGann paid $600 a year in rent, and the Deaf students themselves did painting, carpentry and glazing to make the house fit to live in. Sophia, by then Viscountess Bury, bought Dundurn back in 1868 and leased it to the school until she sold to the merchant and senator Donald McInnes in 1872. The provincial school opened at Belleville on 20 October 1870. McInnes sold to the City of Hamilton in 1899 for $50,000, having asked $75,000; the archived history of Dundurn Park published by the Canadian Parks Movement project records that the ratepayers approved the purchase by 2,016 votes to 914 on 8 September 1899, that council gave final approval on 2 October, and that the park opened to the public on Victoria Day, 24 May 1900. In 1908 the family gave the walled private burial ground east of the house, called Inchbuie, to the Parks Board, and in 1909 the graves were lifted: by that account seven went to the Protestant Hamilton Cemetery across York Boulevard and eight, MacNab's among them, into an unmarked grave in the Roman Catholic Holy Sepulchre Cemetery — the 1862 quarrel settled, forty-seven years later, by dividing the family. MacNab's grave stayed unmarked until 1967, when the Canadian Club of Hamilton placed a stone and a bench. That same year the house reopened, restored between 1964 and 1967 as a Centennial project at a cost the city puts near $3 million. Dundurn Castle was designated a national historic site on 13 June 1984. Camilla, Queen of Canada, is descended from Sophia and is the site's royal patron; she visited the house on 5 November 2009 during that year's royal tour.

Dundurn National Historic Site is at 610 York Boulevard, Hamilton, Ontario, on the west side of the city centre, and is run by Hamilton Civic Museums. When checked in August 2026 the castle was open Tuesday to Sunday from noon to 4 p.m., closed Mondays and some public holidays, and admission was $16.75 for adults 18-54, $14.25 for seniors 55 and over and youths 13-17, $10.00 for children 6-12, free for under-sixes and $45.75 for a family of two adults and up to four children. The same ticket covers the Hamilton Military Museum in the grounds. Entry to the house is by guided tour with costumed interpreters and takes in both floors — the family rooms above stairs and the kitchen, scullery and service rooms below. The house is only partly wheelchair accessible: the service floor and upper storeys are reached by historic stairs. Strollers are not allowed on the tour, though there is somewhere to leave them, and there is parking on site. Hours, prices and tour availability change with the season and with school bookings, so confirm on hamilton.ca before travelling. Dundurn Park itself is free and open, and is the better half of the visit for anyone interested in the ground rather than the furniture. In it are the two-acre historic kitchen garden, where staff grow more than two hundred heirloom varieties for the castle kitchen; the Cockpit, the dovecot and Battery Lodge; and the surviving earthworks and powder magazine of the 1813 British position at Burlington Heights, which is a national historic site in its own right. Hamilton Cemetery, the oldest public burial ground in the city and the first municipally owned cemetery in Canada, is directly across York Boulevard. Ghost tours of the castle are not run by the museum. They are sold separately by private operators — Ghost Walks combines a bus tour of the city with an evening inside the house for about $34 — and they run only around Halloween, with tickets released months in advance. If you want the documented history rather than the ghost, come in daylight and ask the interpreters about the school for the Deaf: the 2024 marker telling that story is on the site.