Frugal Film Project – February 2024 – The Valley

I first found the beautiful downtown of Dundas in 2010 when I did an epic two-day multi-site tour at Doors Open Hamilton. Although I would not return for several more years, I only recently started returning to this stunning downtown as it offered up a different backdrop to my photography but a familiar theme, that stunning mid-19th-century small-town feel. Dundas has this in spades, all in a small, compact, and easily walkable community.

Archaeological records show that 10,000 years ago, long before European contact, the first humans settled in the rich valley in the shadow of the Niagara Escarpment. The woods, streams, and fertile soil made it ideal for humans to live and thrive. These first peoples were the ancient ancestors of the Attawandaron, which occupied the region upon their first contact with noted French Explorer Étienne Brûlé, who noted in his journals that some 40,000 members of what the French called the Neutral Confederacy in the Burlington Bay area. The remainder of the Century would see the Attawandaron destroyed in the Beaver Wars, replaced by the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe. The area would see limited European settlement near the end of the 18th Century, with British Army Officer Captain Thomas Coote enjoying the marsh for fishing and hunting around 1787. The area was ceded to the British Crown under the terms of Treaty 3 in 1792 the goal of Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Graves Simcoe intended to use the area as an anchor point for his military supply road from Burlington Bay to the Forks of the Thames, where Simcoe intended to build a new provincial capital (London). The earliest known depiction of the region came from Elizabeth Simcoe, who is noted to have recorded some of the earliest accounts of Upper Canada. The Governor’s Road would begin construction in 1794, with a townsite being surveyed along Spencer Creek that took the name Cootes Paradise. The small village became known for its ample water supply to power milling, the soil, and its excellent agricultural spot, and a small settlement sprung up. In 1814, the village took the name Dundas after the former Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Henry Dundas, who died three years earlier. The opening of the Desjardin Canal in 1832 saw the meteoric rise of the small village. Dundas became a hub of raw materials and manufactured goods by connecting the town to the growing trade across the Great Lakes. Quarried stone from the Escarpment, beer and spirits from the three breweries, cloth and furniture, steam engines from two foundries, and flours from two mills. By 1846, the village carried a population of 1,700 supported by six churches, six taverns, four schools, a post office, a bank and a thriving commercial downtown. The town was incorporated in 1847, with the new town hall being completed in 1849. When the railway age started, Dundas seemed the ideal candidate for the rail yards for the Great Western Railway. Instead, through the machinations of Sir Allan McNabb, Hamilton would become the railway’s headquarters. While the Great Western Line did run through Dundas in 1853, it was not until 1864 that GWR completed a station for the town. While it seemed Hamilton eclipsed the Valley Town, Dundas was not out of the game, as it had a well-established and trusted industrial base. One of the town’s most prominent players, John Bertram & Sons, now a year old, established their name as a manufacturer of quality tools, many of which went into the factories building rails and engines to drive Canada’s steam-driven industrial future. By 1869, with a population of 3,500, Dundas maintained a reputation as a central manufacturing town. The town took ownership of the ageing Desjardin Canal in 1877, and while they attempted to clean it up and make it a viable option, by the end of the Century, with regular railway service, navigation on the canal ceased. It became a part of the greater efforts to clean up Cootes Paradise as a nature preserve that had started in 1866. A small arts community sprung up in Dundas in the 1930s as students from the nearby and recently established McMaster University sought housing there. To limit further growth, the Dundas Valley Conservation Area, first established in 1970, helped secure the area’s natural heritage, while in the town itself, the historical society began to save the community’s architectural heritage. Both efforts would limit the town’s growth, and while the former Bertram & Sons foundry closed up shop in the 1980s, the town clung to its history. In 2001, Dundas gave up independence and amalgamated with the City of Hamilton. Today, Dundas is a small, thriving community with artisan manufacturing and a craft brewery with a wealth of historic buildings and shops to explore.

Having to pick thirteen images from a roll where I scanned twenty-four of twenty-five frames is difficult as many photos I liked and, in many cases, have history attached. That’s the problem (or blessing) with photographing in Dundas; the amount of history that leaches out of every building is fantastic. And I want to be able to tell all of those stories. I had first to sort out all the images; while I would have liked to include some of the historic homes that I captured, I eliminated those as finding the history of a house without having the address on hand is difficult. I wanted to focus on buildings that played a crucial part in the town’s history and showed the efforts to preserve that architectural heritage. Next, I went to Google to start looking up details on the buildings I selected; when I could find (or had on hand) the history, I marked it for inclusion. From there, I went with my gut. I found the ones that interested me the most, like the Masonic Lodge that operated from 1875 to 2022 in the same building, an old Anglican Parish, one of the oldest purpose-built schools and even some items from the early 20th Century like the Music Hall and a surviving Carnegie Library. While I’m not too fond of the featured image, it was too foggy to get the shot I wanted from the lookout at the top of the Escarpment. I still need to make a point to stop there one day and take the shot, but the fog prevented that, and I did not want to risk driving through that fog on Sydenham Road; it was far too dangerous when I could only see a meter or so in front of my car.

The weather these first two months of 2024 has been weird, to put it mildly, and for the day I went out, I was excited that it would be sunny and unseasonably warm. Except with all the wildly different weather, the day started in a heavy fog. In some cases, it was a scary fog with how dense it lay across southern Ontario. Knowing that Dundas sits in a valley, I was concerned that the entire town would be blanketed in a thick fog that would make photography impossible. I was not about to let that stop me, but I did take some precautions; if the light proved too dull, I packed the 50mm f/1.8 lens with me in case I needed those extra stops while sacrificing the angle of view. Thankfully, by the time I rolled in, it had brightened enough that I could stick with the kit 28-80mm lens while shooting my roll at the box speed of ASA-200. Now, there was still plenty of fog, but thankfully, it had lifted higher into the sky by this point, so it didn’t affect my images, and having access to that 28mm lens, I could quickly shoot the narrow setting common in Dundas. However, parts of me wanted something wider, at least 24mm. I went with a classic for the developer, Adox Atomal 49, with a 1+1 dilution. Now, Atomal is excellent for films with a high silver content. Still, it does a good job on Fomapan 200 (Arista 200 in this case), so I had a bit left over from a couple of other sessions and went with constant rotation to help drop the development time. The negatives were excellent when I pulled them out from the tank and scanned them. The one thing I was concerned about was contrast, and I probably should have used a yellow filter to help out in the field and sacrificed a bit of shutter speed or depth of field. Thankfully, after scanning the film, I could constantly adjust and boost that contrast in post-processing; I need to bump this up a bit, but not as much as I thought I would need.

One of the best parts about Dundas is that while it is a part of Hamilton, it feels like a totally different place. Being older than Hamilton, it has a long history apart from the city that overshadowed Dundas. It’s an excellent spot if you love landscape and urbanscape photography, and if the weather cooperates you can get an amazing view from the top of Sydenham Road before it plunges down into the valley. Plus the people in the town are friendly and the local history museum has an excellent display on the area’s history and has done an fantastic job preserving the wealth of Victorian era buildings. If you’re in the region, it is well worth the effort to stop in Dundas rather than downtown Hamilton. Next month I’ll be heading to a favourite spot of mine in Oakville, McCraney Valley!