 |
 |
||||||||
|
|
Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 9
by Susan Buggey Collins' Bank and WarehouseHistorical Information Collins' Bank is undoubtedly the most renowned of the historic structures in the complex area. Home of the Halifax Banking Company for more than 75 years, its connections with the commercial development of Halifax were rich and intimate. By the mid-1780s Alexander Brymer already had a structure in this convenient location (Fig. 5). It does not, however, appear to have been the same building which stood on the site in 1803 when Robert Lester offered "a neat and compact Dwelling House with good Stores" to the British Ordnance department (Fig. 6).1 Archibald M'Coll's "Wholesale Store," which stocked a large assortment of English and Scottish merchandise, probably occupied these premises between 1801 and 1805. From 1806, when Charles Prescott and William Lawson purchased the wharf, until 1812, when Prescott, Lawson & Company was dissolved, the building apparently housed their "stores opposite the Jerusalem Coffee House." During these war years they traded actively with London, Madeira and the West Indies as well as with American and Canadian ports.2 In 1813 Joseph Allison, the continuing partner of Prescott, Lawson & Company, and Enos Collins, owner of the south side of the wharf, united in a prosperous partnership which lasted 12 years. In addition to their profitable transactions during the late Napoleonic War years in prize vessels condemned by the Vice-Admiralty Court, Collins & Allison regularly imported groceries and dry goods from the United States, the West Indies and Great Britain. The firm was also busily engaged as shipping agents, while the partners were apparently active as well in insurance, exchange and real estate transactions. In 1822 both men were elected to the Committee of Trade and selected members of the newly formed Chamber of Commerce; three years later they were among the eight original partners of the Halifax Banking Company. Subsequently both were seated at the oligarchic 12-member Council Board.3 By 1825, the year in which the firm of Collins & Allison was dissolved and in which the Halifax Banking Company was formed, the stone edifice known as "Collins' Bank" was already standing at the head of the wharf. A number of factors enable the historian to date the building with considerable accuracy. First, no evidence has been found to support the contentions that the structure was erected by 1806 or by 1812.4 Collins apparently did not own the property on which the building stands until 1821 or 1822;5 yet, the similarity in architectural style between the bank and the Pickford & Black Building erected in 1830 suggests that they were the work of the same designer for the same owner. T. B. Akins dated the structure to 1823, and a legal agreement drawn in mid-1854 stated that the building had been standing for 30 years. The small number of tenants assessed on the wharf in both 1823 and 1824 implies that building on the north side of the wharf may have been in progress in both years.6 The edifice first appeared on Toler's plan of the north and south suburbs in 1830 and then on a more detailed map of the area in 1831 (Figs. 10, 11). Collins' Bank When the Halifax Banking Company announced its opening in September 1825 "in the new stone building owned by Mr. Collins,"7 it was not the chartered corporation it had hoped to be but a partnership of eight men whose personal wealth assured the business community of the institution's integrity. A monopoly until the establishment of the Bank of Nova Scotia in 1832, the Halifax Banking Company soon acquired significant London agents and British West Indies connections with which it dealt extensively in exchange. The partners also had other influence nearer home, however, as "Omicron" pointed out in The Novascotian.
Although the bank's political power was reduced during the movement toward responsible government in the 1840s, it nevertheless remained a private company for a further 40 years. Its periodically redrawn partnership agreements reflected the transition from the older generation to the younger, but did not otherwise substantially alter the operations of the "Halifax Bank," as it was then known. Expansion into branches throughout the province followed incorporation in 1872, and by the late 1870s the second generation partners had also withdrawn. From then until 1903, when the Halifax Banking Company amalgamated with the Canadian Bank of Commerce,9 its assets increased nearly tenfold, although its capital remained comparatively small and its banking practices conservative.10 From at least the mid-19th century, the Halifax Bank building housed not only the bank but also private offices. These may have existed from 1825 or the early 1830s, for Enos Collins is reputed to have kept an office on the wharf from the time of his public retirement until his death 40 years later in 1872. From the mid-1860s, offices, apparently on the ground floor, were also occupied primarily by partners of the bank who were at the same time Collins' immediate family. For at least 20 years, for example. Collins' son-in-law P. C. Hill, while mayor of Halifax and a Liberal member of the provincial legislature, maintained an office there; he had, however, removed before he became premier of Nova Scotia in 1874. Likewise. Collins' eldest son, Brenton, a lawyer like Hill, kept an office in the bank building from 1863 until he retired to England in the late 1870s. Two members of the Allison family, insurance agents, also occupied an office during the 1870s.11 After a three-year vacancy the Halifax Banking Company expanded into the premises, and the bank retained them until 1908 when the Bank of Commerce moved to its present edifice on George Street. During the next seven years the bank building appears to have been occupied only in 1912, by the Merchants' Bank of Canada. Thereafter it was rented by Gunn's Pork and Beef Packing Company and before 1920 by Roue's Mineral Water Factory.12 W. J Roue's first interest always appeared to his companions on the wharf to be ships rather than bottling, and in this building he is believed to have designed the racing schooner Bluenose.13 Collins' Warehouse The stone warehouse on the north side of Collins' Wharf was never only the home of the Halifax Banking Company. The eastern half of the building was occupied from 1825, as the whole edifice apparently had been since its erection, as a store and warehouse. E. Collins & Company, in which Enos Collins was the senior partner and William B. Fairbanks and Jonathan C. Allison the juniors, occupied the premises from the spring of 1825. Their busy trade included goods brought by the brig Indus from St. Petersburg, France and Gibraltar, but the firm is more infamously known by its petition for a drawback on imported liquors which provoked the "Brandy Dispute" of 1830.14 During the 1830s the warehouse appears to have been occupied principally by Joseph Allison & Company, a partnership of Joseph Allison with his brother David, which traded extensively in Iberian wines but also dealt in Canadian and West Indian products.15 Cochran & Company offered a wide variety of groceries, construction materials and ships' wares for sale at the warehouse in the 1840s and 1850s, while after 1857 the local manager, William H. Creighton, carried on in his own name until the late 1870s. He apparently occupied the same store where he imported "Charente, Brandies, Rotterdam Gin" and later acted more generally as a commission merchant and an official assignee.16 This warehouse appears also to have been the stone store which the British War Department rented for £150 per annum in 1862-63.17 One or more of the commission merchants located on the wharf continued apparently to occupy the building during the late 19th century. J. P. Cox & Company, for example, leased a part of the premises for a quarter-century from the late 1880s to house their milling and flour agency, while in the early 20th century Charles Harvey carried on his wholesale grocery and fruit trade there (Fig. 17); like Cox, he had developed an extensive provincial business. From 1906 until the late 1920s part of the building was used as a bonded warehouse, of which the carved CUSTOM WAREHOUSE on the lintel remains a sign. C. E. Choat & Company, grocery brokers, occupied the other portion from 1910 until the property was transferred in the 1940s.18 The Property When the property was sold in 1943 to Halifax real estate broker Melvin S. Clarke, the bank and warehouse had been owned by successive generations of the Collins family for more than 120 years. For half that time, the lands had been administered, for instance by the Eastern Trust Company,19 in the absence of the owner. That the registered deed of 1811, transferring the south side of Charles Prescott's wharf to Enos Collins, was then applied to the property on the north side of the wharf, which Collins also owned, is therefore understandable. A careful reading of several deeds makes evident, however, the confusion between the two properties that occurred when the northwest side of the wharf was sold in 1943. First, the south boundary of the water lot granted to Prescott and Lawson in 1809 was the same south boundary as that described, in reverse directions, in the deed of transfer from Prescott to Collins in 1811. Therefore, the north division line described in the deed of 1811 as running north 76 degrees east 450 ft. from Water Street into the harbour fell near the centre of Prescott's, later Collins', wharf. Moreover, this north division line was clearly not the south boundary of the wharf sold by Prescott and Lawson to John Clark in 1810, which ran north 74 degrees east (Fig. 20) and was confirmed as the division line between the two properties in 1822.20 The property on which the bank and warehouse stand was not then the land sold to Collins in 1811 but rather that transferred from Prescott to Collins by a presumably unregistered deed of 1821 or 1822. Melvin S. Clarke immediately transferred the property through Darcy Sullivan to Sullivan Storage Company, which owned the warehouse until expropriated by the City of Halifax in 1968.21 In 1947, however, Sullivan Storage Company sold the western half of the edifice to the Bluenose Bottling Company, successor to Roue's earlier Mineral Water Factory. Two years later the building was again transferred, to the Cleveland Realty Corporation, from which Donald C. Keddy first leased and then purchased it. Keddy's electrical supply firm owned the western portion of the building until it was expropriated in 1968.22 Architectural Information Erected of local ironstone in 1823 or 1824, the three-storey building bore a hipped slate roof with a cornice, spouts and conductors extending under and beyond the eaves.23 The walls — 25 in. thick on the first floor, 21 in. on the second floor and 17 in, on the third (Fig. 18) — were formed of two layers of stone filled with rubble in mortar.24 Sandstone belts marked the floor levels, while the second- and third-storey windows of the warehouse and the three small parallel windows on the south side beside the westerly loading doors indicate the original pattern of openings along the south and west sides of the edifice. The ironstone-filled aperture on the west wall, which resembles a loading door (Fig. 39), suggests that the western as well as the eastern portion of the structure may originally have been intended as a warehouse and store. A brick fire wall divided the interior into two almost equal sections (Fig. 17). Alteration to the building may have occurred very early in its history. After a robbery in "Messrs. Collins & Co.'s Counting House" in 1829,25 security was probably increased. Perhaps the upstairs safe, whose door matches that of the vault in the Pickford & Black office, was then added. The old main door of the building, possibly in the casing headed BANK, may also have been installed at this time. The door was of
Although in 1905 the cashier of the Halifax Banking Company believed the old door to have been original, so early an alteration was then beyond living memory. The large key to the door was "of English manufacture" and was "believed to have been in use from the founding of the bank in 1825 until about 1881, when more modern methods were adopted."27 Moreover, a safe-makers firm of Toronto, when consulted in the 1910s, dated the keys, either Barron's or Bramah's, from 1800 to 1834; they considered the locks to which they belonged to have been constructed by "the foremost manufacturers" and to have been "recognized as the very best of their time."28 If, as reported, however, the £1,200 burglary in 1849 was effected with skeleton keys,29 the locks in use in 1880 may not have been installed so early in this building. Significant alteration to the building did occur about mid-century. According to an agreement of 1854 between Enos Collins, owner of the bank and warehouse, and William Clark, owner of the property adjoining to the north, a crowning roof, intended to be zinc, was to be constructed over the buildings; it was to unite the ridge of the existing roof of the bank and warehouse with that of a similar hipped slate roof to be erected on Clark's stone structure then under construction (Fig. 41). At the same time, the skylights on the north side of the roof of the bank and warehouse, which would be covered by the crowning roof, were to be replaced in "the same number and kinds" on the south side overlooking Collins' Wharf.30 The roof, built apparently with a composition crown, gave the appearance of being a single hipped truncated roof above the two stone edifices (Figs. 23, 39, 43). A photograph taken about the turn of the century showed it with three shingled hoistway dormers, but no skylights, on its south side (Fig. 39). There was also a fourth dormer on the east hip. Three brick chimneys topped the structure, one above each of the fireplaces at opposite ends of the warehouse and one in the western section of the building (Figs. 39, 51). The alteration of the western portion of the building from a three-storey structure with parallel rows of small windows into a double-storey banking hall with two-storey windows on the lower floors has not been positively dated. While the transformation may have been carried out for the second generation partners in the 1850s or 1860s, the changes may instead have followed the incorporation, appointment of new directors, and expansionist mood of the 1870s. As no architectural evidence has been found to suggest that the double-storey windows were shuttered, the iron shutters which were "closed from the outside and then fastened inside by an iron bar" appear to have belonged to the older, smaller windows before their removal.31 By the turn of the century, the small third-floor windows appeared with sandstone quoins, lugsills, and three-over-six sashes. The five long windows were topped by transoms beneath plain heavy lintels; they also had sandstone quoins, lugsills and three panes of glass (Fig. 39). The door labelled BANK at the southern edge of the front probably contained the new locking arrangements to which the cashier of the Halifax Banking Company referred.32 The eastern warehouse portion of the building had also been altered by the 1890s. The westerly loading doors on the first and second floors had been filled by cement and had two different types of windows in their centres. That on the second floor appears to have followed the pattern of the other second-storey windows of the warehouse and have been a two-over-two double-hung sash, while that on the main floor had a double window set into the door opening. In place of the ground-floor loading doors beneath the middle and eastern dormers, there were respectively a plate-glass window and a doorway. The other main-floor apertures had also been elongated. Two window wells were evident at the basement level of the warehouse (Fig. 30). The fact that the belt course stopped beneath the north window on the west front suggests that there was once a window well there (Fig. 39); at least one other on the southwest side of the building is also reported.33 Two major alterations to the structure have occurred in the 20th century. On Christmas Day 1934, a fire, which caused an estimated $30,000 damage to the building and its contents, swept through wooden partitions on the upper floor, feeding upon empty boxes and straw stored there. The fire began in the western section of the building, but spread north and east to the Simon's Building and Collins' Warehouse respectively, destroying the hipped truncated roof.34 A flat roof with cornices subsequently replaced it. At the same time a fourth storey of brick was added to the warehouse, and the windows on the east end were bricked up (Fig. 55).35 No other major structural alterations have been made to the warehouse since the mid-1940s.36 The western section of the building, on the other hand, has been extensively changed to suit the needs of tenants and recent owners. By the early 1860s, in addition to the bank on the ground floor, there had been an office "over [the] Halifax Bank" and another advertised as being in the "Halifax Bank Building." In the renumbering of the streets in 1861, however, the building was assigned two street numbers37 which, a quarter-century later, were clearly applied to the two portions of the main floor—the bank on the south and an office on the north—which were separated by a wooden partition. Division of the main floor seems therefore to have occurred by, at latest, the 1860s. A brick partition parallel to the fire wall also set off the easterly section of the bank building from the bank and office fronting Water Street (Fig. 16). The wooden partition had apparently been removed before the end of the century, and the brick one by 1914 (Figs. 17, 18). A mezzanine floor fronted by glass overlooked the banking hall,38 but its date of construction is unknown. By 1914 the old iron-clad doors on all floors of the fire wall had been replaced by a solid wall; it was not, however, until later that elevators were placed in both sections of the building (Fig. 18). Substantial changes do not appear to have been made within the building until the late 1940s. Then, Cleveland Realty Corporation, under a lease to Donald C. Keddy, agreed to renovate the premises for use as a general warehouse and office, as well as to electrify the elevator and install two space heaters of the pot oil burning type.39 Either in these renovations or in changes made by Keddy after he purchased the property later the same year, the bank door on the west front was closed up and a loading door opened on the south side. At the same time, the mezzanine was replaced by a full second floor, the west stairway put in and the upstairs offices redivided. Later Keddy had the basement filled with rubble and concrete; at that time he removed the main floor vault which was discovered to have been bolted with cannon balls.40 The intricate system of locks upon this vault contributed substantially to the reputed impregnability of the old bank.41
|
||||||
|
|
|
||||||
