Canadian visitors to Frant sometimes arrive with a very specific errand. They are not here for the green, or the pub, or even the High Weald. They want to find a grave.
It belongs to Lieutenant-Colonel John By of the Royal Engineers, who died in this parish in 1836. In Canada his name is attached to streets, a statue, a park and, for nearly thirty years, an entire town. In Frant he is easy to walk past.
From Lambeth to Quebec
John By was baptised at Lambeth in August 1779, into a family of Thames watermen. He entered the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in 1797 and was commissioned two years later. In 1802 he was sent to Canada, where he worked on early locks on the St Lawrence and on the fortifications of Quebec.
He came home in 1811, served briefly in the Peninsular War, and was then appointed engineer to the Royal Gunpowder Mills. After Waterloo, with munitions in rather less demand, he was retired. It might have ended there, as a respectable and unremarkable military career.
The canal
In 1826 he was recalled. The task was the Rideau Canal: a navigable route of roughly 200 kilometres from the Ottawa River to Kingston on Lake Ontario, conceived after the War of 1812 as a military supply line that kept clear of the St Lawrence and the American border.
It involved around fifty dams and forty-seven masonry locks, built through forest, swamp and rock without modern machinery, and it was completed in 1832 — in five summer working seasons. The human cost was considerable: labourers died of disease, particularly malaria, as well as accidents. Today the canal is a National Historic Site run by Parks Canada and, since 2007, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it is still navigable.
Bytown, not quite Ottawa
This is where precision matters. The canal needed a base at its northern end, where it met the Ottawa River, and in 1826 By laid out a settlement there. It took his name: Bytown.
Bytown grew around the canal works, with an Upper Town and a Lower Town either side of them. In 1855 it was incorporated as a city and renamed Ottawa. Two years later Queen Victoria chose Ottawa as the capital of the Province of Canada, and at Confederation in 1867 it became the capital of the new Dominion.
So John By did not found Ottawa in the sense of choosing a capital, and he never saw it become one. He founded Bytown, the settlement that later became Ottawa. That is a more interesting claim, and a truer one.
A difficult homecoming
By returned to England in 1832 to criticism rather than celebration. The Treasury questioned what it considered unauthorised expenditure on the canal, and he received no honour for the work. The Canadian Encyclopedia’s verdict is blunt: he died, three years later, a broken man.
Shernfold Park
His connection to Frant began earlier. In 1820 he bought Shernfold Park, an estate in the parish, and it was there that he returned after Canada. The East Sussex Record Office holds the papers of the trustees of his will, “Col John By of Shernfold in Frant”, including, among the chancery disputes of his heirs, a claim relating to the Rideau Canal itself.
He died at Frant on 1 February 1836 and was buried at St Alban’s. The Historical Society of Ottawa has for many years helped to care for his resting place and memorial, and in 1997 placed a plaque near St Mary-at-Lambeth, where he was baptised. The connection between a Sussex churchyard and a Canadian capital has been kept up from the far side of the Atlantic with real affection.
If you’re staying at Martins Farm
St Alban’s is on the green in Frant village. It is a working parish church, so please check its own information before visiting and be respectful of services and of the churchyard. While you are there, it is worth knowing that the tower belongs to a quite different story: the 1780s survey that measured from Greenwich to Paris, which we tell separately.
He did not found Ottawa in the sense of choosing a capital. He founded Bytown, the settlement that later became Ottawa.