map is from the National Archives (NMC-10628)
Skead's Mills was one of several industrial villages that developed along the new Canada Central Railway which opened in September of 1870 between LeBreton Flats and Carleton Place. In 1869 Senator Skead bought from the Thomsons, who owned Maplelawn, an extensive block of land between the railway (the present transit route) and the river and adjoining his extensive farm which was located in the present Kirkwood - Richmond Rd area.
He built a steam sawmill just down river from the current Westboro Beach the foundations which can be seen from the NCC parking lot. The mill was connected to the railway by a spur line. The mill burned in 1871 but was rebuilt by 1873.1
The mill employed 30 to 40 men and cut 15 million board feet per year as well as half a million shingles and a similar number of laths.
Skead erected a boarding house but but provided no accommodation for families. His neighbour John Birch registered a subdivision plan consisting of two streets with lots on his farm intended for the mill-hands. By 1874 a number of houses had been built on these lots and a Skead's Mills post office had even been opened in Pratt's grocery.
A depression in the early-70s resulted in Skead going bankrupt. In 1880 he lost his mill, timber limits, residence and most of his farm to his creditors who sold most of it to E.B. Eddy.
map is from the National Archives (NMC-10628)
By 1880, little had changed in Skead's Mills. John Birch's two streets were in the hands of an Ottawa real estate agent, with only Birch, a mill labourer and a mill foreman living at the west end of John St. No additional dwellings would be built until around 1910.2 The mill had changed little since the Eddy takeover, still employing approximately 30 people.
By 1900, little had changed on the former mill property. Most
was owned by the C.P.R. and some of the Skead farm on lot 31 was now owned
by neighbourhood cattle dealer James Magee who ran steers over the imaginary
streets near the ruins of the mill.3