An Acre of Time

David A. Lenarcic is an assistant professor of history at Wilfrid
Laurier University.

This is a highly creative book with an imaginative premise. The author
traces the history of one acre of land on Le Breton Flats in Ottawa from
literally the beginning of time until the present day. It is, he says,
“the story, the biography, of the field beneath my feet,” the acre
being “a single page from the book of land.” Along the way the
reader learns about the First Nations whose territory originally held
the acre, the Europeans who initially settled it, the ordinary people
who lived in its buildings during succeeding decades, and the events
(such as the Great Fire of 1900) that shaped their lives. Jenkins
skilfully employs the acre’s past as a microcosm to do some good
old-fashioned storytelling about Ottawa’s and Canada’s history. In
particular, he bemoans the dispossession of Native lands, and laments
the expropriation of Le Breton Flats by the federal government in the
early 1960s, which for him signalled the death knell of a community.

The book is as much literature as it is history, and the average reader
may find the prose excessively metaphorical. Professional historians may
groan at its author’s unconventional approach and at its lack of
scholarly apparatus. Both will find the absence of any discussion of
acre society during the two world wars puzzling, if not absurd.

Yet the book has a unique appeal in the way that it personalizes and
brings to life the experiences of a plot of land and its inhabitants
through time. It gives one the urge to visit this now vacant site,
having learned so much about what happened there.