Moncton Forum

 Riverview Town hall used to be jail

By Nina Chiarelli
Times  Transcript

Long before it was home to water bills and town offices, Riverview's town hall was home to wayward, criminal girls.

The Town of Riverview is looking at building a new municipal building to replace the existing one, seen here

The Inter-Provincial Home for Young Women, and its smaller Honour House Cottage, was built to house girls 16 and older who had committed crimes in the Maritime provinces but were thought to be open to redemption and rehabilitation.

Despite is historical significance, the old building was torn down to make way for the causeway and Findlay Boulevard more than 30 years ago after the farmland it sat upon was expropriated by the provincial government. What's left was taken over by town administration.

"The reason it was called Honour House is because that's where you would go if you were a better student in the two buildings," said Deputy Mayor Bob Hyslop.

The red brick building is Spartan in its design, with small windows, a single, now unused, door under a portico at the front of the building no longer accessible to the public.

The roof apparently leaks, and it's not fit for wheelchairs. In fact, there's no way to get up to the town hall's main reception desk unless you're prepared to climb flights of stairs outside and inside.

Still, the last vestiges of what was once a replacement for women's incarceration at Dorchester Penitentiary which had housed a small contingent of female criminals from the time of its opening in 1880 until 1922 when seven females were housed there along with 390 men, will be left only in photos if the Town of Riverview razes the site to build a new, multi-million-dollar town hall.

In his book A History of Riverview, author Alexander Pincombe said Honour Cottage "was the result of the dream and efforts of Dr. S.H. Prince, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Chairman of the Home Board for over 25 years, and was used to house girls who behaved well and were trusted."

Dave Muir, the town manager, is currently assessing the options in front of Riverview as it moves towards a construction date next year.

Besides the land on Honour House Court, the town is considering building a new town hall on at least two other parcels of land in the town, including a swath of municipal land near the reservoir and property around the Findlay business park.

Since the town has already put aside money in this year's budget to start building a new town hall, including $616,000 for phase 1 of the project town manager David Muir is already studying the feasibility of putting a new town hall together with a rink and civic complex with a wellness centre at those two sites.

The town's five-year capital budget projections also include another $7 million budgeted for 2008 to complete a town hall, with an additional $160,000 to be added to the project before 2010.

But opening up more land around the current town hall would permit council to maintain a presence near the downtown business district, something most councillors have hinted at, while fixing its main issues, including a lack of wheelchair accessibility at the current site, and a small and very outdated building.

There is no historical society in Riverview maintaining records on the building other pictures stored at town hall and books in the adjacent library.

Hyslop said when he tried to generate interest in saving the old post office several years ago he could find none to support the cause.

"There was nobody around that seemed to want to save that particular building," he said.

The building, which originally opened in 1956, doesn't appear to display any unique features or a cornerstone that could be salvaged and incorporated into a new building.

Still, the building housed young women for such crimes as prostitution, theft, vagrancy, drunkenness and attempted murder, among other things.

It also put them to work on the nearby Bulmer farm where George Bulmer was also a caretaker of sorts on the property from the mid-1930s until the home was closed in 1972 and the property was sold in 1974.

Saving the building isn't likely since a consultants report has suggested upgrading the building to code would likely be too expensive, the town manager said.

"The choice from an economical stand point would to tear the building down," Muir said.

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