Province House reopens: where Canada began, mapped

On Saturday, October 24, about 2,000 people walked into Province House in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, on the day it reopened. The building on Richmond Street had been closed since 2015. It is where, in September 1864, the conversations began that created Canada three years later, and it is known across the country as the Birthplace of Confederation.

"The building is an iconic landmark in P.E.I. and it's been closed for the last 12 years," said Joey Jeffrey, the clerk of the Legislative Assembly, as it reopened.

A building that was coming apart

In February 2014, an engineering report found that the foundation was crumbling and that part of the building could collapse. The roof leaked, the masonry was deteriorating and the plaster was peeling. The legislature moved out in 2015 to a nearby building, and the restoration began.

It was meant to take three to five years. It took more than a decade, slowed by the pandemic, supply problems, rising material costs and a shortage of skilled tradespeople. Parks Canada put the total at 138 million Canadian dollars. Every stone and piece of wood was cleaned or replaced, the windows and heritage woodwork were restored, an elevator went in, and a geothermal wellfield now heats and cools the building. The basement floor was lowered by about five feet, and the clerk joked that it is "no longer the dungeon" it once was.

The building

The cornerstone was laid in May 1843, and the legislature first met there in 1847. Its architect, Isaac Smith, was self-trained and came from Yorkshire, and he gave it the Greek and Roman style of the public buildings of its day. The Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island has sat there ever since, which makes it the second-oldest legislature in Canada. The oldest is Nova Scotia's own Province House in Halifax, which opened in 1819.

September 1864: a meeting that changed its plan

The Charlottetown Conference, held from September 1 to 9, 1864, was called to discuss something smaller than Canada: a union of the three Maritime colonies, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, which Britain encouraged. The Province of Canada, today's Ontario and Quebec, asked to join the talks and widened them to a union of all four. Days of negotiation, and nights of socializing, turned the idea into a plan. The delegates met again in Halifax on September 10 and 12.

The road to 1867

From Charlottetown, the road to Canada runs across the map:

• Quebec City, 386 miles to the west, as the crow flies. At the Quebec Conference, from October 10 to 27, 1864, the delegates wrote the 72 Resolutions, the draft of a constitution.
• London, 2,796 miles across the Atlantic. The London Conference opened on December 4, 1866, at the Westminster Palace Hotel on Victoria Street, opposite Westminster Abbey. It produced the British North America Act, which received royal assent on March 29, 1867. The hotel was demolished in 1974.
• Ottawa. On July 1, 1867, the Act took effect and the Dominion of Canada was born, with Ottawa as its capital and four provinces: Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

The island that waited

Prince Edward Island was not one of them. The colony that hosted the first conference stayed out of the union until July 1, 1873, when debts from building its railway helped persuade it to join.

Today the island is tied to the mainland by the Confederation Bridge, opened on May 31, 1997. It runs 8 miles from Borden-Carleton to Cape Jourimain, New Brunswick, and is Canada's longest bridge and the world's longest over ice-covered water.

Province House stands at 165 Richmond Street, Charlottetown, once again home to the island's legislature and open to visitors.

Think you can place it? Our Playground's Monuments and statues quiz is open to everyone, and today's Landmarks match has five more places to find.