From hay fields to housing: The families who have called Barrhaven home for generations

Sitting at their kitchen table, surrounded by family photographs and fresh hydrangea bouquets from the garden, Betty Wallace-Clarke and her husband Glenn Clarke look out at the trees that now tower over their home in Barrhaven.

The sounds of traffic are distant. But Strandherd Drive is only a few hundred metres away, and their home is nestled on a rare five-acre plot, set back from the road, but surrounded on all sides by bustling subdivisions and new developments under construction.

Their property, and the now-mature trees that they planted themselves, are all that’s left of the original 140-acre Clarke family farm — that, and the photos and family stories they spread out on the table to share with me.

The property was settled by Glenn’s family in the 1830s or ‘40s when they emigrated from Ireland during the famine. 

Before that, the land was inhabited by Algonquin, Haudenosaunee and Anishinabewaki nations, some of which were given to the Crown in exchange for goods in the Crawford Purchase agreement of 1783.

It was then that farmers and tradespeople came to the land, settling homesteads and creating the tapestry of farms that became familiar in Glenn’s childhood. His ancestors came from Tipperary, Ireland, and soon established a dairy farm in Ottawa — then called Bytown — as among the original farming families.