The National Capital Commission (‘NCC’) maintains a series of walking and biking trails through the Greenspace in Ottawa, and provides a number of parking lots to access the trails. On its web site the NCC has maps showing the trails and the parking lots. There is no charge to park in the lots. Links to the maps are provided below.
In my November 4, 2015 blog posting (Brett, 2015b) I provided directions to, and photographs of, an outcrop showing convoluted biofilms and stromatolites in the Nepean Formation sandstone in the Greenspace at Kanata. That outcrop is just east of Eagleson Road and south of Robertson Road. It is part of the Old Quarry Trail. Parking at lot P5 off Eagleson provides easy access to that outcrop (and to an abandoned Nepean sandstone quarry).
This posting describes outcrops and abandoned quarries of Nepean sandstone in the NCC Greenbelt about three kilometers to the northwest of the convoluted outcrop on the Old Quarry Trail and briefly discusses their historical significance. Historically the outcrops and quarries were referred to as being west of Bells Corners, because Kanata was not in existence when the quarries were being operated. The quarries are north and south of the Queensway/Highway 417, east of Eagleson Road, west of Moodie Drive, and north of Timm Road, where the easiest access is from parking lot P3 on Corkstown Road.
The outcrops described below are south of the outcrops along Highway 417 that were designated in the 1970's and 1980's as the principal reference section for the Nepean Formation, and which are inaccessible to the public because it is illegal to stop a car on a 400 series highway unless it is an emergency, and because six foot high fences prevent one accessing the outcrops by land. The papers discussing the proposed reference section are listed in my May 22, 2017 blog posting, which discusses drill core from Natural Resources Canada’s Borehole Geophysics Test Area. The Borehole Geophysics Test Area is a kilometer south of the outcrops accessed from parking lot P3 on Corkstown Road.
Directions: Exit the Queensway/Highway 417 heading north on Moodie Drive. Take the first left onto Corkstown Road. Drive about 2 kilometers south then west along Corkstown Road. One hundred meters after crossing the railroad tracks, park in Lot P3 on your right. Exit your car and walk east along Corkstown for about 100 meters, crossing the railroad tracks. Cross Corkstown and take the Trans Canada Trail (Greenbelt Pathway West) under the Queensway. Follow the trail for about 25 minutes until you pass under the high voltage Hydro Lines. Take the narrow path on the west side of the hydro lines and walk north about 60 meters to the outcrops. Plugging 45.33271, -75.85855 into Google Maps will show the location of parking lot P3 on Corkstown Road.
The following extract from the NCC’s All Seasons Trail Map shows the location of the major roads, parking lot P3 and the Trans Canada Trail (dashed red and white). The location of the outcrops of interest is shown by the red square. The easement for the high voltage hydro lines is shown by parallel blue lines. Where the trail passes under the hydro lines the trail is shaded blue. Additional trail 20 is shown in brown, and while it does cross the outcrops of interest, the start of trail 20 was flooded on the two times that I tried to access the trail. The black box enclosing the letter ‘C’ is the approximate location of the Campbell quarry. The letter ‘Q’ in a red box represents one part of the Tillson quarry. The magenta box encompasses the outcrops of Nepean sandstone along Highway 417, which various authors tried to designate as the principal reference section for the Nepean formation. The green square shows the location of the GSC’s Borehole Geophysics Test Site. The black square gives the approximate location of an outcrop of March formation dolostone and dolomitic quartz arenite along Timm Road which is stop 5 for Donaldson and Chiarenzelli’s (2004) field trip.
Plugging 45.325504,-75.860545 into Google Maps in SatelliteView will show the outcrops along the hydro easement. The following extract shows what can be seen in Satellite View.
The light green diagonal swath is the easement for the high voltage hydro lines. I have shown the location of the Trans Canada Trail/Greenbelt Pathway West with red dots. The two white boxes with the included letter ‘T’ are below two hydro towers. The outcrops of most interest are along the hydro easement between the hydro towers and the Trans Canada Trail. The outcrops appear white and gray in satellite view. Glacial striae and chatter marks, which indicate the direction the glacier was moving are visible on the surface of glacially polished outcrops. The white box with the letter G shows the location of additional glacially polished flat outcrops.
The following two photographs show glacial striae and chatter marks at this location.
The following photograph shows ripple marks visible at this location.
The following two photographs show a distorted microbial mat texture, an example of soft sediment deformation likely caused by an earthquake. This feature can be found directly under the southern hydro lines about 25 meters southeast of the lower hydro tower shown in satellite view.
The following photo shows a pitted surface. The holes are thought to be evaporite minerals that weathered out.
Donaldson and Chiarenzelli’s Outcrop
On the map I have indicated with a black square the approximate location of an outcrop of March formation dolostone and dolomitic quartz arenite which is stop 5 for Donaldson and Chiarenzelli’s (2004) field trip. This is their description of the outcrop:
“This section is only a few metres above the top of the Nepean formation. The carbonate beds contain abundant burrows, including several varieties that are bedding-parallel. Despite the extensive bioturbation, wispy biofilm structures and a few possible dewatering structures can be seen at several stratigraphic levels. Both the siliciclastic and carbonate beds display abundant crossbedding, and carbonate intraclasts are evident in some of the siliclastic beds.”
Nepean Sandstone Quarries
In her memoir, Alice E. Wilson (1946) did not describe a type section for the Nepean Formation. She stated “The formation is named from Nepean township, where the large quarries lie from which the stone was taken for the Parliament Building of Canada, and for many other large government and other buildings (See Plate I).” Most of the quarries (now abandoned) lay on Lots 4, 5 and 6 of Concession I, Ottawa Front, Nepean township, and Lots 3, 4 and 6 of Concession II of Ottawa Front, Nepean township (see Parks, 1912, pages 133-137; and Cole, 1923, page 47), all north west of Bells Corners. Corkstown Road is the dividing line between Concession 1 and Concession 2. Concession 1 is north of Corkstown Road while Concession II is south of Corkstown Road.
One of the most important Nepean sandstone quarries was operated on Lot 6, Concession II. In the late 1800's the quarry on Lot 6, Concession II, Ottawa Front was called the Bishop’s Quarry and was owned and operated by Henry Bishop of Bell's Corners. Logan and Hunt (1862) and the Geological Corps of Canada (1876) comment that “The fine quarry from which this sandstone was obtained is on the property of Mr. H. Bishop, and from it the largest part of the stone used in the construction of the Parliament buildings at Ottawa was derived.” It was called Bishop’s Quarry as late as 1904 (see Hoffman, 1906). By 1912 the quarry was owned by T. W. Tillson of Bells Corners (see Parks, 1912). Cole (1923) also states that the quarry on Lot 6, con. II, Ottawa Front was owned by T. W. Tillson, Bells Corners. Parks (1912) reports that sandstone from the Tillson quarry was used in the construction of the Victoria Memorial Museum (now the Museum of Nature), the Mint, the Observatory at the Experimental Farm, and the addition to the Court House in Ottawa.
I marked the location of an abandoned sandstone quarry at the junction of path 20 and the Trans Canada Trail with a letter ‘Q’ in a red box. One will also notice that sandstone blocks are strewn on either side of the Trans Canada Trail from the junction of path 20 to the outcrops of interest, and that it looks like sandstone was quarried from part of the outcrops of interest. Both the abandoned quarry marked with the ‘Q’ and the outcrops of interest fall on Lot 6, Concession II, and are parts of the quarry operated by Henry Bishop and T. W. Tillson. Parks (1912) devotes a little over two pages to a description of the quarry and the different stones taken from the quarry (one a white stone with a calcareous cement; another a white stone with a slight cast of green, with silica as the cement; the third in yellow and brown bands), noting that about 20 acres of stone were exposed on the property, that the sequence of beds is different in different places on the property, and that stone was quarried from various openings at different levels .
Andrew King’s (2017) blog posting has excellent photos of sandstone blocks at the Bishop/ Tillson Quarry (which he misidentified as the Campbell Quarry). One of Andrew King’s photos shows a six to ten inch convoluted layer at the top of an outcrop, likely representing distorted microbial mats. One couldn’t take a better picture showing soft sediment deformation. (I’ll have to go back and look for the outcrop.) His photos appear to have been taken around the northern junction of path 20 with the Trans Canada Trail, the location I marked with a letter ‘Q’ in a red box. [On Sunday, October 24th I visited the abandoned Bishop’s Quarry/ Tillson Quarry looking for the outcrop in Andrew King's photo. I didn't find it. The main quarry area is quite extensive, covering about 140 meters by 80 meters. Discarded stone blocks cover an even greater area. There are a number of benches in the quarry but all are quite shallow (2 to 4 feet). The quarry does not drain well and many parts were covered in up to 2 inches of water and mud. I handicapped myself by not wearing rubber boots.] Andrew King will be familiar to those in Ottawa as an artist whose paintings challenge the observers' perceptions of reality, much like Magritte’s paintings.
The Campbell Quarry, another famous Nepean Sandstone quarry, falls on Lot 3, Concession II and can be found three lots to the west of the Tillson quarry. Nepean Sandstone is the prime building material for Canada’s Parliament Buildings. When a February 1916 fire destroyed the Centre Block and Victoria Tower , the Campbell Quarry, “supplied much of the stone for the Centre Block and all of the stone for the Peace Tower [Lawrence, 2001]” when the Center Block and Peace Tower were rebuilt. Regrettably, the Campbell Quarry is on the premises of Natural Resources Canada’s CANMET research complex and is not accessible to the public. Baird’s (1968) field trip guide to the Ottawa area contains a photograph of workmen “removing flagstone and building stone from the Nepean sandstone outcrops at the old Campbell's quarry, west of Bells Corners.” That photograph is reproduced below.
Sanford and Arnott (2006) describe the quarry as two benches with an estimated 11 vertical meters of strata. They include a photograph of the lower bench of Campbell’s quarry as Figure 64 at page 65 of their bulletin. The quarry is their station O-3. I’ve plotted the location of the Campbell Quarry on my above map with a black box enclosing the letter C based on Bernius' (1981, page 52) map showing the location of the quarry. ( See also the June 29, 2017 comment by nepeanninthenders on King’s, 2017 blog.).
The Campbell quarry had been called the Morrison Quarry before Archie Campbell joined. While the Campbell quarry is credited by Lawrence as supplying much of the stone for the rebuilt Centre Block and Peace Tower, Cole (1923) notes that “The Nepean Sandstone Quarries, Ltd., for several years operated [Howard] Rock's quarry [on Lot 5, concession I, Ottawa Front] and produced stone for use in the new parliament building at Ottawa. Several of the other quarries furnished stone for the same purpose.” Cole noted that at Rock’s quarry “Three types of stone can be recognized, a white, friable variety, a hard, white, consolidated kind, and a brown and yellow variety.”
It is somewhat ironic that Alice E. Wilson (1946) did not describe a type section for the Nepean Formation (and has been criticized for failing to do so), that Greggs and Bond (1972) designated the outcrops along Highway 17 as the principal reference section for the Nepean Formation, that the highway became a limited access highway 417 where it is not permissible to stop unless there is an emergency, yet David Lowe in his doctoral thesis and in Lowe et al. ( 2017) has shown that the Nepean (Keeseville) formation is quite variable being comprised of fluvial, eolian, marginal marine, and shallow marine facies. Alice E. Wilson was right not to describe a type section.
Christopher Brett
Ottawa, Ontario
National Capital Commission Resources
Hiking and Walking in the Greenbelt
https://ncc-ccn.gc.ca/places/hiking-and-walking-greenbelt
All Seasons Trail Map 2020-2022
https://ncc-website-2.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/national-capital-greenbelt-all-seasons-trail-map.pdf?mtime=20200729102617&focal=none
References and Suggested Reading
Agnon, Amotz; Claudia Migowski and Shmuel Marco, 2006
Intraclast breccias in laminated sequences reviewed: Recorders of paleo-earthquakes
Geological Society of America, Special Paper 401
http://indico.ictp.it/event/a08182/session/61/contribution/39/material/0/0.pdf
Baird. D.M., 1968.
Guide to the Geology and Scenery of the National Capital Region. Copyright Geological Survey of Canada. Misc. Report 15, 188 pages https://doi.org/10.4095/119888
Bernius, G. R., 1981,
Boreholes Near Ottawa for the Development and Testing of Borehole Logging Equipment - A preliminary Report GSC Paper 81-1C, p. 51-53
https://ftp.maps.canada.ca/pub/nrcan_rncan/publications/STPublications_PublicationsST/116/116175/pa_81_1c.pdf
Bernius, G. R., 1996,
Borehole Geophysical Logs from the GSC Borehole Geophysics test site at Bell’s Corners, Nepean, Ontario, GSC Open File 3157, 38 pages, doi:10.4095/207617
(pdf 6427 KB)
Brett, Christopher, 2015a
Soft-Sediment Deformation (Seismites) in Nepean Sandstone Close to the Rideau Lake Fault. Blog posting, Thursday, 22 October 2015
http://fossilslanark.blogspot.com/2015/10/soft-sediment-deformation-seismites-in.html
Brett, Christopher, 2015b
In 1924 a report of Stromatolites in Nepean Sandstone by Dr. Morley E. Wilson of the Geological Survey of Canada, and Other Reports of Stromatolites and Biofilms in the Potsdam
Outcrops of Biofilms and Stromatolites in the Nepean Formation Sandstone at Kanata.. Blog posting, Wednesday, 4 November 2015
http://fossilslanark.blogspot.com/2015/11/in-1924-report-of-stromatolites-in.html
Brett, Christopher, 2015c
Dewatering Structures, Biofilm Structures, Glacial Striae and Chatter Marks in Potsdam Sandstone near Newboro, Eastern Ontario. Blog posting, Wednesday, 23 December 2015
Brett, Christopher, 2015d
More Evidence of Microbial Mats in Potsdam Sandstone near Newboro, Eastern Ontario. Blog posting, Tuesday, 29 December 2015
http://fossilslanark.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2016-01-26T09:11:00-08:00&max-results=7
Brett, Christopher, 2017
Why has hardly anyone referred to core from the GSC’s Borehole Geophysics Test Area at Bell’s Corners, Ottawa, when the core contains a 50 cm thick shale layer in the Nepean Formation and the core straddles the boundary between the Nepean Formation and the overlying March Formation? Blog Posting, Monday, 22 May 2017
http://fossilslanark.blogspot.com/2017/05/why-has-hardly-anyone-referred-to-core.html
Cole, L. H., 1923
Silica in Canada. Its Occurrence, Exploitation, and Uses. Part I -.Eastern Canada. Canada Mines Branch, Publication 555, 1923, 135 pages (9 sheets), https://doi.org/10.4095/307756
Donaldson, J. Allan and Chiarenzelli, Jeffrey R., 2004
Stromatolites and Associated Biogenic Structures in Cambrian and Ordovician Strata in and Near Ottawa, Ontario; 76th Annual Meeting, Field Trip Guidebook, New York State Geological Association, 283 pages, at pages 1-20
Geological Corps of Canada, 1876
Descriptive catalogue of a collection of the economic minerals of Canada, and notes on a stratigraphical collection of rocks [Philadelphia International Exhibition, 1876]
Geological Corps of Canada; Geological Survey of Canada, Separate Report no. 405, 1876, 152 pages, https://doi.org/10.4095/216063
Hewitt, D. F., 1964
Building Stones of Ontario, Part IV, Sandstone. Industrial Mineral Report No. 17, at pages 17-18
http://www.geologyontario.mndmf.gov.on.ca/mndmfiles/pub/data/imaging/IMR017/IMR017.pdf
Hoffman, G.C., 1906
Chemistry and Mineralogy, pages 337A-349A, in Geological Survey of Canada , Annual Report for 1904 , Annual Report (New Series) Volume XVI, published in 1906
King, Andrew, 2017
The Deserted Stone Quarry Of Canada’s Parliament Buildings. Blog posting June 2017
https://ottawarewind.com/2017/06/28/finding-the-forgotten-quarry-of-canadas-parliament-buildings/
Lawrence, D.E., 2001
Building Stones Of Canada’s Federal Parliament Buildings, GeoScience Canada, Volume 28, Number 1, 18 pages
Logan, W. E. and Hunt, T. S., 1862
Descriptive catalogue of a collection of the economic minerals of Canada, and of its crystalline rocks sent to the London International Exhibition for 1862. Geological Survey of Canada, Separate Report no. 398, 1862, 89 pages, https://doi.org/10.4095/216057
Lowe, David G., Arnott,R.W.C., Nowlan, Godfrey S., McCracken, A.D., 2017
Lithostratigraphic and allostratigraphic framework of the Cambrian–Ordovician Potsdam Group and correlations across Early Paleozoic southern Laurentia; Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, Published on the web 6 February 2017, doi: 10.1139/cjes-2016-0151
McCormick Rankin Corporation, 2009
REPORT ON Stage 1 Archaeological Assessment West Transitway Extension Part Lots 8 - 11, Concession 1 Part Lots 8 - 16, Concession 2 Geographic Township of Nepean Carleton County, Ontario PIF Number: P311-007-2009 REPORT Report Number: 09-1121-0008 (5000)
https://app06.ottawa.ca/calendar/ottawa/citycouncil/occ/2010/09-08/tc/04d%20-%20Document%204%20Appendix%20C%20-%20Stage%201%20Archaeology%20Report.pdf
Parks, W. A., 1912
Report on the Building and Ornamental Stones of Canada, Volume 1. Canada, Department of Mines, Mines Branch. 376 pages At pages 133-135
Sanford , B. V. And Arnott, R.W.C., 2010
Stratigraphic and structural framework of the Potsdam Group in eastern Ontario, western Quebec, and northern New York State. Geological Survey of Canada, Bulletin 597, 83 pages
Seccaspina, Linda, 2020
Tag Archives: campbell quarry
https://lindaseccaspina.wordpress.com/tag/campbell-quarry
Wilson, Alice E., 1946
Geology of the Ottawa-St. Lawrence Lowland, Ontario and Quebec. Geological Survey of Canada. Memoir 241
Wilson, Alice E., 1956
A Guide to the Geology of the Ottawa District, Volume 70, 1, The Canadian Field-Naturalist, 73 pages, including five plates, and 1 map sheet. Campbell Quarry at page 23.
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/90128#page/33/mode/1up
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Highway Traffic Act
R.R.O. 1990, Reg. 627: USE OF CONTROLLED-ACCESS HIGHWAYS BY PEDESTRIANS
1. (1) Subject to subsection (2), pedestrians are prohibited from using those parts of the controlled-access highways described in Schedule 1.
(2) Subsection (1) does not apply to pedestrians,
(a) engaged in police, highway maintenance, highway construction or vehicle inspection duties;
(b) within commuter parking lots established and maintained by the Ministry or proceeding directly between such lots and adjacent intersecting highways;
(c) within truck inspection stations or pulp load check areas established and maintained by the Ministry;
(d) making use of a controlled-access highway where the use is necessary because of an emergency; or
(e) crossing at a traffic control signal or a crosswalk.
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