Susanna McLeod
Special to Ontario Construction News
The name invokes images of light filtering through sparkling glass, bubbling champagne, and guests in their finest attire. Built in England in the mid-1850s, the original plans for the oversized exhibition hall were created by politician and landscape architect Joseph Paxton (1803-1865). The modular and prefabricated design was composed of cast iron and glass, made relatively easy to dismantle and move. Built in London’s Hyde Park, Paxton’s hall was massive—500 metres in length by 140 metres wide. The inside height soared to 39 metres. The building was the envy of agricultural societies everywhere.
Paxton’s design inspired exhibition halls throughout many nations in the 19th and 20th centuries. Across the ocean, smaller and less grand versions of Crystal Palaces were erected. Over the century, the once thriving exhibition halls disappeared, one by one. The last remaining Crystal Palace still stands proudly in Picton, a town in southeastern Ontario.
Settled by United Empire Loyalists who fled north during the American Revolution, Picton (first named Hallowell) joined with a nearby village and was renamed in 1837 for British Lieutenant Sir Thomas Picton. (The officer died in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo in the United Kingdom.) Before merging, the town organized the Prince Edward County Agricultural Society and 1890, the group prepared for construction of a large agrarian exhibition building.
Preparing drawings, Andrew Irving was inspired by two buildings: Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, and the Greek-cross-shaped Crystal Palace at Kingston, Ontario. Acquiring a parcel of land from the Picton Driving Park Association in 1886, the society’s choice was established as fairgrounds since 1836; the property had a racetrack for trotting horse races and included a grandstand. It was a perfect setting for the new building. (Horseracing stopped in 1890 when export of the horses to the USA was halted due to expensive tariffs.)
Adapting the Crystal Palace plans, Irving designed a structure with wings, composed of wood instead of cast iron. Picton’s building was more practical than glitzy. With a different arrangement of windows and exterior walls than the British version, it was nonetheless impressive. In 1887, local building contractor F.T. Wright launched construction of the town’s Crystal Palace. “Completely surrounded by windows right up to its cupola, the two-storey, open-concept interior is flooded with natural light,” stated Bruce Forsyth in “Things from my travels,”Canadian Military History,January 2022.
The exhibition hall plans did not allow for conveniences such as bathrooms or kitchen facilities. The sprawling space was painted yellow and green, and featured solid wood floors, suitable for agricultural displays and competitions.
Five decades before Picton’s hall, the first Crystal Palace was constructed in Kingston, Ontario, about 85 kms east of Picton. Designed by architect Henry Horsey and built in 1856, Kingston’s exhibition hall was designed in a Greek-cross-style. The Crystal Palace featured “four equal wings converging on a central rotunda [that] provided more compact space than the axial plan of Paxton’s palace,” wrote Fern Graham in Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada Bulletin, 1994.
Four entry points welcomed exhibition visitors to the building with “round headed windows, cupola, and the fan in the transept gables can be found in the palaces erected in New York and Hyde Park,” stated Graham. The four wings were nearly 58 metres long each and almost 18 metres wide. The general height was over 10 metres, reaching to 18.3 metres at the cupola. The original Crystal Palace in Kingston was torn down in the late 1800s and rebuilt with a design by architect William Newlands at what is now the Memorial Centre location. It was demolished in 1947.
By the 1980s, Picton’s century-old Crystal Palace required urgent structural attention. Federal and provincial governments, along with Prince Edward County and private citizens, provided funds for restoration. “This unique, historically and architecturally significant building was carefully restored over a six year period from 1990 thru 1996,” notes a plaque at the exhibition hall site. The Crystal Palace was “officially re-opened by the honourable Hillary M. Weston, Lieutenant Governor of Ontario on June 15th, 1997.”
Nearly three decades later, the hall is once again showing wear. The Crystal Palace is undergoing restoration of the cupola, replacement of rotting footings, and repair or replacement of window frames. Nearing 138 years of age, Picton’s Crystal Palace is in demand as a hub of agricultural and social events, and cherished as a wedding venue.
Joseph Paxton’s dramatic Crystal Palace gave agricultural societies the impetus to construct beautiful exhibition halls throughout Europe and North America. However, the fate of Paxton’s hall in Hyde Park was not as fortunate as the building at Picton. On November 30, 1936, flames seared through the structure, turning the first Crystal Palace into smoking rubble.
The solitary remaining Crystal Palace in the world, Picton’s exhibition hall highlights the enduring Ontario architecture of the late-1800s.
© 2024 Susanna McLeod. McLeod is a Kingston-based freelance writer who specializes in Canadian History.
