By John Rhodes
Special to The Chatham Voice
There was an age when Chatham’s docks would be busy with lake and ocean craft delivering goods to Chatham from all over the world and would depart with lumber, grain and other commodities. The most favoured item was black walnut for the English furniture market.
Maps of the 1880s-1890s depict dock space running on both sides of the river from Second Street to Taylor Avenue. And with the boats, sailors and dock workers came whiskey dens to accommodate indulgent indiscretions.
One such of these hotels was located at the southwest intersection of Thames and Pitt streets; this would be to the immediate west of what was known as the Hadley dock which is now a municipal parking lot.
I have never been able to learn the name of this hotel which stood on this site for more than 100 years, but I have no doubt regarding the nature of the clientele being such that High Constable John Goodyear had more than regular occasion to visit the inn for dispense of his services.
Its days as a booze emporium probably ended with the “High License Laws” of the 1870s. Prior to the implementation of the law, the town had 25 hotels; subsequent to the law, there were 12.
The neighbourhood soon underwent a change to a more residential state and the hotel then became the home of A.M. Lafferty who was a well-known black educator.
Alfred Mitchell Lafferty was born in 1835 and was, in the 1870s, Principal of the Wilberforce School. He later entered law school and became one of the first Canadian-born black men to become a lawyer in Ontario.
Lafferty died in 1912 and reposes in Maple Leaf Cemetery; I think in Old Ward F.
In subsequent years, his former home was used as a storage facility by the Hadley Lumber Company and for a period of time, I think in the 1920s and 1930s, it stood vacant.
At some point during the Second World War, the old hotel became a seven-unit apartment/boarding house operated by W.H. Burrows and functioned in this format until the early 1970s when there are no more listings for it. The site is now an attractive public park.
