Watson's Mill Manotick

The Dickinson House Museum will be closed today for the Parisian Afternoon Tea. 🫖Regular operations will resume on Sunday. Watson’s Mill and the Used Book Store are open as usual!

The Manotick Brass Ensemble is coming to Dickinson House!

As a part of our Victorian Music exhibition in the Dickinson House, we are excited to host a performance by the Manotick Brass Ensemble on Saturday, June 27th at 1:00pm! 🎺 This event is taking place on the lawn of Dickinson House and is BYOC (Bring Your Own Chair).

In the event of rain, the performance will take place inside Watson’s Mill.

On Sunday, June 7 we released 2,000 rubber ducks from the basement of Watson’s Mill for the first ever Great Mill Duck Drop.🦆🦆🦆

Anytime we do a new event, there’s an element of doubt about whether or not it will be a success… Nerves get the best of you and you start asking yourself ‘is any one even going to come?’

Well, we got our answer… YES! 💛We were absolutely blown away by the turnout! Thank you to everyone who bought a duck ticket, came out to watch the race, volunteered their time, sponsored this event and helped activate the Square.
We are so excited to for the Duck Drop to become an annual tradition for the community. The ducks have been packed away, but we promise they’ll be back in 2027 (with a more robust raceway lol).

Thank you to Mothership Photography and to Tamarah Nutik for helping to capture the Duck Drop, and sharing their photographs with us. If you have any pictures from the event, we’d love to have them for our archive! Send them by email to [email protected]

Just as local readers would have in 1896 we have followed the day-to-day reporting on the McCaffrey Hotel fire and the resulting arson trial against local Manotick resident James O’Brien. During the Victorian era newspapers and word of mouth would have been the main ways news like this would have been shared in communities.

The McCaffrey Hotel was built at todays location on the corner of Bridge and Arthur Crescent by John McCaffrey in 1893. It replaced an earlier hotel built at the same site by James Driscoll. The McCaffrey Hotel continued to serve Manotick and local travelers until it was sold for a private residence in the late 1920’s.
(Source: The Rideau Township Historical Society- The Presence of the Past in Rideau Township.)

C'mon Manotick, let's make this Canada Day celebration even bigger. We have the drone show booked but we also have an opportunity to double the number of drones. We need to raise a bit more money to make it happen. You can make a donation online
https://manotick-village-and-community-association-100415.square.site/