Helen Myhill, Renee Watkiss and Elsie Lynch approached the March Township council with a proposal: build
a public library
in 1967 to celebrate Canada’s centennial birthday. The three women asked for $5,000 to get started and to pass a bylaw in accordance with the Public Libraries Act.
They were refused the money. Or at least they were initially, but their fortunes changed when they teased that the all-male council wouldn’t take them seriously due to their extravagant mid-century hats. Their comment clearly guilted the men — the library opened six months later.
This anecdote was a favourite of Joan Dodsworth-Ware’s, Kanata’s first librarian.
The first library at the community centre was run entirely by a group of volunteers, led by Dodsworth-Ware. In 1970, it relocated, becoming a combined library and fire station at 1021 Teron Rd. It was here that Dodsworth-Ware catalogued the library’s entire contents and personally selected its fiction collection, all while raising three young boys.
So when Dodsworth-Ware’s three sons contacted Ottawa city council last year hoping to honour their late mother, who
died in 2024 at the age of 96
, the proposal was approved almost immediately.
“I can just imagine she’d be telling anybody who would listen about it,” says Edward Dodsworth, her eldest grandchild. “She couldn’t wait to tell everybody about everything.”
Dodsworth-Ware would have felt that the commemoration was rightfully deserved, Edward adds. “She definitely had a high opinion of herself. It was often very funny,” he says, reminiscing about a time when she drove into oncoming traffic and refused to admit it.
Perhaps it’s only fitting, then, that the
Beaverbrook branch of the Ottawa Public Library
will soon have two
“Joan Dodsworth-Ware” rooms
— one was certainly not enough to encapsulate her legacy.
Women’s work
Dodsworth-Ware was 11 years old when her parents sent her away from northern England to Kingston, Ont., for the duration of the Second World War.
She would have described this as a “grand adventure,” says her daughter-in-law, Jennifer Morin, who grew up only one house away from the Dodsworths, just around the corner from the library. Morin and her future husband — the youngest Dodsworth boy, John — spent their youth immersed in books at their local library.
When Morin was young, her mother often had the library babysit her and her siblings. She remembers being afraid of Mrs. Dodsworth’s authority. Years later, after Mrs. Dodsworth became Joan and then Joan became Grandma, that sense of childhood intimidation became admiration.
“When Joan had an idea, you just did it,” says Morin, on how her mother-in-law “voluntold” her to teach computers to the elderly in the early ’90s.
“She was generally gregarious and very strong-willed in how she approached things. As we got older, it was very charming,” Edward says about his grandmother.
When
Marianne Wilkinson became Kanata mayor
in 1978,
she sat on the library board, which always pleased her as a bookworm. Wilkinson worked with Dodsworth-Ware in developing Kanata’s library from the late 1960s to the early 1990s and remembers the late chief librarian’s wide-reaching efforts in community development. “She helped us set up a library in our churches.”
Until she passed away, Dodsworth-Ware stayed in touch with the former mayor, even if it was just an online order for Wilkinson’s church bake sale. Wilkinson says that working with Dodsworth-Ware was never professional; it was friends chatting about what they were reading.
John notes that his mother read almost entirely fiction, and she read every night. “I’d say she went through two or three books, it seemed, a week.”
Edward says that his grandmother loved passing along any books related to history, particularly those from when she first arrived at Halifax’s Pier 21 immigration facility. She was a self-chosen family historian, organizing the entire Dodsworth family tree into a bound book.
“She seemed to know everything about everybody in the room, even if she hadn’t seen them in decades,” Edward says.
When Kanata was established in 1979, “Overnight the March Township Public Library Board became the Kanata Public Library Board,” wrote Dodsworth-Ware in her 1992 account of the library’s history. As Kanata grew, her dedication to the library brought the city its second Hazeldean branch in 1980.
“Everybody knew Joan, she was wonderful,” says Neil Thomson, president of the
Kanata Beaverbrook Community Association
, who advocated for her commemoration as it passed through city council.
She was even responsible for
the Beaverbrook branch
being the first
public library
in Ontario to have an automated book-lending system on a modern computer, according to her McGill University speech given in 1988, two years before her retirement.
Her legacy
The rooms — currently meeting rooms A and B — will be officially renamed with plaques and a ceremony in early 2026. They can be joined into one by removing a partition between them and are frequently used by the library’s programs for all ages, such as Sensory Storytime, an autism spectrum disorder-friendly storytime program with dimmed lights, low volume and comforting sensory toys.
But the connection brought by community events like these has become a rarer commodity. Thomson believes that a post-pandemic world has left a
younger generation detached and disengaged
, asserting that it has now become an arduous task to find local volunteers.
In Kanata’s early days, its first residents were required to become members of its newly formed community association for an annual fee of $25. “If you wanted to move here, you had to join — it wasn’t an option,” says Thomson.
“Father of Kanata” Bill Teron
was adamant about creating a strong sense of community, which is why the association has been successful for so long, Thomson says. Many of the original members from 1965 still live in the area, like Wilkinson, who agrees about the significance of Kanata’s founding volunteers, like Dodsworth-Ware.
Despite Thomson’s concerns, a walk through the Beaverbrook branch on a Saturday afternoon reassures bibliophiles who worry about the next generation’s digital dependence. High school students crowded around tables, complaining about their midterms while young children carefully perused the stacks. Dodsworth-Ware would have been elated — even as her health declined, she always talked about her love for the library and its ability to connect people, says Wilkinson.
The Kanata Room’s archival collection holds decades of her correspondence between community members, where she worked diligently to improve infrastructure and co-ordinate affairs like outdoor planting initiatives and bookmobiles.
“No shortcuts!” Dodsworth-Ware noted about adopting technology into her work. But she also said that while technology excited her, a computer could never replace the sense of community that librarians create.
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