William Pittman Lett

William Pittman Lett (12 August 1819 – 15 August 1892) was an Irish Canadian journalist, bureaucrat and poet. He arrived in Upper Canada as a 10-month-old baby in the family of Captain Andrews Lett, a veteran of the 28th Cameronian Regiment of Foot and a pioneer of the settlement of Richmond.

A journalist for the Orange Order, a Tory and loyal to the British Crown, William Pittman was a founding father and chronicler of Bytown, subsequently the City of Ottawa, and its first and longest-serving civic clerk (1855–1891). He promoted theatre in Ottawa and its learned societies and was a prolific commentator and poet of public affairs throughout the second half of the 19th century.

Early life

William Pittman Lett was the great-great-grandson of Thomas Lett (1600–1665), a puritan English captain in the New Model Army, who had moved from Worcestershire to Ireland when Oliver Cromwell invaded in 1649 to conquer an alliance of the Irish Catholic Confederation and English Royalists. William's father, Andrews Lett, continued the family's military and Protestant traditions in the British Imperial Army's 26th Cameronian Regiment of Foot, first mustered in 1689 from the Covenanters to fight for William of Orange to prevent any dilution of the Presbyterian faith. Andrews served under Sir John Moore in the Napoleonic Wars, particularly the Spanish Peninsular War. He married Rebecca Lett, a distant cousin from Ballyvergin, County Wexford and William Pittman was born in nearby Duncannon on 12 August 1819.

Andrews Lett had taken advantage of a land grant afforded pensioned soldiers by the British army which was establishing a reserve force in three Upper Canada townships, Lanark (1815), Perth (1816) and Richmond (1818), to deter and defend against American invasion of the colony at the end of the Anglo-American War of 1812–1815. William was 10 months old when the family stepped ashore at Richmond landing below the Chaudière Falls of the Ottawa River in June 1820 and trekked to the Richmond military settlement to clear land for a farm near Huntley. Andrews died in the Spring of 1824 and the farm was taken over by his son Andrews Lett with whom William stayed until moving with his devoutly Methodist mother to Bytown in 1828. She had remarried to Dr. James Stewart, Bytown's coroner from 1845 to 1858.