came along a little later, were more eclectic and adventurous. In their Church architecture, as in their “Queen Anne Style” house designs, they borrowed and mixed elements from different periods and places, and even invented new ones, in a kind of asymmetrical exuberance.

A good example of this kind of Harris audacity is St. Malachy’s Church in Kinkora, where an octagonal crossing, unusual in a Gothic building, enables him to seat a large proportion of the congregation together in the centre of the building. He used this device in two of his three cathedral designs, none of which, unfortunately, was ever built.

Although Harris’s specialty was churches he also designed many houses, meeting halls, business'blocks and hotels. Charlottetown in Prince Edward Island has more of them than any other place, but there are Harris secular buildings in Summerside, Tignish, the Wilmot Valley, Springfield, New Haven, Emyvale, Kelly’s Cross, and Kinkora on the Island, and in North Sydney, Whitney Pier, Cheticamp, Antigonish, New Glasgow, Windsor, Halifax, Prince’s Lodge, Dartmouth, Canning, Gaspereaux, and New Germany in Nova Scotia. His earliest designs have mansard roofs and are Second Empire in style; but in the 18805 he went on to flirt with the Stick Style, and drew houses characterised by belts of board and batten cladding between the storeys and in gables, and by the use of scalloped shingles on the second storey. After 1895 he moved toward the Shingle Style with broad sloping roofs, umbrages around front doors, snub gables with H_(;, Mills House, Summerstde, c.1898 bargeboards decorated with lines of little holes, and round towers with cone-shaped roofs reminiscent of French chateaux. Inside there are living halls, inglenooks and well-crafted staircases, in some cases semi-circular and cantilevered.

Harris’s most spectacular assignment was as architect of a planned town in Cape Breton Island. Fifty buildings, including two hotels, were constructed in his characteristic style at Broughton near Louisbourg for an English coal-mining entrepreneur, Col. Horace Mayhew, in 1904. But the project collapsed before it had ever shipped a piece of coal, or Harris had been fully paid, and the forest reclaimed the site. Now nothing remains but the massive concrete cellars of the principal buildings.

But Broughton was not his greatest disappointment. That was the rejection in 1906 of his design for the Anglican Cathedral in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he had dreamed all his life of building. The Bishop of Nova Scotia, Clarendon Lamb Worrell, guided by his peers in Toronto and by Percy Nobbs, Professor of Design at McGill University in Montreal, obtained instead a Perpendicular Gothic design with atrocious acoustics and sight lines from the prestigious New York architect, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. It was erected under the supervision of Harris’s partner, William Horton, who by the Bishop’s direction passed materials and methods inferior to those specified. It was opened in November, 1910. A month later Harris suffered the first of the heart attacks that claimed his life in 1913.

In the absence of the cathedrals that were not built, and the planned town that failed, the more modest All Souls’ Chapel at St. Peter’s Cathedral in Charlottetown must serve as his masterpiece. Here in the dim light of its Victorian Gothic interior the mystical inner life of William Harris is given form and substance, a place where the veil between time and eternity is thin, and dreams and faith are more real than disappointments and betrayals.

Robert C.-Tuck, Michaelmas, 2000