The Bahá'í Community of Ottawa, Thornhill, ON

The history of the Bahá'í Faith in Ottawa reaches back to 1926, when Queen Marie of Romania was the first Bahá'í to visit the city.
In 1940, Winnifred Harvey became the first Bahá'í resident in Ottawa. She was one of 12 children raised in rural Manitoba and earned her way through teacher’s college and university in the 1930s by scholarships.
Other early Ottawa Bahá'ís included Lucille Giscome, a journalist and one of the early African Canadian Bahá'ís, Charles Nealy Murray, a civil servant from the US, and Katherine Ferguson, the first Ottawa Bahá'í of Aboriginal descent.
In 1948, there were enough Bahá'ís to form the first Local Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of Ottawa. Winnifred Harvey remained at the heart of early community life.?Helen Andrews, a longtime member of the Ottawa community, remembers “a marvelous spirit existed at [her home]” and Winnifred Harvey was at the heart of it. “People would gather at her place and never leave, ” said another friend.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Bahá'ís from Ottawa began to support the development of Bahá'í communities in Montreal, Belleville, and Pembroke.
By the 1970s, the Bahá'í community experienced rapid expansion, particularly among university students. Bahá’í Campus Clubs started at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa around 1970.
In the early 1980s, the number of Bahá’ís of Persian background was significantly increased with the arrival of many refugees and family members of immigrants fleeing persecution in Iran.
The first Ottawa Bahá’í Centre was established at 25 Charles St. in 1980.
As the Bahá'í community continued to expand in the 1990s, there was increasing community involvement in interfaith and race unity activities. The Bahá’í Information Centre and book store opened at 224 Bank St. in 1996.
In 2001, the municipal amalgamation lead to the election of a single Local Spiritual Assembly for the Bahá'ís of the new Ottawa region.