Coordinates: 46°19′N 78°42′W
Mattawa Line House
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 Location of Mattawa Line House | |
| Location | Confluence of the Mattawa and Ottawa rivers, Ontario |
|---|---|
| Built | 1949 |
| Purpose | Prisoner exchanges; meetings between the two powers |
| Status | Unused since February 2022 |
The Mattawa Line House is a timber meeting hall in Canada, on the flats where the Mattawa River joins the Ottawa, built in 1949 across the line between the territories of the European Federation and the United States. Built for the exchange of prisoners after the First Euro-American War, it became the place where the two powers met in Canada throughout the Kaltkrieg. The Second Canadian Summit was held there, and on 7 February 2022 a shooting during the summit began the Second World War.
Building
The Line House is a long single-storey hall of timber on a stone footing, built across the line established in 1947. It is about 32 metres long and 9 metres wide. The northern half was built by American army carpenters and the southern half by Canadian ones, from timber cut on each side of the line, and each half has its own wood stove. It has a north door, used by the American side, and a south door, used by the Federation's, and a single table runs the length of the hall above the line, which is painted on the floor beneath it. Rules agreed in 1949 allowed each delegation its own armed close-protection officers, who stood along its own wall. The painted line was renewed each spring by a soldier from each side working from opposite ends, and photographers were admitted only at the start of a meeting.
Smaller buildings stood on each side of the line: guard posts, kitchens, and from 1975 a liaison office for each power.
History
The hall was built in 1949 under the Bern Notes, the arrangements that followed the Cessation, for the exchange of prisoners of war, the last of whom passed through it that year. It was then kept for meetings between the two powers. The shooting across the Mattawa between American and Canadian patrols on 14 June 1951, in which 14 men were killed, and an incident on the ice of Lake Timiskaming in February 1966 were both settled there within a week. The teleprinter link between Amsterdam and Washington, set up in 1963 after the Biscay Night, was routed through the hall.
The Mattawa Declaration, which ended the state of war between the two powers without a peace treaty, was signed at the table on 12 June 1975 by the Federation's Foreign Secretary, Pieter de Wit, and the American Secretary of State, Lionel Shaw. It established permanent liaison offices on each side of the line at the Line House, staffed until 2022, and the hall was used from then on for meetings on trade licences, fisheries, the repatriation of remains and incidents on the line, several hundred a year by the 1990s.
On 14 February 2020, after the arrival of the Iris, the two powers signed an accord at the Line House to pool their tracking of the Iris; it was abandoned six weeks later. The First Canadian Summit was held there from 6 September to 6 October 2021, and the Second Canadian Summit from 10 January 2022. On 7 February 2022 a member of the Federation's delegation opened fire on the American delegation in the hall, and American guards fired into the Federation's half of the building. The hall has not been used since. Its south wall and roof were damaged by fire in the shooting and in fighting along the line in the days that followed, and the liaison offices were abandoned. As of 2028 the site lies in contested ground on the line, and the building has not been repaired.
In culture
Photographs of the table and the painted line were the best-known images of the Kaltkrieg in Canada, and the Federation's postal service issued a stamp of the hall in 1975, for the Declaration. The phrase "across the table at Mattawa" was used in both powers for any negotiation between them.