During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the island served as a refuge for typhoid and smallpox patients to keep them isolated from the rest of the city, though the site had to be abandoned every spring due to flooding.

Construction of the hospital was halted due to lack of funds, "shoddy workmanship", and flooding.

The island had a hospital for patients, consisting of a "miserable old clapboard shack 20 x 24 ft. and 1½ stories high, with stove pipe running up the stairway so that one had to go on hands and knees to get underneath it to go upstairs."

[10] That building was replaced by the Gary J. Armstrong Long Term Care Centre in the early 2000s.

[11] In 1986, the island was proposed as a site of the U.S. Embassy in Canada by the chair of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Andrew S.