VOL. 48, No. 3 HEAD OFFICE: MONTREAL, MARCH 1967

Things to Remember

THE HISTORY OF CANADA is in the long and continuingprocession of all the people who passed this way beforeus and left memories of themselves and their worksand the places they knew. Remembrance of themis being given a front seat at Canada’s centennial cele-brations.

Museums, preserved and restored buildings, tell thestory of men and women pitted against the wilderness,without conveniences or comforts, and often with littlehope that conditions would improve. Their valiantlives are shown in their handicrafts and documentedby letters, deeds, grants of land and old portraits,things which enchant the eye and inspire the mind.

These thoughts are close to the hearts of manyCanadians. Reports have been published of some fiftymuseums being organized as centennial projects, nineof them major new buildings.’ In addition, pioneerhomes are being restored, and some gathered togetherinto villages. All these will summon up remembranceof things past and help us to understand how Canadabecame what she is, our present circumstances, andhow we may project the advances of the past into thefuture.

MuseumsIn these days, museums are not looked upon as

stodgy dull centres. It is not enough to assemble acollection of naval and military relics, of stuffed birdsand animals, of native soup bowls and arrows. Mostmuseums of this kind are pathetic and dusty, morereminiscent of death and the tomb than of the stirringtimes which they are supposed to recall.

Museums are now finding it possible to educate in aninteresting way. Mr. J. D. Herbert, Director of Mani-toba’s Museum of Man and Nature, writes: "A museumis an institution that seeks to educate by explainingthe nature, significance and relationships of thingschosen to illustrate the wonders of nature and theworks of man."

Dr. R. Glover, Director of the Human HistoryBranch of the National Museum of Canada, sees thepurpose of the museum as fourfold, and these fourduties interlock: (1) to collect objects of scientific

historic interest pertaining to Canada; (2) to "con-serve" those objects, which means to maintain objectsin good condition or restore them as far as may bepossible; (3) to conduct research, much of which based on the study collections; (4) to educate by a widevariety of means: the publication of scientific andpopular works, exhibits, guided tours, and public lec-tures, including films.

Canada’s museums

There are, roughly, four types of museums inCanada: the National Museum, provincial museums,local museums and special museums.

In the National Museum the principal displays arerecreations of the natural settings of l~ndians andEskimos and of Canada’s wildlife. It has exquisitely-worked and well-designed dioramas of life in allperiods of Canada’s history. Its scope encompasses thewhole country, its people, and its natural history. Itcollects a wide assortment of objects, ranging frommicroscopic organisms to huge war canoes and totempoles; it records all available information about thesespecimens, and it preserves them for this generationand those to come. It is one of the great researchmuseums of the world.

Provincial museums are, of course, interested princi-pally in their own environment, but they must go out-side it on occasion for objects which contribute towardunderstanding local conditions.

This is illustrated in a small way in the New Bruns-wick Museum. The landing of the United EmpireLoyalists at Saint John on May 18, 1783 was a matterof the utmost importance not only at the time but asthe beginning of development that is still going onafter nearly two hundred years. But that event cannotbe understood if we start in a vacuum, so the Museumhas collected letters, ships’ papers and objects withwhich the Loyalists were associated in their previousdwelling places.

The most important section of the NewfoundlandMuseum, and a valuable contribution to knowledge, isits Boethuck Collection. This commemorates the

indigenous Indians of Newfoundland, a vanished racewhose last survivor, Nancy Shanawdithit, died in 1829.These were the people, says the Encyclopedia of Canada,whom the Europeans shot down at sight -- the Frencheven paid a bounty for their destruction- on theprinciple that "there is no good Indian but a dead one."

Centennial Year will see the Quebec Museum dis-playing "French Canadian Arts". This is to give anover-all picture of painting, sculpture, jewellery, draw-ing, decorative arts and folklore arts from the beginninguntil today.

The Royal Ontario Museum is Canada’s biggest, andit is among the three or four largest in the world. Itsthree acres of galleries in the main building describethe structure of the earth, its animals past and present,and the march of civilization from Babylon to earlyCanada.

Manitoba has, as its centennial project, the "Museumof Man and Nature". This concept gets away from thestereotyped split between natural history on the onehand and human history on the other. It portrays manand nature as parts of an indivisible whole -- in otherwords, man in his environment, linking together thepast, the present and the future in one great unifyingtheme.

The Western Development Museum in Saskatchewanhas several branches, each of which displays early farmmachinery and articles once common to every house-hold. A start has been made on reconstruction of apioneer village. The Saskatchewan Archives Board,with preservation of government records as its primaryfunction, has broadened out to the collection ofhistorical records.

The new Provincial Museum and Archives ofAlberta, scheduled for opening in October, will be afree public institution which will portray Alberta bycollecting, preserving and exhibiting significant naturaland historical items.

British Columbia has under construction a large newArchives-Museum complex.

Local museums

The local museum has the function of showing thelife and times of its town or county. To be fully mean-ingful it should demonstrate the process of develop-ment from pre-pioneer days to the present. Littlethings are important: the Albert County Museum inNew Brunswick displays a name-quilt used in fundraising for a community hearse- a pertinent exhibitwithin the context of telling the county’s history.

The great strength and the pulling-power of the localmuseum is its concentration on what is local. It owes itto its visitors to give them a coherent story, attractivelytold, of how and why this particular communityoriginated and developed. As Mr. Herbert remarks, itis possible to entertain and educate at the same time,or to do neither: "The choice you make will determinewhether you run a museum, a midway or a mausoleum."

Special museums

Some local museums specialize in periods or sub-jects, for example the U.E.L. Museum at Adolphus-town, the Brant Historical Museum, the Bell homesteadat Brantford, and the South Sfmcoe Pioneer Museum,with its 5,000 implements. The rectory of the churchat Batoche, Saskatchewan, has been established as amuseum telling the story of the Northwest Rebellion.

There are special museums, big and small, coveringthe development of various human activities: theNational Aeronautical Collection, Ottawa; the Cana-dian War Museum, Ottawa, and the Canadian RailwayMuseum at Delson, Quebec. The Canadian RailroadHistorical Association is devoted to the collection andpreservation of records and rolling stock relating torail and inland water transportation.

Restored houses

Life as it was lived a century ago is best seen in theold houses restored and furnished by devoted localwomen’s groups and historical associations. As thevisitor walks through their doors he enters the life andtimes of the people who lived there.

A house of particular interest because of its manyassociations is that of Simeon Perkins, in Liverpool,Nova Scotia. Colonel Perkins was a merchant andship-owner who came with the United Empire Loyalistsin 1759 and built this house in 1766. Here is Perkins’sdesk, from which he managed activities ranging fromthe West Indies to Labrador; here is that unusual pieceof furniture about which many have read but which fewhave seen- a trundle-bed. A trundle-bed is one thatrolls under an ordinary bed and can be pulled out foruse. The Perkins Hearth Cook Book, containing manyexcerpts from the Colonel’s diary, is being reissued inits fourth edition as a centennial project by the ZionGuild in Liverpool.

Not many miles away is Uniacke House, built by anIrish adventurer from Cork who became a member ofthe Nova Scotia Council and Attorney General. Aunique feature is that the closet doors have holesdrilled in them to admit cats in pursuit of mice.

Although he was influential in Nova Scotia govern-ment, Judge Thomas Chandler Haliburton is mostpopularly recalled as the author of a series of storiesabout Sam Slick, a smart Yankee peddler of clocks.Haliburton has been named "the father of the Ameri-can school of humour." His house has been preserved,and in it you may see one of the original Sam Slickclocks, with wooden works.

In 1705 Claude de Ramezay built his chfiteau inMontreal. After the conquest it was the official resi-dence of the governor-in-chief of British NorthAmerica. In 1775 the American Continental Armymade the chgtteau its headquarters. In 1776 there cameto it Benjamin Franklin as an envoy to stir the FrenchCanadians to revolution. Benedict Arnold occupiedthe chateau for several weeks. It has been preserved

so well that the mark of the old reception dais is stillto be seen on the salon wall.

Ontario has dozens of pioneer homes. At Orillia isthe Stephen Leacock Memorial Home. It containsoriginal furniture and a number of Leacock’s manu-scripts, books and letters.

The quaint and charming home of William LyonMackenzie, leader of the rebellion of 1837, is inToronto: Laurier House in Ottawa was the residenceof two prime ministers. "Chiefswood", at Middleport,was the birth-place of the Indian poetess E. PaulineJohnson. The McFarland House, near Niagara-on-the-Lake, was built in 1800, and served as a hospitalduring the War of 1812.

In far-away Yukon, you may visit the log cabinhome of poet Robert Service. Signatures of visitorsfrom all over the world are to be seen in the registeron the rickety desk where the author wrote his poems.

Churches

The pioneers paid great attention to religious obser-vance, and their church buildings stand as memorialsto their piety.

At Barrington, Nova Scotia, is the oldest non-conformist, non-denominational church building inCanada, built in 1765. The grandson of one of itsclergymen became Archbishop of Canterbury. Nearby is a memorial to the grandmother of John HowardPayne, who wrote "Home Sweet Home". St. Edward’sChurch, at Clementsport, erected by the Loyalists in1788, has many relics.

In Montreal, Notre Dame de Bon Secours (theChurch of the Sailors) was founded in 1657. Damagedby two fires, the church was replaced by the presentbuilding in 1772. Quebec City has many ancient churchbuildings, but of special interest is Notre Dame desVictoires, erected in 1688 near the site of Champlain’soriginal house.

The original mission founded on the site of PrinceAlbert, Saskatchewan, in 1866, is now a museum. TheEnglish River Mission of the Church of England, inSaskatchewan, built in 1850 of logs cut locally andwindows brought from England, is still in use.

Restored villages

Attracting scores of thousands of visitors every year,the restored pioneer villages across Canada are ourmost popular link with our past.

In these villages history drops its textbook guise andreveals itself not as a scholarly record of politicalstruggle and economic development but as the storyof people.

Port Royal Habitation, in Nova Scotia, has beenrestored in accord with Champlain’s plan for theoriginal of 1605. Visitors enter a room furnished as itwas when Marc Lescarbot sat there writing a play in1606, the first drama ever presented in North America,

and the community room, where Champlain institutedthe Order of the Good Time.

Chambly Village, near Montreal, is part of theseigniory granted to Jacques de Chambly in 1672. In itare the St. Hubert house, built in 1760, the Maigneaulthouse, built of four-inch-thick planks, morticed to aframe of hand-hewn timber, and the Lareau house,built on its present site in 1775.

Upper Canada Village, near Morrisburg, Ontario, isa living museum portraying the evolution of life in theprovince from 1795 to 1860. More than forty buildings,many of them brought here from the seven villages nowflooded by the St. Lawrence seaway and power projects,have been refurnished with authentic furniture of theirtime. Among the houses is one that is truly historical:built before 1783, it was the residence of John GravesSimcoe, the first governor of Upper Canada. Aroundthis fireplace he met with the five members of hisexecutive in 1792 and hammered out the institution ofCivil Government. Here, too, are a Glengarry logschool, immortalized in stories by Ralph Connor, andtwo churches, one an ancient log structure and theother brought on trucks from Moulinette, one of theflooded villages.

Near by is an imaginative and beautiful memorial tothe pioneers. Before their churchyards were flooded,burial stones were removed. Stones and bricks fromthe demolished buildings in the valley were broughtto this place and used to build several pleasant gardencourts. The gravestones were set into the walls.

Farther west, crumbling stonework beside the RiverWye marked the site of Sainte-Marie until a few yearsago. In 1940 the Jesuit Order acquired the propertyand sponsored archaeological investigations, and in1964 the government of Ontario began reconstructionof the settlement. The earth was removed a spoonfulat a time to reveal the mouldering remains of thepalisade and buildings. Today the visitor sees manybuildings faithfully reproduced.

There are other historical villages in Ontario,including Fanshawe, Muskoka, Jordan, Kitchener,Rockton, St. Joseph Island, and Black Creek.

On a sixty-acre site near Calgary, Alberta, has beenreconstructed a prairie settlement of the 1890’s. Origi-nal buildings have been brought here and re-erected --a North West Mounted Police barracks, a smithy, aranch, a post office, a barber shop, a bank, a church,a general store and many others.

British Columbia has its Barkerville, where goldflowing from creeks in tens of millions of dollars in the1860’s created the largest settlement west of Chicagoand north of San Francisco. The town is being rebuiltas it looked during the gold rush.

Forts and battlefields

Canadian military efforts have been in self-defence,and there are big and little forts and martello towersin every part of the country, testifying to the deter-mination of Canadians to defend their land.

Stone by stone, the mighty fortress-city Louisbourgis rising from its ruins on the Atlantic coast of NovaScotia. The first French settlers came here in 1713, andby 1755 they had a fortress-city with more than 300homes and 5,000 people. The fortifications cost somuch that King Louis XV said he expected to awakesome morning in France to see the walls looming onthe horizon.

No other place in America has seen so much fightingor so many sieges as has Fort Anne, Nova Scotia,where building started in 1635. Visitors may enter thepowder magazine, built of stone shipped from Francein 1708. The original door is still in place, supportedby one French and one English hinge.

Quebec City is full of memories. Its walls, completedin 1832, cost $35 million, and its gates are attractive.There are houses in which Montcalm lived, and onein which report has it he died after the Battle of thePlains of Abraham. Tablets mark the place where, onthe last day of 1775, the two founding races of Canadaunited for the first time to defend their country. A com-bined French-English garrison beat off an Americanrevolutionary force led by General Richard Mont-gomery and Benedict Arnold.

The first Fort Chambly, Quebec, was built in 1665by a captain in the Carignan Regiment. By 1711 thesolid stone structure, the walls of which remain today,had replaced the wooden fort. The Americans capturedthe fort in 1775, and upon retiring in the following yeardestroyed everything that would burn. Fort Lennox,on Ile-aux-Noix, near Montreal, was built by theFrench in 1759, and for nearly a year held up theBritish advance from the south. Rebuilt in 1775, it wasused as the American base for an advance on Quebec.In 1812 the British built the present fort and occupiedit until 1869.

One of Canada’s most impressive war memorials,because sensitive thought went into its construction,is at Crysler Battlefield, near Upper Canada Village.The battle, in which a British-Canadian force of 800routed an invading American force of 4,000 that wasmarching on Montreal, was fought on Crysler’s Farm,now flooded. By a stroke of genius, the top soil fromthe battlefield was trucked to high ground and builtinto a mound. The memorial, an obelisk built by theGovernment of Canada in 1895, was brought out ofthe valley and erected on the mound.

Fort Wellington, at Prescott, has been partiallyrestored. From it, in the War of 1812, British andCanadian troops sallied out to capture Ogdensburg,and in the invasion of 1838 to repel the Americansunder Von Schoultz.

Fort Henry, at Kingston, was started as a block-house to protect the naval dockyard. When ColonelJohn By began construction of the Rideau Canal toprovide a safe inland passage from Lake Ontario toOttawa and Montreal, the stone fortress was raised toguard the canal’s Ontario end. Wholly restored, thefort offers many souvenirs of the past century.

Authorized as second class marl by the Post Office 4Department, Ottawa, and for payment for postage in cash.

Fort York, Toronto, was established in 1793, andplayed a prominent role in the War of 1812. FortGeorge, at Niagara-on-the-Lake, was built in 1797and destroyed by the Americans in 1813. Its block-houses have been restored, and its powder magazinestill stands.

When Sitting Bull and the Sioux under his commandcrossed the boundary into what is now Saskatchewanafter the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the NorthWest Mounted Police established a detachment atWood Mountain. From this post, of which one build-ing has been reconstructed, a handful of police con-trolled the proud and powerful Sioux Nation.

Fort Steele is being rebuilt a few miles from Cran-brook, B.C. Some twenty houses and buildings havebeen restored.

Sites and plaques

The use of historical plaques is justified whennothing but the site of a building is to be found.

The national and provincial plaques mark placeswhere diligent research has placed an "X" to say thathere a man died bravely, and there a treaty was signedor a battle fought.

These plaques should be easily read. Some, like ournational markers, may be artistically pleasing, buttheir small raised lettering is hardly decipherable.They fail in their duty to communicate.

Without buildings, but still a memorable spotmarked by a plaque, is the site of the Parliament Oakat Niagara-on-the-Lake. On May 1, 1793, there waspassed on this spot the Seventh Act of Parliament,freeing the slaves in Upper Canada. Thus Canadabecame the first British possession to provide by legis-lation for the abolition of slavery, 79 years beforeslavery was abolished in the United States.

Cemeteries, too, have their tales to tell of the heroicpast. In the old burying ground at St. Andrews Westin Ontario is the grave of Simon Fraser, great explorer,the first to descend the Fraser River. Here, too, is amemorial to Miles Macdonell, who was superintendentof Lord Selkirk’s Red River Colony in Manitoba.

Thought kindled by all these memorials will inspireCanadians in their second century as a united nationto actions worthy of such forefathers.

On the occasion of the Centenary of Confederation,everyone who can do so will wish to visit the Legisla-tive Building in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.There is the room in which delegates discussed theUnion of British North America.

A plaque on the wall reads: "In the hearts and mindsof the delegates who assembled in this room onSeptember 1st 1864 was born the Dominion ofCanada." A plaque on the table marks the spot wherethe Articles of Confederation were signed.

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