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    Dundurn National Historic Site: Inside Hamilton's Museums
    Dundurn National Historic Site: Inside Hamilton's Museums
    Dundurn National Historic Site: Inside Hamilton's Museums
    Ebook75 pages52 minutes

    Dundurn National Historic Site: Inside Hamilton's Museums

    By John Goddard

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    About this ebook

    Inside Hamilton’s Museums helps to satisfy a growing curiosity about Canada’s steel capital as it evolves into a post-industrial city and cultural destination. In this special excerpt we visit Dundurn Castle, which once stood as the biggest house in British North America and reflected the outsized personality of its builder, Sir Allan Napier MacNab. Of Hamilton's museums, Dundurn Castle ranks as the biggest and most famous. The grounds host the Hamilton Military Museum, which specializes in the War of 1812. John Goddard takes us on a detailed tour of the historic home, providing fascinating historical background and insight.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDundurn
    Release dateJun 4, 2016
    ISBN9781459737327
    Dundurn National Historic Site: Inside Hamilton's Museums
    Author

    John Goddard

    John Goddard is an author, magazine writer, and former Toronto Star reporter. His books include Inside the Museums: Toronto’s Heritage Sites and Their Most Prized Objects and Rock and Roll Toronto, with pop critic Richard Crouse. John lives in Toronto.

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      Book preview

      Dundurn National Historic Site - John Goddard

      CONTENTS

      PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      DUNDURN NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

      BIBLIOGRAPHY

      PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      A medical test found a small growth a few years ago in my intestines. Cancer could not be ruled out. Surgery was recommended. Do you want to do it in Toronto or do you want the best? asked the specialist in Toronto, where I live, and when I said, the best, he referred me to Dr. Mehran Anvari at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hamilton.

      Dr. Anvari found no cancer and the incision healed well, forever placing Hamilton high in my affections. Sometimes fondness for a city comes from a happy childhood experience in the place, or a love affair with somebody who is from there. For me, emotional closeness to Hamilton came from being wheeled down the corridors of the Sister Mary Grace Wing at St. Joseph’s Hospital, through a set of wide, automatic doors, and into a bright operating theatre smelling of fresh laundry where Dr. Anvari, with businesslike cheerfulness, wished me, Good morning.

      On one of my pre-op trips to Hamilton, I visited a heritage-house museum two blocks from the downtown GO Centre. The museum is called Whitehern Historic House and Garden, built in about 1852. I was writing a book at the time on Toronto’s heritage museums, since published as Inside the Museums: Toronto’s Heritage Sites and Their Most Prized Objects. I like these museums because of the family stories they tell and because of the rare objects they often display. I also like them for the way they deepen a connection to a city. I can hardly walk through my own neighbourhood now, in what was once the Town of York, without feeling the haughty presence of Bishop John Strachan or the irascible spirit of William Lyon Mackenzie.

      I visited other Hamilton museums. The one I most tell friends about is the one I most resisted seeing at first — the Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology. I didn’t want a science lecture. The place turned out to be one of the best little museums in the country, a gem, and the perfect introduction to Hamilton’s heritage-museum network. The Steam and Tech is an old waterworks originally powered by two giant steam engines to pump fresh drinking water from Lake Ontario into people’s homes and shops as running water. Walk through its doors and you instantly step into 1859. All the antique machinery, wooden floorboards, and polished balustrades are still there, and one of the engines still turns, powered now by an electric motor to re-create the exact motion the pistons and pumps traced more than 150 years ago.

      There were other surprises. Toronto has Casa Loma, an architectural horror built by a disagreeable man whose name goes largely forgotten. I excluded Casa Loma from my Toronto book and approached Dundurn Castle with skepticism. I need not have worried. Dundurn endures as a tasteful and captivating mansion, built by Sir Allan Napier MacNab, whose rags-to-riches story is inseparable from Hamilton’s. I liked his exuberance and ambition, and his daughter left behind one of the era’s most endearing artifacts. When she was thirteen years old, as her mother lay slowly dying of a lung disease, Sophia MacNab wrote a tender diary that illuminates daily life at Dundurn in mid-nineteenth-century Upper Canada.

      Battlefield House I knew I would like, especially its annual re-enactment of the Battle of Stoney Creek, which stopped the American army from overrunning the colony in the War of 1812. Griffin House, the Joseph Brant Museum, and the Erland Lee Museum, all in their different ways, told me stories of the city that would be difficult to access any other way. I discovered teenager Billy Green, the accidental spy who helped the British against the Americans. I saw the eighteen-carat gold ring that Mohawk leader Joseph Brant bought to identify his body if he were killed. I came to admire the resourcefulness of refugee slaves Enerals Griffin and Sophia Pooley, and the curious drive of homemaking champion Adelaide Hoodless.

      The one complaint I had was the same as I had had in Toronto. After visiting a museum, I wanted something to take away, something to read. At Whitehern, the interpreter/guide led me upstairs to the upper hallway and offered me a chair in front of a wall display of family photos. The guide then delivered a

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