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Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology: Inside Hamilton's Museums
Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology: Inside Hamilton's Museums
Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology: Inside Hamilton's Museums
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Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology: Inside Hamilton's Museums

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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 Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology, which displays the wondrous twin waterworks engines that supplied the City of Hamilton with fresh, safe drinking water. John Goddard takes us on a detailed tour of the dignified limestone building, providing fascinating historical background and insight into the waterworks.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherDundurn
Release dateJun 18, 2016
ISBN9781459737341
Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology: 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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    Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology - John Goddard

    CONTENTS

    PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

    HAMILTON MUSEUM OF STEAM AND TECHNOLOGY

    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,

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