Toronto’s Mechanics’ Institute, with its lecture, study and library facilities, became the Toronto Public Library in March 1884. It immediately met with “violent opposition manifested against it by an influential section of the city authorities, and the lamentable dissensions among the Library Board,” as reported by contemporary historian C. Pelham Mulvany. It was still […]
Vancouver began in the 1860’s as a logging and lumbering community on the south shore near the mouth of Burrard Inlet. Giant Douglas fir and cedar logs were dragged by oxen along skid-roads to tidewater, where Hasting’s mill cut them into timbers and lumber. Loaded aboard the tall-mast sailing ships, the sawn lumber […]
Be prepared to work hard or stay home, was the advice offered to prospective immigrants to Manitoba on April 15, 1879 by the Winnipeg Daily Times in the following article. Immigrants and adventurers. The people we need and those we don’t want. A floating population who find it hard to float. The eyes of all […]
The Battleford Saskatchewan Herald, December 16, 1878, tells the of story of an Indian woman’s incredible tenacity on 10-day journey, caught in an early winter. Because of domestic trouble, Meskacis decided to leave the home of her stepmother near Regina, where she and her husband had lived, and join her sister at Battleford. It was a walk of […]
“Canada is excited by the Boat race which comes off today between the ‘Paris crew’ of Saint John, N.B., and the Tyne crew of England,” says the Nova Scotia, Yarmouth Herald, September 15, 1870. Regarded as country bumpkins—a lighthouse keeper and three fishermen—the Saint John crew won the world rowing title at the […]
Two examples of the tenacity with which French Canadians clung to the soil of family farms and homes are cited in news reports. The Montreal Herald, February 10, 1863 tells about the family that had farmed the same soil at Ancienne Lorette, a village and later a suburb that was merged with Quebec City in […]
The Great Recession of 2008 began with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank and the bursting of an eight trillion dollar real estate bubble. The Great Financial Panic of 1857. might have been a lesson. It began with the collapse of a bank in Ohio, railway failures and the burst of an […]
North West Transportation, Navigation, and Railway Company has a plan to beat the United States with the first railway across the continent to the Pacific coast, the Ottawa Citizen reports, September 28, 1858. Backed by Toronto investors, the plan is the brainchild of Toronto lawyer and mining and transportation promoter Alan McDonnell. Initially, transportation […]
In London, on the last day of 1857, Queen Victoria chose a new capital for Canada. Five cities had fought fiercely for the honour and economic benefits. Four—Toronto, Kingston, Montreal and Quebec City—had at one time or another served as a capital in what was then called Canada East (Quebec) and Canada West (Ontario). […]
An America magazine has called Queen Victoria and her family “dull, coarse and illiterate.” This is “a gross and indecent attack on Her Majesty” by Harper’s magazine, protests the Nova Scotia Yarmouth Herald, December 16, 1857. It adds that Harper’s has been “expelled from several colonial libraries and reading rooms.” The incident arose from […]