The Collingwood Museum is using some of today’s technology to help residents and visitors step back in time to Collingwood during the First World War.
A new virtual walking tour put together by museum staff, including educational programmer Elizabeth Mei, offers historic photographs, letters, newspaper clippings and other records arranged to tell the story of places and people in Collingwood at the time of the war.
The virtual walk, which launches Nov. 11, will be available on a Google Maps and a My Maps platform. Mei has created clickable placemarkers on the maps of Collingwood for some of the key buildings and locations during the First World War. Once those places are clicked, photos from the museum archives of the same location, but in the early 1900s, are viewable along with information about the space, the photo, and sometimes about a Collingwood resident featured in the photos or with links to the place.
Mei, a former teacher from British Columbia who started working at the museum this summer, said the task of putting together the virtual walk brought to life some of the people who lived in Collingwood more than 100 years ago.
“I started noticing people’s names a lot, too. Then, I would see them on the cenotaph, and it’s so much more impactful,” she said. “It’s sad, but it’s good putting an actual personality to the people.”
The walking tour also includes information from newspaper clippings gathered by Chic Simonato, a Second World War veteran, who made it a personal mission to create a newspaper archive of Collingwood’s war history.
The names Charles and Fred Macdonald came up a lot in Mei’s research. Charles is the architect who designed Collingwood’s cenotaph. Fred was the model for the bugler Charles put on top of the cenotaph.
“Charles Macdonald was a prisoner of war in Germany,” said Mei. “Our brains immediately go to concentration camps when we hear prisoners of war, but his letters home said he was being really well taken care of and he was allowed to receive mail. He said he could send one postcard a week.”
Newspapers in Collingwood printed guides to help people send mail to prisoners of war.
According to the Collingwood Museum exhibit set up for Remembrance Day, there were 7,000 people living in Collingwood at the time of the First World War, and 700 of them enlisted.
Records show 107 men and women died at war, and many more were injured and/or captured.
“I think it’s important to know the history of where you are and where you’re visiting,” said Mei, acknowledging the years during the First World War are a short part of a much longer history of the lands now known as Collingwood. “It makes things more real … You can say things like, ‘The curling club building was once the armoury,’ and that’s not really interesting until you see the first nine in front of the armoury.”
The “first nine” were the first people from Collingwood to enlist at the beginning of the First World War.
To launch the walking tour, Collingwood Museum staff will be offering by-donation mini-tours starting at 9:30 a.m. before the legion’s Remembrance Day ceremony at the cenotaph.
Inside the museum, and in addition to the permanent First World War exhibit installation, there is a temporary exhibit to highlight the different ways Collingwood honoured the people who came home from the war and remembered those who died.
While there was no formal Remembrance Day until Nov. 11, 1931, the town still gathered to honour veterans.
The Wall of Honour set up on Hurontario Street, where the current TD Bank is, was a temporary memorial to local soldiers and nurses who served in the First World War. The memorial was massive, standing at least 10 metres in height and about triple that in length. The three panels in the Wall of Honour were painted with the “honour roll” of names of those who enlisted, and one panel to list “the glorious dead.”
A specific fire alarm was used to let the town know when a soldier was returning home by train after the war, and in August 1919, the town hosted a parade to welcome returning soldiers home.
More information about the parade, Wall of Honour, and the other ways Collingwood honoured the people who went to war, and the unique story behind the local cenotaph, can be found at the Collingwood Museum.
Watch the Collingwood Museum Facebook page for links to the First World War virtual walking tour when it goes live.