PDP #63: Fred Grant Square

It seems as if every Canadian community of village-size and greater, so long as it existed before 1914, must have its own war memorial. That's no surprise thanks to places like Passchendaele and the Somme. Many of them are simple and straightforward in their own way, such as in Long Branch, others with cenotaphs carved with the names of the fallen, or monuments in cities such as Toronto inscribed with the battles and wars where they fell.

My old hometown Barrie has its own memorial in Fred Grant Square, between Dunlop Street and Kempenfelt Bay, in the heart of its vestigial downtown. The statue of the soldier on top helps, I think, to ground it. While the war memorials in Peterborough and Vimy Ridge do include statues, in both places they're symbolic representations of Canada; I think the choice of the First World War soldier at Fred Grant Square represents well the down-to-earth attitudes of what was, at the time, a small-to-middling Central Ontario community.

It makes the war less of an apocalypse and more a thing of men.

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