being excused for “habitual tardiness or failure in [his] studies” by bringing in regimental buttons he had found while “ransacking the dust heaps of Fort George.” A found military cross-belt plate atoned for major truancies.[24]
In 1897 a Toronto newspaper reporter described the pastoral vista.
A visitor naturally asks on approaching the Commons from the town, where is Fort George? He is pointed to a grassy hillock surmounted by a grand old tree [the Lonely Sycamore]. A nearer approach shows the grassy depression compassing the old earth works that did service in the moat. Here, where once the murky cloud from cannon dulled the sunlight, a little streak of blue smoke rises from a small frame homestead nested in the heart of the old fortifications. The ruins of the magazine are there. Strong and massive in those days long ago; if the cow is out you can enter and look around.…[25]
The Wright Cottage, photo, circa 1910. For over one hundred years the interior of Fort George was intermittently leased to custodian-tenants, the Wright family being the longest occupants. The cottage incorporated the small 1814 officers’ barracks and was eventually restored as such in the 1930s. Private collection.
However, such a peaceful scene belied a major controversy. In the 1880s a golf club had laid out a nine-hole course on a portion of the ruins and adjacent Commons. By 1895 it had expanded to eighteen holes and a total distance of over five thousand yards. Janet Carnochan, herself a daughter of Scotland, described the unique course so eloquently:
… surely never had the players of the game such historic surroundings. The very names of these holes are suggestive of those days when, instead of a white sphere, the leaden bullet sped on its way of death or the deadly shell burst in fragments to kill and destroy. The terms used in describing the course — Rifle Pit, Magazine, Half-Moon Battery, Fort George, Barracks — tell the tale.[26]
The club, whose membership was predominately American summer residents, proposed cleaning up the old fort site and erecting a clubhouse within. Increasingly impassioned letters to the editor and editorials in the local and Toronto newspapers referred to the desecration of sacred heroic sites as a sellout to “Sabbath-breaking Americans,” while others countered “predatory bovines now wander at their sweet will through the bastions, the inner court is used as an oat field … A five minute ramble serves to cover one to the elbows with burs, and this is the place that patriotic ‘Canadian’ wishes to save from desecration!”[27] Surprised and bewildered by the opposition of the townsfolk, the golf club quietly abandoned its plans (see chapter 20).
In 1912 Robert Reid, a former local chief of police, was hired as caretaker of Fort George by the Department of National Defence. He undertook an aggressive cleanup of the site, and by the following spring the local newspaper exclaimed, “a wondrous change has taken place.”[28] The locals once again were enjoying the “ruins” on the Commons, but soon all would change. With the outbreak of war in 1914, Camp Niagara on the Commons was thrown into high gear (see chapter 14). The Wright’s lease was not renewed and the Fort George golf links were closed. The southern portion of the fort’s former esplanade was soon the site of a fifty-bed military hospital complete with one fully equipped operating room. It was officially opened by Lady Borden, wife of the Canadian Prime Minister. Several other auxiliary buildings were erected, including a mess, kitchens, guardhouse, and toilets.
With the end of the Great War the buildings within the ruins sat unused, but the site was finally beginning to attract some recognition from historians and politicians. The newly formed Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada dedicated a stone cairn on the site to recognize the importance of Fort George. To provide better public access to the site a road was built in 1931 from the Niagara Parkway’s intersection with John Street northwards along the river and then skirting the western edge of the ruins to connect with the end of Byron Street. (The portion skirting the fort was removed in 1990 and replaced by the Recreation Trail.) Seven years later the Parkway was also extended down to Navy Hall to connect with Ricardo Street.
In the mid 1930s, with Canada in the depths of the Depression, the federal and provincial governments were looking for make-work projects. The Niagara Parks Commission (NPC) proposed to the Department of National Defence that they would undertake the restoration/reconstruction of Forts George and Mississauga, as well as Navy Hall, if they were granted a ninety-nine-year lease for a nominal one dollar per annum. The offer was quickly accepted, but with some stipulations. To be eligible for federal funding preference would have to be given to workmen who were presently unemployed and married with dependants, they should be from the area, and the work should include as many workmen as possible. The Department of National Defence, mindful of past experience, also reserved the right to reclaim the lands with six months notice.
The two men who were instrumental in the eventual success of this ambitious undertaking were the Honourable Thomas McQuesten and Ronald Wray. McQuesten was chairman of the NPC as well as Minister of Public Works and Minister of Highways. An overachiever, this tireless visionary proposed and supervised many similar restoration projects and was the driving force behind the Queen Elizabeth Way superhighway and the Niagara River Parkway. Wray was the project historian and director of all the Niagara projects. Considered one of the historical restoration experts of the time, he was also in charge of the Fort Henry restoration in Kingston at the same time. Despite frequent commutes between Niagara and Kingston, Wray found the time to court and marry a local Niagara girl.[29]
After considerable archival research but no archaeological survey,[30] the decision was made to reconstruct the fort to its original 1799 layout. A careful survey of the site was not easy:
A century of erosion had reduced the earthworks to little more than five or six feet above the overall level of the site. In some places they were barely discernible at all … The survey … went slowly due to the almost impenetrable growth of brush and thorns which again covered the earthworks.[31]
Work began on Navy Hall in August 1937. A few weeks later a Michigan Central freight train came puffing and hissing down the King Street tracks carrying heavy excavating equipment. Such was the announcement to the sleepy little town that work was soon to start on Fort George as well. The initial restoration and reshaping of the earthworks using bulldozers took several months.[32] Only the two northern bastions had retained any semblance of their original configuration. The military hospital, mess hall, kitchens, and one caretaker’s cottage were relocated to the edge of Paradise Grove. The original 1796 stone powder magazine, particularly its interior brick lining, was in very poor shape but was eventually completely restored. The small officers’ quarters (1814) was moved to a new location[33] and restored to its presumed original appearance. All the timber for the fortifications was pressure creosoted for longevity. They lasted until 2010.
As previously described, much of the long-neglected site had become overgrown with trees of various sizes, all of which were cut down with one exception: a giant sycamore (buttonwood) tree some eighty feet tall standing as if on guard on the edge of the northeast (Brock) bastion. There was great public concern for this beautiful and impressive “Lonely Sycamore” that had become part of local lore, a favorite venue for family picnics, and praised both in prose and poetry.[34] An heroic and monumental effort[35] was made to move this landmark, which weighed an estimated one hundred tons, under the supervision of students at the Niagara Parks Commission’s School of Horticulture. In May 1939 the tree was replanted in a new location just outside the northwest bastion. The tree seemed to be viable at first, but with each succeeding spring it sprouted fewer and fewer leaves, and finally the Lonely Sycamore succumbed. A small rise in the turf near the bastion marks it final spot.
In the spring of 1939 the second phase of Fort George’s phoenix-like rise began. After the stone foundations had been completed, the fort’s lost buildings were reconstructed based on the research available at that time. All the timber used came from a first-growth white pine
