Local History Minute

In Ottawa there is a ton of local history. We stroll around parliament hill as if it were just another park, Wilfred Laurier lived down the street from where I lived here, a constitutional accord was drafted across the lake from where we swim with the kids, Thomas D'Arcy McGee was assassinated near this pub over there...

I'm trying to learn a bit about the history of my new city and just found out that a piece of the anchor from the SS Mont Blanc, that was the source (if not the cause) of the Halifax explosion of 1917 landed just down the street from my house. That's about 5km from ground zero, which is impressive. Of course entire neighborhoods in two cities (Dartmouth on the other side of the Bedford Basin, as well) were leveled -- 1,600 homes were destroyed -- windows were broken throughout the entire city, the shockwaves were noticible as far away as Sydney, and over 2,000 people lost their lives and another 9,000 were injured.

So an anchor shank isn't really anything to be proud of, but history is about connections and hopefully understanding, not jingoism. So that's cool in its own way.

Cheers