30 December 2020
The subject of this blog is intersections in time as we come to the end of 2020. In south Oakville, in the last 20 years, parts of the town have been altered so radically that people who grew up here and left, upon visiting, might question whether they were on the same block they had intended to visit.
The most glaring example is what is euphemistically still called the Oakville Trafalgar lands. This parcel runs between Reynolds and Allan Streets with a north boundary of MacDonald Road and a south boundary just north of Sheddon Avenue. These lands served as one of Oakville’s earliest graveyards. When the town’s growth required a high school, the remains of the deceased were disinterred and moved to the end of Lyon’s Lane, St. Mary’s Pioneer Cemetery.
Oakville Trafalgar High School (OTHS) opened in 1908 and, about forty years later, the Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital (OTMH) was built. If you think of public spaces, and those were both public spaces, they are usually alive with human activity. The thing about that activity is that, for over one-hundred years, collectively, those two buildings created spillover that animated the neighbourhood of old Oakville. Nothing did more to reduce pedestrian traffic into the downtown than the (needless) demolition of OTHS. Five times a day, near the end of its run, OTHS had at least 20% of its population or 260 students on a “spare” period. Many of those students left campus walking to Mr. M’s sub shop, Donna Lee’s coffee shop...or crowded into cars to go to the new Baskin Robbins or McDonald’s, near Kerr St. Art students would be sent into George’s Square with large handheld hardboard easels for sketching assignments. Phys Ed classes would jog around old Oakville and students on “spare” would gather at the homes of classmates who lived locally. Is it an accident that we now see a hive of residential condominiums being constructed to increase the density surrounding the downtown core?
My second point is more poignant, sobering, and civically uncomfortable. Both of our children were born at OTMH. My grandfather died in that hospital as did the parents of two of my dearest friends. There’s nothing special about my tenure in this town i.e., thousands or tens-of-thousands of other families could make the same claims.
South of that building, at the north end of the main hall of the original OTHS (still standing) was an engraved wood memorial to the alumni who had lost their lives in the two world wars. Those memorials were removed from that hall and installed at the new high school on Devon Road. Here’s the thing: those soldiers walked the Reynolds Street hall. That hall with it’s creaking floors, plastered walls, and exposed piping. And those deceased Oakvillians probably loved and cursed it as we loved and cursed it.
All these dead and new-born Oakvillians, in the heart of the original town, and the only commemoration is the apologetic name on a (probably excellent) new community centre. If, as a town, we had any sense of decorum, when the old OTHS is repurposed, those plaques will be repatriated.
What this has to do with intersections in time is the erasure of memory. As the youngest staff who worked at OTMH and the last (original) OTHS graduating class die, the memories of what that land meant will also die. Occasionally an historian may dig up something like this recollection and revive the memory for a week but it’s the odd unrecognized coincidences that really haunt me.
Imagine the row of townhouses to be built on the south side of MacDonald Road in the next year. In fifty years, when those townhouses are well integrated and taken for granted, a baby may be born in one of those homes. Will that mother know the karmic debt owed to the lands beneath her on which the recovery rooms for mothers with newborns sat for decades? Will she know that when I walked my Scotch dogs, unknown mothers waved at us, delighted to share my dogs with their newborn children? Will she know that thousands lived and died, unmarked, in the space she now inhabits?
The erasure of memory is the erasure of self.
Thanks Dan… very thought provoking : )
John k
Thanks for reading, John. Always glad to provoke thought.
Thanks Dan – interesting facts. I was sorry to see both the high school and the hospital relocated though in hindsight this was more for reasons of nostalgia than anything practical. Their replacements are great buildings and life marches on. Best wishes to you and Sue for the new year. Stay safe …
Gitta Mullally
Best wishes to you, too, Gitta. I think of Carl often. Would love to have a coffee with you when normalcy returns. Thanks for reading and commenting.
Thank you for the enjoyable, and very relatable read.
Thanks for that comment, Janet. It’s the fact that so many people can and do relate that surprises me. I wrote it mostly to document the facts and my own sadness about those facts so when people feel the same way…really gratifying.
Thanks for the memories and the grateful insight, Dan.
Thanks, Louise. I am grateful for those insights. I think we came of age in a privileged time but not in a monied way. More in the sense of community that still existed in town and at the school. Known faces and waved hands almost everywhere you went.
Hey Dan,
Wondering if you would like to contribute this and anything else to Oakvillenews.org? Our readers would love this story.
Chris Stoate
Hi Chris, and thank you for the kind offer. I’d be happy to share this. Perhaps when you have 5 minutes we can set up a Zoom call so I can understand what Oakville News is all about. I appreciate you commenting and reaching out.
So sad they will never know that was a beautiful Hospital where my children were born my grandchildren were born I was a nurse at that hospital they won’t know the history of Oakville Trafalgar High School and how the students practice carrying Gurney’s down from the roof preparing them to go to war and they won’t care because they won’t know they won’t know the beautiful history behind that land and also the sad history of people being buried there who started Oakville our beautiful town
Thank you for those memories, Eve Elliott. When this is published (on the internet), those comments will become part of the searchable record so they are not in vain. Nor were any of your experiences judging strictly from the obvious impact they had on you. Be well.
Loved this Dan! Well written. You write about quite a few points i hadn’t known about or had forgotten. I had many if tge experiences you describe..the gym class jogging; many trips down Reynolds St. Lots of hospital memories too. I love the ‘karmic debt’ phrase. I often think about tgat wherever I am…who was here on this spot before us? What were their lives like?
Thanks again…well done!
Thank you, Paul. (I remember your dear sister, Stephanie, from OT.) I’m so glad you can confirm some of those memories. And even more gratified that others think about intersections in time, the theme of that article. Thank you for reading and taking the time to comment.
I was curious to read what you had written about my home town. I was born in OT hospital, and although I never attended OT (having went to Blakelock), I remember the buildings well, been in them more times than I care to remember and walked out of them with mixed emotions.
I always feel a great deal of sentimentality whenever I wander through the downtown, always surprised and somewhat saddened by the changes. Time marches on to the beat drummed by growth and progress; all things must change and we must change with it or be rendered obsolete. I do love when history is retold, however. It may be dredged up in the future from a dusty file and tell a story to someone not yet born. For that I’m always grateful. Thanks.
You’re welcome, Pia. The demands of growth certainly provoke change but was that “growth” helpful or harmful to the town and its people? Thanks for reading and commenting.