Ontario historical plaques by subject — the people, places and events they mark

Plaques about people in Ontario outnumber every other kind, and that tells you something about how the province chose to remember itself. Ontario historical plaques by subject sorts the collection the way the plaques sort themselves — the people who did something, the places where it happened, and the events that were worth casting in bronze.

Chloe Cooley and the 1793 Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada · Photo by contributor Colin Semple - November, 2007

People

Politicians, soldiers, doctors, athletes, writers and the occasional inventor. Plaques about people in Ontario tend to be biographical to a fault: birth, education, achievement, death, in a hundred words. The subject groupings below separate them by what the people did rather than when they lived. Ontario historical plaques by subject keeps that biographical habit visible rather than hiding it behind a date range. The groupings are the ones the original record used, and they are uneven in the way such schemes always are: a category for naturalists sits beside one for archaeology, because someone decided at the time that both were worth separating. Rather than impose a tidier scheme after the fact, the original divisions are kept, and a plaque that fits two of them appears under both.

Places

Churches, mills, bridges, canals, libraries, schools and houses. A places plaque usually stands at the thing it describes, which makes it the easiest kind to find and the most likely to have been moved when the thing itself was demolished. Reading Ontario historical plaques by subject rather than by county puts a mill in Perth next to a mill in Essex, which is usually the more interesting comparison.

Events

Battles, rebellions, fires, floods, foundings and first crossings. Plaques marking events are the ones most often revised, because the wording of a rebellion or a raid rarely survives fifty years of new scholarship unchallenged. Where a plaque marking events has been contested, visitors have usually said so in the notes. Dates are another recurring source of correction. A founding year cast in bronze in 1955 often rests on a single secondary source, and local historians have spent decades since correcting them in print. Where a visitor has supplied a documented correction it sits below the transcription rather than replacing it.

Ontario historical plaques by subject: every grouping

The subject groupings used across the collection.