War Memorials

During the First World War, Westville was at the heart of the coal-mining industry in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. In 1933, one of its churches remembered the dead - and the survivors.

Private D.M. Edgar of Hayter, Alberta  the only child of J. and E. Edgar, was killed in action March 31st, 1917.

Clarence E. Orr, a gunner of the 70th Battery CFA suffered medical complications at the base hospital in Toronto, Ontario and passed away on March 6, 1918 at the young age of 17 years and five months. 

The Hants County, Nova Scotia, war memorial drew its inspiration from British history, from the creators of Stonehenge to the builders of the British Empire.

Frank Elvin of Guelph, Ontario, was not yet twenty years old when he went missing in action in the last stages of the Battle of the Somme in October 1916. The date on the card likely refers to the date that official notification reached his family.

This bilingual booklet was available for battlefield tourists four years before the Vimy Memorial was unveiled, and remained in distribution until invading Nazi armies in 1940 confiscated the remaining stock of copies.

When the Pugwash war memorial was unveiled in 1922, the souvenir booklet listed not only the area's dead, but those people who had donated to the memorial fund, as well the amounts.

Merton Crawford of New Brunswick enlisted in the Canadian Mounted Rifles in March 1915, and went missing in action during the last weeks of the Somme campaign in 1916.

Wreaths cover the base of the cenotaph in Edmonton, Alberta, during a service held after the Second World War.

This companion to the 1920 exhibition of the Canadian War Memorials Paintings includes a catalog of the collection and photographs of some of the paintings.