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Griffin House and Fieldcote Museum: Inside Hamilton's Museums
Griffin House and Fieldcote Museum: Inside Hamilton's Museums
Griffin House and Fieldcote Museum: Inside Hamilton's Museums
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Griffin House and Fieldcote Museum: Inside Hamilton's Museums

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Inside Hamilton’s Museums helps to satisfy a growing curiosity about Canada’s steel capital as it evolves into a post-industrial city and cultural destination. In this special excerpt we visit two sites, Griffin House and the Fieldcote Memorial Park and Museum. Griffin House honours one of Ancaster's earliest black settlers, Enerals Griffin, and pays tribute to the black slaves from the United States who fled to freedom in Upper Canada. Fieldcote Museum was built as private home and now functions as a gallery for exhibitions alternating between local history and the visual arts. John Goddard takes us on a detailed tour of the historic homes and gardens, providing fascinating historical background and insight.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherDundurn
Release dateJul 2, 2016
ISBN9781459737358
Griffin House and Fieldcote Museum: Inside Hamilton's Museums
Author

John Goddard

John Goddard is an author, magazine writer, and former Toronto Star reporter. His books include Inside the Museums: Toronto’s Heritage Sites and Their Most Prized Objects and Rock and Roll Toronto, with pop critic Richard Crouse. John lives in Toronto.

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    Book preview

    Griffin House and Fieldcote Museum - John Goddard

    CONTENTS

    PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

    GRIFFIN HOUSE

    BIBLIOGRAPHY

    PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

    A medical test found a small growth a few years ago in my intestines. Cancer could not be ruled out. Surgery was recommended. Do you want to do it in Toronto or do you want the best? asked the specialist in Toronto, where I live, and when I said, the best, he referred me to Dr. Mehran Anvari at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hamilton.

    Dr. Anvari found no cancer and the incision healed well, forever placing Hamilton high in my affections. Sometimes fondness for a city comes from a happy childhood experience in the place, or a love affair with somebody who is from there. For me, emotional closeness to Hamilton came from being wheeled down the corridors of the Sister Mary Grace Wing at St. Joseph’s Hospital, through a set of wide, automatic doors, and into a bright operating theatre smelling of fresh laundry where Dr. Anvari, with businesslike cheerfulness, wished me, Good morning.

    On one of my pre-op trips to Hamilton, I visited a heritage-house museum two blocks from the downtown GO Centre. The museum is called Whitehern Historic House and Garden, built in about 1852. I was writing a book at the time on Toronto’s heritage museums, since published as Inside the Museums: Toronto’s Heritage Sites and Their Most Prized Objects. I like these museums because of the family stories they tell and because of the rare objects they often display. I also like them for the way they deepen a connection to a city. I can hardly walk through my own neighbourhood now, in what was once the Town of York, without feeling the haughty presence of Bishop John Strachan or the irascible spirit of William Lyon Mackenzie.

    I visited other Hamilton museums. The one I most tell friends about is the one I most resisted seeing at first

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