PARIS PAST: The names on the stone: Paris remembers in the Legion's hundredth year
Chris Whelan
Editor
In the last week of August 1914, a crowd gathered at the corner of William and Willow Streets to see off seven young men. War had been declared barely three weeks earlier. The volunteers, the first from Paris to answer the call, climbed into Ford Model T cars for the drive to Brantford while neighbours lined the street beside the tracks of the Grand Valley Railway.
Their names survive on the matting of a photograph in the D.A. Smith Photograph Collection at the Paris Museum and Historical Society: Napoleon Larin, Aylmer Fraser, Sergeant A. E. Cullum, Patrick Fitzpatrick, Ivor Murray, William Mears and Sinclair Knill. Longtime readers may remember the image. It filled the front page of this newspaper on Remembrance Day three years ago.
It is worth looking at again. Nobody in that crowd could have known what was coming. The war they cheered off that summer would last more than four years. It would take sons, husbands and at least one daughter of this town, and it would leave Paris with a granite memorial at the corner of Mechanic Street and Grand River Street North that we still gather around every November 11.
This year, that gathering carries extra weight. Paris Legion Branch 29 received its charter in October 1926, which makes 2026 its centennial year. For a hundred years the branch has kept a promise the men in that photograph were too young to imagine needing: that the town would not forget them.
This Remembrance Day, the Independent looks back at the names, the stone, and the branch that has carried their memory across a century.
The war comes home
The Great War did not stay in Europe. It arrived in Paris through telegrams, casualty lists in the Brantford papers and empty chairs at kitchen tables.
The face of the cenotaph records where the men of Paris fought: Vimy, Lens, Hill 70, Arras, Drocourt-Quéant and the Canal du Nord. Read in order, those names trace the Canadian Corps' hardest road, from the ridge in April 1917 to the breakthroughs of the war's final hundred days in 1918.
Behind each battle are people. Private William English, son of Thomas and Jane English of Paris, served with the 4th Battalion. He was 21 when he died on October 18, 1918, less than a month before the guns fell silent.
Private Jairus Alexander Maus was born in Paris in 1880 and had gone west as a young man. He enlisted in Victoria, B.C., in November 1914 and served with the 16th Battalion. He died in December 1915 and was brought home to rest at Paris Plains Church Cemetery.
The war's reach did not end with the armistice. Private George Henry Cracknell enlisted in Paris and served with the 54th Battalion. He died on November 7, 1919, nearly a year after the fighting stopped, and his name stands on our memorial with the rest.
Some have no grave at all. Flight Sub-Lieutenant William Arthur Moyle is commemorated on the Arras Flying Services Memorial in France, which honours airmen whose remains were never found.
And then there is Dorothy Baldwin.
Dorothy Mary Yarwood Baldwin was born in Toronto in October 1891, the daughter of Robert and Mary Baldwin of Paris. She trained as a nurse at Victoria Hospital in London, enlisted as a nursing sister in May 1917, and by that summer was serving with No. 3 Canadian Stationary Hospital in France.
The hospital was housed in an old citadel at Doullens. On the night of May 29, 1918, German aircraft bombed it. Baldwin and two fellow nursing sisters, Agnes MacPherson and Eden Pringle, were in the operating room helping with surgery. All three were killed. Dorothy Baldwin was 26. The three women were buried side by side at Bagneux British Cemetery.
She is one reason the cenotaph's inscription speaks of the men and women of Paris who fell. Her memory was also kept closer to home: in a memorial sunroom bearing her name at the Willett Hospital, and on the Paris District High School First World War plaque, placed by the school's Nu Omicron society in honour of former pupils who gave their lives.
A memorial in granite
Twelve years to the day after the armistice, on November 11, 1930, Paris dedicated its war memorial.
It was designed and built by George Hunter of Hunter Granite Works in Simcoe. The front panel reads: "To the glory of God and to the memory of the men and women of Paris who fell and in honour of those who served in the Great War." In its original form, carved flames topped the posts on either side of the central cross, like torches held up by the town.
The honour of unveiling it went to Mrs. R. Baldwin, Dorothy's mother. Few in the crowd would have missed the meaning of that choice. A grieving mother drew back the cover on a monument that carried her daughter's name among the town's dead.
The dedicatory address was given by Archdeacon F. G. Scott, known to a generation of soldiers as Canon Scott, the much-loved senior chaplain of the 1st Canadian Division. He had buried many of their friends in France, and he had lost a son of his own on the Somme. The bands of the 10th Brant Dragoons and the 1st Dufferin Rifles played, and those attending received a pamphlet printing the town's Roll of Honour. Some of those pamphlets survive, and the names in them are the same names we read today.
Peace did not last. Less than a decade later, Paris sent another generation overseas. When they came home, the town added to its memorial rather than building a new one. Two granite shafts, one on each side of the original, were dedicated on November 11, 1947, for the Second World War. Inscriptions for the Korean War were added later still.
Granite is patient, but the ground underneath it is not. Over the decades the structure shifted. In May 1995, Deroche and Sons carefully removed pieces of the cenotaph so the entire foundation could be re-cemented, work paid for by the Brant War Memorial Committee and the Town of Paris.
That November 11, the 50th anniversary of victory in the Second World War, the town added a plaque thanking the citizens of Paris who served Canada in that war. It closes with four familiar words: "We will remember them."
A hundred years of Branch 29
The cenotaph tells us who was lost. Branch 29 is the story of those who came back.
Thousands of Canadian soldiers returned from the Great War wounded, disabled or simply changed, and found little support waiting for them. They looked after one another through groups such as the Great War Veterans' Association. In 1926 those scattered organizations joined together, and on July 17 of that year the Canadian Legion was formally incorporated. It would later become the Royal Canadian Legion.
Paris did not wait long. Branch 29 received its charter that October, built largely by members of the local Great War Veterans' Association. Chartered under the original name, the Canadian Legion of the British Empire Service League, it is one of the first Legion branches in the country.
The branch has called 70 William Street home for most of its life. The house came to the Legion in 1937, bequeathed by Franklin Smoke on his passing, and it has been a gathering place ever since. Over the decades the branch's work has reached well beyond veterans, into youth programs, support for seniors, and a long list of community causes.
The centennial year has been a busy one. Members marked the national Legion's 100th birthday on July 18 with cake and a community barbecue. Volunteers gathered for poppy-netting bees, and residents were invited to add to a national remembrance mural.
At the heart of the celebrations is a fibre art quilt made and donated by local artist Donna Campbell. It depicts the town's history, its landmarks and its bond with its veterans. The quilt has travelled widely over the past year, from the Paris Fair to the Paris Public Library, the Paris Museum and Historical Society, the Adelaide Hunter Hoodless Homestead and the Canadian Military Heritage Museum in Brantford. The branch then celebrated its own hundredth anniversary with a weekend of events at the start of October.
One change this year will outlast the centennial. Beginning in 2026, the Legion's national Poppy Campaign now runs on fixed dates every year, from October 24 through November 11. If you haven't yet picked up a poppy, there is still time to do so on November 11th.
Why we still gather
On Wednesday November 11th, Paris will gather once more at the corner of Mechanic Street and Grand River Street North. The procession will begin at approximately 10:45 a.m. behind the Council Chambers on Broadway Street, making its way to Mechanic Street and ending at the cenotaph, where the service will be held. Elsewhere in the county, Burford's procession leaves the Legion at 6 Park Avenue at about 10:40 a.m. for that town's cenotaph, and in St. George marchers set out from Church Street at about 10:45 a.m., heading along Main Street to the cenotaph at Main and Beverly Streets.
The ceremony will feel familiar, and that is part of its strength. The colour party will march in. Wreaths will be laid by the Legion, by families, by local businesses and by schoolchildren. At 11 o'clock the bugle will sound and the town will fall silent for two minutes. Someone will read the names.
It is fair to ask why a town keeps doing this, more than a century after the first of those names was carved. Nobody who served in the First World War is still alive. The veterans of the Second World War who once filled the front rows are now very few. Within a generation, Remembrance Day in Paris will be kept entirely by people who never met the men and women it honours.
That is exactly why it matters. Memory that isn't passed on doesn't survive. The Legion has spent a hundred years making sure it is passed on: to students who learn the names, to families who bring their children, and to newcomers who stop by the cenotaph and wonder who these people were.
When you stand at the memorial on this day, look past the battle honours to the names. Each one belonged to someone who walked our streets, shopped on Grand River Street and crossed our bridges. Many were young men much like the seven who stood at William and Willow in August 1914, waiting for the cars to Brantford. One was a young nurse whose mother pulled the cover from this very stone.
The Legion that has guarded their memory for a century still sits on William Street, a short walk from where that crowd once gathered to see them off. A hundred years on, the promise holds.
We will remember them.
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