By Galen Simmons
As locals honour those who served and are serving in the military during this year’s Remembrance Day ceremony, the St. Marys Museum will launch a new exhibit highlighting an often-forgotten but no-less-important piece of the war effort during the first and second world wars.
On Nov. 11, the museum will open its Behind the Battlefield: War on the Homefront exhibit showcasing the hard work and dedication of locals who may not have served overseas during WWI and WWII but did serve important roles at home that supported the war efforts all the same.
“We have our military gallery upstairs and we try to do a different annual exhibit up there; if there’s a specific military anniversary, we’ll focus on that, or the installation of that exhibit tends to align with our interns being onboarded, so if they have a specific military history (of interest), we’ll focus on that,” museum curator Amy Cubberley said. “Izzy (Mitchell), our intern, was assigned to kind of run with that exhibit and she had more of an interest in the homefront, and that’s one we hadn’t done in many years.
“There is some interesting history there related to our local history as well, so that’s what we’ve gone with.”
The exhibit, which will run until November 2025, explores what it took from those left at home to support a total war effort.
Locally, that included the planting of victory gardens on residential properties across town so local families could feed themselves and boost wartime food production for Canadians at home; the advent of many cutting-edge agricultural practices still in use today with the goal of boosting yield and efficiency, many of which were pioneered by local junior-farmer clubs; the encouragement of near zero-waste lifestyles by locals with used items like razor blades and tin cans being donated by local families back to the war effort to be recycled and reused; and the production of grenade casings by a mostly female workforce at the local Maxwell’s factory.
“That became a primarily female workforce during the war,” Cubberley said. “They manufactured primarily farm machinery, but during the Second World War, they got a contract to produce arms, so there were actually 2.5 million grenades produced in St. Mary. Maxwell’s is a foundry, so the casings were made here, but the actual explosives were added at a top-secret government facility. They were just making the shell of the grenade here.
“ … We have a number of grenades in our artifact collection, and grenades are still found in the community. As a child, my brother and some neighbourhood kids had a metal detector and found a grenade. The factory was on James Street, kind of backed onto the train tracks, and I suspect they were just tossing the defective ones out the back door or something.”
According to Cubberley and Mitchell, without the commitment to the war effort by those on the homefront – especially during the First World War – the world as we know it today could have been very different. While the production of food, munitions, rubber and other necessary supplies were greatly impacted by the fighting in Europe and Britain, Britain’s relationship with its colonies – something the Germans didn’t have – allowed it to continue producing the goods it needed to support the war effort and was one of many factors that tipped the scales in favour of our troops.
“A lot of Canadian society as we know it today was set up, put into place during the homefront years,” Mitchell said. “Agriculture, a lot of recycling initiatives, our income-tax system as we know it today was almost entirely set up during the First World War. We tend to have a very heavy focus on military with a capital ‘M’ during Remembrance Day, which is, of course, super valuable and absolutely worth remembering, but it’s also worth remembering that the war effort was a lot more than just the front lines.
“The thing that is so significant about the world wars is this is total war; this is all-encompassing, every area of society is focused on pushing forward the war effort. It totally makes sense that the people whose lives were on the line are at the forefront of our remembrance, but I don’t think it has to be one or the other. It’s also worth remembering all the people who participated in blood drives who gave their blood, who did charitable programs to knit bandages for civilians and soldiers on the front line. Pretty much everyone contributed to the war effort.”
The St. Marys Museum is open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Friday.
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