MR. PEE

🇨🇦 “Port Hope” Peter Smith stepped from the American colonies into the hush of the Ganaraska valley and raised a cabin where the creek still ran clear. By 1788 the place already carried his name. When Upper Canada granted the land to Elias Smith and Jonathan Walton on the condition they build mills and draw settlers, the first Loyalist families arrived in 1793 Myndert and Polly Harris, the Ashfords, the Johnsons, the Stevens, the Haskills, and the Smiths themselves with their children. Mills turned by 1797. A town plot was laid in 1800. For forty years the settlement answered to Smith’s Creek. Then, in 1818, a public meeting chose Port Hope over the pressure to call it Toronto, and by 1819 the name stood. A village with a board of police in 1834 became a town in 1850. The river that had carried beaver and sturgeon now carried the first permanent streets. Long before Smith’s cabin, First Nations had lived along these banks for more than a thousand years. The watershed itself, shaped by ice and later by Mississauga and Ojibwa presence, still feeds the lake with cold water that draws steelhead from late March and Chinook from August. On March 21, 1980, the flood of the century rushed through the town at 421 cubic metres per second; the river was later widened and deepened so the forest could breathe again. Today anglers stand in the current while geese rest on the rocks, and the same water that once floated trade canoes still holds the seasons open and closed by law. On the green before the red-brick hall stands the bronze figure of Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur T. H. Williams, sword raised, commemorating the Midland Battalion’s charge at Batoche and the life given near Fort Pitt in 1885. Nearby the cenotaph, raised in 1926 by the Daughters of the Empire, bears the names of eighty-one local men lost in the Great War and those added later from the Second World War and Korea. Banners along the avenue name Vernon Kenneth Shortreed and William Terence Ashley Nichols. The cannon that once defended the settlement now rests on its concrete carriage, silent under the clock tower that keeps the town’s time. William Leonard Hunt, the Great Farini, left these streets to walk a rope across the Ganaraska in 1859 and later to match Blondin above Niagara. He returned an inventor of folding theatre seats and circus cannons, and is buried in Union Cemetery. The Capitol Theatre, opened in 1930 as one of Canada’s first purpose-built houses for talking pictures, still shows its twilight sky ceiling. The Kinsmen Club, founded here in 1953, gave the park and gazebo that now bear Jeff Lees’s name, and the Navy League building keeps the anchors of RCSCC Skeena and NLCC Northumberland. Of every town crossed in North America, none has held the same quiet authority. The forest centre rises under spruce, the river runs clear enough for trout and salmon, and the old bank that became the Carlyle still keeps its Italianate cornice. The air itself seems to have decided long ago that haste is unnecessary. One sits on the cannon and feels the town’s measured pulse. The thought arrives without drama: this region could be home. Port Hope keeps its founding name against the larger map, its river against the flood, its monuments against forgetting, and its streets against the noise that elsewhere passes for progress. The place does not raise its voice. It simply remains, and in remaining it gathers those who recognize peace when they stand inside it. 🌲 🐟 🕊️ 🇨🇦 🏛️ 🌅 #PortHope #GanaraskaPeace #WhereTheRiverRemembers #Him🤴🏾