Niagara is a region of confusing names. There are two Niagara Falls, one on each side of the border. Then, there’s the Niagara Falls, the waterfall. There are also two Niagara-on-the-Lakes, one is the town and the other is the wine region, the two overlap with slight border differences.
Camp Niagara has been an active military site when needed from the War of 1812 through to the mid-twentieth century. Fort George used to sit at the site until it was destroyed by the Americans in 1813. A new military base was built in 1814 and became known as Butler’s Barracks by 1854, it was the main British garrison in the Niagara Peninsula until the 1860s.
In the following century, the barracks were used as a training centre during both world wars for troops sent overseas. In 1955, the eighth World Boy Scout Jamboree was held on the site. It was the first scout jamboree held outside Europe and involved 11,000 scouts from 71 regions in the world.
Like many other Ontario cities, Niagara-on-the-Lake has a cenotaph downtown commemorating fallen soldiers. Unlike other Ontario cities, this cenotaph is a functional clock tower. The memorial is in the town’s historic district, which was built by Loyalist refugees in 1778. The town was the first capital of Upper Canada from 1791 to 1796. The town was destroyed in the War of 1812, so the residents rebuilt it in British classical style. It is among the best-preserved historic sites in the country with architecture from the first half of the nineteenth century.
One of these buildings is the Niagara District Court House. Completed in 1848, it served as a courthouse until 1862 when it was converted into a town hall. The buildings in the historic district were rehabilitated in the 1960s.
The Niagara-on-the-Lake Museum was rearranging its exhibits when I visited, so I got to go in for free. Although it meant that there was less to see, I still got to see Major General Sir Isaac Brock’s hat, he repelled American invasions in the War of 1812 and died in battle in 1813. The museum is house in Memorial Hall, built in 1906 and was the first building in Ontario that was purpose-built to be a history museum.
Fort Mississauga is a national historic site. The square-shaped fort with water on one side and a star-shaped wall on the other was built on a strategic location at the intersection of the Niagara River and Lake Ontario. The first fort was built by the French in 1678 and the one currently standing was built in 1720 and captured by the British in 1759.
