The Great War and Maud’s Community: The Great War came to Ontario County in June 1915, when local lawyer and MP Samuel Sharpe began recruiting young men for service in his brand new 116th (Ontario) Battalion. As with other communities in other counties in other dominions of the Empire, the families in Maud’s vicinity responded. Young men joined “this great adventure” quickly because they feared it might “all be over by Christmas.” But the impact on those who served as well as on the world they left behind proved indelible. Of more than a thousand Ontario County men who joined Samuel Sharpe’s battalion, only one-tenth returned; they were truly “the lost generation.” On Thursday, Oct. 13, 2011, Ted Barris joins the 100th anniversary celebrations of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s arrival in Ontario with a talk that focuses on a few of those who enlisted from Maud’s neighbourhood, what they experienced and how the war affected the young men in uniform and community back home.
When: 11 a.m., Thursday, Oct. 13, 2011.
Where: Uxbridge, Ontario.
Contact: Kathy Wasylenky, President of the Lucy Maud Montgomery Society of Ontario, 905-852-5284, kwasylenky@sympatico.ca
