Editorial - May 14, 2008

By Laurie Brett

Honouring the past!

It was 1908. A single photo from that year reveals a dirt road running through the centre of Essex lined with a few horses and buggies. The new Imperial Bank at the corner of Talbot and Centre Street (on the site of today’s Bank of Montreal) had opened the previous year. Despite the setbacks caused by the explosion that shook the town on August 10, 1907, an ever-expanding retail sector was flourishing on mainstreet Essex.

A century after the fact, it’s hard to imagine how devastating that explosion must have been. We know that two brakemen, Joseph McNary and Leo Conlon, were killed by the blast when a carload of leaking nitroglycerine exploded on the tracks just west of the Essex Railway Station. Debris of every kind – steel, wood, glass – scattered across town. If you have the time and patience to scroll through the microfilm of that year’s Essex Free Press available at Essex Public Library, you’ll find that news reports were chock full of the details —the names of businesses and homeowners affected by property damage, the extent of each loss, the details of the coroner’s inquiry and the efforts of residents to rebuild.

One casualty of the explosion was Grace Methodist Church, which sat on the property currently occupied by the post office. Damage to the building was so extensive that the congregation decided that it would need to be replaced. In short order, a building committee was struck and the corner stones for the new church on Talbot Street — known today as Essex United Church — were laid only nine months after the blast.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the laying of the corner stones – a milestone event that serves to remind us how resilient our ancestors were in the face of disaster. True to form, the Essex Free Press reported every minuscule detail of the ceremony held May 25, 1908 and followed up almost a year later with a report on the opening of the new Methodist church – “a beautiful and imposing structure… as handsome a structure, both outside and inside, as any in the county.”

For better or for worse, journalism has evolved somewhat since 1908 such that we no longer publish quite as many details about community events. Instead, we honour the hard work of our ancestors by commemorating significant milestones that shaped our community. In this week’s edition of the Free Press we pay tribute to Essex United Church with a two-page centre spread featuring excerpts from the 1908 and 1909 reports and a brief history of the congregation’s 134-year history written by the church’s “official” biographer, Brian Sweetman.