Letters to St.Catharines

Contents: About the Collection | About the About Page | Tech

About the Collection

This exhibition features a collection of handwritten letters from people to or from St.Catharines Ontario, the grouping of letters displays a wide array of communication including words of love, letters from grandmothers for someone’s first birthday and land ownership disputes.

Many of the letter come from notable families and influences in St.Catharines, for instance Andrew May and Erecta Mory who are shown in the collection, did eventually marry once Andrew returned from dentistry school in Buffalo. Once they married, Andrew built their home on a plot of land on Ontario street, which is now the Mayholme Foundation which assists in genealogy and historical research and is run by one of the descendants of Andrew and Erecta May. Another letter is from Frank C. McCordick who was originally a leather manufacturer but in 1915 he took command of the 35th battalion, and when he returned to St.Catharines He was Mayor from 1930-1931.

These letters are found moments in lives, that happened to be lucky enough to have been kept safe because someone in 1850 decided to keep this letter safe, to make sure that it stayed dry and safe and then one day it arrived at a university archive. This exhibition is about the power of word, the loss of that art in today’s world and how we are continually losing so much from our past in our golden age of technology, but somewhere alone the way these pages made it. They made it through the discovery of electricity, of telephones and cars and even the internet.