When Kingston commanded

A 200-year-old map shows the city’s military heritage

IT CONTAINS some good houses, and stores … and all the appendages of an extensive military, and naval establishment, with as much society as can reasonably be expected, in a town so lately created from the “howling desert.” One wonders what Lt. Francis Hall would make of Kingston, Ont., today, 200 years after he penned this blunt assessment of the settlement for his travelogue Travels in Canada, and the United States, in 1816 and 1817. Kingston still has military ties, of course, home to a Canadian Forces base and the Royal Military College of Canada. But its Lake Ontario shoreside charm now also draws students to storied institutions such as Queen’s University and tourists to historic sites on leafy streets lined with a panoply of architectural styles. As a British army officer, Hall would have been keenly aware of Kingston’s strategic importance during and after the War of 1812, a fact acknowledged in the title of his otherwise bucolic painting Kingston Dockyards and Citadel from the Town ( above). Indeed, Hall might have had much to discuss with fellow soldier Lt. E.A. Smith, who created the map shown here in the same month Hall visited Kingston, which in less than a decade would be twice as large as York, as Toronto was then known. The map’s focus is military — forts Henry and Frederick, the naval hospital, dockyard and two batteries are labelled — but Smith did see fit to note two places familiar to all of Kingston’s approximately 2,000 residents. The first is a cemetery, marked “Burying Ground,” in roughly the same location as today’s Mcburney Park (a.k.a. Skeleton Park), where headstones are still occasionally found. A little farther on, out where a snooty, early 19th-century urbanite might have felt Hall’s description of a “howling desert” was still justified, is the second: “Suburbs.”