A statuesque salute to Canada’s first prime minister
Hamilton was the first city in the country to raise a statue to Sir John A. Macdonald
More than 20,000 people crammed the area around King and John streets on Nov. 1, 1893, to watch the unveiling of a statue to Canada’s first prime minister who had died two years earlier.
Prime Minister Sir John Thompson pressed a button that lowered a covering of flags to officially reveal the likeness of John A. Macdonald as the crowd cheered wildly.
In his address, Prime Minister Thompson said, “I consider it my first duty to tender my congratulations to … the people of Hamilton, for having been the first in the Dominion of Canada to erect and unveil this statue to the eminent statesman whose memory we are to recall today. I thank you in the name of the Government of Canada; I thank you and congratulate you in the name of the people of this Dominion; but my congratulations and thanks are wider still, for I have the pleasure here of voicing the sentiments of millions of British subjects all over the world, who will hail this as a great event and a new milestone reached in the history of the British Empire.
“As time goes on other statues will be raised to his memory in various parts of Canada, and yet the grandest thing for his memory will be that his fame needs no monument to extend or to preserve it. At the time of his death it was poetically and truthfully said, ‘His work, ‘a nation’ stands his monument.’ Of no man of any period can it be more truly said that he was the father and founder of his country.”