Although soldiers had died overseas before the First Word War, as evidenced by Bracebridge’s Memorial Park memorializing two local men killed in the Boer War, no special day was designated for those who never came home. Only after the Great War ended was a day officially designated to hallow the sacrifice of soldiers’ lives.
“Armistice Day” commemorated the November 11 date in 1918 when fighting ceased. However, it was a mere add-on to Thanksgiving. In the 1920s, Legionnaires pushed war-mindful Ottawa (where both the Peace Tower and National War Memorial were being built) to move Thanksgiving to a different date, so November 11 Armistice Day was exclusively to remember – during two minutes of silence in factories, shops, and schools, and wreath laying – those killed in the Great War. By 1931, to enhance solemnity, the Legion achieved a more potent name-change to “Remembrance Day.”
By then, Muskoka’s first legions had emerged, organized locally by returning soldiers. Unwilling to talk with family or friends about the war’s traumas, or their recurring nightmares, or their strange awkwardness with civilian life, they sought understanding and reassuring camaraderie with fellow veterans. Muskoka’s vets created club-like / pub-like atmospheres for themselves. Their halls offered refuge – half-way houses between army barracks and private homes, not run by the military but not subject to family constraints, either.
Huntsville’s returning soldiers formed a Great War Veterans Association by February 1920. Their club room, paid for by a grateful town, was by the river in the Boyd Block on Main Street. It was a hideaway to exchange war tales, discuss jobs and community news and disability pensions, or just settle into a comfortable chair, alone, to read newspapers and magazines. One GWVA business meeting organized Huntsvilles’ first sale of pins on “Poppy Day” in 1925, marking a further shift toward true remembrance by focusing on Canadian soldiers still in Flanders fields, beneath the poppies . . . row on row.
In Rosseau, area veterans also formed a Great War Veterans Association. These GWVAs, sprouting up locally, laid the foundation for a 1926 national organization. Called the “Canadian Legion of the British Empire Service League,” an early version of today’s Legion, it began establishing “branches,” causing local organizations like Huntsville’s GWVA to apply for Legion status and becoming Branch 232. The Rosseau Great War Veterans Association reactivated itself as Branch 289 of the Canadian Legion. Bracebridge’s former servicemen got their charter for Branch 161 in 1929. Gravenhurst’s Branch 302 was established the year after Huntsville’s, in 1933. Subsequent formations included Peninsula Branch 489 in Minett, Bala Branch 424, and MacTier Branch 507, although Port Carling needed the critical mass of more veterans after World War II to establish Branch 529 in 1951.
Muskoka’s scattered Legion branches acquired distinctive characters, and each has ebbed and flowed in membership and activities over the years, but all share one common mission – to “Uphold Peace, through Remembrance.”
