On the morning of December 6 I walked up the street to mail a package at the Post Office in the Halifax Shopping Centre. At almost exactly that moment 108 years ago a munitions ship in the harbour blew to pieces, flattening the North End of the city, killing 1800 people and injuring 1000s more. On the spur of the moment I decided to take a meandering route home and visit nearby sites related to the Halifax Explosion.

Anchor Shank

In 1917 the landscape I walked through was a combination of scrubby wetlands and small farms. People living here would have heard the explosion and felt the shockwave and then  been showered with jagged pieces of shrapnel dropping from the sky. This included a whopping chunk of steel, from the anchor of the munitions vessel Mont Blanc, now displayed next to Calvin Presbyterian Church on Ashburn Avenue,  below the elevated ramp to the BiHi.

The day after the Explosion this heavy memento was retrieved from a wetland closer to Mumford Road and for years it was used as an entrance step for an outbuilding on a farm in Dutch Village, just to the west.

On my visit, the shard was decorated with a delicate layer of frost contrasting with the unimaginable forces that had snapped the iron shaft in pieces and propelled it about three kilometers through the air.

Vince Colman’s Grave 

At the time of the Explosion, Halifax was on its third wave of cemeteries. The first were just outside the 18th century palisade, around the present day east end of Spring Garden Road. In the mid 1840s Camphill Cemetery and Holy Cross were established on what was then the edge of the city. In the 1890s Fairview Lawn Cemetery was created in the far west of the peninsula for protestants, and Mount Olivet at the end of Mumford Road for Catholics.

On my ramble I visited Mount Olivet to see the grave of the most famous victim of the Explosion, Vince Colman, the railway telegraph operator who died after sending a message to stop an incoming passenger train.

Foot prints in the fresh snow were evidence that others had also visited. Increased public interest in the Explosion has meant his grave attracts symbols of respect.

In Mount Olivet the graves of about 300 of the people who died in the Explosion are marked with yellow stakes that allow visitors to identify clusters of the unfortunate victims.

The yellow stakes mark the graves of people who died in the Explosion.

A charming feature of the cemetery is a flowing stream that starts in the highlands of the Ashburn Golf Club and eventually passes under the Armdale Roundabout into the Northwest Arm. Hearing the babbling brook I realized that 108 years ago it would have been producing the same sonic landscape. I paused to observe ducks being ducks.

Graves of Unidentified Dead

Thousands of vehicles are driven onto the BiHi every day. Drivers need to be mindful, as they jockey for a lane, so they probably do not glance to their right and notice an empty field, behind a black, steel fence. Under this ground are buried 125 children, women, and men, victims of the Explosion who could not be identified.

There is only a single monument, shielded by small grove of cedars.

This is now called the West End Cemetery but originally it was part of the Fairview Lawn Cemetery that is close by, to the north.

Many of the first Explosion memorials called it the “Great Disaster.” That’s what it felt like.

Imagine digging so many graves by hand in the frozen ground just a week and a half after your community had been wrecked. Read a description of the burial ceremony here.

As I looked at the monument starlings hopped and chattered in the cedars. Made me wonder how birds had fared in the Explosion?  When did they start to sing again?

Postscript

A couple of days after my ramble I went out on our apartment terrace to look at a rainbow and realized it more or less ended on the graves of the unidentified dead. Also in my view (marked with a white arrow) is the location where the anchor shank fragment is now displayed. While plummeting to earth it would have passed me and probably landed nearby. If I turned around and looked to the left I would see where Vince Colman and scores of other Explosion souls are buried in Mount Olivet. A landscape with so many stories.

Concealed by the trees to the right is the new rail line to the deepwater port that was close to completion at the time of the Explosion.