“Where They Called Home”--that is, the placing of commemorative signs at the addresses of local fallen soldiers--has confirmed two truths, as admirable as they are unsurprising: in times of war, local soldiers acted with selfless courage; and their families, as well as the entire community, sacrificed much.
By design and by necessity, during both world wars most people lived in what are today the city's central and south ends.
As this map shows, that includes where Sarnia's fallen soldiers lived.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1hjDEA5lzIlDWE1M1kxGuJli6JvMbfC0
They lived on streets familiar to us and in houses that, for the most part, still stand, ones that we've probably passed by hundreds of times. But “Where They Called Home” pays tribute only to fallen soldiers. If signs were placed on the properties of all local soldiers who served in the Boer War, both World Wars, The Korean War, The War in Afghanistan, and in The Service of Canada, approximately 4,000 signs spread throughout the city's core would signal the extent of Sarnians' patriotism and sacrifices.
Records on where all these soldiers once lived have not been kept, but a start is recognizing the courage and heroism of the men whose names are inscribed on the Sarnia Cenotaph at Veterans Park.
Over 250 of their addresses have been confirmed but, unfortunately, not all their houses exist today.
That Dr. David Bentley loved his home in Sarnia is indisputable. In March 1917, as he lay dangerously ill in his hospital bed in England, the good doctor, aged 52, longed to return to his beloved home at 197 Wellington Street. Unfortunately, Dr. Bentley, who had saved countless lives by treating wounded soldiers in France, never got home. He passed away in early April, and the home he valued so much no longer stands.
The home of Irene and Leonard McMullin at 418 Vidal Street South was indistinguishable from those around it. But it was from this house in the spring of 1916 that 18-year-old Leonard left for good. In his hand he was clutching a note of permission that his mother, Irene, had signed, one that allowed him to enlist underage. After a German bomb killed Leonard in May 1918, Irene McMullin became an unrelenting advocate for having a cenotaph erected in Sarnia. Irene got her wish. More than a century later, the cenotaph remains a fixture at Veterans Park, but the McMullin home was torn down long ago.
In total, approximately 80 residences, once home to fallen soldiers, are gone. If they were not razed to become parks, parking lots, empty fields, or high-rise apartment buildings, they have become pizza shops, restaurants, and business offices. Signs for these fallen soldiers whose houses no longer stand have been placed in rows at Centennial Park to replicate a war cemetery where so many Sarnians lay buried.
Of the 170 houses that do exist, the majority are located on over 50 streets that run throughout the southern and central sections of what was then a much smaller Sarnia.
Sixteen soldiers who never came home lived on Brock Street. Mitton Street is dotted with 15 houses of fallen soldiers. The list of all the streets where they resided is too long to include, but a couple deserve mention. Alfred Street extends only two city blocks but three soldiers who all fell in World War II--William Anderson, Wilfred Knight, and Wilfred Durocher—occupied three houses in a row. The families would have surely known and consoled one another. Thomas Hazen in The Great War and William Oliver in World War II both left the same house on Proctor Street years apart to serve their country.
Certain houses tell stories of grief and loss. The living room window of a house on Maria Street, that was once home to the Cameron family, is the same window from which Ellen Cameron looked out onto the street when the war ended, desperately hoping that her son, Bill, would walk up the sidewalk and open the front door again. Farther east on Maria Street is the former home of the Brown family. In August 1940, Ada Brown, a school teacher and widow, accidentally fell to her death from a second floor window. Her son, Paul, received the horrible news on the H.M.C.S. Saguenay that was torpedoed four months later. His body was never recovered.
Every home has a personal story, the place where loved ones first learned that a son or a husband or a brother was coming home or the house where families received the life-changing news that a beloved family member had died. We can only imagine the anguish they felt. In some cases, families such as the Poles on Essex Street; the Gorings on Richard Street; and the Thains on Bright Street had to cope with the loss of two sons or two brothers who gave their lives for Canada. Raymond and Robert Dionne, a father and his son who lived on Victoria Avenue in Point Edward, paid the supreme sacrifice in World War II.
Collectively, their homes reflect the types of people they were. Sarnians, like many other Canadians who served, were mostly ordinary middle-class citizens, not trained soldiers, when they enlisted. They held a variety of jobs—from farmers, labourers, teachers, railway employees, students, store clerks, and mechanics, to machinists, grocers, painters, journalists, lawyers, sailors, and truck drivers. There were exceptions, of course, but most were not wealthy. A few fortunate ones had the same job waiting for them when they returned, but approximately 300 Sarnians, ranging in age from 15 to 54, never made it back.
In an era when the average size of a Canadian family was larger than today's families, the houses of Sarnia's soldiers, like others in their neighbourhoods, were usually much smaller than any modern house. Soldiers going off to war often shared a bedroom with a sibling or two. Some men were married with a number of small children, and occasionally their parents or in-laws lived with them. Somehow, they all squeezed into what we today would consider a tiny home.
These were the many homes where Sarnia's soldiers and their families once lived--just ordinary people living in ordinary houses on ordinary streets still familiar to us.
That makes their sacrifice all the more extraordinary.
They were volunteers, known as “citizen soldiers”, who left the comforts of their homes and loved ones to serve in far off lands to fight for our freedom.
The unfortunate ones never returned. For decades, our local fallen have lain buried in over 120 cemeteries in at least 17 different countries; others have no known grave—their names are inscribed on war memorials throughout the world.
They had lived in Sarnia before they enlisted, and many had grown up here. Recognizing where they lived in Sarnia might help us to remember and to honour them further. Perhaps Oliver Wendell Holmes said it best: “Where we love is home—home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts."