Lanark Part 3 War Heroes and Village Queens

CLIPPED FROMThe Ottawa CitizenOttawa, Ontario, Canada02 Jan 1953, Fri • Page 19

13 enemy aircraft. A graduate of Toronto University, he interned at Ottawa Civic Hospital. Local dentist is Dr. E. H. Hewitt who serves patients who come from a wide area. Lanark has a strong Women’s Institute whose president this year is Mrs. Mary Willis. Annual Parade Shortly before Christmas, the Lanark Chamber of Commerce, headed by president Don R. Miller, 5-and-10-cent store man here, staged the annual Santa Claus parade through the streets for the village children and wound up with a bang up party for the kids. A man who puts the dateline LANARK on Citizen new stories originating here is Rev. Robert J. McNaught, United Church minister and Citizen correspondent at Lanark. He has known Lanark ever since his dad, now United Church minister at Russell, was incumbent at Balderson, near here. Digging in his garden one day last summer, Mr. McNaught found a copper half-penny token dated 1815. On one side is an eagle holding three arrows in one foot, a laurel leaf In the other; on the reverse is a figure of Britannia. Anyone know if it has any value?

Mr. McNaught told me that David Livingstone is sala to have spent a summer here when his brother was a tailor in Lanark, but he can find no trace of Livingstone or his , tailor shop today. Other names’connected with early Lanark are Charles Mair, George Mcllraith, MP; Dr. W. G. Blair, MP, whose ancestor was the first school teacher in Lanark; Robertson Mason, Fwart Robertson, with Lord Beaver-brook’s paper since the First World War; William Manahan, Ph.D. Lanark has Its bake shop, locker service ‘ plant, welding shop, planing mill and two second-hand stores, the latter something unique for a village. Before Christmas, the office of the Bell Telephone Company here was dressed up with an electric train running through snowy fields and a Bell Company truck stopped at a lowered crossing gate.

Lanark has a good war record and sent many men to two world wars. The big town clock on top of the fire hall tower is a memorial to men who died in the First World War and there is a bronze plaque fastened to the Town Hall’s stone wall that gives the names of men who died in that war. On Remembrance Day, Lanark citizens turned out in force to honor their war dead They gathered in front of a novel memorial, an ornate gateway to the village park and sports field. Plaques are mounted on the gateway pillars; one on the left gives the names of 11 men lost in the first war and one on the right names 20 men who died in the second war. Lanark, founded as an aftermath to a war, has lost some of its best men in subsequent wars.