Historian David Yates Has Asked Huron County Council For Funding For A Book On Huron County Cenotaphs

by Bob Montgomery

Historian David Yates and photographer Conrad Kuiper made a presentation to Huron County council recently asking for $5,000 in funding towards a book on Huron County's cenotaphs. The book is called "For One Fleeting Dream of Right".

Yates says Huron County has thirteen cenotaphs, plus the one in Luckow that recognizes soldiers from Ashfield, and what he and Kuiper decided to do is write a history of those fourteen cenotaphs. Yates says each one of those cenotaphs tells an important part of the story of that community and how they opted for the cenotaph that they did. Some of them, like Blyth Memorial Hall, is the cenotaph for the war dead of that area. There are six soldier statues, three of them are cast in bronze and three of them are carved in marble.

Each story of how the community arrived at their cenotaph was really quite moving and at the end of the war when everybody knew the names that were inscribed on those cenotaphs there was a very powerful and emotional debate that he found as he went through the old newspapers when they were talking about a soldier monument or a war monument or memorial. By the late twenties when people had to decide what to call them, a new term, cenotaph, became part of the discussion. Cenotaph is Greek for ‘empty tomb’ and that's exactly what the cenotaph turned out to be.

Yates says at the unveiling ceremonies there tended to be the largest crowd that had ever gathered in each of those towns. And the purpose of that ceremony was to give the soldiers who were lost overseas the funeral that they couldn't get at the time.

Yates says the funding they've requested from the county will go towards their costs and anything that's left over from that will go back to the county, hopefully to help establish a restoration fund for the day when the cenotaphs require some maintenance. He says they all appear to be in very good condition now, but they're close to one hundred years old now and the day will come when they need some attention and it would be nice if there was some money available in a restoration fund to address that.