Halifax Public Gardens - Monuments and Commemorations

Monuments and Commemorations

• Frances Willard by the local WCTU (1939)

• Griffin Pond - named after wrongfully convicted and hanged Frederick Griffin (1821)

• Francis Joseph Fitzgerald Bridge (1911)

• Francis Fitzgerald Bridge Plaque

• Halifax Provisional Battalion Plaque, Main Gate (1907)

• Boer War Sculpture by renowned sculptor Hamilton MacCarthy (1903)

• John Bartholomew Gough Plaque (1936)

• Clonard Keating Plaque (1898)

There are various plaques throughout the Gardens commorating important people of the Victorian Era. One such plaque is to renowned suffragist Frances Willard by the local Woman's Christian Temperance Union on the centennial of her birth (1939). Willard was instrumental in passing the 18th and 19th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The 19th Amendment permitted women to vote in the U.S., and the 18th forbade the use of alcoholic beverage. Willard was the president of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union for 19 years (1879-1897).

Griffin Pond, on which floats a model of the Titanic, is named after a young Irishman Frederick Griffin. Griffin was charged with murder and the legal proceedings took seven months. Under the authority of the Lt. Governor James Kempt, Griffin was wrongfully convicted and hanged for murder on October 24, 1821 on the east side of the pond.

The Public Gardens has various war monuments. There is a commemorative plaque for the Halifax Provisional Battalion (1785) which served in the North West Rebellion.

There is also a statue of a soldier from the Canadian Mounted Rifles (renamed the Royal Canadian Dragoons) who fought in the Second Boer War by renowned sculptor Hamilton MacCarthy. A tree was also planted in memory of the first Canadian casualty of the Boer War, Charles Carroll Wood.

There is also a bridge that commemorates Nova Scotian Francis Joseph Fitzgerald of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police who died tragically in the "Lost Patrol".

Another tree was planted and plaque created for renowned temperance crusader John Bartholomew Gough by the Rosebud Band of Hope and the Sons of Temperance (1936). Gough wrote about visiting Halifax:

I continued there for more than a week, delivering nine lectures. I had an opportunity of addressing the famous 42nd Regiment of Foot, then stationed at Halifax. An English paper stated, three years after, that "many of the men were all the better for it."

In 1887 (the same year that the Bandstand was built), the estate of chief justice Sir William Young, donated three statues from Roman mythology and six urns from his own garden, to the Halifax Public Gardens. Ceres, the Roman goddess representing agriculture and fertility; Flora the goddess of flowers and spring, and Diana the goddess of the woodland and wild animals, all reside along the Petit Allée. The six urns were placed around the Bandstand within the ‘floating beds’.

In 1898 a plaque was created for Nova Scotian Clonard Keating of the Prince of Wales's Leinster Regiment who died in the Second Boer War.