History
John Galt, founder of Guelph, assisted by his surveyor, planned the community. He plotted a series of large public "squares" of varied shape; this unique street design provided one of the earliest examples of town planning in Ontario.
Tradition relates that John Galt, or one of his companions, laid his outstretched hand on a tree stump and predicted that the streets of the new town would radiate from a central point such as his fingers radiated from his palm. It is true that the main streets of downtown Guelph do follow such a pattern, but which came first, the legend or the plan, remains in doubt.
Read more about this topic: Downtown Guelph
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... all big changes in human history have been arrived at slowly and through many compromises.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“All history and art are against us, but we still expect happiness in love.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)