History
Dundurn Castle, a Regency house, was completed in 1835 by architect Robert Charles Wetherell. MacNab purchased the property from Richard Beasley, one of Hamilton's early settlers, when financial difficulties forced Beasley to sell lands at Burlington Heights (present day Dundurn Park), and MacNab built Dundurn Castle on the foundations of Beasley's brick home. Once built, Dundurn Castle became famous all over the country for its grand entertainments. Sir John A. Macdonald and King Edward VII are among those who have been entertained there.
Sir Allan MacNab, later prime minister of the united Province of Canada between 1854 and 1856, hired architect Robert Wetherall and construction of this stately home was completed in 1835. It became the property of the City of Hamilton and, in the late 1960s, it was restored as a Centennial project. It is now designated as a National Historic Site of Canada.
A Strathspey for bagpipes was composed in honour of Dundurn Castle.
Read more about this topic: Dundurn Castle
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)