Guidebook to the Historic Sites of the War of 1812. 2nd ed.

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Many historians, both amateur and academic, are content to toil among
library stacks and archival boxes. Others believe that there is also an
important but indefinable sense of the past to be gained by walking the
ground where history was made. Gilbert Collins of Ottawa, author of this
fine and attractive book, is one of these. During “large portions of
[his] spare time over a twenty-year period,” he visited more than 400
sites associated with the War of 1812. He has arranged his material
geographically; 28 chapters, each prefaced with a map, deal with
specific regions, and a one-page final chapter reports on a plaque in
Belgium where a treaty was signed to end the war.

A helpful feature is the use of one or more of 17 symbols to indicate
what can be found at each location: monument, ruins, museum, etc. Many
photos by the author let us compare a site today with a 19th-century
illustration, but often we read that any trace of what a place looked
like nearly 200 years ago has been obliterated by modernity. At almost
half of the sites, all that can be seen is a plaque, not always at the
actual location. This is an updated edition of a 1998 book and the
author reports some losses since then of bits of our heritage, but there
are also a few gains. One fort in Ohio was recently restored, for
example, and remains of a ship found at Southampton, Ontario, were
identified in 2005 as those of a brig that was in the Battle of Lake
Erie.

As well as being an excellent field guide (although too hefty for a
pocket), this book makes good armchair reading. Each site has a story
and the author’s telling of these pieces of our history is clear and
concise. That the accounts are abbreviated is a necessary feature of a
guidebook, but a helpful bibliography is supplied.