Guidebook to the Historic Sites of the War of 1812

Wesley B. Turner is an associate professor of history at Brock
University and the author of The War of 1812: The War That Both Sides
Won and The Military in the Niagara Peninsula.

Of all the guidebooks on the War of 1812, this is the most complete.
Collins has spent more than 20 years in his quest to locate and record
every site that had any connection with that war. He was inspired both
by curiosity and by a concern that sites would disappear or be changed
beyond recognition by the juggernaut of “development.”

The book is arranged geographically into 27 areas, and each has a map
with the sites indicated by a symbol. The 17 symbols indicate such
features as a museum, a fortification, a monument, a statue, ruins, an
unmarked site, or a graveyard. For each site, there is a description.
Collins surveys southern Ontario from west to east, and then considers
the Georgian Bay area. He looks at sites in Quebec, New Brunswick, and
Nova Scotia. In the United States, he covers the eastern seaboard from
Maine to Virginia, and even mentions two sites in Georgia and one in
South Carolina. States that possess numerous sites are New York,
Michigan, and Ohio, but he also records sites in Illinois, Indiana,
Wisconsin, Vermont, and Delaware. He looks at the U.S. Gulf Coast from
Florida to Louisiana. He devotes a chapter to Washington, D.C., and one
to Baltimore, Maryland, but no fewer than three to the Niagara River and
its vicinity. There is one site on the West Coast—Fort Astoria,
Oregon—and he concludes with the text of the plaque in Ghent, Belgium,
where the peace treaty was signed on December 24, 1814.

The author provides three appendixes: one is a lengthy chronology of
the war, and the other two cover the naval war. The text discusses many
of the events of the war and many of the people involved, but Collins
does not attempt to provide a complete history. For readers who might
want to know more, he offers a brief bibliography.

This is an unusual and interesting book. It is fascinating to dip into
and would be particularly useful on a trip to the areas where the sites
are found, helping travelers to locate the sites and to understand their
significance.