I'm Head Over Heels In Love With This Photo From The Ex in 1906

I really am. I just love it. Especially if you look close — click here and then on the photo that pops up to make it full-sized and scroll around looking at the expressions on the faces of these people from 190freaking6. Just amazing.

They're sitting on a spot in the Exhibition Grounds that's now probably actually just a littttle bit outside the Exhibition Grounds, pretty much where Lake Shore Boulevard is now. Behind them, in a sliver on the left-hand side of the photo, you can see just a bit of the Manufacturer's Building. It was built a few years earlier and would burned down in the 1960s. They built the modernist Better Living Building to replace it. It's still there today.

There's a bit of interesting history related to monument behind them, too. It was built by the Independent Order of Foresters, a fraternal organization (kind of a little like the Masons) with roots going all the way back to the royal English forests of the 1300s, when people used to band together for safety. The Foresters spread to Canada thanks to Oronhyatekha — a Mohawk from the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation, near Brantford, who was the first indigenous student at Oxford, the second indigenous doctor in Canada, a member of our national rifle team and the very first indigenous member the Foresters ever had. A bunch of the indigenous artifacts at the ROM come from his collection; he'd started a museum of his own in the Foresters Temple at Bay & Richmond. He died about six months after this photo was taken. And he'll totally be getting his own post someday.

 I came across this photo here.