There is a "Sons of Martha" cairn at Hawk Lake, Ont. MP 121.7 Ignace
Subdivision
Hawk Lake on Highway 17, approximately 25 miles east of Kenora
You can drive right to the cairn, which is in the bush, about 100m from the
tracks on the north side.
Just follow the road [old highway] to Hawk Lake. This road is about 300m,
east of the CPR overpass.
At 02:41 PM 2/18/00 -0600, you wrote:
From: Tyler Dick <cdick@...>
During the "Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer", which I went through
last spring at the University of Manitoba, reference is made to a railway
contractor who erected a series of monuments or shrines across western
Canada that are dedicated to the engineers, surveyors and construction
forces that built much of Canada's rail network. The locations of
approximately one dozen of these monuments were mentioned, but the only
one that I can remember off-hand is one near Cranberry Portage on the
Hudson Bay Railway. These monuments were erected during the first few
decades of the twentieth century, so it is possible that this particular
contractor as involved in a CPR construction project. I think a reference
may have been made to a location along the CPR mainline between Winnipeg
and Thunder Bay, but I am not certain.
The monuments themselves consist of several plaques that contain the
complete text of the poem "The Sons of Martha". This poem describes the
unappreciated but important role that engineers play in maintaining the
infrastructure and systems on which society depends. The complete text of
this Rudyard Kipling poem can be found at the following URL:
If anyone has any further information on the location of these monuments,
particularly along the CPR, pass it along.
Tyler Dick
Railway Engineering Grad Student
Department of Civil Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Peter Jobe
Mississauga, Ont.
18.1 CP Galt Sub.
