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epitome of incomprehensibility
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It was the 1600s and then World War 2, with a Victorian camera in between.
Or it was that I did a quick sweep around the upstairs of this museum, knowing I had to get myself and my slower-walking mother to a bus stop soon ("irritating" tells the exciting tale of lunch and disappointment).
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I'd gone there years ago. My favourite thing to learn: the current airport site was a horse racetrack in the 1910s and 1920s.
My second favourite: the east-west train I often took used to have a stop that was closer to my parents' house than Pine_Beach is. This was in the 1960s, probably before the highway was put in. I gawked at extra stop on an old version of the train map. I told my mother, who couldn't understand why I was so moved by that. So transported by transportation. That stop was just a mundane thing for her young self - visited often enough, but not missed overmuch when it was gone.
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This time, it occurred to me that I didn't know how the town I lived in began, nor where it got its name. I figured it was someone named Dorval (I was right on that part). But it used to be called Gentilly and then De La Presentation and a woman owned much of the land at a time when women didn't usually do that. Agathe de Saint-Père. She industriously wove flax and other native plants instead of wool, and maybe not-as-industrially came from money.
Question. Why does the plaque in my photo specify the exact Catholic order that set up the Gentilly mission (the Sulpicians) but not the name(s) of any nations and tribes they were trying to flip to their religious side? "The native peoples" - you're being vague. People might be mocked for using "Eurocentric" too much, but in this case it fits. Or settler-centric. Whatever.
Jean-Baptiste Bouchard Dorval bought the land from Agathe the spinner and deed-signer. Eventually it got named after him. I didn't read about the process. I pivoted to the airport that was built in a year.
Just a year? At least, that's what I got from the plaque: thought up in 1940, completed by 1941. To be fair, it was much smaller then. A military airport to support the war effort. The commercial expansion was more than a decade away.
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261107
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