Niagara, Ontario Loses One Of Its Most Revered Local Historians

A News Brief by Doug Draper 

She was a living, breathing archive for the history of this Niagara region.

Niagara historian Esther Summers

Esther Summers, a member f a proud farming family in this region and has served as the official historian for the municipality of Thorold in Niagara since 1983, died this December 26^th, 2013 at age 101. 

I had the pleasure of meeting Esther Summers only a few times some 15 years ago to mine her wealth of information for feature articles I was writing for the local media on Thorold’s history. All I had to ask her was; ‘What about the old hamlets of Beaverdams or Decew or St. Johns?’, and she would share with me, in colourful detail, the history of those communities, going back hundreds of years to the arrival of the earliest European settlers in this region. And she would do it withoug consulting a single piece of paper.

Esther Summers was in her mid-80s at the time and recited this history with a passion of someone more than half her age. The only person who came close to equaling that knowledge and passion for the history of Thorold and surrounding communities in Niagara was Alun Hughes, a former Brock University professor, who unfortunately died this past spring at a much earlier age.

As sad as it is that we have lost these great people, it is just as tragic to consider the possibility that there are very few if any among us to replace people like this. There is not much left of the sense of community that nutured the depth of interest in learning about those who founded and built our communities in the first place. 

History? In this internet age,  any information we may choose to google or download about our communities is almost never copied to paper and is more often than not, dragged from the desktop of our computer screen to the trash within a matter of a few days or week. That is the extent of our history. 

So the passing of community historians like Esther Summers and Alun Hughes marks the end of an era we may never see the likes of again. 

To compound the loss, we lost Peter Stokes, one of Canada’s great restoration architects, and a strong voice for protecting historic buildings in Niagara while he lived here for many of the last decades of his good, long life.

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