Angel Cake

Orland French brought a cake to the Hastings Heritage Centre to recognise and thank the Archive Angel volunteers for their help in making the Society's 2011 Annual Banquet a success.

In the picture below, starting on the left and proceeding clockwise around the table: Elizabeth Mitchell, Katharine Mills, Lorna Garbutt, Donna Fano, Orland French, Mary Jane Throop, Erin Ryan, Marilyn Hughes, Jeanne Delaney, Kieran Delaney and Laurel Bishop (back of head only); Archivist Sharon White is standing on the left, and on the right are Dick Hughes, Adele Dibben, Bill Kennedy, Lois Foster, .

Photos by Nick White

Annual Banquet

The Society’s 2011 annual banquet was a sold-out success!  Keynote speaker Senator Mike Duffy gave a boost to the archives campaign and entertained us with his own unwritten stories about politics and Prime Ministers from Sir Mackenzie Bowell to Jean Chrétien.
 
The political dignitaries of Hastings County were well represented.

City of Belleville Councillor Garnet Thompson, County of Hastings Warden Jo-Anne Albert, and Quinte West Councillor Ron Hamilton all brought greetings from their respective municipalities.

 

Other dignitaries attended, including Prince Edward-Hastings MPP Todd Smith and MP Daryl Kramp.

The exhibit of posters featuring Hasting County's political history and the design drawings of the proposed new community archives attracted considerable interest, but the main draw was the stories and anecdotes from Senator Duffy's long career as a political reporter and broadcaster.

Senator Mike Duffy with the man he calls his mentor – Peter C. Newman, Companion of the Order of Canada and Honorary Chair of the Society's Capital Campaign Committee.

In his talk Senator Duffy encouraged the community to rally behind the Society's push to create an archives where people can learn more about local history and access the wealth of information that is their heritage.

For the article in the Belleville Intelligencer click on this link. Opens in a new window.

For additional pictures of the event click on this album link. Album opens in a new window.

Story and pictures Nick and Sharon White

175 Years of Policing in Belleville

Uniforms from around 1900

To an audience of over seventy members, guests and visitors, John Lowry (assisted by Staff-Sgt. Tony MacKinnon) gave an overview of the history of policing in Belleville and the work that is now being undertaken to preserve that history for future generations


He recounted how Belleville’s police service was officially established in 1836 with the appointment of Henry Avrill as high constable and Hiram Fulford as bailiff. The village had at that time a population of about one thousand souls and encompassed an area of just over six hundred acres at the mouth of the Moira River.
 
Its early beginnings make Belleville's police force one of the oldest police services in Canada, pre-dating the Kingston Police (founded 1843), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (founded in 1873) and the Ontario Provincial Police (1909).

Belleville moved from village status to that of a town in 1850 and to a city in 1878. By this time the city Police Department had expanded to six members headed by Hugh McKinnon. The population had grown to nearly ten thousand people living in an area covering 1,760 acres.

A little over a half century later during World War II the force consisted of ten members. In 2010 there were 132 members of the police force.

A more complete history of the Police force can be read in the November issue of the Society's newsletter Outlook. 

A copy of that edition can be viewed by clicking this link.  

The link will open in a new window.

John Lowry and Staff-Sgt. Tony MacKinnon display equipment once used by Belleville's Police Force

Pictures Nick White, story based on Outlook article