The Milton Victoria Park Cenotaph, supplied by Thomson Monument Company of Toronto, was erected by public subscription. It was unveiled on September 5, 1926, by Colonel Henry Cockshutt, Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and dedicated to those that died in the First World War. Later, names from the Second World War and Korean War were added.
During the Milton Soldiers research program, two errors were found. All of the names under the list of soldiers killed after the First World War are Second World War soldiers other than Smillie (Korea), Paterson (error) and Dixon (Merchant Navy). Mary Paterson was Mary McLachlan Blaikley of Gartcosh, Scotland. She never served in the Canadian Forces and never left Scotland or the battlefields of Europe. Her mother Elizabeth Blaikley married John Paterson, a First World War Milton Soldier, but that was several years after Mary was born.
Dixon D. was an addition (time and reason unknown) to the cenotaph. The only record for a Canadian casualty in either of the World Wars was Daniel Dixon (family from Barbados), who was a Galley Boy in the Canadian Merchant Navy. He was on the SS Lady Hawkins out of Nova Scotia and was killed on January 19, 1942. The link to Milton is not known at this time.
Emmanuel Hahn's statue design represents the sorrows caused by war. The soldier atop the cenotaph looks down in sadness at the ground below him, as if he might find there, his fallen comrades, if not for the tragedy of war.
The statue depicts a young, grieving Canadian soldier in First World War army uniform. With uncovered head, he is standing at a battlefield grave – a simple cross with poppies and a broken chain at the base and the flag draped behind it – the final resting place of a comrade killed in action. His left hand rests on the cross, while his right hand holds a reversed rifle. His helmet is slung over his shoulder.
Emanuel Hahn moved to Toronto at the age of seven with his family of artists and musicians from Germany, in 1888. He studied commercial design and model-making at Toronto Technical School and Ontario College of Art and Industrial Design. At 25 years old Hahn began a nearly lifelong contract with Thomson Monument Company of Toronto. Two years later, he also started work as a studio assistant to sculptor Walter Seymour Allward. Part of his duties included assisting on Allward’s significant works such as the South African War Memorial in Toronto.
In 1912 Hahn began an association with the Thomson Monument Company of Toronto. It was there, along with several assistants, he made the many war memorials that are found across Canada: Fernie, British Columbia; Killarney and Russell, Manitoba; Alvinston, Bolton, Cornwall, Hanover, Lindsay, Malvern, Milton, Petrolia and Port Dalhousie, Ontario; Gaspe, Quebec; Moncton, New Brunswick; Springhill and Westville Nova Scotia; Summerside, Prince Edward Island.
Hahn is probably most famous as the designer of the Bluenose on the back of the Canadian dime and the Caribou on the back of the Canadian quarter. He was a victim of anti-German sentiment in the years following the Great War, when his design for the Winnipeg Cenotaph was rejected in 1925.
