On June 29, 1921, the Alvinston Cenotaph was unveiled, with great ceremony, to honour the local men killed in the First World War. The statue was sculpted by Emanuel Hahn for the Thomson Monument Company of Toronto. Toronto’s own Ned Hanlon modelled for the statue, which depicts a soldier draped in cloth, holding a down turned sword in one hand, symbolic of the end of conflict, and holding up broken chains in the other - symbolic of freedom. Names of the men lost in the Second World War were inscribed after 1945.
The statue has a twin located in Toronto (Malvern), Ontario. In 2011, the sword on the Alvinston statue was used as a reference to create a copy of the missing sword on the Malvern statue.
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.
