Saturday July 16th, 2022 marked the Almonte Legion’s 90th anniversary and a celebration was held with a pig roast and entertainment. Sunday September 11, 2022 will mark 99 years since the Almonte cenotaph was erected and dedicated to honour those who fell in WWI and later included WWII and the Korean War.
The following information is from:
The Missing and the Missed of Lanark County, Ontario: Great War Sacrifice and the Memorialization of Exclusion in “The Volunteer” Monument (erudit.org) by Kelly Morrison.
Three faded photographs tucked into a thin file folder at Archives Lanark are perhaps the only remaining visual records chronicling the dedication ceremony of The Volunteer, a modest but impressive monument, dedicated in 1923 to the memory of those local men of Almonte, Ontario, who died in the Great War. Raised on the banks of the Canadian Mississippi River in this Ottawa Valley region, the eight-foot bronze soldier keeps watch over a triangular patch of land facing Bridge Street, near the centre of town. One of more than two hundred commemorative bronze and stone soldiers erected across Canada in the wake of the Great War, this Volunteer sits atop a plinth of Indiana limestone and is surrounded on all sides by the names of Almonte’s war dead. In these original images, he is flanked on his right by the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway and William Thoburn’s Woollen Mills, and on his left by Almonte’s Old Town Hall.
There is present in the photographs a large group of people “an impressive gathering” reported the Almonte Gazette, but particularly notable is the mass of flowers that encircle The Volunteer. They are abundant in each corner and crevice, cascading from every surface, an overflowing adjunct to the monument’s simple epitaph: “To the men of Almonte who fell for freedom, 1914- 1918.” Amongst the many organizations to place flowers that day were the Sons of England, the Sons of Scotland, the Presbyterian Church in Canada, Daughters of the Maids of the Empire, and the St. Andrew’s Society, organizations representative of the young country’s British parentage and evidence of the figurative “silken thread”3 knitting together the two nations. Local remembrances included those from St. Paul’s Church of Almonte, the Rosamond Woollen Company, the Girl Guides Association, Mayor Thoburn and many others.
The sculpture, known as “The Volunteer”, represents the image of Lt. Alex Rosamond and requested by his widow, was designed by the noted Dr. R. Tait McKenzie. Rosamond was a lieutenant in the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry who had taken over leadership of the Rosamond Woollen Company from Bennett Rosamond. He noted that, if he did not return, he hoped a memorial could be built in a central place in Almonte, “to the men of Almonte who fell for freedom.” Apparently, it was too much of a likeness of Rosamond, that his widow had it redone.
Lt. Alexander Rosamond (1873-1916) fell at Courcelette in the Battle of the Somme. He has no known grave.
The monument was restored in 2013 just before the Remembrance Day ceremony. Each year the grounds are carefully kept , trees and flowers beautifully maintained by volunteers and town staff.
Recently, the Branch 240 Executives in collaboration with Mississippi Mills staff, installed fencing around the Cenotaph grounds with the intent to protect the area and monument from damage caused by snow mobiles and ATVs using the OVRT that runs beside it.
