The push by Andrew Williams and his Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance board to demolish Stratford’s Avon Crest hospital has taken us back to the late 1880s, when a group of determined women led a campaign to give the city its first public hospital.
For more than a century, those women, and hundreds thereafter, devoted themselves to making it the best facility possible for treating the ill and injured.
About eight decades later, for a related cause, the women rose again, in time to save a building which in 1974 became a “property designated under the Ontario Heritage Act.”
This video celebrates the women who saved the city hall.
Note: A 53-page story on the saving of city hall is the first chapter in a book by Dean Robinson, Not the Last Waltz and other Stratford stories, published late in 2019.