The struggle to save local historic buildings

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.