GOOD-BYE, MAGGIE ::: CANADA’S FORGOTTEN TRAGEDY OF TRUE LOVE ~

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ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-THREE YEARS AGO… George Washington (GW) Johnson was standing where I was standing Sunday in Mount Hope, in White Church Cemetery. This abode of rest is not far from the airport, and the famous Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum which was my whole reason for being in the city.

 

 

And yet, I was here.

 

 

Right there, right where George once stood, broken, as he watched his precious wife, Maggie, get lowered into her grave.

 

 

Their love story had come to this bitter end, folks.

 

 

And the couple had been married less than a year.

 

 

Less than a year? Couldn’t have been much of a love story?

 

 

Oh, but it was. Their unusual love (which would be highly forbidden in today’s leftist victim-maker caldron) had actually been a whirlwind romance for over a half decade.

 

 

It had even began innocently enough.

 

 

In 1859, George, a fresh graduate of U of T, arrived to teach at S.S. #5 Glanbrook, in Hamilton, Ontario.

 

 

At 21, George was tall, dark, and handsome.

 

 

And incomplete.

 

 

Shortly into his very first year of teaching, George found himself irresistibly drawn to one of his brightest students, Maggie Clark.

 

 

Right here, alarm bells, definitely not school bells, would be going off in every phoney social justice warrior’s brainwashed mind. Teacher and student?! Pairing up?!?! Every normal person out there knows there are exceptions to the rules, and here was surely one.

 

 

Although Maggie was three years his junior, and still a high school student, the young Clark girl proved to be quite receptive to her teacher’s very clear overture of affection. Soon enough, she too, was in love.

 

 

The informal courtship began, slowly, after class hours were over.

 

 

The couple would be seen walking long distances together, talking and laughing, strolling along the banks of 20 Mile Creek. Lost in companionship these two had all the time in the world.

 

 

The pair would also show up elsewhere, for instance, at the Glanford Glee Club to participate in community singing activities there. Well … that is, of course, when they weren’t singing together with family and friends at Maggie’s place, the very Clark household itself!

 

 

Yes, these residents of Upper Canada (there was no Canada then) were indeed young, and had their whole lives before them, lives full of hope—and promise.

 

 

Maggie soon graduated from high school and went off to Wesleyan College in Hamilton, while George was off to study in New York.

 

 

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as they say, and that was the case for this couple. And later, when they both returned to Glanbrook at the end of their studies, those lovebirds picked up right where they had left off.

 

 

Walks, friends, relatives gathered again, at the Clark house for sweet nights of music and singing … and then undeservedly—disaster struck.

 

Maggie had a cough that wouldn’t go away. Without saying a word, soon everyone knew in that small community, that Maggie somehow, somewhere (likely at Wesleyan) had contracted the dreaded GWP pandemic.

 

 

Most people then didn’t recover from the “Great White Plague”, as they called it, or TB (as we call it today), but there were a few who did.

 

 

Maybe Maggie would.

 

 

Not to be put off, or let the onset of a malicious disease dictate their lives, in the early months of 1864 George proposed marriage, and Maggie gushed out her “yes”. The well-known local couple were now engaged in spite of all the dark clouds of uncertainty approaching them on the horizon.

 

 

Now unfortunately, for this new time together, Maggie could be fine for a time but then unfailingly she would resume having her distressing bouts of TB sickness. Severe coughing with blood. Chest pains. Night chills. And her endless fatigue.

 

 

During one such severe bout of illness, George was so distraught over his fiancee’s suffering that he walked from Maggie’s on Nebo Road (near to where Munro Hamilton International Airport is today) right to Hamilton’s mountain brow, overlooking the city! An enormous distance of about 17 kilometres back then! And right there, at the mountain brow of Hamilton, in the midst of his grief, he started to pen his soon-to-be-famous poem, ”When You and I Were Young, Maggie” (see, far below).

 

 

Incidentally, by 1906, just a few miles west of this point on the Mountain, Hamilton would open up the Chedoke Sanatorium specifically for people with TB!

 

 

These infected and publicly shunned people (people knew in the early 1900s how contagious TB was, while they didn’t know in Maggie’s time) could live their lives at Chedoke, grow their own vegetables, etc. while remaining quarantined from the general populace. That very Hamilton facility would be credited with saving the entire Inuit population of the Near North as over 1,200 Inuit took up residence there in the 1950s to get well again. The facility’s arrival, however, would come forty years too late to save Maggie.

 

 

George’s romantic and rosy poem … of his and Maggie’s tender love, entitled “When You and I Were Young, Maggie”… looks ahead, written as if George and Maggie had been together a whole lifetime, and had already grown old together. In the poem they reminisce about how things once were… back in the day…when they were young.

 

 

George was hoping against hope, penning this, I think, that somehow, Maggie would beat the odds. Love hopes and expects. Because, remember, even then some folks did recover, even back when medical treatments were so crude.

 

 

And Maggie did have a recovery of sorts…for a while.

 

 

Rising to that occasion, George and Maggie were married on October 21, 1864 at Methodist Church, in Glanford Township (The church still stands to this day, and is now known as Case United Church).

 

 

George by then had packed it in as a teacher! GW had taken up journalism some time previous while still teaching, and had sought out various writing positions abroad. His search ended with an offer of employment from Cleveland City’s “Plain Dealer”!

 

 

So down to the USA George went, while Maggie temporarily remained in Canada.

 

 

With the passing of just a couple months, George confident he was secure in his new writing post … summoned his bride to Cleveland. That was early 1865. Now Mr. and Mrs. would finally set up house together, something couples usually do, right after they are married, but were denied this tradition when George went south to start his new job.

 

 

At long last—now they would be permanently together.

 

 

And things appeared to be working out, initially, as Maggie’s health had actually been stable for the first four months of the new year!

 

 

However, by May of 1865, it was evident that something was seriously wrong.

 

 

At this point Maggie’s health entirely unravelled.

 

 

With her tuberculosis no longer responding to any sort of medical treatment, and being only seven months into her marriage, far from family and friends, with only her husband by her side in a strange new land, Maggie breathed her last—on May 12.

 

 

She was just twenty-three years of age.

 

 

Their love story had come to this bitter end. TB had won.

 

 

George, not unexpectedly, was overwhelmed.

 

 

With the loss of his soulmate, he immediately resigned his position at the “Plain Dealer”, and returned with Maggie to Canada.

 

 

At some point he would resume teaching in Binbrook. He even married again.

 

 

And since life is often unfair, before long there would be another funeral!

 

 

And George attended.

 

 

Yes folks, unfortunately, on December 17, 1866…Maggie’s younger sister, Mary, died a spinster, also from the dreaded tuberculosis pandemic.

 

 

Likely she caught her TB helping to care for her older sister, Maggie, in their Nebo St. family residence that is still there today (but is now a private residence). Mary is buried alongside the famous Maggie, and both her parents, at the obscure family plot in White Church Cemetery on the Mountain.

 

 

I wonder what George thought as he looked at both sisters now in their graves.

 

 

Life marches on, and soon George’s tender love poem would achieve worldwide acclaim after it was set to music by J.A. Butterfield in 1866. J.A. happened to be a friend of George’s. Several famous musicians of the time would sing the lover’s song and each one turned it into a hit.

 

 

Even the great and legendary Perry Como would cover it, and make it a hit yet again, some 90 years later!

 

 

Amidst all this fame, and this tragic tale of young Canadian love … it’s unsettling and unfortunate that a forlorn, weather-beaten family plot marker (see pictorial above - far right) is all that points us to this largely forgotten Canadian love story. This “George and Maggie” story really is Canada’s “Romeo and Juliet”, with the exception being the lovers’ only antagonist was the dreaded disease of tuberculosis. There was no family or community opposition to these lovers back then, like there would be today with the current crowd of SJW dodos.

 

 

And TB as their only antagonist was slowly, and eventually enough, to permanently separate these newlyweds forever.

 

 

But George’s and Maggie’s antagonist today—the entity who seems to be most against the wonderful remembrance of these two former residents…is the City of Hamilton, itself! Expressed shabbily through that city’s poor (non-existent) historical representation at the actual gravesite of the historic Maggie.

 

 

Contrast that lousiness with the treatment of another famous Canadian poet in Guelph, Ontario!

 

 

A park beside the former homestead of poet/soldier/doctor John McCrae of “In Flander’s Fields” fame, has a stone and large bronze monument. At the very centre of this edifice is McCrae’s solemn world famous poem, etched in eternal bronze, for all visitors to read. And reflect upon.

 

 

Meanwhile, the City Hamilton, a city five times the size of nearby Guelph, entirely marginalizes its’ own history and along with that … Canada’s most tragic love story.

 

 

Wonder why no one in Canada, or very few, know the quiet and beautiful, but ultimately tragic tale of George and Maggie? Or why is there no Hollywood movie?!

 

 

Well, folks … look no further than Hamilton City Hall and how the Council has prioritized that very early Canadian memory.

 

 

They haven’t.

 

 

Back to Guelph, folks—if one is curious to see how another Canadian city does get their remembrances right.

 

 

Go to McCrae House in Guelph, at 108 Water Street and see what I alluded to, earlier.

 

 

That’s a serious and worthy remembrance.

 

 

On every Valentine’s Day, George’s poem should be read to the Canadian masses, in remembrance of true love.

 

 

Now, I am going to say something for lovers only.

 

 

Always ignore the jaded, and the spent.

 

 

Make that a rule.

 

 

But, there’s something else. There is something to be said … for standing at Maggie’s gravesite, and being able to read George’s tender poem of a young lover's wishfulness…written in grief but transformed into hope. His wife faced with a pernicious illness, what could the young George do to provide any relief to her suffering? So he wrote this poem to her. The troubled present became the far conquered past. It was a trick of the mind. A re-ordering to see things from a fresh perspective. A most noble poetic effort to console his ailing love.

 

In their heart of hearts they knew I’m sure, or were pretty sure of the eventual “Shadowlands” ending, but would George give up or walk away? No. Instead, he took the high road and walked alongside Maggie toward whatever future they would have together. Theirs was a bittersweet love. It was for better, or, for worse, before the vows.

 

A frank and sobering lesson for many in today’s age, where people find themselves disposable…or only a means to an end.

 

I repeat, THIS LEGENDARY CANADIAN POEM, is not for the jaded, or the superficial, or the cynical, or for mockers, or for the beaten ~

 

Now, without any further delay:

 

When You and I Were Young, Maggie

 

 

I wandered today to the hill, Maggie,

To watch the scene below;

The creek and the creaking old mill, Maggie,

As we used to long ago.

The green grove is gone from the hill, Maggie,

Where first the daisies sprung;

The creaking old mill is still, Maggie

Since you and I were young.

 

And now we are agéd and gray, Maggie,

And the trials of life nearly done;

Let us sing of the days that are gone, Maggie,

When you and I were young.

 

A city so silent and lone, Maggie,

Where the young and the happy and the best,

In polished white mansions of stone, Maggie,

Have each found a place of rest,

Is built where the birds used to play, Maggie,

And join in the songs that were sung;

For we sang as happy as they, Maggie,

When you and I were young.

 

And now we are agéd and gray, Maggie,

And the trials of life nearly done;

Let us sing of the days that are gone, Maggie,

When you and I were young.

 

 

They say I am feeble with age, Maggie,

My steps are less sprightly than then,

My face is a well-written page, Maggie,

But time alone was the pen.

 

 

They say we are agéd and gray, Maggie,

As sprays by the white breakers flung;

But to me you're as fair as you were, Maggie,

When you and I were young.

 

 

And now we are agéd and gray, Maggie,

And the trials of life nearly done;

Let us sing of the days that are gone, Maggie,

When you and I were young.

 

 

— George Washington Johnson (1864)

 

 

Thanks for the additional info and leads:

 

 

Mitchell Smyth POSTMEDIA (a big help here …

with location of Maggie’s childhood home, etc,

I did find the cemetery and tombstone on my own,

however)

 

 

The Hamilton Spectaor

Glanbrook Heritage Society

Robert Williamson

Gregory McIntosh

Wikipedia

Dan Robinson

Bob Moore of Guelph

 

 

FYI - THIS POST is revised as deemed necessary by discovery of errors or updated with new facts.

Done