Smith's Knoll

The knoll's cairn carries one of the most famous inscriptions in Canadian military history: twenty 'good and true King's men,' it says, died and were buried on this knoll. But the stone tells a tidier story than the soil did. Veterans Affairs Canada notes that soldiers of both armies who fell at Stoney Creek were laid to rest here — the remains are not all British, whatever 'King's men' suggests. They weren't found by an army, either. Farmer Allan Smith turned them up while ploughing in 1899, and what came out of the ground was a jumble of both sides: British and American insignia together, the two armies finally sharing the same earth. The knoll was consecrated as a burial ground on May 3, 1908. We don't know exactly who the 'twenty' were, or whether the number is precise — the inscription is a memorial, not a roster. What we do know is that this quiet hill holds men from both flags, and that someone had to name them before anyone thought to count them.

Look up: the cairn is crowned with a stone British lion and a Union Jack design — standing guard over a grave that holds American soldiers too, men who died fighting that very flag.

Why is a battlefield cemetery called Smith's Knoll? Because of a farming family, not a general. The knoll sits on land once worked by Herim Smith and his wife Louisa — and Louisa was the great-granddaughter of William Gage, tying this ground right back to the homestead down the road. Their son Allan was the one who found the soldiers' remains while ploughing — the McMaster research dates the discovery to the 1880s, though local accounts often say 1889 or 1899, so the honest answer is 'sometime in the 1880s or 1890s.' One thing every account agrees on: during the battle, the American artillery stood on this rise, and those were the guns the British captured that night. The name isn't heroic. It's the most ordinary thing in the world — a field named for the people who farmed it. Which may be exactly why it survived, long after the battle's grander monuments were still being argued over.

Smith's Knoll has been re-inscribed almost as often as it's been remembered. The first cairn went up in 1909, after the local branch of the Wentworth Historical Society — formed in 1908 specifically to gain ownership of the knoll — joined forces with the Army and Navy Veterans' Association to mark the ground properly. The whole battlefield got its centennial gala in 1913. But stone weathers and wording dates: Veterans Affairs Canada records that the cairn was re-plaqued several times, the latest version re-dedicated on June 6, 1956, by Her Majesty's Army and Navy Veterans Society of Hamilton. Why 1956, exactly? No surviving record says. The honest answer is probably the dull one: the stone needed renewing, June 6 was the battle's anniversary, and the veterans who had tended the knoll for half a century were still there to do it. There's something fitting in that. The inscription you read today isn't the original — it's the third or fourth draft of a sentence a community keeps rewriting: we were here, we remember.

Most battlefields get one monument and fade into the background. Stoney Creek got a century of caretakers. The local historical society ran annual commemorations; in 1926 the National Society of U.S. Daughters of 1812 placed a bronze tablet; in 1947 a new plaque went up. When the original society wound down in 1948, a revived Stoney Creek Historical Society picked up the work in 1986 — and in 2000 they went further than anyone had: the Smith's Knoll monument was dismantled, a crypt was built beneath it for the soldiers' remains, a time capsule was added, and the whole thing was re-dedicated on June 6, 2000. Academic historians have a term for places like this — a 'deathscape,' a landscape whose meaning gets rebuilt by every generation that tends it. The knoll is the textbook case: farm field, then burial ground, then veterans' shrine, then heritage park. Same hill, same quiet men underneath, new meaning every century.