Historian David Frank on Miners’ Houses, the painting of a Glace Bay townscape by Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris, now on a stamp. Harris visited Glace Bay in 1925, the same year striking miner William Davis was shot by company police. “Glace Bay is really no town, but a number of huddles of box-like houses around scattered coal mine mouths. . . . It’s drab and dreary and bedraggled even on a sunny day . . . “, Harris wrote at the time.
Canada Post recently issued a stamp of Lawren Harris’ painting ‘Miners houses, Glace Bay’. Fiona McQuarrie writes about her personal connection and the painting’s significance in terms of Cape Breton labour history.
At the Nova Scotia Advocate we hate food banks with a vengeance. It is also one of our favourite charities. Let Glenn tell you why. Check it out, it only takes a couple of minutes.
This week’s featured video is Cottonland, a 2006 documentary about recovering addict Eddie Buchanan and the damage the prescription painkiller oxycontin is doing to his friends and neighbors in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. It’s also about the shutting down of the coal mines. And it’s about a bunch of exceptional people, loving parents, funny, with big hearts. They’re also thieves who do or did terrible things.