Fort Erie museum’s new war exhibit tells history with human stories

Patrick Dearborn was 18 when he was killed in Vietnam on November 2, 1966. Mayor Wayne Redekop remembers him as a Ridgeway kid, the younger brother of a girl from his own high school years.

Dearborn’s story now sits inside a glass case at the Fort Erie Historical Museum, alongside two other local men who died in wars decades apart.

The museum opened its new exhibit, Wartime Experiences: A Local Perspective, on Thursday in Ridgeway. It traces conflicts from early Indigenous wars to the ongoing war in Ukraine, but curator Nicole Komar says the focus is on what those wars did to people from Fort Erie and their families.

“I want visitors to be able to draw connections between how these conflicts have affected people in very similar ways over the years,” Komar said Thursday.

Komar spoke about three men whose deaths the exhibit places side by side, starting with Dearborn.

Forty years after Dearborn’s death, Cpl. Albert Hugh Storm of Fort Erie was killed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on November 27, 2006. He was 36 and served with 1st Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment. Seventeen years after that, Cole Conrad Zelenco died near Bakhmut, Ukraine, on April 26, 2023. He was 21 and had joined Ukraine’s International Legion.

Relatives of Dearborn and Zelenco gave the museum the personal items that made the display possible, and Zelenco’s mother attended Thursday’s opening.

“Although generations apart, these men were remembered for their commitment to a cause and really fighting for something that they believed in,” Komar said.

More than 80 years after the Second World War ended, Redekop said the museum must now teach young people what war does to soldiers and their families, since the residents who lived through it are dying.

“Our challenge in many respects is to make sure that the young people that are growing up have some knowledge of what war is like,” he said.

The exhibit also reaches back to the Battle of Ridgeway, where Canadian militia fought Fenian forces on June 2, 1866.

A marble memorial to the nine Canadian volunteers killed that day now hangs in the museum with its original 1874 hardware. The congregation of the former People’s Memorial United Church donated the plaque, and a new theatre space plays first-hand accounts of the battle.

Clark Bernat, who took over as the town’s manager of museum and cultural services in February, told the audience that residents he has met since then keep telling him they have not visited the museum in years.

“I think a lot of people I’ve talked to haven’t been in here in a long time,” Bernat said. “There haven’t been a lot of changes, but we have changes now.”

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