3-021-232 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Monument to Lieut. H. E. Baines at [Mount Hermon Cemetery], Quebec, 1869. Obelisk '...over the grave of Lieutenant Henry Edward Baines, of the Royal Artillery, who died of the injuries he received in the heroic performance of his duty at the great conflagration on Oct. 14, 1866, when above 2500 houses were destroyed...The General Hospital Convent, with 300 inmates, of whom 150 were infirm and helpless, was approached by the flames with fierce rapidity; and the only way to save it was to blow up an intervening building...This brave young officer...ordered a keg of gunpowder to be placed in the building, and then went in by himself to set the fusee for its ignition...He had just left the building to seek shelter...when a premature explosion of the gunpowder took place; the building was levelled with the ground, and the Convent Hospital was saved, but he was crushed beneath the walls of the building...his injuries were found to be mortal; and, having been nursed with the utmost attention by the grateful Sisters, whose own lives he had so nobly preserved, he expired...The monument is [in] the Egyptian style...cut from a solid block of English sandstone, selected [for] its great hardness adapting it to the severity of the climate in Canada'. From "Illustrated London News", 1869.