Qualla: Peace Arch

Peace Arch: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rschen7754, CC BY 2.5. Sealed inside the cornerstone is a box hammered from the steel of a captured slave ship. Sam Hill, a lawyer for the Great Northern Railway and a restless promoter of causes, filled that box with fragments of two vessels before the concrete went over it. One piece came from the Mayflower. The other came from the Beaver, the Hudson's Bay Company paddle steamer that was the first steamship to work the Pacific Northwest and that ended her days aground off what is now Stanley Park. Two founding stories, carried in the metal of a slaver, buried on the precise line where one country becomes another. The drivers idling in the queue a few metres away have no idea it is under them.

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Image: Rschen7754 | CC BY 2.5

Peace Arch: The Man Who Wanted an Arch

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Hill launched his international fundraising campaign in 1914, a hundred years after the Treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812 and set the two countries on a course neither has since abandoned. The American architect Harvey Wiley Corbett donated the design. Volunteers from both si...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Peace Arch: Children of a Common Mother

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Quintin Soloviev, CC BY 4.0. Read the frieze from the American approach and it says "Children of a common mother" - an acknowledgement that both nations came out of the same empire. Walk through and read the Canadian face, and it says "Brethren dwelling together in unity," a line lifted from Psalm 133. Insid...

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Image: Quintin Soloviev | CC BY 4.0

Peace Arch: A Lawn With a Line Through It

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abhinaba Basu from Redmond, United States, CC BY 2.0. The grounds are two parks pretending to be one. The Canadian half became Peace Arch Provincial Park in 1939; the American half is Peace Arch Historical State Park, open from eight in the morning until dusk. Together they hold broad lawns, a lily pond, and a flower bed planted in ...

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Image: Abhinaba Basu from Redmond, United States | CC BY 2.0

Peace Arch: Concerts, Paint, and a Torch

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Theorb assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. In 1952, Paul Robeson came to the border because he could not cross it. The singer and activist had been stripped of his passport during the Red Scare, so he stood on a flatbed truck on the American side and sang to a crowd standing in Canada - a performance he repeated over seve...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Theorb assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain