Say that oak was a seedling in 1870. That’s just three years after the Dominion of Canada came to be. The area where we live, under the escarpment and near to Highway 403, would still have been wooded and probably full of game. A few hundred yards to the south-west of our oak, the Chedoke creek would have been flowing clear over the escarpment and down through the ravine, without all the contaminants that pollute it and culverts that cover it today. Hamilton had become a city only 24 years earlier; the beginnings of a town had been established—by George Hamilton—in 1815, when the population was just under 1,000. By 1870 the city’s growing commercial and industrial prosperity had brought many immigrants from Britain and elsewhere, with a consequent need for public transportation. That seedling oak-tree may have seen the beginning of the Hamilton Street Railway in 1874 with horse-drawn vehicles, converted in 1892 to electrical power. It was a seedling twenty-five years before the first car appeared in Hamilton, thirty-odd years before the first airplane flight, almost fifty years before women in Canada had the vote, and several more than that before the first commercial radio. Our little tree was eight years old when the first telephone exchange in the British Empire was opened in Hamilton. Twenty years later it may have seen local Canadians volunteering for the Boer War in South Africa, and then in the 20th century it witnessed Hamiltonians leave to serve in two World Wars. It stood firm as other trees were felled and houses constructed all around it in the 1910’s and 1920’s. Perhaps in 1926 it watched the first motor bus crawl up Dundurn Ave., the gentle rise to our street at the base of the escarpment. Just above it to the south, from 1907 to 1931 it could surely have heard train traffic on the radial railroad to Ancaster, today transmogrified into a well-used “rail trail” for hikers and dogs. Perhaps it heard the crowds at the very first Commonwealth Games in 1930, down at the Hamilton Civic Stadium where Tim Horton’s Field is now. Perhaps from its great height it could see the arrival of McMaster University in 1930, the 1941 establishment and subsequent development of the Royal Botanical Gardens, and the opening of the first ever Tim Horton’s on Ottawa Street in 1964.