The Women of Murney Tower: Expanding Kingston’s Military History
In her summer position as the Chief Historical Interpreter of Kingston’s Murney Tower Museum, Madeline Legg focused on the understudied history of family life in the military fortress.
As a Master’s student in art history at Queen’s University, Legg studies female artists in the Baroque period. While serving Kingston’s first museum, Legg applied her interest in the lives of women to those of Murney Tower. As she and most visitors were surprised to learn, up to six families would have lived in the small, one-room Tower at any given time, making women crucial to the running of the fort.
Murney Tower is one of four Martello Towers (round, defensive forts) constructed in Kingston in the 1840s amid rising fears of another clash with the United States. Kingston’s proximity to the border and access to key waterways made the city a strategic hold for Canada—and a likely target of US hostilities. Yet, these anticipated attacks never came, making the Martello Towers either symbols of Canada’s overreaction, or proof of their defensive power; as Legg suggested to visitors, “if the Martello Towers hadn’t been there, who knows what might have happened?”
On tours of the fortress, Legg showed guests the Tower’s basement where dungeon-like rooms end tunnels through the Tower’s fifteen-foot thick limestone walls, allowing soldiers space to fire at the enemy. These rooms sit in the dry ditch that encircles the Tower like an unfilled moat. This ditch, Legg explains, is also lined with limestone, making an invader a “sitting duck,” as bullets would have ricocheted around the sunken space, ending any attack with ease.
It is this dry ditch, that led Legg to her research on the lives of women in the Tower. The only way out was down a ladder, through the ditch, and back up a ladder on the other side, meaning that military wives often gave birth inside the Tower itself! These women of the Tower, the Wives of the Royal Canadian Rifle Regiment, were essential to the operation of the Canadian military, serving as caretakers of the Tower and the soldiers within it. The familial community they fostered was so tight-knit, Legg discovered, that daughters of regiment families would often marry soldiers in the same unit to stay “within the family.”
As day-to-day manager, tour guide, and researcher, Legg touched all aspects of the museum during her posting, adding a focus on family history that altered the perception of women in military, allowing guests to see Kingston’s oldest museum in a new light.
At Queen’s, Legg studies Elisabetta Sirani and Italian Baroque art history under Professor Gauvin Alexander Bailey. She is a Ph.D. candidate and expects to graduate in May of 2021.