We're calling for your help to be part of this historic national Public Art Monument to key founders Harry Falconer McLean and Rudyard Kipling of The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer and the Iron Ring Ceremony.
The monument will be located where some of the first meetings took place in the historic heritage village of Merrickville along the banks of the Rideau Canal, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
With your help, this monument will be a national focus for all engineers today and in the future to their forebears, and as a public symbol of engineers' vital historic and ongoing contribution to humanity. It will also commemorate the hard-working tradesmen who worked on national major engineering projects and lost their lives.
"Big Pants" Harry Falconer McLean (1881 - 1961) – Unsung American-Canadian hero of the engineering tradition and nation-building infrastructure projects, who went from water boy on Dakota railway projects to become President of Dominion Construction that built the railways, dams and dangerously difficult infrastructure for Canada. Wartime friend to Prime Minister William Lyon McKenzie King and President Franklin D. Roosevelt who McLean on a handshake built with his own money an airstrip in Alaska to aid the Allies in the WWII efforts.
Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) - Famed author of works like The Jungle Book, collaborator with noted H.E.T Haultainand McLean created with others the tradition that continues to this day: The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer. McLean gave a very generous endowment to secure its legacy which today is still recited in a secret ceremony by all graduating engineers in Canada. Another of Kipling’s works, The Sons of Martha, is inscribed on stone cairns erected by McLean to memorialize fallen workers who were injured or died on major projects.
The Public Art Monument will consist of an authentic seven-foot stone cairn with bronze plaques inscribed with Kipling’s poem standing alongside life-size bronze figures of McLean and Kipling in earnest discussion of the secret engineer’s ring ceremony.
Buy art, commission a project for your company, community or home, or kindly fund this project.
The project costs are enormous, including bronze casting and installing the stone backdrop for the Sons of Martha Cairn Monument. I'm hopeful of a completion and installation date in Merrickville for fall 2022.
Please, every dollar is going to fund this project
Thanks for your support!
