In 1919, Coral Shay lit a fire in the basement of the Belmont Home. But she wasn’t cold — she was desperate.Young women had been sent to the home for being incorrigible, difficult, promiscuous — and the institution had a habit of never letting go of women they deemed feeble-minded. Coral had been living inside the Yorkville compound there since she was 14 — for a theft in her hometown of Forest, Ont. She was now about to turn 30, her entire youth spent scrubbing collars and sewing buttons, sleeping in dorms, and staring out of barred windows at the city she was not a part of.Sent to the Belmont in 1905, she missed the rise of the motor car, the sinking of the Titanic, a world war, and her youth.In December 1919, she stood in the ironing room in the basement, and lit some straw on fire. Maybe this would be a distraction that could help her escape, or a chance to tell a firefighter how she had been a prisoner of the moral reform movement for half of her life.But no hero swooped in. The fire was quickly extinguished, and the superintendent of the home called police. Coral Shay was arrested.The Don Jail suited Coral. Anything was better than the Belmont Home, and maybe this time, she’d never return.I had been reading archival stories about the Belmont Home, when Coral Shay’s hometown caught my eye. We grew up a few streets away from each other, a century apart.Forest was bustling in her day, with businesses catering to the orchards and the rich farmland that surrounded the Lambton County town. There were apple evaporators, a barrel maker and, by 1912, basket and canning factories, local historian Fred Jamieson writes in his book, Walk Through Forest: 140 Years of Progress in a Small Ontario Town. The Grand Trunk Railway ferried people and products from Toronto to Sarnia, dropping people off in Forest for the town-wide reunion in 1905. By the turn of the century, close to 2,000 people lived in the town, and they prided themselves o ...
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