Two weeks ago, Shawn Day, a Guelph alumnus and PhD Candidate at McMaster, impressed a full house at the Wellington Brewery’s Iron Duke lounge with his perceptive thoughts about the city’s relationship with alcohol. The fundraiser for Guelph Museums attracted a young, professional, and very engaged audience — perhaps as much for the beer tasting as for the talk, but I think Shawn had them at his subtitle, “Was Guelph a Drinkin’ Town?” The material he used to answer this question came from his MA at the University of Guelph and his current doctoral work on the larger history of liquor and licensing. He found that Guelph had an unusually high concentration of taverns and hotels for a town of its size, and perhaps not surprisingly, a proliferance of temperance groups who brought prohibition briefly to Guelph in 1885, thirty years before Ontario’s provincial prohibition.

Although this research presents a story of local interest there are far wider implications for the history of urban alcohol and other consumption and the importance of the hotel as gathering place for people and goods. He fielded some good questions about temperance but also some intriguing ideas from the audience pertaining to tavern density and street culture then and now.

The larger paper is available on his research page and includes some of the great visualizations he prepared for the talk. Shawn is likely blogging a talk at McMaster U at this moment, one which I was sorry to miss and am anxious to hear the synopsis.