NEWS RELEASE
SIMCOE COUNTY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
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Three Bradford District High School students have won the Simcoe County Historical Association’s (SCHA) Andrew Hunter Award for excellence in essay writing on a topic in Canadian history.
Abiishan Nanthakumar won first place, Katie Jung won second place and Clare McCormick placed third in this year’s awards. All three winners wrote essays about Quebec’s Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.
Each winner will receive a cash prize as well as a copy of The History of Simcoe County, the book written by Andrew F. Hunter, this award’s namesake. Andrew Hunter was an early local historian of Simcoe County and a co-founder of the SCHA. His book was one of the earliest local histories to be published in Ontario and remains an essential read today.
The Andrew Hunter Award was originally offered to post-secondary Canadian history students at Laurentian University’s Barrie campus. When Laurentian phased out its history program, the award went dormant for a few years until it was relaunched in 2020, this time focused on students of Canadian history at high schools across Simcoe County.
Says SCHA president Ted Duncan, “We at the Simcoe County History Association believe that if you want people to preserve historical places, buildings, artifacts and archival material in the future, we must connect them to history as they develop and grow. The Hunter Award program is one way to do that.”
“We must support educators who develop programs to involve their students in our past through research and storytelling,” Duncan says. “Andrew Hunter believed in that, and so do we.”
The SCHA will be accepting submissions for the next Andrew Hunter Award throughout the current academic year. Interested teachers can contact the SCHA for more information at [email protected].
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