On January 24th, 2019 we were part of a small group of privileged Lawrence citizens who gathered at the Lawrence Public Library, courtesy of the White Fund Lecture Series and Northern Essex Community College, and listen to Marc Laplante discourse about The WWI Project.
Undoubtedly, the WWI Project has been Marc Laplante’s family project!
On the Centennial of ending what is described as “the war to end all wars”, it led to the mobilization of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history. One of the deadliest conflicts in history, an estimated nine million combatants and seven million civilians died as a direct result of the war, while resulting genocides and the 1918 influenza pandemic caused another 50 to 100 million deaths worldwide.
Brilliantly, Laplante explained from a PowerPoint projection all about WWI, from the beginning, including the reason, until the end of the bloody contest, and intentionally he brought the attention to Lawrence, the Immigrant City and its involvement in the war.
It is worth noting that the information that appears in this projection is not found in Wikipedia, no, for sure it’s only obtained after hours, days and months of intense research through dusty documents, perhaps in files forgotten in a dark corner, besides several trips to France where he and his family visited cemeteries in his efforts to locate the fallen heroes in their last dwelling.
Thanks to Laplante’s findings, now we know that 5,500 Lawrence residents enlisted or were drafted into military service of which 200 of them lost their lives in the war and 35 of them were given special recognition by city officials with a bridge, park, square or buildings were named after them.
For a city that had about 80,000 residents at that time, we think it’s outstanding that so many brave men took a step forward in response to the call to arms, considering that most of them, according to Laplante, were immigrants, including a German that enlisted to fight against his own country when he found out about civilian massacres in Belgium and northern France that were perpetrated by the German armies in 1914.
As we said in our first paragraph, we were part of a small group of privileged Lawrence citizens listening to Marc Laplante’s presentation about The WWI Project, and at the same time, we strongly believe his effort deserves a larger audience, that his findings are collected by a larger news network like PBS, and show the world who we were, who we are and what a small city is capable to do.
