Often blogs focus on
the large and the name grabbing titles but I want to look at a little
dirt speck on the map of Ontario. Just fifteen minutes outside of
Parry Sound there's a wee village called McKellar. I'm going to tell
you its history.
Please don't run away.
I promise its way more interesting than I first realized, and I grew
up there.
The village is
beautiful. Its small, quaint and pinched between the butt cheeks of
two large lakes, with a third dangling above it in the north end.
I've grown up there, and spent childhood, teenage and adult years
wandering the minimal streets and looking out at the smooth glassy
lake. But I also spent a long time looking at books and papers and
listening to people's story of a distantly dead relative and told me
with a grainy picture of a building that they're great great whatever
built this.
I went to the city and
began studying history because to me, Canadian history is probably
the driest in terms of High school history. There's no Hastings,
Waterloo, Warring states period, Zulu expansion or Vikings. Well there
are a bit of Vikings, but they weren't even interested in us. And
there's not a single 'great man' or woman to be found with their fancy
dates and speeches. I studied all those things, but in my final year,
I studied Victorian socio-economic history.
That is a very boring
sounding word, but I hadn't realized how much economy, trade and
objects as simple as sugar could create such a change, often more
powerful than war and politics. So when I was shuffled back to my dry
little small town with its friendly elders repeating stories of
people building a town, it eventually dawned on me that I've been
looking at their stories wrong.
They're not boring!
Well they are a bit. "Back in my day" tales are condensing and are
just the hem of the boring blanket. But its hard when all you've been
looking at are the same four forested walls all your life. Taking a
step back and seeing where you really fit in the grand cog makes your
history just that bit more interesting. Forget about having your men
become great men and your buildings becoming national monuments in
three hundred years. Forgetting that is the first step to making your
tale a little less boring. Looking at their effort in the grand
scheme of things, not as great men but the vital little parts that
made a whole and built a nation.
Most small towns focus
on plain old preservation when they look at history and my town is no
exception.
They want to put a
plaque for this and sign for that so that when people come through
they'll have the same love and appreciation for these reasons that
their great great grandchildren do. And it is this place that they go
wrong. You can not preserve what people aren't engaged with. They
show you a part of the car, a small fragmented piece and don't tell
you in what context it was created or how the car itself was
important. I am certainly not denying the importance of record
keeping, for that is the backbone of creating the story itself.
So the story I see
instead is how McKellar is not extraordinary, but it was important. Its
location is important, the natural resources that allowed it to last
instead of becoming a ghost town. It tells the tale of rural Ontario,
and the socio-economic battle that was trying to fuel the machine
that was the Industrial Cities, the giant nations that had been their
for so long before.
See next week when I
talk about the logging industry and how plaid will always stand the
test of time.
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