Letters – Our Readers Write: Winter 2024

Historic Orangeville

Re At Home in the Hills: “Leaving Their Mark” [autumn ’24]: I have often felt that First Avenue/Zina Street was such a unique thoroughfare, it deserved a place of its own in Orangeville’s history. My former house is on the corner of First Avenue and Second Street, part of 200 acres of land north of Purple Hill once owned by Seneca Ketchum, one of the town’s founders. 

Every house along the two blocks from Third Street to First Street is different. The oldest was the house next to mine, since demolished, reportedly built in the 1850s as an Orange Lodge. Supposedly, there was once a log cabin on my property, but it was long gone, replaced by a house and carriage paint shop in the 1880s.

Around the turn of the 20th century, it was raised and a rubble-and-mortar foundation was built under it, whereupon it became a residence. A decade later, a second floor was installed, making it one-and-a-half storeys (apparently taxed less than a full two storeys). This could have been when it was bricked; the original exterior was shiplap timber and there is a 6-inch airspace between the inner and outer walls, in lieu of insulation. 

This also explains how soundproof the house is. There’s a good 18-inch to 2-foot gap between the first and second floors, as the original roof rafters are still there. Our teenagers could have their music blasting upstairs and we could barely hear it downstairs. An addition in the 1920s made the house L-shaped. We lived there for 17 years, from the mid-’80s to the early 2000s with many happy memories, but we were far from its longest-standing occupants. 

They would have been the Marshalls, whose patriarch, Clifford, then in his 90s, strolled past when we lived there, but would refuse all invitations to come in and see what we’d done with the place. I guess he wanted to remember it as it was when he raised his kids there, at least one of which was born in the house. I feel the same way now myself. The Marshalls lived there for 34 years. One of his sons owned Marshall’s Men’s Wear on Broadway, remembered by old-time residents. In the house, I found a plethora of what would now be called “vintage” items, from comic books dating in the 1950s (under the front porch) to newspapers from the 1920s and a manual for a coal-fired furnace (chinking gaps in the mortared basement) to a cow’s skull buried in the garden with a neat little hole right between the eyes! We redid the kitchen and dining room and, I’m happy to say, the current owners did a major renovation. The old homestead looks great. Preserving the past while looking toward the future.

— Garth Steibel, Mono

Farm Fresh Gratitude

We want to share with you how the Headwaters Farm Fresh Guide [summer ’24] was recently used to highlight all the amazing fresh local foods that are available in our community to students at Primrose Elementary School. 

At Primrose ES, a group of parent volunteers runs a monthly Salad Bar Day, when students can order ahead and build their own salad as a nutritious lunch option. The program aims to celebrate local foods and offers students the opportunity to try different foods to broaden their culinary horizons. We always do our best to support local farms and offer in-season fruits and vegetables when possible. This fall, for our first salad bar of the school year, every single fruit and vegetable in the salad bar cart (aka Big Red) was sourced from farms within 20 kilometres of the school!

Thanks to your Farm Fresh guide, we are able to discover local options and connect with farms to create a unique salad bar every month. We share with students where their food is coming from, and we highlight some of the more unique or unfamiliar food options by designing simple graphics about a particular vegetable and/or farm. For the fall Salad Bar we used the Farm Fresh guide as a centrepiece to a bulletin board we created to show exactly how close to the school everything was grown. 

Between the bulletin board and the “mystery item” we were offering, we generated a huge buzz around the school that day. Students came running down (shhh, don’t tell the teachers they ran in the halls) to Big Red, excited about which farms the food came from and with guesses about what the mystery item would be. Students noticed that some veggies came from their friends’ or neighbours’ farms and, in some cases, even from their own farm. In addition, various herbs were harvested from the school gardens, so some students were able to boast they had a hand in tending to those during the growing season.

As for the mystery item, due to a last-minute offer from a local farm with a bumper crop, we brought in enough cucamelons to cause a stir. Giving kids an opportunity to try them in a no-pressure way resulted in their discovering a new flavour and a new appreciation for what local farmers can grow.

We use the Farm Fresh guide to educate students about fresh food, where it comes from, and how easy and fun it can be to eat locally. Thank you for publishing an amazing resource!

— Adelle Barr-Klouman, Amy Ouchterlony and Annalea Kidd on behalf of the Primrose Salad Bar Team