Heritage

The sound of children’s laughter still echoes up the hillside at SS#1 Stanton, attended by four generations of the writer’s family, including the school’s current occupants who have made it their home.

Just over a century ago the horseless carriage chugged into these rural hills and ran head on into a horse-reliant culture. What began as a novelty soon became a nuisance, sparking a battle for supremacy on the roads.

On a cold, dark November night in 1941, just when the war news from Europe was bleaker than ever, a fatal plane crash in Caledon Township showed that even training for war was perilous.

Screaming headlines in Toronto newspapers turned an 1897 trial in Shelburne into a Canada-wide sensation, painting Melancthon as a hotbed of arson, fraud, perjury and intimidation.

In the Waldemar store, pop was five cents in the 1940s (seven cents if you took it outside, but there was a two-cent bottle return).

The Toronto Grey & Bruce and the Toronto & Nipissing Railways were the first of their kind on the continent.

“We did not see a drunken man on the grounds,” observed the Advocate (although the paper did wonder who rang the park bell at 6 a.m. on Saturday morning).

After the ox cart driver bid farewell and left us, and I began to clear away the snow where we were to lay our bed.

For a lot of members, it’s more than just a hobby. There’s a connection to some memory.

If there is one elemental resource we can count on in this region, it is rocks. Our practical forebears cleared them laboriously from the land, by hand and with horse…

Railroads brought a giant step in technology to the people of these fair hills, a step that took some getting used to. Although the new technology promised commercial progress and an easier lifestyle, it came at a price.

Children were expected to work, often in the cruellest of conditions. Destitute, abandoned or orphaned, many children survived by their wits on the street.