The Social / Cultural Changes in Muskoka the Result of the City-Moving-North? It's Not Only the Landscape That Experiences Drastic Change

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

    

     I did have a hand in saving Bracebridge's "Woodchester Villa," also known as the "Bird House," named after Bird's Woollen Mill founder, Henry Bird; his octagonal residence built on the hillside above the North Branch of the Muskoka River, just above the cataract of the storied Bracebridge Falls. It was the late 1970's and it was an historic building that needed saving. With the support of many different community groups, including the Rotary Club, and the Town of Bracebridge, and a literal army corp of volunteers, the house was spared, conserved and opened in the early 1980's as the town's first and only museum. Well, it suffered some hard times like the rest of us, but it has once again, after a period of closure, been expertly restored and re-opened as a cultural centre. But I'm glad I signed up for the original project of saving it from the wrecking ball.

     Gosh, I even helped save the Stephenson Road one bridge back in the 1980's, as the editorial king pin of the Balsam Chutes and Bonnie Lake Road "Save Our Bridge" group, that would successfully lobby both Huntsville and Bracebridge to partner a major restoration project. It's come up again recently but I think the matter has been addressed.

     I initiated a number of projects that reached the fruition level, including the showcase installation of the Bracebridge Sports Hall of Fame, courtesy my involvement with the Crozier Foundation, and felt pretty good about being the curator of the collection for twelve years following founder Roger Crozier's death. I also worked feverishly to help save the Muskoka Lakes Pioneer Museum from closing, due to funding problems and construction woes, and as a director, boy oh boy was that ever a longshot victory on the part of interested citizenry who had a steep uphill battle against those most determined to close it for good. Yes, I was very comfortable back in my heyday to stick my oar in, as they say, where it was not welcome. I didn't care then and while I'm a little more selective these days, because I'm an old fart, I do have a staunchness that just won't quit when a community issue rears up, like the most recent closure order that had been posted on Muskoka Beach, for waterfront wall repairs. It would have meant a total closure for the entire summer season. Suzanne and I jumped all over this one because it was so wrong, and didn't have to be executed in such a punitive way to the public that make tremendous use of this most beautiful property on Lake Muskoka. The Town changed it's collective mind on the prematurely post closure order, and agreed to allow use of the park and beachfront over the busy summer period at least.

     The earth movers and the home and building wreckers can change the landscape to suit the building agendas of the day. But often what gets knocked down and buried in this same progress, is the community tradition and social / cultural nuances, that have taken hundreds of years and many life altering events, to create in earnest, and local sensitivity, lost the result of the collateral damage that very few elected officials and developers consider worth more than an old story-spinner's contenting reminiscences told and re-told to justify what the past meant to the present tense.

     I couldn't do a darn thing when the post office decided to create the neighborhood super box program in our respective towns in Muskoka, eliminating in large part, attending the central post office buildings that had long been social hubs in the community. Add to this, that you could buy stamps in other retail outlets, and as a result, necessitating much less daily, weekly, or monthly need to visit these newly antiquated landmarks, and without nary a thought of its impact on neighborliness as it used to exist in our small towns, those familiar gatherings on the steps and in the lobby were ghost images of a bygone era. We didn't even have time to say goodbye before it was the new reality of the new and imposing mail delivery dynamic. Now while you might believe, and rightly so, that mail delivery has become more efficient in many ways, what has been lost will never return; and that is the social / cultural communing that occurred each morning at opening time, and carried out, in smaller numbers, throughout the business day, by those who not only needed to go to the post office, but wanted to, in order to touch base with the folks who hung out there, and relayed the latest local news and sports scores, Just in case you hadn't heard before you got to the post office steps. How many deaths notices were delivered intimately by the story tellers who gathered there, by tradition, and how many reports were offered-up by friendly busy-bodies, who had heard of someone's nasty fall down the back stairs of their homes, or who had suffered a heart attack the night before; or did you know who was getting married to now on the town society register?

     The post office was a central meeting place, and as informal as it was, the news of the day travelled fast on this root of the community grapevine. It was a free-wheeling but good hearted way to get the news from the very heart of the town, and to connect with the latest current events of a social nature, and learn about the latest hockey and baseball news without having to wait for the mid week delivery of the local papers. It was a ways for oldtimers to stake their claim to the legacy of the neighborhood and the old town, and talk candidly about their families who arrived as far back as pioneer times, when the encampment was nothing more than a few log shanties and wishful thinking about a hamlet becoming a village and maybe one day, a town. They would tell you about the cemeteries in which these early builders of our respective towns were buried, and what they did to make those settlement transitions leading up to the present. Might they have been bakers, lumbermen, homemakers, tannery labourers, woollen mill staff, lawyers, doctors, surveyors, or writers of the local news dating back to the 1870's?

     When the main street and downtown area newspaper offices were closed, I think this was also particularly damaging to the social / cultural / historical fabric of the community, especially in Bracebridge, where I had been a part of its intimacy, with the neighborhood, as editor of The Herald-Gazette in the early to mid 1980's; and then with the Muskoka Advance and Muskoka Sun up to 1989. I worked in that old time newspaper office that looked down the length of Ontario Street, to where I could watch the comings and goings at the historic Bracebridge and Muskoka Lakes Secondary School, now, by the way, a sorry looking remainder of what used to be such a grand relic of local education, that Suzanne and I attended ourselves; Suzanne going on to teach there as well, from the early1980's until the brink of this new century. It is heartbreaking for us antiquarians to accept what happened to that fine old building in the name of progress. I don't see anything of progress about it, and I'm sure many of the proponents of its redevelopment wish they could have a do-over now.

     The newspaper office of Muskoka Publications at 27 Dominion Street was an amazing gathering place for folks, not just subscribers, or those placing classified ads each week, who had been for many years, making a point to visit the staff of the Herald-Gazette who they knew personally from their own neighborhoods, clubs and organizations they had in common, and who knew each other from church involvement and let's not forget that there were relatives working at the paper, and family visits were always welcome. So many social events developed in the lobby and offices of the paper over the decades, that it might make a pretty good history on its own, should someone wish to revisit a time when newspaper offices were, like the post office, central to what the community was all about. This must seem to some readers, an overly romantic, sentimental and nostalgic angle, to defend why history should be preserved, land newspaper offices and central post offices preserved, less the town should be forever diminished in its fabric constitution, but, by golly, the proof as they say, is in the pudding. We are diminished socially and culturally by the progress and corresponding change that has taken over our contemporary existence here in small town Ontario. The way we used to live has been improved, as our progressives tell us, and arguably, even the historian has to admit that it is easier to walk across our lane here at Birch Hollow, to get the mail each day. And the newspaper is chucked in my driveway each Thursday morning whether I want it or not, and I don't have to go further than the end of our car to pick it up, with a companion bag that is supposed to keep it dry in the teeth of inclement weather. And while I accept, as do most of us oldtimers here, there and everywhere, appreciate that time etches like a glacier in retreat, and we have to soldier-up to change in all quarters. Yet it does remind me that all change is not in the spirit of neighborliness and the kindnesses of once. We don't often commune with the person who delivers the mail here each day, because they are a fleeting reality by time we get down to the end of our driveway. I don't know the mail carrier's name and we have never really had a heart to heart, because it's not a favorable environment, in a snowstorm, for example, to chat about "what's new with you." And there is no newspaper office any more, so I can't look forward to getting a little advance notice about the latest breaking news before it's inked on the front page of the coming edition.

     I had the very great privilege of working in the First Street office of, Muskoka Today, when it was a print operation (now online publication) operated by Hugh and Mark Clairmont, in the former historic digs of the Orange Lodge building, where communing was just as important as getting the twice month papers off the press and on the news stands around the district. What made it so darn socially important, and yes, culturally enhanced, were the many unscheduled meetings of readers and contributors who enjoyed any opportunity to chat with master story teller Hugh Clairmont, a long time newspaper columnist and musician, who may have been Gravenhurst's most unsung ambassador; and Mark, his son knew pretty much everyone in town and they knew him. So as a new Gravenhurst resident, and eager writer with the new media presence, I enjoyed every minute at the office, because it was a storied place if ever there was one; being so typically a small town publication that yielded the right of way to the best story spinners, and never turned away a mate, a crony, a partner gossip, or an historian wishing to bend an ear for a few moments, offering story ideas the Clairmonts couldn't resist following up. When it was closed up, and the Gravenhurst Banner office locked up for the last time, and the building sold off, we lost a lot more than business shingles and their loyal staffers. Lost were the refuges for news seekers like me, and those who felt it important that every thriving community should have such offices hinged to active publications, that represent the legacy of respective pioneer settlements that grew into the going concerns of modern day. It is particularly hard to represent this theme of community loss, at a time when excavators are transforming the landscape, and new building projects are about to change our commercial context. We have to move on, as they say. But at the same time, to historians like me, it is a pinch of sin, to not recognize that we have lost something important here of our own unique small town culture, by the fact we haven't fully acknowledged the cost of urbanization at city pace; because the changes coming will be far more dramatic than most of us "locals" can imagine, of the once quiet little burg that was once said to have been locked into the 1960's even in its present tense.