Well it’s official. Mother Nature has reluctantly agreed that it’s spring and has pushed the great migration button. This past Sunday, while spreading grit on the icy path to the BBQ, I heard my first flight of Canada Geese winging their way north.
Historical potluck
Another sure sign that winter is finally drawing to a close is that the Glengarry Pioneer Museum’s AGM and Potluck Supper has rolled around again. This year’s event will take place on Friday, April 12that the Dunvegan Recreation Hall, 19053 County Road 24. Things will get underway at 5:30 PM with an informal cocktail hour as the attendees arrive and their potluck offerings populate the long serving table. On or about 6:00 PM, folks will start lining up to fill their plates. And then, one hour later as dessert and coffee are being enjoyed, a short business meeting will be held to approve the budget and Board of Directors for the coming year.
I believe the meeting will also honour two members of the community by bestowing the Glengarry Pioneer Museum’s coveted Pioneer Award and the equally prestigious Volunteer Certificate of Appreciation. As well, I’ve been pressed into service to reprise the presentation I gave at the Dunvegan Recreation’s AGM on the Orange Lodge Hall’s one hundred years of service. The meeting is open to all those who want to attend; you need not be a card-carding member of the museum. All the organizers ask is that you bring a main dish, salad or dessert.
Musical sawmills
It’s been said of the blacksmith that he is the only tradesperson who can of make the bulk of his own tools. Similarly, I submit that the sawyer can produce the timbers, planks and shingles from which to fashion the mill’s housing. When a sawmill is relocated — at least a steam-powered one — the sawyer need only move his boiler and circular saw apparatus. The building that once housed the enterprise can be discarded, like the hermit crab does its temporary home. I surmise that this explains, in part, how a sawmill was moved in and out of the hamlet of Dunvegan from the late 1800s and to the early 1940s like a game of musical chairs.
I started thinking about the pivotal role of the sawyer while examining a vintage photo of Dunvegan Road looking west from around Pendleton Street to Church Street… or County Road 30, as it is known today. What struck me about the cheek-by-jowl structures in the streetscape was the huge amount of sawn lumber used. Even those buildings that I suspected had started out life as square log structures were now sheathed in clapboard or vertical siding. From there, I began to reflect on the tool that had made this possible: the saw.
The oldest known examples of the saw so far found are from the Neolithic era, about 12,000years ago. Little more thana flint blade (some glued into wooden handles with pitch), these primitive tools still have the distinctive saw-tooth pattern chipped into them. Where the idea for the saw came from is anyone’s guess. It’s been suggested that early saws were modelled on sawfish, or wasp stingers or even saw grass. No one knows for sure. However, mankind’s need for a saw-like tool appears universal. The historical record shows that islanders in the South Sea used sharks’ teeth to fashion saws. And ancient Mexicans used Obsidian, an incredibly sharp type of volcanic rock, for the teeth of their saws. Both of these solutions were arrived at long before contact with Europe or Middle Eastern cultures.
Much closer to home, the first reference I’ve come across so far for a sawmill in Dunvegan appeared in the Glengarry News of March 21, 1913. No doubt there’s an earlier one, but I have yet to find it. The terse entry on page four read simply: “McKercher’s Mill at Dunvegan is now running full time.” There’s nothing here to suggest that the sawmill was a new business; it sounds more like a seasonal business that was starting up again. So the McKercher mill could well have been operating from before the turn of the century. This will warrant more research.
I do know that by 1919, if not before, the sawmill had been relocated to Moose Creek because it was in that year that Dan McKercher sold it to W.A. MacEwen of Maxville, who promptly dismantled the equipment and resold it to W.W. (Wallie) MacKinnon of Dunvegan. So by 1919 or 1920, the sawmill was back in Dunvegan where it remained until 1942 when Wallie MacKinnon sold it to D.A. Gray. A few years later, Gray sold the mill equipment to a Quebecer and it was moved yet one last time… to the best of my knowledge.
If you’d like to see the Dunvegan streetscape or the MacKinnon sawmill mentioned above, I would direct you to the 1989 Kenyon Bicentennial calendar. If you don’t have one, the Glengarry County Archives has a copy. Both images are also a part of the photo rotation in the header of my Dunvegan Timesblog: www.dunvegan-times.ca.
Are you sure?
On bended knee, I beseech e-mail software developers to rethink the “Reply All” button. I imagine they assumed the general populace would use common sense in its employment, but they were sorely mistaken. It’s a rare day that the receipt of a group e-mail message doesn’t result in a cascade of replies from every Thom, Richard and Henry on the distribution list. Now, on rare occasions, it can be helpful for the group to see how each member responds to the original message. However, in the vast majority of cases, the only person who needs to see the responses is the initial sender. The barrage of Reply All responses is just a waste of bandwidth.
My suggestion is that the programmers introduce an “Are You Sure?” pop-up whenever someone selects Reply All. Perhaps this might give serial senders pause to reflect and ask, “Do I really need to send this response to everyone?”
Sin City North?
It’s hard to envision our sleepy hamlet as a bustling village, but there were times when it really rocked. For example, the 1912 edition of the Farmers and Business Directorycontained the following list of Dunvegan enterprises: a hardware store, two blacksmiths, a cheese maker, a physician, a shoemaker, two general stores, a hotel, a post office, an agent selling pianos and a harness maker.
And twenty years earlier, the Baltic Corners (sic) column in the July 22, 1892 issue of the Glengarry Newssuggests that our little corner of the world was also the place to be when the sun went down. “Neil McLean, of this place, runs a stage from here to Dunvegan every Wednesday evening. Pleasure seekers should take advantage of the cheap fare and take a trip to Dunvegan.”
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