Although Americans commonly give credit to Benjamin Franklin for the invention of DST or Daylight Savings Time, it was actually a New Zealander — entomologist George Hudson — who, in 1895, first proposed the concept of DST. The next two ‘Summer Time’ firsts belong to Canada. Port Arthur, Ontario, on the far western shore of Lake Superior, was the first city in the world to enact DST, doing so on July 1, 1908. And Orillia, north of Toronto, followed suit four years later. However, it wasn’t until 1916 that the concept was introduced at a sovereign state level. The German Empire and Austria-Hungary adopted DST as a way of conserving coal during WWI. Not to be outdone, Britain and its Commonwealth allies, including Canada, jumped on board. And like the other ‘temporary’ wartime measure — income tax — it has been with us ever since.
Given that the 2022 edition of Daylight Saving Time begins this weekend, Rev. Jim Ferrier wanted me to remind you to set your clocks forward by one hour Saturday night, so you don’t miss the special church service on Sunday morning. Last Sunday, the Kenyon Presbyterian Church was to have kicked off the Lenten season with a celebration of Holy Communion. However, Mother Nature had other ideas and the service was cancelled due to freezing rain.
As a result, the Lenten Communion will be held this coming Sunday, March 13th. Worship in Dunvegan will be at 11:00 am this Sunday morning. Rev. Jim extends a warm welcome to all to come and join the Dunvegan congregation as it continues its journey into Lent. He also stressed that Kenyon Church’s worship services for the months of March and April will be at 11:00 am… Daylight Savings Time, of course.
Covid crushes crokinole
After what seems like an eternity, I finally see a small crack in the Berlin Wall of pandemic NOs that brought the Dunvegan Recreation Association to a grinding halt just after the Winter Carnival o f 2020. True, this year’s popular Crokinole & Pizza party is still a NO. It was decided at the recent DRA Executive meeting, since masks and social distancing are still required, large indoor events will remain verboten until full restrictions are lifted.
However, the Committee has voted to give outdoor events the green light. This means that the grand opening of the Clark-MacIntosh Park at the corner of Church and Murray Streets in downtown Dunvegan can finally be held. The park is named in the memory of Leslie Clark and Weldon MacIntosh, two local, community-minded farmers who were instrumental in the formation of the Dunvegan Recreation Association in the early 1970s. Leslie was the original President and Weldon was Vice-president.
The date and more details are still up in the air, but I’m told the plan is to throw a party to thank all the local volunteers, organizations and elected officials who have made the park possible. As soon as I know more, I will alert you here. In the meantime, I take heart in the fact there is a shift, albeit small, towards normalcy.
Portrait of an artist
I suspect that Norman MacLeod, son of Angus MacLeod and Isabella MacKenzie from Syke, north of Dunvegan, was a young man largely out of step with his time. Born in 1863, the fifth of thirteen children, Norman was a painter. Not a house painter, but one who paints portraits. Which can’t have been an easy calling in a rural farming community in the very rump end of Glengarry at the turn of the 19th century. I learned of Norman while reading an account written by his baby sister, Ellen Bella (nee MacLeod) Daggett of Salmon Arm, British Columbia. Mrs. Daggett died in 1974 at the age of 92. When she was 80, she put down on paper her memories of growing up in the Skye/Dunvegan area in the late 1800s and very early 1900s. Luckily for us, her daughter kept her mother’s memoirs and, a few months after her mother’s death, forwarded them to the Glengarry News where they appeared in their entirety on Thursday, June 6, 1974.
The introduction to the 1974 article in the News mentions that Ellen was born on Lot 6 Concession 9 Kenyon. However, the historical land records do not support this. Instead, Donaldson MacLeod pointed me to page 314 of Lochinvar to Skye. There, the entry for the north 100 acres of Lot 14, Concession 9 Kenyon, provides a detailed account of property’s stewards from when Ellen’s father acquired it from the Crown in 1860 to when the late Murray MacQueen and his wife Thelma purchased it from Aime Filion.
It’s obvious from reading Ellen’s memoirs that her family was comparatively well off. “We kept 20 horses, 40 head of stock, a dozen pigs, big and small, 50 sheep and many Iambs, also 50 hens,” Ellen wrote. “We lived in a big log house with eight rooms and a big Iong kitchen with a sink and pump and a cement cistern full of soft water underneath. We had a big upstairs off (sic) the kitchen where we kept books, surplus clothes, honey and maple sugar.” The description in Lochinvar to Skye compounds this impression of affluence. It describes how the logs of the very large structure were never exposed to the weather. From the moment it was built, the home was clad with pine boards, an expense that was beyond the reach of most homesteaders.
What’s impressive for the time is that Norman’s parents, or at least his mother, supported his career choice. “My brother, Norman… went to Ottawa and took an artist course,” Ellen wrote in 1980. “Mother gave money in gold coins which her father gave her. He was a portrait painter and painted my cousin, Minister Campbell… (he) also painted ‘King William on the Grey Horse’ on red satin for a large flag for the Orange Men, The glag (sic) was three yards wide, and it was put on a pole and they held it up at the Orange Walk Parade on the 12th July.”
I checked with Jennifer Black at the Glengarry Pioneer Museum and, unfortunately, there is no record of this hand-painted flag ever being donated to the museum. Which is a real shame.
Norman MacLeod opened a studio in Vankleek Hill, the ‘centre artistique’ of the region — then and now — and accepted commissions like the Gaelic lettering on the original chancel at St. Columba in Kirk Hill and a landscape of D.D. Campbell’s farm and barn. His sister Ellen was in awe of his talent. She wrote, “We had a Jew storekeeper near our school… and he used to come to our place, and Norman was home that winter and he painted him through the window upstairs, just perfect.”
Norman died in 1911, at age 48. From lead poisoning, according to the genealogical timeline at the end of his sister’s memoirs. Ellen would have been 29 at the time. And his death obviously had a real impact on her. In her recollections she wrote, “Norman used to come home once a month and we never thought of making a cake or darning his socks. He should have had an acre of our land to make a home for himself and maybe he wouldn’t have died.”
I’ve never seen any of Norman MacLeod’s paintings. But I’d really like to. Against all odds, he chose a path rarely taken in these here parts in those days. It would be interesting to see the talent that underpinned this decision. If any paintings from Norman’s hand still exist, perhaps their owners could be persuaded to lend them to the Glengarry Pioneer Museum for a retrospective of his work.
His sister Ellen Bella Daggett thought he was one of a kind. “He was the only one of the family that had a moustache,” she recalled with fondness. And I suspect she’s right. About his uniqueness, not his moustache,
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