The question on the minds of many Dunvegan residents last week was not whether the thunderous hordes of two-wheeled anti-vaxxers would attempt to seize control of the Federal government over the weekend by revving their straight pipe engines. Or which pair of designer socks our PM would sport when making the Emergency Measures Act II announcement from the front porch of his cottage. No, the issue was one much closer to home. What a number of people asked me was: what was being built at the north end of Leslie Clark’s old farm, just before the 417 overpass?
If you haven’t been to the top of Church Street recently, a laneway off of County Road 30 has been installed across the field and an excavator has been hard at work preparing a building site on the half-hidden hillock. Some thought it was for a solar panel installation. Others suggested it was for a giant wind turbine. And a third explanation I heard was that a new chicken barn was in the works.
My sources tell me that number three — a new poultry barn — is the most logical explanation. In order to comply with the new animal welfare standards that will come into effect in a few years, I’m told Markus and Roxanne Haerle are future-proofing their operation by building a state-of-the-art production facility north of the hamlet. The Haerles purchased the Dunvegan farmland a few years ago from the McKendricks who, in turn, acquired it from the late Leslie Clark.
If the Haerles do as nice a job on the new barn as they did putting Leslie’s former bush lot back into production, it will be an operation that Dunvegan can be proud of.
Going up or down?
I regret never having crossed paths with Claude Mainville when he lived and farmed in this area. Claude grew up on a farm on the north side of Stewart Glen Road that his father purchased in 1941. As Catholics, the Mainville family attended church in St. Isidore. However, Claude went to school in Dunvegan in the one-room brick schoolhouse across from the manse. When his dad passed away in the early 1960s, Claude carried on the family farm until 1993 when he sold it to Joseph Ottermatt.
As you may recall, Claude’s name cropped up this past January in an item about the last “farm excursion” from this area, which took place in 1957. Claude, Jimmy Fletcher and his brother Warner, all from Dunvegan, and two other friends from Moose Creek drove out west together to hire on with the wheat harvest. After the crop was off the fields, Claude and Jimmy stayed for a few more months to work on a cattle ranch, before heading home to Dunvegan, their pockets full of cash and with enough memories to last a lifetime. It was this column that resulted in Claude calling me out of the blue. An old friend and neighbour from his Stewart Glen days had showed him the article and he wondered if I had Jimmy Fletcher’s number. The two had lost touch over the years and Claude wanted to reconnect with his old friend.
While I had Claude on the line though, I talked to him about his life pre- and post-Dunvegan. He admitted that taking the decision to sell the family farm was not an easy one. Farming had literally been his life since he was knee high to a grasshopper. Selling felt like he was breaking a promise to his late mother. But he received an offer he couldn’t refuse, so he and his wife packed up and moved out. When I asked to where, he said to Limoges. “I lived so long beside the 417,” he told me, “that I needed a place that was close to the highway, and Limoges fit the bill.”
Another carryover from his life as a farmer was the need to stay busy. Like a shark that must constantly be in motion to survive, Claude’s description of his retirement days would be enough to tire someone half his age. He still has a piece of bush on the Glen road and he fells, splits and loads his own firewood. Plus, as soon as the fairways dry up in the spring, he goes to work every day at the local golf course.
Returning to his childhood in Dunvegan, I asked Claude what it had been like to grow up as a Catholic in a sea of Presbyterians. While life wasn’t nearly as polarized as it probably was around the turn of the 19th century, Dunvegan in the 40s and 50s still had an active Orange Lodge and held an Orange walk each year to celebrate William of Orange’s defeat of the Catholic forces at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. He said that, apart from the undercurrents of discrimination he experienced from a few adults, it was a mainly a non-issue. Any overt anti-Catholic taunts he occasionally heard from other kids were obviously echoes of what they heard at home. He told me that he and his Protestant chums got along famously. Only one thing puzzled Claude: the afterlife. “I never understood why my Protestant friends were all sure they were going to Heaven,” Claude told me, “while, as a Catholic and a sinner, I knew I was probably going to Hell.”
Dunvegan to the sea
Back in March, I did a piece on the lost hamlets of Glengarry — places like Athol, Baltic’s Corners and Fiske’s Corners. In it, I commended the volunteers who have kept the location of these formerly vibrant communities alive by erecting unofficial road signs. In the interim, I have learned of one more private place marker… on Skye Road north of Dunvegan. This one identifies the name that Scottish settlers gave to a small stream: Creek Buidhe. Ken McEwen, who brought this sign to my attention, tells me that “Buidhe” is Gaelic for “golden.” My online Gaelic translator says its English equivalent is “yellow.” Both are in the same ballpark.
The stream flows north through Lot 6 Concession 9 Caledonia, the farm where Ken’s late wife Tina Mae grew up. If you’re driving east along Skye Road, slow down when you get to the turn-off to Old Skye Road. Stay on Skye and the creek and its sign are just about five hundred feet further east on your left. At the time, the McEwens owned the property on which the sign still stands. Rene Trottier, who Ken tells me is a very accomplished welder, made the signpost and Ken anchored it in stones and poured cement over them. The sign’s unveiling took place on the occasion of Ken’s 70th birthday in 2003. “We thought it was the right thing to do,” Ken wrote in an email to me, “before fading memory and lack of interest robs us of local history.”
While today’s Creek Buidhe is a relatively unimpressive waterway, who knows what it looked like back in pioneer times. If was given the designation of “creek”, it probably wasn’t a close cousin of the mighty St. Lawrence. Nevertheless, it would have been a godsend for the early settlers. For example, John Norman MacLeod — The Pumpman of Skye (so named because, in the days before cast iron water pumps, he magically turned logs into wooden pumps) — once owned the farm just across the road. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, his farm was a beehive of activity. Here’s what I wrote ten years ago about John Norman: “The quality of John Norman’s pumps was legendary and demand grew steadily. And this success, together with the need to clean up all the fallen logs in his bush following the brush fires, induced him to branch out and acquire a small sawmill. Then, a year or so later, an automatic shingle saw was installed on the second floor, above the mill. Naturally, the mill building was located close to the creek that ran through the property for easy access to water for the steam engine.” I didn’t know it back then, but the stream had a name: Creek Buidhe.
Thanks to an amazing online Ontario government topographical map, I was able to follow the course of this creek (which is unnamed on the map at this point in its journey) northward until, around St. Amour, it’s large enough to be labeled “Paxton Creek.” It then continues its twisted way until flowing into the Nation River and, in turn, the Ottawa River, the St. Lawrence River and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean.
Equally interesting… at least to me… is the route the Buidhe follows to its headwaters. South of where it crosses Skye Road, the creek travels about two-thirds of the way down the length of Lot 15 Con. 9 Kenyon. It then takes a sharp turn to the west, cutting across Lots 16, 17 and 18 (the soon-to-be quarry). At the west end of the quarry property, it heads south to Dunvegan Road… through the pond on what was once the Geddes place… across the former Luscombe property to the neighbouring farm to the west… which is Creek Buidhe’s source: the marshy verge along the southern edge of where Alister and Katherine Macdonald used to live.
Which, incidentally, is right across the road from where Terry and I reside.
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