While it will be a long time before life returns to normal (if ever), members of the St. Columba Presbyterian Church are no doubt delighted to be going home. Last Thursday, the Session at St. Columba decided to resume worship services in their church this Sunday, November 1stat 9:30 am. For the past two months, St. Columba congregants have attended a joint service in Dunvegan’s Kenyon Presbyterian Church, which resumed in-house services as of Labour Day Sunday. “It’s been far too long a time to be away from one another,” Rev. Jim Ferrier wrote me in an email, “and we look forward to welcoming everyone for worship.”
Halloween: same, same, but different
This item is for parents and grandparents with young trick-or-treaters who bemoan the cancellation of the Dunvegan Recreation Association’s annual community Halloween party this year. As I mentioned last week, the DRA and the Glengarry Pioneer Museum have organized a Halloween scavenger hunt on Saturday, October 31st from noon to 4:00 pm. Within the time allotted, families have to find word clues hidden around the museum site, use the words to make a sentence and, if it’s correct, claim their Halloween loot bag prizes. Because of Covid-19, families must register in advance and participate as a group. The local public health officials have requested that only people residing in the same household be considered a group, and that there be at least one adult.
The Weather Network’s forecast is predicting a fine fall day for next Saturday: 8°C and sunny, with light winds from the southwest. So if you’re looking for some family fun this Halloween, call 613-525-9664 or 343-987-7151 and reserve a time slot. Or, if you prefer email, you can register by contacting annefb@me.com or mona.andre@hotmail.com. For more details, visit the Dunvegan Recreation Association’s Facebook page.
A ‘sweet’ appeal
The Dunvegan Recreation Association is once again asking for your help to fill the prize bags they’ll be giving away to youngsters who participate in this year’s Halloween Scavenger Hunt at the museum. Contributors are asked to leave their bag or box of candy, chips and other individually wrapped goodies on Mona Andre’s front porch. She lives in the grey house with white trim on the northeast corner of the Dunvegan crossroads.
S.S. #4 errata
Canada Post must be on fire these days. Usually, it takes a week or more for copies of the Glengarry News to reach out-of-region readers via Pony Express. However, just two days after last week’s paper hit the streets, Ottawa reader Ken McEwen emailed to point out a number errors in my piece on S.S. #4 Kenyon, St. Elmo East. And I’m glad he did. His insights — and those from other readers — are the way I learn more about Dunvegan’s past.
To begin with, Ken said that S.S. #4 was situated on the southwest corner of Lot 33, Kenyon Concession 8, not the southeast corner where I wrote it was located. In addition, the school was not fashioned out of brick, from Sinclair’s or any other brickyard. As Ken recalls it, the building was frame construction, clad with white clapboard. And it had three big windows on either side, each with four generous-sized panes. The entrance faced south toward the roadway, and there was a chimney at the far end, which accounted for the only brick used in the school’s construction.
By way of explanation, not excuse, my source for the school’s location and building type was the Upper Canada District School Board’s “Information on Historical Schools in Glengarry County” page. Unfortunately, my recently acquired copy of Schools of the Glens did not include one-room schools east of Big Beaver and Cotton Beaver… such as S.S. #4 (St. Elmo), S.S. #3 (Dunvegan), S.S. #21 (Stewart’s Glen) and S.S. #17 (Athol), the school featured in Ralph Connor’s Glengarry School Days. I am not faulting the authors. A line had to be drawn or the project would have required multiple volumes. It’s a shame, though, that a similar historical account of other Kenyon one-room schools was never penned. The window of time to collect information in now largely in our rear view mirror.
Dixon brickyard’s New York connection
Part of last week was devoted to helping Frances Dickson from New York. She was researching her husband’s great grandfather, William Dickson, and had Googled “Sinclair Brickyard.” This search term brought up the Pugmill by the Scotch item in my March 4th, 2020 column.
Her query was based on an agenda she found on the Township of North Glengarry’s web site for a February 5th, 2018 council meeting. The item that caught her eye was #6, a recommendation by the Arts, Culture and Heritage Committee that — to protect it from being demolished by developers — the Gordon Free Church in St. Elmo be added to the Municipal Register as a non-designated property of cultural heritage value and/or interest. In the supporting documentation there were two references to a Dixon (stet) brickyard. Wallace MacKinnon in his History of St. Elmo Church refers to the “Sinclair-Dixon brickyards”. And Donald N. MacMillan in The Kirk in Glengarry wrote, “127,000 bricks at $4.25 per thousand were purchased from the near-by Dixon and Sinclair brickyards.” Frances wondered if the “Dixon” in these two references could be William Dickson and if he had been a principal in the Sinclair brickyard.
Her hunch was partially right. “Dixon” was a phonetic spelling of William Dickson, her husband’s great-grandfather. However, he was not a partner in the Sinclair brickyard. Here’s what Ken McEwen, who grew up next door to the abandoned yards, had to say:
“Interesting inquiry. There was no Sinclair-Dickson brickyard. There were two separate enterprises. The Sinclair yard on the east side of the Scotch River, on what is now Franklin’s farm (originally Sinclair’s). And the Dickson brickyard on what I believe is… Lot 35 in the 8th Concession on the other side. In my youth, Sinclair’s yard had ample evidence of brick making, piles of broken brick and rusting machinery such as huge cogwheels. The Dickson yard was much smaller, a pond filled with cattails, with no evidence of its former use. Both sites are now Franklin owned, and all indication of their use or existence has been filled in and ploughed over.”
I’m delighted to report that a few of those cast-off Sinclair bricks still exist. In fact, when I was visiting Jack Fraser at his son’s barn last week, he kindly gave me one. It’s all misshapen and unusable for building. But it’s a wonderful memento of the entrepreneurial spirit that once existed in the backwoods of Glengarry.
The question remains where William Dickson lived while making bricks on the 8th Con. At the time the Gordon Free Church was being built, Alexander McRae owned the land where the brickyard was located. Out of curiosity, I looked at the Ontario land records for Con. 7 & 8 (and Indian Lands) for this time frame and could find nothing owned by a Dickson (or Dixon)… within a reasonable distance.
Pandemic silver linings
I would never suggest for a second that the pandemic that has turned our world upside down is a good thing. Nevertheless, I have come across some positive changes have resulted in response to the restrictions imposed by Covid-19. The first is that the Ministry of Health is finally compensating health practitioners when they use public communication platforms like the telephone, Skype and Zoom to consult with patients. Before Covid, the only OHIP-approved virtual consultation system was the Ontario Telehealth Network. OTN had a monopoly on virtual medical consultations… appointments that could not be accessed from a patient’s home. We should all send a letter to our MPP urging that the government continue to recognize real-world virtual interactions between medical professionals and their patients.
Not all of the silver linings I’ve encountered have been large-scale systemic changes. For example, Brenda Kennedy from Baltics Corners told me of an innovative solution the creative writing group she attends came up with in response the social distancing guidelines. To the delight of the members, the group has been holding their meetings around a campfire. Like so many have discovered in the past, there is a natural connection between a communal fireside gathering and the telling of stories.
If you’ve come across a “silver lining,” I’d love to hear about it. You can reach me at my new Dunvegan column email address: james@dunvegan-times.ca
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