Wanderung 7

Ogling Ottawa and Ontario's Outstanding Outdoors

September 2004

September 23 - Volksmarch in Cornwall - Ottawa, Ontario

After a good night's sleep we felt normal at long last, or as normal as we ever get, and we charged off to Cornwall to do the Volksmarch there. We parked, however, near the Civic Center rather than the new starting point at the MacEwen's gasoline because the gas station had almost no spare parking spaces. We therefore started off walking westward on the riverside hiker biker path and had wonderful views of the river on our left.

The first major landmark on our route was the tall, spindly bridge linking Canada and the United States across the St. Lawrence River at this point. From far off the bridge looked frail, almost a frilly tracery of white girders against the bright blue sky. As we came up on the bridge it loomed overhead in a graceful arc from the island in the middle of the river on our left to the center of Cornwall on our right, truly an impressive sight.

Immediately after the bridge we passed what appeared to be a paper mill on the riverbank to our right. I saw full logging trucks from the U.S. crossing the bridge to Canada and empty ones going back, so the mill had at least something to do with lumber. It also let off explosive bursts of steam from a big smokestack about every 20 minutes or so during our walk, and when we passed the factory on the return loop we were even showered with droplets from one of those bursts, which I was strongly hoping did not have much sulfuric acid in them.

Anyway, we continued along the riverside of an old canal for the next couple of kilometers. We passed a man picking wild grapes and he showed us what they looked like, saying that they made a rather tart tasting jelly. It sounded great to me and the price was right (free), but we didn't have any containers for collecting them so we continued on our way. We crossed back over to the riverbank at an old lock complex where another gentleman was fishing and started back to the east along Queen Street.

The neighborhoods we walked through ranged from the post-war Cape Cod style cottages to larger styles of housing, and they were all well kept and pin neat. One house had a carved wooden statue of a bagpiper in the front yard in a flowerbed--quite cute. The downtown section was a nice assortment of businesses and appeared to be quite prosperous from the couple of blocks we saw on our way through. After the downtown we reached the riverfront area, turned left, and passed the Civic Center as we reconnected with the hiker biker trail, which we followed back to the parking lot where we had left our truck.

Afterwards, we went off to find the town's only Dairy Queen to celebrate, sharing a Blizzard for desert and purchasing a "pizza" made of kind of an Oreo cookie type crust on the bottom topped with ice cream, caramel, and peanuts to take back to the trailer with us. Back at camp we popped it in the freezer, downloaded the morning's pictures, and headed off to the Upper Canada Village site upriver from our campground. The entrance fee was $16 Canadian, which we felt was quite cheap for an extensive open-air museum with re-enactors at every site in the village. The time period for this village was 1860, an interesting era since it was the middle of the Industrial Revolution, resulting in a curious mix of hand work and machine work in the various enterprises depicted in the village.

We toured a complex of a woolen mill, flour mill, and saw mill just inside the entrance, all fed from a common mill pond. Now I think they were using pumps to fill the pond in the first place, but at least the machines in the woolen mill and saw mill were being powered by the mill pond water passing through some water turbines. I was absolutely fascinated by the machinery and the big leather belts that powered devices in the mills. I was also struck by the exposed, dangerous nature of the machinery of that period and could well believe that those old businesses had a very high rate of workplace injuries.

We took a carriage ride around the village to get a feel for it, which was a lot of fun and a relief for our feet. Essentially the town had two major streets facing a small segment of canal and the St. Lawrence River beyond. Queen Street seemed to have more of the residences of the village citizens, while Albert Street behind it had more of the shops, mills, and workplaces. The carriage ride paused at the other end of town at the Loucks Farm and Tenant Farm areas, and right next to that was a tow scow dock where we could take a canal barge trip from one end of the village to the other.

Later on we took the canal barge journey and I was fascinated to watch how they maneuvered the horse, towline, and barge around corners and onto the docks at each end. The process looked like it would put a lot of wear and tear on the rope, which made it less surprising when our Captain said they replace the rope every 6 weeks. Along the way we saw a pretty little white clapboard lighthouse on the end of the canal leading out into the St. Lawrence. The barge itself was oak ribs covered with white pine planking for the hull, sturdy and useful but not by any stretch of the imagination graceful. Barges of that type in the 1860s would have carried 1 ton of bulk cargo or barrels from Montreal to Prescott on Lake Ontario, where it would all be reloaded on a Great Lakes schooner.

After our ride we started our walking tour on Queen Street with the Robertson Home, a typical home of that time for a middle class bachelor. The rooms were comfortable and well furnished in Victorian era furnishings. Interestingly enough, one of the docents mentioned that Robertson's will left all the household furnishings to his live in housekeeper, which was unheard of in those days. His son, who had apparently expected to inherit the land, house, and furnishings, was probably put out about it, but that's why it is called a "Will" and not a "Want" or a "Pretty Please Do This".

The Chrysler Store was a general store that had all kinds of preserved foods, but no fresh foods, meats, or anything that could spoil. There I found a beautiful old hand powered coffee grinding mill made of intricately cast iron. The general store also included the Post Office. A stamp at that time was 5 cents for sending mail within Canada, and 12 cents or so for foreign post. That may sound cheap, but I am sure that 5 cents at that time was worth a lot more than 5 cents nowadays.


 

The gentleman at the bakery, like all the other re-enactors, was just chock full of information about the operation, which I thought was pretty extensive. He baked several hundred loaves of bread everyday using flour ground in the mill down the street, and he described every step in the process. If you visit Upper Canada Village, you might try to see the bakery early in the day while he is in the middle of this process, because it sounded very interesting and it certainly smelled wonderful! I was surprised to find out that commercial yeast was only allowed to be distributed to bakeries and breweries by law, apparently to avoid the possibility being used to make moonshine! The bread he baked was used in the on site tavern and lunchroom as well as being sold in the gift shop.

The physician's home down the street was complete with a gruesome collection of surgical implements, which I was just as happy to not have described to me. Unique to this house was a network of stovepipes that ran along the ceilings and then upstairs to heat those rooms, a primitive form of heat distribution as I saw it. The stove in the living room in the back had some features that I have never seen before, including 4 pillars that seemed to conduct hot exhaust gases from the combustion chamber to a rectangular upper chamber. The top was flat and could well have been used as a warming plate of some kind, which seemed useful.


 

The dressmaker in a nearby house might just as well have been a stand up comedian, she was that funny. She talked about her role in keeping the wardrobes of the local womenfolk up to date, and entertained us with stories about them. I kept asking questions that set her off on another riff, basically acting as a straight man for her. When I asked about "bloomers", she reacted in mock horror and then completely filled me in on the real story behind the changes in women's costumes in that era. She explained that women would were clothes appropriate to their age and what they were doing. Looking at Monika in shorts, she quipped "and those would not be appropriate for any age!" The examples of dresses that she was working on were also quite interesting, and pretty even to modern eyes.

In the combination blacksmith and wheelwright shop, we watched the blacksmith teach two young boys some basic blacksmith skills. He first worked with them in heating some nails and bending them to form hooks using the hammer and anvil. They finished off the hooks by drilling a mounting hole using a hand cranked drill press, and the boys left with some useful mementos of their visit (we had to pay for ours later at the gift shop!).

The shoemaker in the cobbler's shop chatted with us about the practice of that time of making custom lasts for the feet of each customer upon which to mold the shoe. I really wish I could find someone who would do that in the modern world, because a 12.5 AAA is really not commercially available. Currently, I'm using some crescent shaped wooden wedges stuck in the front of my size 13s to try to get them to approximately fit my feet. The wedges fight with the orthotic inserts, and the outcome is not always a happy one for my feet, so perhaps the Gentle Reader can understand that I had some personal interest in having shoes made on a customized basis like they did in the 1860s. Of course, in the modern day and age that would be prohibitively expensive, so with a last longing look at those customized wooden lasts, we continued our tour as we were starting to run out of time.

Our next to last stop was the McDiarmid home where we found a woman using a spinning wheel. It always fascinates me to watch other people work, and watching her spin wool was almost mesmerizing. Squeezed into the same room was a very nice weaving loom, and Monika had a good long look at that as it was the type of loom her mother had learned to use in weaving classes in Germany. The docent said typically the husband would construct the loom, which surprised me a bit, but truly there was not anything intricate about the basic structure as this was a "manual everything" loom. Still, it would be a bodacious amount of work, I suspect, so I was just as glad that Monika had not followed her mother's footsteps in taking up weaving as a hobby.

The last stop was the one room schoolhouse. At this time, they rigidly separated boys and girls on different sides of the schoolroom. Other schoolhouses I have seen have used either 1-student or 2-student desks, but this school was equipped with benches and tables arranged along each side of the room. The school featured the same type of wood stove that resulted in my mom's school burning down around 1910, but I didn't see any of the maps or charts I associated with schools circa 1900 in the U.S.

By this time it was 5:00 p.m. and all the buildings were closing for the day, so we never did get a chance to visit the Union Cheese Factory, the broom maker's house, the Gazette printing office, the Loucks Farm, the Tenant Farm, the Tinsmith, or the Lutheran Pastor's Home all located on the premises. We were there from 1:30 to 5:00, so if you are as slow at doing museums as I am, you should allow a minimum of 4 hours for seeing all the sights at the Upper Canada Village. I would advise you to come in the morning so that you can have lunch at the Cook's Tavern or Willard's Hotel, because it looked like they were serving authentic cuisine and at least you could taste some of that stone ground bread and farm made Canadian cheddar cheese!

As for us, we made the mistake of peeking into the gift shop that was still open until 5:30 (smart people, these), thus dropping 30+ dollars. I was, as usual, the major part of the problem as I found a couple of books on making wooden toys for kids that I had never seen before ($10 each), and I just decided that I wasn't leaving without them. Monika, much more modest in her choices, bought a thimble, a stick of licorice, and a wooden spatula. If we go broke later in life, I won't have far to look to find the major culprit, will I?

After a hop, skip, and jump back to our campsite, we had our evening meal complete with "pizza" for desert, downloaded 250 pictures, and then ran outside to take some more sunset pictures out over the St. Lawrence. Isn't digital photography wonderful?

Then it was time for some serious computer work. Monika wrote more in her autobiography while I brought the journal up to date, and then we read some more of "The Nanny Diaries" before turning off the lights for the night. Unfortunately, the book was so engrossing that when we finally closed it we found out it was already after 11 p.m., so we got to sleep rather later than usual.

Copyright 2005 by Robert W. Holt and Elsbeth Monika Holt
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September 2004
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