Happy Christmas from the North Frontenac 39’er

Jeff Green | Dec 16, 2010

Editorial by Jeff Green

As is our custom, we send out greetings to our readers on our Christmas issue, which is also our final issue of the year and the occasion for our annual two-week break.

As you flip though our Christmas issue, you’ll see messages from the group that has brought this newspaper to your mailbox each week for the past 39 years – namely, the local advertisers who pay the bills.

The format of the Frontenac News has changed over the years, as has the name (for almost 30 years we were the North Frontenac News, which is still what we are called by many of our readers).

The paper was also produced by Northern Frontenac Community Services for many years, before becoming a privately owned business 10 years ago.

But - we hope at least - the main function of the Frontenac News, which is to let people know what is happening in their community, their township and their county and to foster communication between people in the scattered villages of Frontenac County, Addington Highlands and the western edge of Lanark County, has not changed.

We are getting set to celebrate our 40th anniversary, which we will do in March of next year with a special issue. Thinking back to the way things were in this region back in 1971, it is clear that nothing has replaced the mining, logging and railroad industries that were so dominant in the past, and that although agriculture remains viable in the south and in pockets, it is not the kind of economic engine that it once was. We drive far away for work now, and while we are there we do a lot of our shopping, and the retail sector in our villages is not what it was even 20 years ago.

Still, we work together in small and larger groups to forge a new kind of rural identity, and if there is one thing that we have chronicled in these pages week after week, in about 1,600 issues (the paper was not a weekly for the first 15 years) it is the things people do each week to re-make their own world.

At Christmas time we see this in spades. People drag themselves out of the house on Saturday mornings after a week of school and work, to participate in a parade, sing in choir, go to a meeting, or run to the mall.

There are groups trying to figure out how we can use the land to feed ourselves in a different way. We need to figure out how we will care for and educate our children, how we will care for the poor, the sick, and the old, all without any magic economic bullet to bring money into the region.

Essentially, we are all struggling just to get by, but in doing so we are also building new communities in the shells of the communities that came before.

It's easy to look around and see the problems that we are facing, but at the same time we keep building houses - $40 million this year in mainland Frontenac County. Tay Valley is building a fire hall, and so will North Frontenac soon; and a new school is coming.

I had a quick look at the new Frontenac Maps website this week, and when you look at the region at a 10,000 to one magnification you can see fields, roads and lakes in the south, trees, roads and lakes to the north, and little dots where the villages are. As you zoom down to 1,000 to one you can see houses, buildings, ball fields, churches, etc. in between the vast expanses of landscape.

That's what we have followed for 39 years, the activities of the people in those scattered enclaves. The people are still here, and we are privileged to be here to chronicle some of the joy and pain of modern life in a rural context.

See you in two weeks, on January 6, 2011.