This year in the paper, we looked backwards many times, running a year-long series of articles to mark the 150th anniversary of Frontenac County. Many of the articles, which will continue into 2016, were based on interviews with people from our communities who made their lives in this part of the world when it was a different world.

At that time electricity was just coming in; communication infrastructure was just being developed; the world they lived in was smaller. But major global events, such as world wars, had an impact on their lives, and in the 1930s, people from all over Canada trudged up to meager farms near the K&P and CP railroad lines looking for a meal or a day's work. They came from the west and from the east, looking for something, and when they found there was no more here than anywhere else, they slipped onto the next train and carried on, never to return.

What also came out in those interviews is that although life in Frontenac County was harder than it is today, the communities were stronger in many ways. Because people travel constantly for work and shopping now, our villages are not the retail centers they used to be. Still, permits for $40 million in residential construction were taken out in Frontenac County this year, so people are investing in our county.

But Frontenac County still lacks an identity. For its 150th anniversary Frontenac County put on one minor and one major event. This stands in stark contrast to the scope and breadth of the 200th anniversary events set for the Township of Tay Valley and the Town of Perth in 2016, which will take place on almost a weekly basis.

The North Frontenac News was established 42 years ago to help bridge the gap between the communities in northern Frontenac County, and as the Frontenac News we have served southern and northern Frontenac for 18 years. The issues are the same throughout the county as they were in the north 42 years ago.

The ties of community are strong in and among the neighboring villages and hamlets, and week after week we publish stories about how we gather together to help each other and to celebrate with each other.

However, there is no coherence to Frontenac County; there is no overall community.

The county level of government is not where this kind of coherence will come, at least as it functions currently. Frontenac County is an upper-tier municipal institution, more concerned with institutional framework than the human level of politics, more adept with “best practices” and “accounting principles” than with building community.

My sense is that there is a lot of frustration at meetings of Frontenac County Council, as if it does not satisfy a need among its member politicians to really tackle the issues that brought them into municipal politics. After watching these meetings over the years, my conclusion is, more and more, that these issues do need to be tackled by the people at that table, but in some other way and in some other place.

It might be helpful if county politicians made some informal efforts outside the confines of the council. More might be accomplished with a phone call or a cup of coffee once in a while, than with a well-argued position at a council meeting.

But enough of that. We have enjoyed bringing you stories about the past, and the trials and tribulations of the present, this year, and I would like to thank all our advertisers, readers, staff members and volunteers for helping us put out another 50 editions this year.

In two weeks we will be back in the office to start putting another 50 out, and we hope everyone enjoys a good holiday as we enjoy our time off.

Q. What do grandfather clocks and bees have in common?

A. Virgil Garrett

This past summer there was a construction project on Road 38 at the northern edge of the village of Sharbot Lake. For a time there was a stoplight for southbound traffic in front of Virgil and Beryl Garrett's house. One afternoon while a half dozen cars were waiting for the light to change (an unwelcome novelty in this part of the world) Virgil Garrett was standing on the sidewalk, waiting for all the cars to clear the scene before slowly and serenely walking across the road to get his mail, just as he has done since 1949.

In the rear view mirror driving away, Virgil was in the foreground and the sun lit up the landscaped north end of the Garrett property, where Virgil has spent hours trimming, mowing and planting for so many years. Whether on his own property, or in groups such as the Masons, the Sharbot Lake 39ers, the farmers’ market or the school, Virgil and Beryl have been fixtures in the community for longer than anyone, other than Virgil, can remember.

Virgil Garrett was born on April 3, 1922, on a farm on the Zealand Road in what is now Central Frontenac Township. The Zealand cemetery is located on the Garrett farm.

He was the “center” child as he puts it, between older brother Roscoe and younger sister Billie.

Virgil’s grandfather was in the British military and was offered a land grant in Bathurst Township in Lanark County in the 1840s. He eventually moved to Zealand, which was a community at that time, later in the 19th Century. Since that part of Frontenac County was settled up to 50 years later than nearby communities and farms in western Lanark County, the Garrett homestead, which is in the former Oso Township, is one of the oldest in Central Frontenac.

Virgil's father was raised on the farm, did some work in the lumber trade in his youth, and eventually settled down to farming. His mother was a Drew from Long Lake, one of a long line of teachers, a profession that was eventually taken up by Virgil and his wife Beryl.

As a child, Virgil helped out on the farm as much as he could, and attended school at SS #3 Oso Township, about a half mile from his house.

Not only was there no electricity in the school, there was no well on site either, and students had to go to a nearby farm to ferry back pails of water. The school had a woodshed and two back houses, which were stocked with Eaton's catalogues for student use (there was no Frontenac News in those days).

The only light in the school was provided by three small windows on each side of the building, and coal oil lamps. Virgil was a small boy, which came in handy on occasions when the school was accidentally locked by the teacher. A couple of bigger boys hoisted him up and he climbed through the small window on the side of the school porch. He then unlocked the door from the inside.

One of Virgil's first jobs was as the school's caretaker, for which he was paid $11 a year. His responsibilities included daily routines such as cleaning blackboards, sweeping the floor, filling ink bottles on students' desks, and keeping wood available for the stove, as well as keeping the fire burning throughout the day when needed.

In 1937 Virgil was sent off for a summer to Napanee to help out a beekeeper, and that got him started on keeping bees at the farm in Zealand, which he continued even after moving to Sharbot Lake in 1949. At one time he was producing as much as 1,000 pounds of honey in a season, “But at a price of ten cents a pound I never became that rich from it. I don't think I know a single wealthy beekeeper,” he said. Although he only keeps a small operation going now, he has kept bees almost continuously for about 78 years. Virgil has supplied honey to local stores and markets for most of those years, and has apprenticed many beekeepers over that time. When the Sharbot Lake Farmers Market started up a few years ago, he was one of the first to sign up, and although he does not sell a lot of honey any more, he still frequents the market. This past summer he served as a celebrity judge at the first ever Great Butter Tart Challenge at the market.

When the Second World War came along, Virgil was the Garrett who stayed home on the farm because his parents were quite elderly. His brother Roscoe and sister Billie both joined the armed forces. After the war he worked for the railroad in Toronto and elsewhere, coming home on the weekends.

He married Beryl and they built their house in 1949, but Virgil kept working on the railroad for a few years, and Beryl began teaching. In the mid-1950s Virgil went back to high school at the new school in Sharbot Lake near his house, and then took a teaching course in Toronto. In 1959 he took on a job that combined his love of wood-working with his interest and training in education. He became the Industrial Arts teacher at Sharbot Lake High School, a position he would keep for 25 years until he retired in 1984, partly because the dust in the shop had begun to affect his lungs after so many years.

During his years as a teacher, one of his major goals was to find projects for his more advanced students that would motivate them to develop more wood-working skills.

One year he decided to spend the spring break building a small grandmother clock.

“When the students came back to school after the holiday there was the clock, standing on the floor. They asked me where that came from and I said 'when you were on vacation I was doing some work'. About six of them asked if they could learn to make one, and that's what they spent the fall doing when they were in grade 12.”

Virgil and his students became known for the grandfather clocks that were made in the shop, and he has a number of them in his house to this day. Other advanced cabinetry projects followed, and thanks to Virgil the school developed a reputation for craftsmanship.

“Once a student got the idea that they were capable of making something and they wanted to get it made, nothing was going to stop them,” Virgil said of the students he taught in the 1960s and 1970s.

He takes pride in the fact that a number of the best carpenters in the region got their start in his class.

After he retired in 1984, Virgil carried on with his beekeeping and his activities with community groups and the local Masonic lodge, where he has served in a number of leadership roles.

He also, almost accidentally, acquired a 1916 Canadian-made Ford Model T in the 1990s. It tweaked his memory of packing into Model Ts to get to ball games and other events when he was young and he was compelled to get this one on the road. He spent years finding parts in “old barns, flea markets, garage sales” and got the Model T in running order. Although it hasn't been driven recently it still sits, intact, in Virgil's garage.

With some support from family and home help, Virgil is still a fixture in the local community, and, as always, he is as quick with a joke as anyone else.

In 1973, Winston Cosgrove published a 60-page book on the history of Wolfe Island. Wolfe Island Past and Present outlines how the island came to be settled, how it remained in use by indigenous peoples as fall and winter fishing and hunting grounds until the middle of the 19th Century, and how the population peaked in the late 19th Century before beginning a long decline that has only recently been reversed.

The book is written in a kind of discreet manner that suggests its focus was more in the past than on what was then the present, and of course 40 years have passed since it was published. It contains, however, much information about how the island community developed from the late 17th until the 20th centuries.

In 1685, Robert Cavallier, Sieur de Lasalle, having been granted the Signeury of Fort Frontenac by King Louis the 14th ten years earlier, conferred ownership of what would become known as Wolfe Island on James Cauchois. It was the “first conveyance of any part of Ontario from one subject to another”.

The land remained in the Cauchois family for over 100 years, until it was sold in the early 1800s to David Alexander Grant and Patrick Langan for one shilling an acre. Grant had married the Baroness of Longeuil in 1785, and although the sale of the island to Grant and Langan severed all ties to the French monarchy it did establish the Baron of Longeuil as a major force on Wolfe Island.

In 1823, David Alexander's son, C.W. Grant, the 4th Baron of Longeuil, owned about 11,000 acres on the island. A similar amount was split among the three daughters of Patrick Langan. Two-sevenths of the land had been turned over to England's King George when the British overturned French rule in the entire region.

Grant sold off 100 acre lots starting in 1823, and settlement began in earnest. He also had a large house constructed near Marysville. The house, which was called Ardath Chateau, was known locally as the “The Old Castle”. It had 25 rooms, a dungeon, a carriage house and servants' quarters and was the “focal point for many years of life on the island”. In 1929 the house, which had been unoccupied for at least 15 years, was razed in a fire.

“Being a native born Islander, this writer recognises the staunch loyalty among the Islanders for one another and out of respect for this tradition, would prefer 'to let sleeping dogs lie' rather than delve further into the matter.” This suggests that Winston Cosgrove knew more about the fire than he was willing to say, and in all likelihood further information about what happened that dark night in 1929 is still carried by any number of Wolfe “Islanders”.

Although “The Old Castle” was certainly grand, the housing situation for Wolfe Island settlers in the early to mid 19th Century was more modest.

Fifteen settler families lived on the island in 1823, and this increased to 261 persons by 1826. The population grew steadily, peaking at 3,600 by 1861.

When the island was being settled in the 1820s and 30s “the typical house was a log cabin, 20 feet long by 16 feet wide, 6 logs high, with a shanty or sloping roof. Some had glass but most often the windows were only holes in the wall, which could be covered in the winter.”

During the 1850s, demand for lumber for D. D. Calvin's shipbuilding operation on nearby Garden Island led to a lumbering boom on Wolfe Island, and the boom ended when the trees were gone. The population began to dwindle at that point, and by the time Cosgrove's book was published in 1973, it was down to 1,200. It had dropped to 1142 by 2001, and the 2011 population survey lists Frontenac Islands (including Wolfe and Howe Island) at 1864. The current permanent resident population of Wolfe Islands, according to Wikipedia, is 1,400, although it is twice that or more in the summer (perhaps excluding this past summer due to the Ferry Fiasco of 2015).

Wolfe Island Past and Present contains a wealth of information about landmarks and renowned island residents. It explains how Marysville was named after Mary Hitchcock, who lived all of her 92 years on the island and was its first postmistress between 1845 and her death in 1877.

The General Wolfe Hotel, originally known as the Wolfe Island Hotel, was built in 1860. It was renamed the General Wolfe by the Greenwood brothers in 1955, and benefited from the results of a liquor referendum in 1957, which was won by “the wets”. The hotel remains an island landmark and a major part of the hospitality industry. It's 130-seat restaurant has won a number of provincial awards.

The final chapter of the book deals with a crucial subject, one that has been top of mind on the island this summer and was also the subject of a discussion and slide show on Wednesday, December 2, “Ice Travel” with Kaye Fawcett and Ken White, which was organised by the Wolfe Island Historical Society.

Throughout Frontenac County the history of road and railway construction is full of colour, hardship and a fair taint of corruption and scandal.

On Wolfe Island there is an added dimension - the water that separates the island from the mainland and the City of Kingston. It was 50 years ago, in 1965, that a year-round ferry service financed by the Province of Ontario was established on Wolfe Island.

Until then the ferry service ran only until freeze up, and during the winter an ice road was the way across.

In 1954 the winter was so warm that the ferry was only inactive for 2 days, but between 1955 and the onset of the year-round ferry in 1965, the range was 60 to 110 days, with an average of about 80 inactive days each winter.

Over the years, tragedies and near tragedies occurred on the ice on many occasions. One of the more famous events was the near drowning of entire families on Christmas Day in 1955.

The ferry was out of commission because of an early winter, but a tug boat, the Salvage Prince, waited at the edge of the ice at Barrett's Bay for families who had come to the island for Christmas Day and were returning to Kingston late in the afternoon. They were being drawn across the ice in a sleigh, but just before reaching the boat, the sleigh went through a wet spot in the ice, forcing a hurried and dangerous rescue, as children, adults and seniors, were luckily all pulled out of the freezing water back to the tug and a boat ride to Kingston. Some were taken to the hospital for observation. An account of the trip by Brian Johnson is available at thousandislandslife.com.

In the concluding pages of his book, Winston Cosgrove makes the argument that the economy of Wolfe Island will be doomed unless a bridge is built.

“In the past the economy of the island has been purely an agricultural one, with hunting and fishing and summer residents as minor items. Under this system the population has dwindled. The key to the problem is transportation. There is much beautiful undeveloped shoreline and land that is is well-suited for permanent homes but better ways are needed to get to and from the mainland if the community is to develop and grow. A ferry service is not efficient enough ... Meanwhile the Islanders who want a bridge must be content to await future developments while acting as guardians of a great land developed by pioneers, to whom all are indebted.”

Although Cosgrove's views may have had a lot of currency this past summer while the Wolfe Islander ferry was in dry dock, Wolfe Island has reversed the population slide over the past 10 years and a number of tourism-related businesses are thriving.

The Trinity Quilters will be celebrating the county's 150th anniversary with a special heritage quilt show featuring over 100 quilts and other items that will be displayed in the sanctuary of Trinity United Church in Verona on Saturday Oct. 17.

The show will feature numerous heritage and antique quilts from the collections of the group's members, and members of the local community, as well as a wide selection of heritage quilts from the collection of Dr. Peter Bell. Quilt historian, Bethany Garner, will be on hand talking about her own unique display of quilts and Eric Simkins will be displaying his collection of antique sewing machines.

Members will also be showing off some of their newer quilts and various quilted items, including table runners, wall hangings, pillows, and wearable art. Three gorgeous quilts will be raffled off at the event. The first is a queen-size, hand cross-stitched, floral patterned quilt, machine quilted by Nancy Holden; the second, a Frontenac Star quilt, pieced together by group member Jean Claire and hand quilted by the Trinity members, and featuring blocks of stars with a triangular flying geese border design. The third quilt is a colorful children's pinwheel quilt, machine quilted by Doreen Morey, with blocks made by the Trinity group. It features a playful cowboy patterned design.

An on-site boutique will be offering various smaller quilted items for sale including pin cushions, scissor holders, small wall hangings, Christmas decorations and more. Wilton Creek Fabrics of Harrowsmith and Hamilton Fabrics will be selling a wide range of their related wares and Sharon Sole will be offering up her quilt photo greeting cards.

Lunch can be purchased for $6 and will be served between 11am and 2pm. Coffee and muffins will also be available for early guests. A number of door prizes will be given out to visitors throughout the day. Admission is $5 and proceeds from the quilt raffle will be donated to the church and will also help support Southern Frontenac Community Services' Day Away Program.

Don't miss this rare event on October 17, when Trinity United Church will be ablaze in colour to the delight of quilters and quilt enthusiasts alike. Trinity United Church is located at 6689 Road 38 in Verona. For more information contact Ann McDougall at 613-374-2516.

Rightly so, Frontenac Park is considered the hidden jewel of Frontenac County. It is located in the midst of an array of communities and cottage lakes within a stone's throw of Sydenham and is a short drive from Kingston; and yet it is a backwoods park in a unique geological and climactic location. It features the best canoeing, camping and hiking this side of Bon Echo Park, which is also a jewel but one that is less hidden and is also shared between Frontenac and Lennox and Addington.

In his definitive book on the back story about the land where Frontenac Park is located, “Their Enduring Spirit: the History of Frontenac Park 1783-1990”, Christian Barber extensively researched all of the development that took place in and around the park before the idea of a park was floated and eventually acted upon in the 1960s.

Their Enduring Spirit is not only a valuable resource in terms of how the park was developed; it is also an account of the difficulties posed by the Frontenac Spur of the Canadian Shield on those who were unlucky enough to attempt homesteading in its rocky terrain.

The park is located in what were then Loughborough and Bedford Townships, now both part of the Municipality of South Frontenac. Many of the settlers who attempted to make a life in that region did so in the mid-to-late 1800s. There were some Loyalists among them, but there were also a number of Irish immigrants who made their way first to St. Patrick's Church in Railton, and then headed into the wilderness north of Sydenham in search of a new life.

What greeted them was brutal and difficult.

The history of a number of homesteading families forms the core of Their Enduring Spirit. Based on historic records, interviews with descendants who lived on or visited those who lived on the farms, and by walking the land and examining the remnants that are being reclaimed as wilderness lands, a picture of life in the back townships during the first 100 years of Frontenac County emerges.

(An account of the life and times of the Kemp family can be found at Frontenacnews.ca under the “50 Stories/150 Years” tab)

The level of poverty among late 19th Century settlers is reflected in some of the minutes of meetings of both Hinchinbrooke and Loughbrough Townships. In the minutes there are accounts of grants for as little as $1 for families in need after the death of a partner or a debilitating illness.

Families who had settled on the worst pieces of land, who suffered from any kind of ill health, or for some reason were not able to keep up with the demands of clearing land, building shelter, keeping warm in winter and raising enough food, ended up in desperate straits. That is why settlers would take over abandoned fields and houses and only settle the ownership later on, if they decided to stay. Far from disputing this practice, as long as the property taxes were paid the local townships did not question the ownership of the properties.

Mining was one of the few means of getting money for labour, and was also a major impetus for the establishment of the K&P Railroad.

The village of Godfrey, to the west of Frontenac Park, was originally called Deniston after the name of the post office but it was known as Iron Ore Junction by the local population. The Glendower company mined 12,000 tons of iron ore between 1873 and 1880, and later the Zanesville company took over and a spur line was constructed between the mine and the Bedford Station (renamed Godfrey in 1901) of the K&P.

A large deposit of Feldspar was found between Desert and Thirteen Island Lakes, and it was mined, on and off, between 1901 and 1951, producing a total of 230,000 tons in that time.

In and right around the park, it was mica that was the most commonly mined mineral, in small mines as a kind of cottage industry and on an industrial scale as well.

There is an account of how a mica mine operated in one of the issues of “The Frontenac News” (not this newspaper but the newsletter of the Friends of Frontenac Park)

Below is an excerpt:

1905 - early in the morning Tom Gorsline, the foreman at the Tett mine, is checking the steam piping as a worker starts a wood fire in the boiler that will provide the steam that runs the drill and the water pumps. The miners had been following a vein of amber mica (phlogopite) since 1899 - the main pit now plunged close to 80 feet into the rocks and water sometimes was a problem. Fortunately, the price for mica is on the rise again and the main vein is still good.

The hand drillers are already at work. Their job is to make holes in the rock to receive the explosives. The drillers are working in teams of two using a method called "double-jacking". One person, the holder, manually holds a steel drill against the rock. The other, the striker, swings an eight-pound sledgehammer hitting the end of the drill. In between the blow, the holder twists the drill to loosen the rock chips so it does not get stuck in the rock. Then the next blow comes with a sharp clank when steel meets steel. They are drilling at a rate of 1.5 to 2 feet per hour. After a half-hour, the holder and striker exchange places so the striker can have a rest. As you can imagine, accuracy is crucial. If the striker misses, the holder could be maimed for life. This is dangerous enough when they are drilling on the floor of the mine, but often the veins are at the roof of a drift or on the wall of the pit.

As soon as the steam from the boiler reaches the right pressure, a miner starts the steam drill. It is faster and easier than hand drilling but the steam drill is enormous, unreliable and unwieldy because of connections with the steam pipes that come down from the surface. As a result, the steam driller is assigned fairly open spaces while the hand drillers work in tight quarters. Drilling is hard and dangerous - there are no hard hats, goggles, or electrical lights - but the dollar a day they are earning helps to feed their families.

Now that the holes are in place, Tom calls the blasters. They make sure the holes are dry, otherwise the charges may not go off. They put the black powder in waterproof covers, attach a proper length fuse, and place it down in the hole. They pack the rest of the hole with clay. The length of the fuse is important or they could meet their maker faster than expected. After a few minutes, all charges are ready. The head blaster gives a signal to Tom Gorsline who orders all miners and equipment out of from the mine. When all is clear, the blaster lights up the fuse and moves quickly out of the way. The explosion rumbles and the ground shakes.

After the smoke and dust settle, Tom sends in the muckers. They have a hazardous job. Everyone knew of George Amey, a mucker at the Birch Lake mine, who lost an eye when his pick hit a charge that did not fully explode. Some muckers sort the ore from the waste while others, with picks and shovels, load the waste rock in a large bucket until it is full. Then one of them yells: "BUCKET." Upon hearing the signal, a man at the surface gets the horse moving on a circular track so that the winch can hoist the bucket up to the top. The bucket is dumped on the tailings pile. As soon as the muckers are finished clearing the debris from the last blast, the drillers begin to make new holes.

Cleaning the mica is the job of cobblers who work on the surface. Some cobblers "thumb trim" the mica by the pit while others are working at the cleaning shop attached to the main mine building, "knife trimming" the mica to remove all traces of unwanted material. They store the clean mica in barrels.

The mica is shipped down the Hardwood Bay Road to Perth Road then north to Bedford Mills. There, the mica will be shipped to a buyer in Ottawa via the Rideau Canal.

The Tett mine operated from 1899 till 1924. It produced 99 tons of mica for a value of $27,279.00. For a few months, it was the largest mica producer in Ontario.

By the 1940s the mica mining boom had passed and most of the homesteads in the area had been abandoned or were on their last legs. It was then that the idea of establishing a wilderness park on the lands in Loughborough and Bedford township that had resisted settlement, and whose lakes (Devil, Big Clear, Otter, and Buck) were not already cut up into cottage lots, was first floated.

In 1954 a Parks Division was created within the Department of Lands and Forests of Ontario (the precursor to the Ministry of Natural Resources.

In 1957, the Kingston Rod and Gun Club submitted a proposal for a new park to serve the growing numbers of people in Kingston and southern Frontenac County wanting to experience the great outdoors, hiking, camping, fishing and the enjoyment of a sandy beach.

The proposal included twenty-seven 200 acre lots in Bedford and twenty-five 200 acre lots in Lougborough, a total of 16.2 square miles, with an option to increase it to 23.7 square miles if the area below Otter Lake was added.

That effort was not successful, and seemed to be dead when Murphy's Point Park on Big Rideau Lake near Perth was established instead.

Five years later, in 1962, another group, the Kingston Nature Club, put forward a similar proposal. This time, even though the cost of purchasing private land for the park had ballooned to $200,000, the proposal was successful. It eventually cost over $1 million to create Frontenac Park, which opened in the late 1960s.

The park's first superintendent, Bruce Page, was the great grandson of Jeremiah, one of the first settlers on the land in the vicinity of what became Frontenac Park.

Among the features of the park, and on the nearby Gould Lake Conservation Area, are hiking trails that pass by and over mica mine sites. In the Park, the 10 km Tettsmine Loop passes by remnants of a log slide from the lumbering days, abandoned mica mines and the remains of McNally Homestead.

At Gould Lake, the Mica Loop passes over several small mine sites and mica minerals can still be seen sparkling in the rock faces.  

There were a number of distinguished Frontenac County wardens from the Township of Wolfe Island during the first 133 years of Frontenac County history, and since municipal amalgamation there have been two more from the Township of Frontenac Islands: Jim Vanden Hoek for two years, and the current warden, Denis Doyle.

Although Tim O'Shea was only county warden for a single year, the centennial year in 1967, he was a member of the council for 33 consecutive years as the long-serving reeve of Wolfe Island. He retired from politics in 1991 and died in 1996 at the age of 78.

His son, Terry, who served as the clerk of Wolfe Island and Frontenac Islands for over 20 years, starting in 1986, described his father as someone who enjoyed people and was able to remain calm in tense situations, which might explain why he was able to win election after election.

He worked for most of his life as a hunting and a fishing guide on Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, and in the evenings he tended to township matters. As well as presiding over Council, he was the welfare officer for the islands as well as the manager of the ferry, all part of the functions of the reeve.

Perhaps his most lasting accomplishment was convincing the provincial government to take over the ferry service from Wolfe Island and make it a free service. He also presided over the construction of the first library, medical clinic, ambulance base and fire department on the island. Because of all his accomplishments and longevity, he is still considered to have been the dean of Frontenac County councilors.

One hundred and two years before Tim O'Shea served as county warden, another Wolfe Island politician held the post. The first ever Frontenac County warden was Dileno (Dexter) Calvin, the proverbial self-made man. He was orphaned at the age of eight in Rutland, Vermont.

When he was 20 he moved to the State of New York where he worked as a labourer until he entered into the lumbering business when he was in his mid-20s. He started in 1825, squaring some timber with a neighbour and transporting it by raft to Quebec City. Slowly, he built up the business, and in 1835 he moved to Clayton, NY, and established a lumber transport business. Soon after, he became involved in a company based on Garden Islands, the Kingston Stave Forwarding Company, which was later renamed Calvin, Cook and Counter, and then Calvin and Cook after the men who owned it. In 1844, Dexter Calvin moved to rented land on Garden Island and took control of the company, taking advantage of the island's location, its sheltered port, and the fact that it was within the British rather than the American trading system.

Out of its base on Garden Island, the company maintained agencies in Sault St. Marie, Quebec City, Liverpool and Glasgow, operated 12 -15 ships and employed as many as 700 people in its peak years. It became a generalized shipping company, and also operated a large tugboat service.

The move to Garden Island took place soon after the death of Calvin's first wife, Harriet Webb, in Clayton, New York, in 1843. the couple had been married for 12 years and had six children. He remarried Marion Breck in 1844. They also had six children between 1844 and her death in 1861. His third wife, Catherine Wilkinson, whom he married in 1861 when he was 63, had two children, and lived until 1911. Of his 14 children, only six lived to adulthood.

During the last 40 years of his long life (he died in 1884 at the age of 86) Calvin was a sort of patriarch to the inhabitants of Garden Island. He bought 15 acres of land on the island in 1848 with his partner Hiram Cook, and by 1862 they owned the entire island. Calvin bought Cook’s share in 1880.

Garden Island became a model company town, with its own school, library, and post office. Although it was made up of people from different national origins and religions, it was reportedly remarkably peaceful and well managed. It was also a dry community, under the express orders of Calvin himself, who became a prohibitionist at the same time as his conversion to the Baptist Faith about a year before the death of his first wife.

Since most of the inhabitants of Garden Island worked for Calvin, he was able to shield them from economic turbulence in two ways. For one thing, since he was more involved in lumber transport than buying and selling, the fluctuations in the price of lumber did not affect the business in a substantial way. He also chose to use the company's reserves to shield his employees during serious downturns, such as one that took place in 1873. At that time he cut wages but did not lay any one off, which was as unusual then as it is now. He was strongly opposed to organized labour, however, and when sailors on his ships started a union drive, he hired replacement workers from Glasgow and eventually sold some of his schooners and bought great lake barges to cut down on the need for labour.

His political life, which began when he was in his early 60s, was quite distinguished. He had become a naturalized Canadian within a year of moving to Garden Island. By the time Frontenac County was established in 1865 after the amalgamated County of Frontenac, Lennox and Addington had been disbanded, Calvin was already ensconced as reeve of Wolfe Island and the surrounding islands. He became the first warden of the County, a position he also held the following year and in 1868 as well.

He then took a turn at provincial politics, as a Conservative MPP for the riding of Frontenac. He served from 1868 until 1883, with the exception of the years between 1875 and 1877, when he lost favour with the party. In those days, becoming the Conservative candidate in Frontenac was more difficult than winning the election against opposing party candidates.

He was also one of the first directors of the K&P Railroad.

He was a man who was known for his eccentricities, such as a dislike for short men “for no other reason than that they were short” according to his grandson, as well as men who bit their fingernails (author's note – I'm sure we would have gotten on famously) as well as dogs and people who own them. “When a man's poor,” he said, “he gets a dog. If he's very poor, he gets two.”

Dileno Dexter Calvin died in 1884, and despite his great success in Canada, he was buried next to his mother and his first wife in Clayton, NY.

Rightly so, Frontenac Park is considered the hidden jewel of Frontenac County. It is located in the midst of an array of communities and cottage lakes, within a stone's throw of Sydenham and is a short drive from Kingston; and yet it is a backwoods park in a unique geological and climactic location. It features the best canoeing, camping and hiking this side of Bon Echo Park, which is also a jewel but one that is less hidden and is also shared between Frontenac and Lennox and Addington.

In his definitive book on the back story about the land where Frontenac Park is located, “Their Enduring Spirit: the History of Frontenac Park 1783-1990”, Christian Barber extensively researched all of the development that took place in and around the park before the idea of a park was floated and eventually acted upon in the 1960s.

In doing so, Their Enduring Spirit is not only a valuable resource in terms of how the park was developed; it is also an account of the difficulties posed by the Frontenac Spur of the Canadian Shield on those who were unlucky enough to attempt homesteading in its rocky terrain.

The park is located in what were then Loughborough and Bedford Townships, now both part of the Municipality of South Frontenac. Many of the settlers who attempted to make a life in that region did so in the mid-to-late 1800s. There were some Loyalists among them, but there were also a number of Irish immigrants who made their way first to St. Patrick's Church in Railton, and then headed into the wilderness north of Sydenham in search of a new life.

What greeted them was brutal and difficult.

The history of a number of homesteading families forms the core of Their Enduring Spirit. Based on historic records, interviews with descendants who lived on or visited those who lived on the farms, and by walking the land and examining the remnants that are being reclaimed as wilderness lands, a picture of life in the back townships during the first 100 years of Frontenac County emerges.

The first family to be profiled in the book is the Kemp family, who arrived at their farm at Otter Lake, near the west gate of the park, sometime in the 1860s. By the time of the 1871 census, William and Jane Kemp, both 47, had six children living with them. The land they laid claim to, in addition to other properties taken on by their son George, was very good by local standards. Over two decades of work, making use of the efforts of the entire family, 30 acres of the 95 acre property had been cleared.

“That might not sound like much to show for 20 years of labour, but in that district most farms worked 15 or 20 cleared acres. In fact the clearing was usually completed in relatively short order. But it was back-breaking work, without mechanical means. It involved cutting down the trees and clearing the brush, then burning the stumps that could not be wrenched from the ground by a team of horses or oxen and hauled away to form a first fence row. In the meantime the job of raising a crop to feed the family over the winter had to go on, and the first seeds were usually sown among the stumps ... it was no wonder that among the first settlers it was axiomatic to hate trees,” wrote Christian Barber in Their Enduring Spirit.

The Kemp family prospered, and by 1900 the original log cabin that was built in the early 1870s had disappeared beneath white, painted clapboard, and numerous outbuildings had been constructed as well. There was a root cellar below, and fields that extended right to the front doorway.

Still, cash was not easy to come by.

A ledger from M.A. Hogan's General Store in Sydenham illustrates this. In late 1912, Mary Shales Kemp, George's wife, who managed the family finances among numerous other tasks, purchased dishes, a pair of overalls for a dollar, and the indulgences of walnuts and a vase, for a total cost of $7.32.

Her custom was to pay for her purchases with butter and eggs from the farm. However on this occasion, after the eggs and butter were factored in there was a shortfall of $1.45. Back went the overalls and the extra 45 cents was paid in cash.

During the mica mining year in the first decade of the 20th century, George Kemp found a number of small deposits on his farm, and even took on investors to pay the $70 that was needed for drills and blasting powder at one site. However, enough mica was never found to make a profit on the venture.

To the extent that there were roads in the area, they were built and maintained by all of the farmers living in there, sometimes as part of their taxation responsibilities, which, in the late 19th century, included putting in some time improving the local roads.

While the Kemp family were able to establish a successful farm in what is now Frontenac Park, it was ultimately unsustainable. Mary Kemp lived on the farm after George died, but moved away in 1928 and sold the property in 1941. The last people to occupy it were a family from Wyoming in the late 1940s.

By the time Mary Kemp died in Sydenham in 1952 at the age of 93, the property where she had made her life had been abandoned and the house and barns had burned down.

When Christian Barber went to the property in the late 1980s as he was preparing his book, it was mostly overgrown with vegetation, and it required effort on his part to find the remnants of what had been a going concern for 60 or 70 years.

He notes this at the end of his chapter on the Kemp family of Kemp Road : “... the fields, so painstakingly cleared and planted and harvested by generations of settlers, are overgrown with sumac and birch, locust and juniper. Rusted barbed wire – embedded by years in the centre of the trees that it was originally stapled to the bark of – is stretched to the breaking point by fallen trees, and there is no one to cut them away; no farmer in overalls, with strong, knuckly, barked, and sun-tanned hands to walk the line on a summer day between haying and harvest and maintain a fence.”

The Kemp family's story is similar in outcome to others told in the book - struggle and some success followed by a move to better farmland elsewhere in the region or to work off the farm in Sydenham or beyond. Mining and logging were also prevalent in the park. Logging started in the early 19th century and mining later on, with the logging having the greatest impact on the land, as it did elsewhere in the region generally.

In the interesting chapter on mining, Barber touches on the story of Antoine Point on Devil Lake.

Francis Edward Antoine and his wife, Letitia Whiteduck, built a log cabin on the Point in the mid 19th century and they are buried there. One of their sons, John Antoine, is listed, along with the government, as the owner of Antoine Point in the 1883 Meacham map, one of the best source materials for information about land ownership in those years. John, with his wife Elizabeth Hollywood, had 11 children. According to Antoine family lore, it was John who found mica deposits at Antoine Point, although there are competing accounts about who found the ore at that location, and it seems that the Point became of interest to mining interests in the early 1890s.

There is an entry in the land registry indicating that John Antoine sold his interest in the land to William Jones for $50 in 1897, and the Antoines moved to Godfrey, and eventually back to Sharbot Lake, where another branch of the family was already located.

The idea of establishing a wilderness park on the lands in Loughborough and Bedford township that had resisted settlement, and whose lakes (Devil, Big Clear, Otter, and Buck) were not already cut up into cottage lots, was first floated in the 1940s.

In 1954 a Parks Division was created within the Department of Lands and Forests of Ontario (the precursor to the Ministry of Natural Resources.

In 1957, the Kingston Rod and Gun Club submitted a proposal for a new park to serve the growing numbers of people in Kingston and southern Frontenac County wanting to experience the great outdoors, hiking, camping, fishing and the enjoyment of a sandy beach.

The proposal included twenty seven 200 acre lots in Bedford and twenty five 200 acre lots in Lougborough, a total of 16.2 square miles, with an option to increase it to 23.7 square miles if the area below Otter lake was added.

That effort was not successful, and seemed to be dead when Murphy's Point Park on Big Rideau Lake near Perth was established instead.

Five years later, in 1962, another group, the Kingston Nature Club, put forward a similar proposal. This time, even though the cost of purchasing private land for the park had ballooned to $200,000, the proposal was successful. It eventually cost over $1 million to create Frontenac Park, which opened in the late 1960s.

The park's first superintendent, Bruce Page, was the great grandson of Jeremiah, one of the first settlers on the land in the vicinity of what became Frontenac Park.

When Plevna quilter Debbie Emery won the design contest for the Frontenac County 150th anniversary quilt, she knew she was going to have a lot of work to do to translate her design into a finished quilt.

By the time she delivered the quilt to the county in early August, in time for it to be displayed as part of the 150th anniversary celebrations, she had put 650 hours of her own labour into the project, turning the $2,000 prize for winning the contest into a $3 an hour part time job for eight months.

More importantly, the quilt was front and centre at the opening ceremonies of the celebration event in Harrowsmith, and will be available for display at the county offices for years to come.

Using the rail line as a unifying feature, the quilt illustrates the three geographical components of Frontenac County, from the island communities that are surrounded by Lake Ontario, to the farmland in South Frontenac Township and into the Canadian Shield in the north.

The quilt also points to the First Nations heritage of the county, and to activities such as logging, homesteading, tourism and the night skies.

Attendance reaches target of 10,000

It took the efforts of a committee of volunteers, the Township of South Frontenac, Frontenac County staffers Alison Vandervelde and Anne Marie Young, co-ordinators Pam Morey and Dan Bell, and hundreds of volunteers on the grounds to produce a relaxed, happy, and engaged crowd at the Frontenac County weekend-long 150th Anniversary Celebration.

The long range planning that helped make that happen started with the upgrades that were done to Centennial Park to turn it into a mixed-use facility that is as suitable for a soccer tournament or a high school football game as it is for a fair or large exhibition. This involved clearing a swath of land for parking, paving walkways, upgrading the stage/picnic area, etc. All of this work was taken on by the township over the last 18 months, and was done with accessibility needs in mind thanks to the efforts of Neil Allan, who consults with the township and sits on the county accessibility committee as well.

The planning for the event itself has been underway for a couple of years, but it was over the last six or seven months that all of the detailed work was done, the musicians booked, the vendors sought and secured, etc.

By the time Friday (August 28) rolled around, tents were going up around the grounds; cordoned-off areas had been set up for kids who would be playing on the bouncy castles and for adults at the “saloon”; the re-enactors had set up their camp; and the dignitaries were gathered for the opening ceremonies.

Any illusion that the proceedings would be dry and formal were dispelled when Central Frontenac Town Crier Paddy O'Connor enlisted the audience’s participation in calling out “O-yeah”.

This was followed by the raising of the Canadian flag and Heather Bell singing O Canada.

The MC for the ceremony was Phil Leonard, former mayor of Portland and South Frontenac Townships and County Warden on several occasions as well. Leonard also sat on the 150th anniversary committee. He introduced a number of speakers, including: South Frontenac Mayor Ron Vandewal, Kingston Mayor Bryan Paterson, MPs Scott Reid and Ted Hsu, MPPs Randy Hillier and Sophie Kiwala, North Frontenac Mayor Ron Higgins, culminating in remarks by Dennis Doyle, the Mayor of Frontenac Islands and Warden of the County.

The speeches were, for the most part, brief, and in keeping with the tone that had been set early for the event, relatively irreverent. Among the other dignitaries at the event were a number of former wardens of Frontenac County, including 95-year-old Don Lee, Jack Moreland, Bill MacDonald, Bill Lake, Barbara Sproule, Phil Leonard, Ron Sleeth, Janet Gutowski, and Jim Vanden Hoek.

The ceremonies having been dispensed with, it was time to let loose, and the saloon was a destination for politicians - a fitting location considering that the county and townships used to hold their meetings in pubs in the 1800s.

Following the showing of a family movie, a fireworks spectacle ended the opening night of the festival.

Saturday was a busy, busy day. A parade started it off, and with the Frontenac Plowing Match underway across the road, thousands enjoyed the sunshine and a full schedule of events. Over 5,000 people streamed into the park throughout the day, enjoying free admission and entertainment from a host of musicians, a strongman competition, and a short skirmish by the Brockville Infantry Company of 1862.

On Saturday night, the Golden Links Hall hosted a Heritage Ball, where about half the audience was dressed in 1860s vintage clothing. This was a challenge because not only did the band Soul Survivors keep the R&B hits coming all night to keep the dance floor full, but the evening was more than a bit warm for wool suits and layered dresses.

Sunday, the final day of the event was a bit more low key than Saturday, although the park remained busy.

The Brockville Infantry, who had been camping on site throughout the weekend, finally had their chance to put on a full re-enactment. The Fenians, Irish descended former Americans who raided Canada in order to pressure England to pull out of Ireland, lost the battle to a squadron of Red Coats and the Brockville Infantry amid gun and cannon fire. The Fenian raids took place around the time that Frontenac County was founded, and they were the last time any attacks on Canada were launched from US soil.

About an hour after the re-enactment, the closing ceremonies got underway. As the public left, the vendors, food trucks, and volunteers began to clean up, leaving Harrowsmith Centennial Park in pristine condition, a fitting legacy project for the 150th anniversary.

Agnes Morrow is 101 years old, and when she was born on March 9, 1914, World War One was still six months away; oil had not yet been discovered in Alberta; and James P Whitney was the Premier of Ontario.

When historians look at the 20th century, 1914 is seen as a pivotal year, because it was the start of the war that profoundly changed the political landscape around the world and in Canada, and left millions dead and millions more displaced.

But in the community of Donaldson, where Agnes Morrow was born in the farmhouse of Louis and Julia Morrow, the third of eight children, world events had little impact in those years. Donaldson, which is now merely an access road to a small number of properties, was at that time a community made up primarily of Morrow family farms.

“There were around 39 Morrows living within five miles of one another. Uncle Neil had a farm; Uncle Louis had a farm; Uncle Henry had a farm; Elmer Morrow had a farm; they were all little farms,” Agnes recalled when interviewed this week from her home near Lavant Station, a few kilometres from where she was born.

Among the first things that Agnes remembers, besides the death of her sister at the age of five, six months after an appendicitis operation left an incision that did not heal properly (the rest of the family lived into their 80s and 90s), was the day in 1919 when her father got his first team of horses, greatly expanding the family's prospects.

One of the things her father did with the team was clear a swamp on the farm in order to create a small hay field. “But like a lot of the work done to clear land it has gone back to the way it was over the years,” said Agnes.

When Agnes was very young, six or seven years old, she started helping to milk the 13 cows that her father, Louis, kept. The cream was delivered to a cheese factory at Lavant Station or the creamery at Snow Road, and in the 1920s there was a bread truck and a meat truck that came around on a weekly basis.

Some of the other memories that Agnes has are about the food that her mother, Julia, prepared for the family.

“Mum and dad were good providers, and mum was an awful good cook. She could take an old hen and make it taste like a spring chicken, and she made the best apple pie. We had an orchard and we picked berries in season, but the apple pie was the best. I made pies all my life, many pies, but never like she made.”

In addition to the orchard, the Morrows grew fields of turnips and beans and other vegetables for fresh eating and for winter storage.

“My oldest brother Alfred was very good to us little ones as well,”Agnes recalls, recalling one event in particular.

“One day mum and dad were off to Perth and Alfred was home with us. A storm came up and it was a bad one. Hail came with it and was laying on the ground in sheets, there was so much of it. Alfred had the little ones gather it up and he got a ten gallon syrup pail and had them pack it with the hail and added salt to keep it frozen. He put a pail of cream in the middle and I flavoured it with vanilla and we started stirring it and shaking it one way and another. It never quite made it to ice cream but it tasted good all the same. We cleaned up and put everything away and thought that was the end of it. But at supper time my little brother John said he wasn't hungry and mum asked him  what was wrong. He said he was still full from the ice cream, and then we had to answer for it.”

Agnes attended school at both Mundel's school near Donaldson and at the Lavant School.

When she was 17 she met Archie Thomas at an event at the Lavant schoolhouse. There was  man who had a bear that did tricks and people had gathered to see his show. Archie was the youngest of a family with 10 children in Ompah.

In 1933, when Agnes was 19, the couple married. They both started working on a farm near Agnes' family farm that was owned by the Ferguson family. Two years later the elder Ferguson died of a heart attack while checking on his cattle, and in 1938 the Fergusons offered to sell the farm to Archie and Agnes Thomas.

To this day Agnes lives on that farm, in the farmhouse, built in 1840, which she has now looked after for 77 years.

In 1938, when they bought the farm, eggs sold for 11 cents a dozen; butter for 15 cents a pound; and syrup went for $2.90 a gallon.

While she does not remember World War One, the Second World War had an impact on Agnes' life, and that of the local community. Dozens of local men went to war; a number came back injured and several died overseas.

The biggest improvement on the farm took place in May of 1949, when it was hooked up with electricity.

“We had all the wiring done for lights in advance, so we were ready for it. The first thing we bought was a washing machine. One of the cottagers sold fridges and he had a second-hand one that he sold to us. I was in hillbilly heaven when we got that washer. Then, when we could afford it, we added a refrigerator. Before that we had an ice box, and had to go to Sunday Lake in the winter to cut blocks of ice, haul it home, and store it in sawdust for the summer. The refrigerator was a big, big improvement.”

Archie died a number of years ago, and the children are living away from the farm, although one of Agnes and Archie’s daughters, Shirley Whan, lives in Sharbot Lake.

But Agnes has never seriously considered leaving the farm. “I wouldn't have lived here for so long if I didn't like it here,” she said. “I've had a good life in this house.”

She has slowed down, of course. In place of the large garden she used to keep she now has a “box garden with cucumbers, beets, tomatoes and carrots” and the house is still surrounded by flowers, including her favourite double impatiens and begonias.

She walks with the help of a cane and uses a speaker to help her hear better, but with the help of relatives and friends, and six hours a week of housekeeping help, Agnes says “I thought about leaving but I decided to stay here for another year.”

She said that one of the secrets to her long, relatively healthy life, has been the fact that she never drove a car.

“I saved all that stress, and here I am,” she said.

(note - an earlier version of this story mistakenly said that Agnes' husband name was Charlie in two places. This version has been corrected)