Shirley was born and raised in Sharbot Lake, and although her family moved to Perth when she was nine, in 1935, it was her first school principal at Sharbot Lake Public School who introduced her to naturalist pursuits.

“He took us outside and introduced all sorts of vegetation and birds, showed us Blue Herons. It certainly caught my attention,” she said,

Shirley always returned to Sharbot Lake on weekends to visit her grandmother. In 1988, she had a small house built on the lake, on a lot in the village that was still in her family, to serve as her winter home.

It was difficult to talk to Shirley on Tuesday, because the phone kept ringing as friends from all over were calling to congratulate her as news of her appointment to the Order circulated around the province.

“I’ve known for three weeks, but I wasn’t to tell anyone except for family until it was officially announced,” she said, but since Shirley is not exactly prone to self-promotion it is likely she wouldn’t have told anyone about it at all if it hadn’t already been publicized.

After being raised in eastern Ontario, Shirley said, “I wanted to know what it was like to live in different parts of the province.” That led her and her husband, who was a teacher, to move to Kenora. In 1956 a road was built joining Quetico with the rest of Ontario, and it wasn’t long after that that Shirley made her first trip to the park.

Fifty-four years later, her story has become synonymous with that of Quetico Park. Marie Nelson, who has worked as a ranger in the park with her husband Jon, is the person who put the application for the Order of Ontario togethe

Shirley Peruniak was born at Sharbot Lake in 1926, and she can trace her family roots back at least two generations further to a grandfather who lived south of the village near the Tryon Road. She attended Sharbot Lake Public School until she reached grade 7. Her father, who worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway, was then transferred to Perth to work in the office of CPR Express, a postal mail and parcel service. Although Shirley did not live full time in Sharbot Lake for over 50 years (1935 until 1988) she always came back to visit her grandparents and other relatives for Christmas and summer holidays. They

who owned a number of cottages on the lake, and rented some out during the summer tourist season.

Shirley, whose maiden name was Walroth, has always been a history buff, and attended Queen's on a sholarship to study history. She lived with her husband in Kenora for many years where they were teachers, adn where she formed an association with Quetico Park in northwestern Ontario (Onear Dryden). In 2010 was honoured by being named to the Order of Ontario for her work as a historian and naturalist in the Park.

When she returned to Sharbot Lake in 1988 after her husband had died, she torn down one of the two remaining cottages that she owned herself byt that time and had a small house built on the lake, on Walroth Lane (her maiden name was Walroth)

She quickly established herself as a historian in Sharbot Lake at that time, working with then librarian Michael Dawber (who late wrote a book about he history of Central Frontenac called Back of Sunset) she founded the Oso Historical Society.

In the early years of the society, descendants of some of the long standing families in the township spoke at public events that were organised for that purpose, and although much of the energy of those years has slipped away, Shirley has kept an archive of material, with files about each family kept neatly in alphabetic order at her home, and in a series of file cabinets that are housed at the Sharbot Lake Branch of the Kingston Frontenac Public Library.

Her own memories of life in Sharbot Lake in the 1920's and 30's are consistent with other accounts, and the material she has gathered about life in the preceding 50 years are consistent with other sources, including the chapter on Oso township in County of 1000 Lakes, which was written by Peggy Cohoe, Evelyn Johnson, and Doris and R.D. Ayers.

“I know that farming was particularly difficult all through those years,” she said.

Based on census data and accounts or people such as Thomas Gibbs, the surveyer who completed a Survey in 1860, County of 1000 lakes says that the entire population of the township was 138 in 1860, but that number rose steadily over the next 40 years. By 1900, 60% of the land in Oso was listed as agricultural, but even then the life blood of the town was the railway, since the CPR and K&P rail lines crossed at Sharbot Lake. In 1900 there were five lumber mills in the vicinity of the village, employing 150 people, and an apatite mine employed 40 more. All of this was based on the ability to ship product to markets in all directions.

Over the next 20 years most of the mills closed, a discovery of large quantities of apetite (which was used int the fertiliser industry) in Florida led to the mine being shut done, the population dropped by 25% and farming became less and less popular.

By 1911 there were 160 farms in Oso, and by 1961 there were 31, which is still a lot more than there are today.

Shirley Peruniak remembers the railway as central to the town in the 1920's.

“The K&P would come in first, and it would wait for the CPR to arrive. People and goods were transferred, and the trains would be on their way,” she recalls.

One of Shirley's regrets is that in those years she took many trips on the K&P to Kingston, even when she was only a summer visitor to Sharbot Lake, but never took the train north the Snow road, or Flower Station, or to where it ended, at Calabogie.

Long before Mary Howes had established herself as a major force in local and regional organisations, she was a young girl from Tichborne who had been raised in a great aunt and uncle's house, near the rail station.

After high school she went to Toronto to work, living at another aunt's house, but she did not like it very much.

“I didn't like it because I was a country girl, not a city girl,” she recalls now, from the house in Parham that she has lived in since 1952.

She would take the train home every weekend from Toronto, but her days in Toronto ended when one evening at the Parham Fair, she met the man she would end up marrying. “I met Glen for the first time at the dance at the Parham Fair in 1950. We knew of each other of course, but that was our first meeting,” she said.

The dances at the fair were held in the Palace, where all the fair entries are set out during the day. She does not recall who the band was led by that night, although she remembers that the band that played at her wedding was led by Bill Hannah.

There was one problem in the romance between Glen Howes and Mary Sweetman, however. She was from Tichborne and he was from Parham. Tichborne and Parham were opponents in those days, both in hockey and in baseball, and there was always a question of where Mary's loyalties lay.

“Nobody in Parham wanted me to marry Glen; they were rival towns,” she said, although she did add that it was not that intense a rivalry, “Nothing like Romeo and Juliet, but it was something people talked about.”

Tichborne was founded in the late 1860s or early 1870s. The K&P rail line came in 1872. It is thought that the name Tichborne was brought by a Mr. Lunscombe, who was an engineer with Canadian Pacific.

Later there was a mine in the vicinity, the Eagle Lake Iron Mine, which at one time employed 100 people. The mine closed in 1902. (information courtesy of County of 1000 Lakes)

When Mary Howes was growing up in Tichborne in the 1930s, it was very much a railway town, as the K&P rail station, known as Parham Station at one time and later Tichborne Junction, was located there, as well as the “main line” station for the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Located on the same piece of land that the CPR still uses just east of Road 38, the CPR had a full station in Tichborne in the 1930s, which handled passenger and freight traffic.

Mary remembers that the CPR building was always very well maintained, and “there were flowers planted along the walkways where people came off the train.”

Mary was raised within metres of the train tracks, and her family ran the coal loading operation at Tichborne.

“The coal was being brought in on coal cars loading into the chutes near the station, and the coal would be dumped into the hoppers of the trains,” she said. As far as Mary knows, the Tichborne station was the only coal loading depot between Toronto and Montreal.

“The men would always come home covered in coal dust. It was quite a job for my great aunt to wash the clothes out each day,” she said.

Although she was very young, Mary remembers the people who rode the rails in the 1900s, trying to get to somewhere better than where they came from. “We didn't call them hobos or anything back then; they were just people who were looking for some help, and we always had enough to share with one or two."

In the '40s, she remembers handing out apples to the people who were on the trains that were headed towards Fort Henry, filled with immigrants who were being interred because they had the bad fortune to come from one of the countries that was on the other side of the conflict.

“We didn't know who they were or where they were going, but they asked for apples and we gave them apples,” she recalls.

When she was young, Tichborne boasted three stores, two hotels, a bank, as well as a school, and there were a number of cheese factories in the vicinity.

When Mary married Glen Howes in 1952 and moved to Parham, she was moving to a larger town, the agricultural hub of Hinchinbrooke Township.

“It had three garages, a blacksmith, hotels, stores, and was a very busy place,” she recalls.

Glen worked in one of the garages, Simonett's, which later moved to Sharbot Lake. He and Mary had five children, four boys and a girl, with the youngest two being twin boys. When the children were grown she worked in maintenance for the school board, first in Parham and later on at Sharbot Lake High School, where she worked for 20 years.

As well, she became very, very active as a volunteer, where she has made a mark. Not only was she the president of the Women's Institute on several occasions, but also of the United Church Women as well as being involved with the Parham Happy Travelers and the Parham Fair.

She is perhaps best known, however, for 20 years of work with the Cancer Society. “The cancer society was very good to me when my brother was dying and I knew I had to volunteer with them” she said.

Her first job was as a canvasser during the door-to-door campaign each April. That progressed to being a canvass organiser in the villages around her home.

“I used to run 100 canvassers in the region,” she said, “which kept me busy for three months, getting ready in February and March and canvassing month in April.”

The trick to keeping canvassers happy was to limit their responsibility to 10 houses or so. “People were happy to do their family and neighbours, I never had a lot of trouble finding canvassers.”

Eventually, Mary became involved with the executive of the Cancer Society Regional office based in Kingston, serving in a number of roles, including that of president. The region extends from Trenton to Prescott and includes the rural areas to the north of the 401 throughout that vast territory.

“I spent a lot of time on the road, to Kingston all the time and further yet quite often,” she said.

In recognition of her high standard of volunteer effort, she was one of the first recipients of the Central Frontenac Volunteer of the Year award for Hinchinbrooke District and she also received a Jubilee award a couple of years ago.

Although she says she has turned lazy in her old age, she has been actively involved in the push to turn the former Hinchinbrooke School into a community centre for Central Frontenac.

“We do need some place to gather in this part of the township, and the school is sitting there empty,” she said.

If she can help bring that about, maybe she will finally be accepted in Parham after living there for 63 years, even if she is a Tichborne girl.

The one constant at Fairmount Home, through all its renovations and changes, from a 96-bed municipal home for the aged, to a Class D and then a Class A nursing home with 128 beds, has been the smiling face of Mary Lake.

As director of care, Lake has watched over the residents at Fairmount through all those years, and she will retire at the end of this week.

“I literally grew up in long-term care,” she said in an interview on Monday. Not only has she worked in long-term care for over 40 years, she started working summers in a nursing home when she was a young teenager.

“My grandmother owned the Picton Manor, and as soon as school let out each summer I would head over there to work. I changed beds, did cleaning, whatever was needed.”

A lifelong Frontenac County resident, Mary Lake was raised at Elginburg (in what was then Pittsburgh Township), where she attended public school. She went to Sydenham High School, and then studied Nursing at the Kingston General Hospital (KGH) School of Nursing. After graduating in 1972, she took a job at KGH.

In 1974, she started working as a long-term care nurse, and aside from a short stint at Kingston's Prison for Women in 1984 (as a nurse not an inmate) she has remained working in long-term care ever since.

She took on the job of director of care at the municipally owned Fairmount Home for the Aged in 1987.

She has seen a lot of changes at Fairmount over the years. When she first started there, the home was licensed, and funded by the Ministry of Community and Social Services, not the Ministry of Health, which now oversees all long-term care facilities under a single set of rules under the Long Term Care Act of 2007.

“We were a country home, and we served the residents of Frontenac County mostly, at that time. The care we delivered was always excellent, but the facility was not what it was today,” she said.

All of the rooms at Fairmount had two beds, and the rooms did not have private bathrooms or showers. It was more of a dormitory-style facility with a single dining room for all 96 residents.

Improvements to the level of care came with new standards of care in the 1990s. As director of care, Lake was in charge of operations at the home, including nursing and personal support workers as well as all of the support staff in the home. The administration of Fairmount was taken care of by Frontenac County. She helped the home maintain its reputation as a caring facility, for families and residents to feel safe and well supported.

When municipal amalgamation took place in the late 1990s, Frontenac County decided to keep Fairmount Home, even though its location was becoming subsumed by the City of Kingston when it annexed Pittsburgh and Kingston Townships.

The Chief Administrators of the new County, first Bob Foulds and later Elizabeth Savill, became administrators of Fairmount, giving Mary Lake someone to report directly to.

When all long-term care facilities started to come under the same set of standards and regulations, Fairmount was designated as a Class D facility because of the physical limitations of the home. It was faced with a choice to upgrade or close, and this led to a long, sometimes difficult, set of negotiations with the City of Kingston and the province, funding partners of Fairmount, over plans to renovate.

The $17 million upgrade eventually got underway in 2003, and this led to a challenging period for Lake as director of care, ensuring that residents were well cared for and as well prepared as possible for the changes that took place.

“Through attrition we dropped to 78 beds, and when the new section was completed, the residents all moved there as the old section was completely retrofitted. In 2004 everything was complete and we became the 128-bed facility that we are today,” said Lake.

Once the new state of the art facility was complete, a new challenge faced Mary Lake.

“We had to get used to the change, and change is difficult, even positive change. We lost our culture of care for a while when the new Fairmount opened. Our staff took some time to transition, but we worked hard at it and we got it back. It took about a year,” she said.

Aside from the physical changes in the early 2000s, the home also acquired a full time administrator. Under the regulations, Class A municipal homes must have a full time administrator and full time director of care.

“If I ever wanted to be an administrator,” Lake said, "I would have been one, but I always wanted to be involved in the service end of things. I never wanted to have any other job than the one I kept.”

Ironically, however, that is the role she is retiring from. She has been filling in for Julie Shillington, the full time administrator, who has been on a leave of absence for health reasons and will not return until later this year.

As Lake looks back at her career, she says that while tightened up regulations were a good change in long term care, the ministry has gone too far, leaving homes with more concerns about rules and less time for care.

“They have really gone too far with regulations, because there isn't enough staff available to cover all the requirements and still provide the kind of care that we all want to provide. That is why we came into long term care in the first place, not just to comply with regulations but because we want to provide care,” she said.

Another issue faced by the home is the push for ageing at home, which Lake said is a good thing. However it has meant that people do not come into care until they are at a point where their needs are greater. As well, there is pressure on Fairmount, and other homes, to provide care for patients with mental health issues that are more severe than the home can handle.

“There is a gap in the health care system for these people and they get shuffled around,” she said.

One of Mary Lake's major professional and volunteer interests is providing service to those suffering from dementia. Many of the residents at Fairmount have dementia of varying forms and levels of severity. The home has a wing devoted to those with advanced dementia.

She has been a board member for years with the Alzheimer's Society and has volunteered with Southern Frontenac Community Services to run Alzheimer's support services.

“It is very trying on families, on other residents at Fairmount, and of course on those with dementia themselves and the staff who care for them,” she said, “but we have learned. The drugs are better and the techniques for helping people have advanced over the years,” she said.

While she said she has no plans for retirement other than a summer at the cottage, it will be impossible for her to stay completely away from her calling. She expects that by next fall she will be looking for a part-time volunteer role doing something.

No doubt it will involve looking after people in some capacity or another.

When Jan Hassler was 19 years old, he decided to leave his native Holland and seek a new life in Canada. One of the reasons he left was that after living through World War 2, he was facing the obligation to join the Dutch army and be deployed to Indonesia to defend Dutch colonial interests. Instead he applied to come to Canada, and that led him to Wolfe Island.

At that time, in order to migrate to Canada, sponsors were needed. A Wolfe Island fishing lodge owner, Jack Campbell, needed a hired hand, so Jan Hassler was sent to work for him. After one year he had fulfilled that commitment and he was free to make his life in Canada. Although he did travel around the country he ended up making his life on Wolfe Island, even if he knew from the start that Wolfe Islanders took family history on the island pretty seriously.

“Wolfe Island is Wolfe Island, and the residents here - they thought they were the only Wolfe Islanders. A couple of them told me, you know, you'll never be a Wolfe Islander unless your grandparents are buried here. So I said, I'll tell you what I'll do. If I like it and stay here, then maybe I'll have them shipped over,” he said, during an interview from his house in Marysville on a cold, blustery day this past January.

In 1962, he was working in Kingston in financial services when he was drawn back to the island to work with his brothers-in-law at the General Wolfe Hotel, which he managed until 1977. At that time he purchased a fishing lodge, Hitchcock House, and he kept that business until 2010.

After establishing himself as a Wolfe Island resident, raising a family, and becoming part of the business community, he was approached to join Wolfe Island Council, which he did in 1985. He served a term as a councilor, a term as deputy reeve, two terms as reeve and a term as the first ever mayor of Frontenac Islands between 1998 and 2000. He was the warden of Frontenac County in 1997, the year before municipal amalgamation.

That put him into the middle of a lot of different political debates on the island, and throughout the County.

“A lot of things were shaken up in the 1990s. One was the idea of making Wolfe Islanders pay for the ferry. It was Gilles Poulliot [Minister of Transportation under the Bob Rae NDP government] who first came to us and asked if we would mind paying a bit of money for the ferry, maybe a loonie or a toonie. We said that might be ok but what if it goes up to $5 or $10 in a few years? A number of ministers came and went and we kept saying we didn't want it of course, but the idea didn't go away. In fact I think they even printed up tickets. They're probably in a warehouse somewhere in Kingston still. Then I got a call from Tony Clement, minister under Mike Harris, asking me to come to Toronto, where he said ‘I have good news for you, the fee is not coming in.’”

When municipal amalgamation was forced on Ontario townships, Hassler and the Wolfe Island Council had some decisions to make. The question of whom to join was paramount.

“We talked to Pittsburgh Township about joining with them and forming a new township, and the idea of Howe Island joining with Gananoque also came up. But when Pittsburgh joined with Kingston we were left with a choice between Kingston and remaining with Frontenac County,” he said.

His fear about Kingston was that Wolfe Island, or even all the islands together, would become a single ward in the new City.

“That would have left us with one vote out of 12 on Council, and no independence,” he said. “As far as I was concerned that was not an option.”

In the end the Frontenac Islands were the last to sign on to join the Frontenac Management Board (which became Frontenac County again a few years later.)

“At the end everybody had agreed but I hadn't agreed. If I had decided Wolfe Island is not going to go for it, the whole thing would have fallen apart. I said yes as you know. It wasn't a perfect marriage but I don't think there are any perfect marriages. I think we made the right choice.”

One project that he still looks on with pride from his years on council was the construction of the new Wolfe Island branch of the Kingston Frontenac Public Library, which was built under his watch and was recently dedicated to his predecessor as reeve of Wolfe Island, the late Timothy O'Shea, who served for 33 years from 1959 to 1991.

Jan Hassler is retired now, but he continues to keep an eye on comings and goings on Wolfe Island, and when pressed, he still gets animated about a topic that is a perennial controversy on the island, the possibility of a bridge to Kingston.

“You never worked on a bridge?” I asked as we were at the end of our interview and thinking about timing our return to the mainland to meet the afternoon ferry schedule.

“Don't ask me about a bridge,” he said. “It's been years since I thought about this bridge business. When we looked at it years ago, it would have cost $50 million to build a bridge and it was costing almost $10 million each year to run the ferry. Anyone who studied math even a little bit can tell that a bridge is cheaper in the long run, and it would not take that long to pay off, but someone has to invest in the first place.

“Even if a bridge costs $100 million it will still pay off. They are talking about spending $75 million on a bigger ferry. But I never could get anyone to take a bridge project seriously, and there are those on the islands who are opposed and will always be opposed. So I don't think about it anymore.”

Elected officials from the Township of South Frontenac and Frontenac County Council along with members of the County's 150th Anniversary committee helped celebrate the 5th annual Family Day at the Frontenac Arena in Piccadilly. The celebrations included giving out 150 free barbequed sausages courtesy of Gilmour's on 38 in Harrowsmith.

Though the temperature was chillier than normal, many families came out to celebrate with their young ones in tow and enjoyed outdoor games, snow shoeing, a free skate, a fireside marshmallow roast, horse-drawn wagon rides and more, with organizers expecting 800-900 visitors throughout the day.

The event was catered by Jeanette and Carl Pixley of Pine Ridge Catering in Yarker. It also included a draw celebrating community volunteers in South Frontenac, who were recognized by fellow residents for the important work they do in the community. A total of 20 winners took home a number of locally donated prizes.

Dan Bell and Pam Morey organized the Family Day event along with the help of a number of community volunteers. Both Bell and Morey are long-time volunteers in South Frontenac, both with the Portland District and South Frontenac recreation committees and the S &A Club, and together they are coordinating the 150th Anniversary celebrations for the county.

The two decided that Family Day would be a great way to spark off the celebrations. This is just the start of the fun and the official three-day anniversary party is scheduled to take place at Centennial Park in Harrowsmith on August 28, 29 and 30. This free summer event will include opening and closing ceremonies, an anniversary parade, fireworks, the Frontenac County Plowing Match, a Strong man competition, a dazzling line up of live musical guests, a vendors' market, a BBQ lunch and a beer tent.

Other attractions will include a wide variety of fun family activities, a wide range of heritage and community displays, and a special Heritage Ball that will be held at the Golden Links hall in Harrowsmith. Organizers hope that people will mark the date now on their calendars and bring along family and friends for what is sure to be a fun-filled weekend.

A detailed program of all of the events will be posted on the County's website come April. Alison Vandervelde, communications officer with the County, said that she is very excited about the plans for the County celebrations. “This summer's 150th anniversary showcase will be a fantastic event and we are hoping that residents bring along their friends and family here to the Frontenacs in August to help us celebrate.”

Local quilter, Debbie Emery of Plevna, won the quilt design competition put on by Frontenac County in August last year in their effort to have a unique quilt designed and created to celebrate the County’s 150th Anniversary.

Emery, who moved to Plevna over six years ago, has been quilting for close to seven years. She found out about her win just before Christmas and said that since she does not feel she is “an artist”, she was a bit surprised. At the same time, though, she feels that she did her research well and knew, going into the competition, that she had some pretty good ideas for the project. She said it was her first time entering a competition and that she was thrilled to have her design chosen.

The competition was judged by well-known local quilters/fibre artists Bethany Garner and Beth Abbott. Emery describes her winning design as a “story quilt”, one that “reflects the unique culture and people of Frontenac County from the past, present and into the future.”

The quilt, which will measure 48 x 60 inches, will incorporate multiple quilting techniques including appliqué, embroidery and hand quilting. Emery chose different subject matters to represent the various regions of North, Central and South Frontenac and said that she focused on the unique histories and characteristics of each part of the county to show their diversity.

For the north she will depict Bon Echo Provincial Park and the Dark Skies, the latter of which she says “brings the north into the future”. In Central Frontenac she is focusing on the history of the railroads and will create a steam engine as well as elements of the area’s farming and logging history. In the south she has chosen to depict the windmills of Wolfe Island and also a lighthouse to show the proximity of the southern most portions of the county to Lake Ontario.

In order to incorporate some of the more general aspects of the area as a whole, the quilt will feature some historic architecture including an old church, and school and a log cabin. Emery said that she also wanted to include the Aboriginal history of the area and she has included in her design an Aboriginal woman, a teepee and the wild rice of Ardoch Lake, the latter of which recalls the historic stand off between locals and the government in the 1970's.

Emery said that she is honored to have had her design chosen. “To know that it will be hanging in the County offices and people will be seeing it well into the future is quite exciting for me,” she said. Judging by the sample section that she had on display at the Frontenac Heritage Festival’s craft show at St. James Major Catholic Church hall on the weekend, her win is no doubt well deserved and she said it has definitely “got her creative juices flowing.”

Emery’s quilt will be unveiled at the official opening of the 150th ceremonies, which will take place in Harrowsmith from August 28 to 30. After its unveiling the quilt will be hung at the offices of Frontenac County near Battersea.

Emery also makes and sells various fashionable accessories from her home in Plevna. For more information, contact her at 613-479-8057.

Unlike a number of people being profiled for the Frontenac County 50 stories/150 years project, Gray Merriam does not have deep family roots in Frontenac County.

He first came to Kennebec Lake, with his wife Aileen, because they were starting to look for a place to move to after Gray had retired from Carleton University, and they happened to be headed to Toronto for a conference.

“There was a property on Kennebec Lake, and it was on the way so we stopped in,” he recalls.

It was early March and they could not take the road all the way in to the property for fear of not getting back out, so they left their car behind and walked in.

“I wanted to live within two canoe lengths of the water, which this property had since the house is right on the Salmon River, where it flows from Kennebec Lake. To tell the truth even before we got to the house I was sold on the property because of the snow fleas that made it look like the snow was moving in waves.”

Gray began his academic career as a population ecologist and was one of the people who developed landscape ecology as an academic pursuit.

“I began my career as a population ecologist and developed landscape ecology, with others, during my time at Carleton,” he said.

Landscape ecology was different at that time because it was based in Europe and was urban-based. It was connected to urban planning.

“When we started looking at it here it was more about large mosaics of various habitat types. It was farmland so you had little sugar bushes at the back of the farm, farm fence rows, crop field, hay fields, little creeks with some brush along them, and that entire mosaic was what the organisms were living with so we tried to study that entire mosaic. Previously ecologists tried to narrow things down to one little homogeneous bit, but it was clear to us that everything around it was the driving variable for how it all worked.”

This approach was used at first to determine, for example, how populations of bird species could survive in farmlands where there are only small pockets of suitable habitat.

“It turned out, that while small populations were vulnerable because they did not always breed, other populations would migrate to the habitat if it was not being used. So this tells you that the fate of a population in a single woodlot goes on and off like a little neon light but the fate of population in the region has a very high level of security. What that led to is a realisation that the organisms located between different patches of habitat are very important for the species to be able to migrate from one patch to another. It's the nature of the movements between patches of habitat that determine the success rate. So we did a lot of work on farm fence rows as a connectivity."

This kind of academic pursuit brought Merriam into contact with ecologists and other academics from across North America and elsewhere. When he retired he took on the goal of seeing if the principles of landscape ecology could be applied in his new community.

“The first thing was to bring the idea of ecological processes in lakes to try to engage the folks on the lakes about water quality sampling, shoreline surveys, and that led eventually to the lake planning that has become popular everywhere. Lake plans are based on the ideas of landscape ecology, especially when they extend to looking at watersheds as a whole,” he said.

One thing that Merriam did was to start writing articles for the Frontenac News, and writing books. He also founded the Friends of the Salmon River, and became instrumental in the work of the Frontenac Stewardship Council, which is now the Frontenac Stewardship Foundation. When Frontenac County began to set out an Official Plan, he began pushing for a Stewardship Plan for Frontenac County, a goal that he is still pursuing.

“The Friends of the Salmon came about when I met some neighbours downriver and we started talking about the health of the river and how we could monitor it. So I held a meeting at my house and a number of people came and they became the Friends of the Salmon.”

He expected he would find hot spots and complaints about the state of the river. “There weren't any, which makes it more difficult to organize people but there you have it.”

If there is a single issue that is most important about the future of the lakes along the Salmon River watersheds and all the watersheds in Frontenac County, he says it is phosphorous. Most of the phosphorous affecting lakes here is coming from faulty septic systems.

“We understand the role of septics, but the problem is the people, who resist being told what to do, and the potential cost is an issue as well. But by focussing on waterfront properties the people who own them tend to have more money available. The properties on the hillsides don't have the same problem because the runoff from the septics is taken up by vegetation, trees, etc.” he said.

On all the groups he has been involved with he sometimes comes into conflict over what he calls his “insistence that projects that get done make ecological sense.”

Another thing that he has pushed over the years is the interest of the north end of the county over what he sees as a bias towards the south.

“When I first was introduced to the Stewardship Council it was known as the South Frontenac Stewardship Council and it did not consider that it would ever extend north of Highway 7. We had to convince them there was life up here,” he said.

One of the things that he has been able to focus people's attention on is the two different geological regions in Frontenac County, the Limestone substrate in the South and the Canadian Shield landscape to the north.

These issues will be discussed in the extended version of this article, which will be published on February 26, in the 50 articles / 150 years supplement that will be a monthly feature of the Frontenac News for the rest of the year.

It was in late August that I went to interview Lee-Anne White at her home on Road 506 at Fernleigh, which at one time was a full-fledged hamlet with a post office, a store and a school, but is now only a clutch of houses around a crossroad.

I was accompanied by Jesse Mills, the videographer for the Frontenac County 150th anniversary project, and when we arrived Lee-Anne had a bandage on her leg and was limping when she opened the door for us.

“The nurse was just here this morning,” she said, “to change the dressing on my leg.”

She had hurt her leg by dropping a piece of wood on it as she was feeding the box stove in her basement to take off the morning chill a few days earlier. But though her leg was slowing her down, she still had a basin overflowing with bread dough in the kitchen and was de-frosting five pounds of ground beef to make meatballs for a family reunion that was coming up on the weekend.

Aside from her leg, something else was bothering her. Her car, a 2010 model, was in need of some work.

“They tell me that I don't drive it enough. That's why the linkage needs to be fixed and it needs new tires. I haven't told my son yet but I think I'll trade it in on a new one rather than bother with it,” she said.

Lee-Anne Kelford was born at Ompah on January 9, 1915, and this week she turns 100. She remembers the kinds of efforts that were required to survive on the Canadian shield farmland in the days before electricity, cars and other modern conveniences. What money her family made came from her father shoeing horses or milling wood, but most of the food they ate they had either grown, gathered or slaughtered from their own herds of cattle, sheep and pigs. For chairs they used burlap bags stuffed with straw or hay. They went barefoot in the summer and in the winter wore gumboots with homespun yarn straight off the sheep wrapped around them for warmth. When she was coming home from school with her brothers and sisters her mother would meet them with baskets and they had to fill the baskets with wild strawberries or raspberries on the way home. In the spring they would catch hundreds of suckers and salt them for winter eating. In the summer they picked blueberries and apples, worked in the garden and helped harvest hay and grain.

While the large 17-member Kelford family, seven brothers and seven sisters, father and mother and hard-bitten grandmother Jane Kelford, never had a lot of money, they were certainly not the poorest family around

“We were better off than those that were further down the line, I'd say. We always had enough to eat; we had cows and sheep and a big garden and a root cellar and mother was always baking biscuits or something, so we had no complaints,” said Lee Anne.

She still talks about her father's capacity to build things and make things work on their property. Although he could not read or write, he managed to build a steam-powered sawmill, a smithy and whatever the family needed to get by.

However, he may have taken on a bit much when it came to orthopedics.

When Lee-Anne was seven years old she fell out of an apple tree in an old orchard where she was picking apples with her mother. Of course there was no 911 to call. As she recalls it, she had driven the horse-drawn wagon to the orchard while her mother held her baby sister Elsie. Since her arm was broken and the bone was sticking out, her mother popped Elsie on Lee-Anne's lap and tied the baby to her so she wouldn't fall off. Her mother then drove home.

When they got back to Lee-Anne's father's wood and smith shop back at Ompah, he looked at her arm quickly and decided it needed to be set.

So, “he took an old cedar block, about 6 inches long, that was lying around,” in Lee-Anne's words, cut it and augured out the centre, then cut it again and split it to fit her small arm. He put her arm in and tied it together snugly with string, forcing the bone back into place at the same time. The next day her brother Sam got into a fight with another brother, Wyman, and Sam's wrist ended up being broken. Their father set that wrist as well.

The children then had to immerse their arms in a barrel of ice water repeatedly over the next two days, presumably to keep the swelling down. The treatment was successful in both cases - to a point. Lee-Anne was able to use her arm afterwards, but could not raise it all the way up to the top of her head, and her brother developed growths on his wrist.

At the time and to this day, after 93 years have passed, Lee White supports everything her father did that day.

“A neighbour said he should take us to a doctor but there was no doctor close by and we didn't have money to pay for a doctor anyway,” she said.

Her father lived a long life as well. He died at the age of 97 in 1977.

When Lee-Anne was older she took a job at a new lodge on Kashwakamak Lake that was opened up by an Ahr family from the United States. The lodge, which became known as the Fernleigh Lodge, is open to this day. She worked there for seven years, cooking and cleaning for over 100 guests at a time, and in the winters she worked at the Trout Lake Hotel in Ompah.

It was at Fernleigh Lodge that she met her husband, Melvin White, who was a guide in the summer and fall and trapped in the winter time. Melvin was from Plevna, and although he ran away from home at age 16, when the couple got married, Lee-Anne ended up living at Melvin's taking care of Melvin's parents and their farm for at least one winter during the 1930s, when she wasn't drawn back to Ompah to help her own family get by.

Eventually, Melvin was given a one acre piece of land on what is now Road 506 and the Whites built a 23 x 14 foot shack for themselves. Afterwards they built the house where Lee-Anne still lives on the same property (Melvin died in 2009).

“We scratched I tell you, but we never borrowed a cent in our lives. When we were building our house, with help from his half brother and uncle, I said to Melvin I'd rather eat one meal a day than go into debt.”

The couple had three sons, George, Andy and Danny. Lee-Anne ended up taking a job drawing mail from Fernleigh to Cloyne, a job she kept for 38 years.

At her 100th birthday party at the Clar-Mill Hall last Saturday, her sons were all there, as were her grandchildren, daughters-in-law, nieces and nephews and long-time friends. Sitting at the front with her, among the certificates from the governments of Ontario and Canada and one from Queen Elizabeth, was her aunt Agnes, who is 101 and still lives near Ompah. When it came time to take a family picture, both women pulled themselves out of their chairs, even though Agnes recently had an operation, and they walked over to be in the picture.

Back in the summer, we left some of our equipment at Lee-Anne's house when we recorded the interview. When I dropped back to collect it a few days later, I found her leaning into the back seat of her car, reaching over, with a vacuum cleaner going.

“I'm tying to get it ready for sale,” she said.

One thing that Lee White did not do was drive to her own 100th birthday party. The weather was pretty stormy that day so she took a ride from one of her sons. But she insisted that they take her brand new red truck, which they parked just out from the front door of the hall.

It's a nice looking truck - paid in full, to be sure.

There is a video below, and there is also a second video on Youyube. Click to broken arm video the clip tells the whole story of Lee-Anne's broken arm.

It was in late August that I went to interview Lee-Anne White at her home on Road 506 at Fernleigh, which at one time was a full-fledged hamlet with a post office, a store and a school, but is now only a clutch of houses around a crossroad.

I was accompanied by Jesse Mills, the videographer for the Frontenac County 150th anniversary project, and when we arrived Lee-Anne had a bandage on her leg and was limping when she opened the door for us.

“The nurse was just here this morning,” she said, “to change the dressing on my leg.”

She had hurt her leg by dropping a piece of wood on it as she was feeding the box stove in her basement to take off the morning chill a few days earlier. But though her leg was slowing her down, she still had a basin overflowing with bread dough in the kitchen and was de-frosting five pounds of ground beef to make meatballs for a family reunion that was coming up on the weekend.

Aside from her leg, something else was bothering her. Her car, a 2010 model, was in need of some work.

“They tell me that I don't drive it enough. That's why the linkage needs to be fixed and it needs new tires. I haven't told my son yet but I think I'll trade it in on a new one rather than bother with it,” she said.

Lee-Anne Kelford was born at Ompah on January 9, 1915, and this week she turns 100. She remembers the kinds of efforts that were required to survive on the Canadian shield farmland in the days before electricity, cars and other modern conveniences. What money her family made came from her father shoeing horses or milling wood, but most of the food they ate they had either grown, gathered or slaughtered from their own herds of cattle, sheep and pigs. For chairs they used burlap bags stuffed with straw or hay. They went barefoot in the summer and in the winter wore gumboots with homespun yarn straight off the sheep wrapped around them for warmth. When she was coming home from school with her brothers and sisters her mother would meet them with baskets and they had to fill the baskets with wild strawberries or raspberries on the way home. In the spring they would catch hundreds of suckers and salt them for winter eating. In the summer they picked blueberries and apples, worked in the garden and helped harvest hay and grain.

While the large 17-member Kelford family, seven brothers and seven sisters, father and mother and hard-bitten grandmother Jane Kelford, never had a lot of money, they were certainly not the poorest family around

“We were better off than those that were further down the line, I'd say. We always had enough to eat; we had cows and sheep and a big garden and a root cellar and mother was always baking biscuits or something, so we had no complaints,” said Lee Anne.

She still talks about her father's capacity to build things and make things work on their property. Although he could not read or write, he managed to build a steam-powered sawmill, a smithy and whatever the family needed to get by.

However, he may have taken on a bit much when it came to orthopedics.

When Lee-Anne was seven years old she fell out of an apple tree in an old orchard where she was picking apples with her mother. Of course there was no 911 to call. As she recalls it, she had driven the horse-drawn wagon to the orchard while her mother held her baby sister Elsie. Since her arm was broken and the bone was sticking out, her mother popped Elsie on Lee-Anne's lap and tied the baby to her so she wouldn't fall off. Her mother then drove home.

When they got back to Lee-Anne's father's wood and smith shop back at Ompah, he looked at her arm quickly and decided it needed to be set.

So, “he took an old cedar block, about 6 inches long, that was lying around,” in Lee-Anne's words, cut it and augured out the centre, then cut it again and split it to fit her small arm. He put her arm in and tied it together snugly with string, forcing the bone back into place at the same time. The next day her brother Sam got into a fight with another brother, Wyman, and Sam's wrist ended up being broken. Their father set that wrist as well.

The children then had to immerse their arms in a barrel of ice water repeatedly over the next two days, presumably to keep the swelling down. The treatment was successful in both cases - to a point. Lee-Anne was able to use her arm afterwards, but could not raise it all the way up to the top of her head, and her brother developed growths on his wrist.

At the time and to this day, after 93 years have passed, Lee White supports everything her father did that day.

“A neighbour said he should take us to a doctor but there was no doctor close by and we didn't have money to pay for a doctor anyway,” she said.

Her father lived a long life as well. He died at the age of 97 in 1977.

When Lee-Anne was older she took a job at a new lodge on Kashwakamak Lake that was opened up by an Ahr family from the United States. The lodge, which became known as the Fernleigh Lodge, is open to this day. She worked there for seven years, cooking and cleaning for over 100 guests at a time, and in the winters she worked at the Trout Lake Hotel in Ompah.

It was at Fernleigh Lodge that she met her husband, Melvin White, who was a guide in the summer and fall and trapped in the winter time. Melvin was from Plevna, and although he ran away from home at age 16, when the couple got married, Lee-Anne ended up living at Melvin's taking care of Melvin's parents and their farm for at least one winter during the 1930s, when she wasn't drawn back to Ompah to help her own family get by.

Eventually, Melvin was given a one acre piece of land on what is now Road 506 and the Whites built a 23 x 14 foot shack for themselves. Afterwards they built the house where Lee-Anne still lives on the same property (Melvin died in 2009).

“We scratched I tell you, but we never borrowed a cent in our lives. When we were building our house, with help from his half brother and uncle, I said to Melvin I'd rather eat one meal a day than go into debt.”

The couple had three sons, George, Andy and Danny. Lee-Anne ended up taking a job drawing mail from Fernleigh to Cloyne, a job she kept for 38 years.

At her 100th birthday party at the Clar-Mill Hall last Saturday, her sons were all there, as were her grandchildren, daughters-in-law, nieces and nephews and long-time friends. Sitting at the front with her, among the certificates from the governments of Ontario and Canada and one from Queen Elizabeth, was her aunt Agnes, who is 101 and still lives near Ompah. When it came time to take a family picture, both women pulled themselves out of their chairs, even though Agnes recently had an operation, and they walked over to be in the picture.

Back in the summer, we left some of our equipment at Lee-Anne's house when we recorded the interview. When I dropped back to collect it a few days later, I found her leaning into the back seat of her car, reaching over, with a vacuum cleaner going.

“I'm tying to get it ready for sale,” she said.

One thing that Lee White did not do was drive to her own 100th birthday party. The weather was pretty stormy that day so she took a ride from one of her sons. But she insisted that they take her brand new red truck, which they parked just out from the front door of the hall.

It's a nice looking truck - paid in full, to be sure.

There is a video below, and there is also a second video on Youyube. Click to broken arm video the clip tells the whole story of Lee-Anne's broken arm.