Three Museums
On one of my days off, I visited three museums: one in Newmarket, where I live, and the others in rural towns: Whitchurch-Stouffville, and King.
As Newmarket has grown, beginning about 1803, it has repeatedly annexed territory from rural townships: the ones already mentioned, to the east and west respectively, and East Gwillumbury to the north. Newmarket was incorporated as a village in the 1830s, and saw consistent industrialization, along with the growth of the railroads from about the 1850s. The golden age of factories making the town economically self-sufficient may have been the 1960s, when (I believe) Dixon Pencil and Office Specialty were both here. The museum naturally emphasizes "pioneer days," before 1900, with a certain emphasis on the very earliest settlers, and how they carved something out of very difficult bush and wildnerness. (First nations people are given their due; we have a main street that still roughly follows the path of an Indian trail between Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe).
To the extent that there is an emphasis on "buildings" in the town, it goes back to earlier decades, focussing a bit on very old buildings on or near Main Street that are still standing. All of this is understandable. I guess one big educational point of museums is to give school kids and others a sense of a world that used to be right here, where we are sitting/standing, yet it would be almost unrecognizable to us. Something akin to us that is gone for good.
I just think there should be room to talk honestly about the suburbs. One of the history books on Newmarket speaks of the first subdivision in which the town insisted that some recreational facilities be provided by the builder/developer. What about issues of reconciling growth and planning? What about the idea, now supposedly discredited, of the planned new community like Scarsdale in the U.S. or Don Mills here in Ontario--houses kept a pristine distance from stores and businesses, so everyone is practically forced to drive everywhere. This still seems to be the model for most of the new subdivisions around here. What about sprawl vs. so-called Smart Growth?
Then there are delicate subjects of race and ethnicity. Newmarket was established by Quaker farmers and millers, fleeing the American Revolution. Much of southern Ontario was founded by various English-speaking, ethnically English folk from the U.S. Within a few years immigrants were a significant force--but they were Scottish immigrants. For a long time this mixture was what was meant by "English Canada." Newly arrived ethnics would fit in as best they could, often anglicizing their names to do so as in the U.S.
The situation today could hardly be more different. Toronto itself is often called one of the most multi-cultural cities in the world--and there seems to be no one cultural type or dogma to which everyone is expected to conform, unless it is a vague hipness. The suburbs are generally more white-bread than the city, but the cultures of the city make their impact. In Richmond Hill to our south, one hears of considerable Chinese neighbourhoods, and Russian ones as well. Italians, who may not even count as ethnic any more, have tended to move north roughly along Bathurst/Dufferin/Keele, from little Italy downtown, to St. Clair/Oakwood, to Downsview and other parts of North York, to Concord, Maple, and other parts of Vaughan. People from the Indian sub-continent are in Brampton.
Not only have sleepy little farming communities been replaced by sprawling suburbs, but people who were proud to be in the British Empire or Commonwealth have been replaced or out-numbered by people to whom this means very little.
Both Whitchurch-Stouffville and King give a stronger sense of the contrast between old and new. They have preserved buildings from pioneer days. Each of them has a school; W-S has a log cabin and a somewhat newer and nicer house; King has a train station and a church. Maps show that in the golden days of the little schools and churches, there were somewhat isolated hamlets surrounded by farmland. Those hamlets through which the railroad ran became at least somewhat prosperous; others died.
Whitchurch-Stouffville, in the history part of their web site, talk about the de-forestation that had taken place by 1900, and the various efforts to establish new forests. Sand dunes and mini-deserts were literally becoming a problem toward the top of the Oak Ridges Moraine. Today the managed forests make some older areas once again a pleasure to drive through. King emphasizes the hardy pioneers, but as far as I know they differ from W-S in that they have attracted the investment of so many rich people from Toronto over the years. The land is still mostly not urbanized or suburbanized. There are lots of stories of rich people with horse farms and such buying land at subdivision prices simply to preserve it more or less as it is. The only reference to this part of King's history at the museum is some developments around Eaton Hall--for a long time, the vacation retreat of the Eaton family, owners of a famous chain of department stores.
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