In 1902, the Picton High School classics master was looking for a way for his staff to entertain themselves on long winter evenings. In a County whose motto is, “Blessed by Nature, Enriched by Man, Loyally Founded, Loyally Built,” the Tennyson Club was just the ticket for such enrichment. After all, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the British Poet Laureate, who penned "The Charge of the Light Brigade,” had just died 10 years earlier in 1892. And Tennyson himself, while at Trinity College in Cambridge, had joined The Apostles, a literary club.
The Picton Tennyson Club was part of a much larger late 19th and early 20th Century explosion of literary societies in rural Ontario. One of the best-known members of the Tennyson Club in Picton was composer Gena Branscombe. Born in Picton to a United Empire Loyalist family, she graduated from Picton High School before going on to study music in Chicago and composition in Berlin. The Macaulay Club in Chatham got its start in 1882; the Twenty Club of Lindsay in 1892; and the Tuesday Reading Club of Woodstock in 1896. Indeed, self-improvement manifested itself in numerous forms during the period. This was also the era of the Chautauqua movement, named after the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly founded in New York State in 1874 as an educational experiment in out-of-school, vacation learning. It was broadened almost immediately beyond courses for Sunday school teachers to include academic subjects, music, art and physical education. Likewise, it was the era of the Carnegie libraries – so named after Scottish-born American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie – including two striking examples extant locally in Wellington and Picton.
The Tennyson Club in Picton has evolved over 105 years from a purely musical and literary group into an eclectic mix covering a spectrum of interests. Today, life-long residents of the County and newcomers may find themselves side to side in the Tennyson Club, although membership is limited to 30 as they meet six evenings a year from September to May on a rotating basis in members’ homes. The 30 members are divided into six groups of five, with each group responsible for putting on a program for one evening a season. The form of the program is up to the presenters: it can be a debate, discussion, theatre, art, music, games, etc. Programs in recent years have included, “The County – Whither Goest Thou?”; “Drama – Mirror of the Age;” and “The Enterprising Mind.”
So, enjoy the nice summer weather by all means, but remember to keep it in the County while improving your mind and spirits when the cold westerly winds again begin to blow off Lake Ontario. For more information on the Tennyson Club you can call their president, Margaret Moore at (613) 393-5771 or reach her by e-mail at: moorejo@reach.net
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Spreading the ‘Good News:’ International Christian media and Prince Edward County
Burlington, Ont. may have Crossroads Christian Communications’ 100 Huntley Street, but Bloomfield has Wesley Acres at West Lake, a 250-acre island camp affiliated with the Free Methodist Church in Canada, with its own share of evangelical media heavy hitters either passing through as guest speakers or summering in tranquility here.
Chris Mitchell, who was raised a Roman Catholic but is now the Middle East bureau chief in Jerusalem for the largely Protestant evangelical Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), spoke at a tent meeting on “radical Islamist ideology” and the “Battle of the Ages” at the time of last summer’s conflagration in Lebanon. Mitchell also noted there are lots of moderate Muslims who are not jihadists and are working for peace in the Middle East, often at great personal risk if they are seen as Christian collaborators by their co-religionists. Speaking of the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives, Mitchell repeated what Derek Prince, the Pentecostal Bible teacher observed years ago: “You don’t choose Jerusalem, Jerusalem chooses you.”
For those County residents who perhaps don’t follow the genre closely, CBN is the CNN equivalent in Christian broadcast media. Founded by Southern Baptist televangelist Pat Robertson, the Virginia Beach, Va. Christian broadcaster has been on-air since 1961 and is best known for The 700 Club talk show. Meanwhile in Canada, David Mainse, a Pentecostal minister who would go onto create 100 Huntley Street and Crossroads Christian Communications, got his start the following year in 1962 with a 15-minute program following the late night news at CBC affiliate CHOV-TV in Pembroke, Ont.
But Crossroads Christian Communications is by no means the only Canadian organization with a stake in Christian broadcasting these days. There’s different broadcasters with different projects for the same mission, which is why if you take a weekend trip to Wesley Acres on West Lake this summer you may just run into Donald Brooker, executive director of the Canadian office of SAT-7, also in Burlington, which produces indigenous Arabic Christian satellite television out of Nicosia, Cyprus for broadcast in the Middle East and North Africa. Around 20 million Arab Christians live in this region. About 11 million are Orthodox Christians, 5.4 million are Catholic and 3.6 million are Protestants. SAT-7’s international chairman is Rev. Habib Badr, senior pastor of the National Evangelical Church of Beirut. Congregational and Presbyterian American missionaries established the church in 1848.
Protestant evangelical Christians, however, by no means have a monopoly on being religious communicators here in the County. Just down the road from Wesley Acres, West Lake and Bloomfield, you may find Rev. Peter Timmins preaching the Sunday sermon at mass at the Church of St. Gregory the Great in Picton. Timmins, a Montreal-born priest most recently serving in Kingston, has been the administrator of the Roman Catholic parish in Picton for some months now while Rev. Brian Hart is on administrative leave. But it’s not Timmins’ sermons that make him remarkable; homilies after all go with the job description. What makes Timmins somewhat unusual is how as a communicator this retired parish priest, as he describes himself, who is certainly be no means a theologian, is not only the author of several well-received adult and children’s books on the Catholic faith (Nothing for Granted, The Candle and the Flame and A Salmon Story), but was also a passionate early adapter among area Catholic clergy of the potential uses for a website on the Internet. But perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us completely that Timmins is a fairly hip guy; his niece is Margo Timmins, vocalist for the Cowboy Junkies, whose 1988 album The Trinity Session, recorded live in a single day on a single microphone in a church in Toronto, still receives critical notice almost 20 years later. At Rev. Timmins' website (http://www.nothingforgranted.com) you can check out this and that, including some of his homilies in his Living Our Story section.
Chris Mitchell, who was raised a Roman Catholic but is now the Middle East bureau chief in Jerusalem for the largely Protestant evangelical Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), spoke at a tent meeting on “radical Islamist ideology” and the “Battle of the Ages” at the time of last summer’s conflagration in Lebanon. Mitchell also noted there are lots of moderate Muslims who are not jihadists and are working for peace in the Middle East, often at great personal risk if they are seen as Christian collaborators by their co-religionists. Speaking of the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives, Mitchell repeated what Derek Prince, the Pentecostal Bible teacher observed years ago: “You don’t choose Jerusalem, Jerusalem chooses you.”
For those County residents who perhaps don’t follow the genre closely, CBN is the CNN equivalent in Christian broadcast media. Founded by Southern Baptist televangelist Pat Robertson, the Virginia Beach, Va. Christian broadcaster has been on-air since 1961 and is best known for The 700 Club talk show. Meanwhile in Canada, David Mainse, a Pentecostal minister who would go onto create 100 Huntley Street and Crossroads Christian Communications, got his start the following year in 1962 with a 15-minute program following the late night news at CBC affiliate CHOV-TV in Pembroke, Ont.
But Crossroads Christian Communications is by no means the only Canadian organization with a stake in Christian broadcasting these days. There’s different broadcasters with different projects for the same mission, which is why if you take a weekend trip to Wesley Acres on West Lake this summer you may just run into Donald Brooker, executive director of the Canadian office of SAT-7, also in Burlington, which produces indigenous Arabic Christian satellite television out of Nicosia, Cyprus for broadcast in the Middle East and North Africa. Around 20 million Arab Christians live in this region. About 11 million are Orthodox Christians, 5.4 million are Catholic and 3.6 million are Protestants. SAT-7’s international chairman is Rev. Habib Badr, senior pastor of the National Evangelical Church of Beirut. Congregational and Presbyterian American missionaries established the church in 1848.
Protestant evangelical Christians, however, by no means have a monopoly on being religious communicators here in the County. Just down the road from Wesley Acres, West Lake and Bloomfield, you may find Rev. Peter Timmins preaching the Sunday sermon at mass at the Church of St. Gregory the Great in Picton. Timmins, a Montreal-born priest most recently serving in Kingston, has been the administrator of the Roman Catholic parish in Picton for some months now while Rev. Brian Hart is on administrative leave. But it’s not Timmins’ sermons that make him remarkable; homilies after all go with the job description. What makes Timmins somewhat unusual is how as a communicator this retired parish priest, as he describes himself, who is certainly be no means a theologian, is not only the author of several well-received adult and children’s books on the Catholic faith (Nothing for Granted, The Candle and the Flame and A Salmon Story), but was also a passionate early adapter among area Catholic clergy of the potential uses for a website on the Internet. But perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us completely that Timmins is a fairly hip guy; his niece is Margo Timmins, vocalist for the Cowboy Junkies, whose 1988 album The Trinity Session, recorded live in a single day on a single microphone in a church in Toronto, still receives critical notice almost 20 years later. At Rev. Timmins' website (http://www.nothingforgranted.com) you can check out this and that, including some of his homilies in his Living Our Story section.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Farmgate produce: You may need to live here to get it
Prince Edward County residents are blessed with one of the most pastoral landscapes in Eastern Ontario. Closer to paradise, I sense as I travel several times a week between Wellington and Picton along the Loyalist Parkway with Lake Ontario and West Lake just off to my west. Old red and green barns adjacent to freshly-seeded pasture on both sides of the road. Cows and lambs meandering and milling about. Blue skies and sunshine with a south breeze at 18 km/h blows in off the water today giving us a comfortable 22 C while it is 31 C up the lake farther in Toronto this afternoon. Does it get anymore perfect than this?
Tourism and vineyards may be ascendant here in the popular imagination, but old fashioned cash crop and animal farming haven’t disappeared either. A year ago next week – May 29 to be exact – County council held a special meeting to “show support for our local agricultural community and to help members of council better understand the impact of the economic crisis in agriculture on our local primary producers, family farms and related businesses.” Leona Dombrowsky, minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, attended the meeting and among those offering deputations that evening were John Thompson, president of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture (and now a councillor as well); Ken Marisett from the National Farmers Union; Wayne Gyde of the Prince Edward-Hastings-Northumberland Landowners' Association; Andy Margetson, president of the Prince Edward Cattlemen’s Association; and Achim Mohseen-Beyk from the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario.
The usual farming woes were cited with the usual suspects named. The gist of the evening, for simplicity’s sake, might be reduced to claims of too few domestic subsidies from the federal and provincial governments (although they wouldn’t be actually called subsidies) and too many (unfair) subsidies (which would be called subsidies) from foreign governments (think American) for their farmers.
None of this is new down here. "Barley Days," as they came to be known, were a heady time for the County, but ended in October 1890, when the U.S. government enacted the ad valorem McKinley Tariff with a rate of 48.4 per cent for imports to give American farmers more protection. Overnight, the price of County barley fell to rock bottom and Barley Days were over. With the end of barley came the rise of the canning industry. The first canning factory was built in the County as early as 1882, but reached its zenith during the Second World War when the “Garden County” shipped a million and a half cases of tomatoes alone in 1941 – 43 per cent of the total produced in all of Canada that year. Corn, peas, pumpkin, beans, and fruit all found their way to the factory, and canning continued as a major County industry until the 1950s until the frozen food industry spelled the gradual end of canning in Prince Edward.
Now, a year after that special council meeting of May 29, 2006, council will be again discussing agriculture Monday night. This time they’ll be voting on whether to accept a $355,000 grant from the Advancing Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food (ACAAF) program to assist in developing markets for Prince Edward County meat and produce in Toronto, Kingston and Ottawa. The ACAAF program, launched in 2004, replaced the Canadian Adaptation and Rural Development (CARD) Fund established in 1995. The money, applied for by economic development officer Dan Taylor, would be used to hire a salesperson to develop sales and distribution channels and build supply relationships with institutions including colleges and universities, hospitals and prisons. An operations staff person would also be hired to manage the office’s administration and finance functions. Under the plan, the grant would subsidize the cost of an office for three years after which local producers will need to fund the plan on their own.
Taking the money at first blush may seem a no-brainer. After all, it was only a year ago council deemed it necessary to hold that special meeting “to better understand the impact of the economic crisis in agriculture on our local primary producers, family farms and related businesses.” But just as there’s no free lunch, there’s no free money either. Under the plan unveiled last week, the county would have to spend $50,000 in the first year, and $25,000 the following two years as their matching funds contribution, although Taylor says a portion of the County’s matching contribution could come in the form of in-kind services and programs already funded through the Harvestin’ the County initiative.
But it seems the even bigger catch is our local primary producers and family farms are despite their “economic crisis” going pretty much flat out and aren’t at all sure they’d have enough produce to meet the demand that might be generated through the ACAAF funding.
The mood going into Monday night’s council meeting might be described as distinctly ambivalent. “I’ve talked to many local producers,” said Coun. John Thompson, president of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture, last week at a corporate services committee meeting, “and they’ve established pretty good markets already, whether going to a market or at the door. They don’t see a lot of surplus product. The question then is: Where will product come? I’m not saying it won’t come but in terms of a business case in setting up this collaborative – before we commit money to it. I think we need to have another meeting with producers and find out how much they are going to commit.”
Seems County farmers are pretty much content to sell any farmgate surplus they might have, well, at the farmgate or roadside. Fact is there’s not even a farmers’ market in Picton. Thompson says “producers say they don’t have any excess product to bring to a farmers’ market. And we can’t produce anymore. So unless some new producers to expand production we are not meeting the demand we have already.”
Most of us know by now that eating locally-grown foods makes for common sense. We’ve read Gary Paul Nabhan 2002 memoir, Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods; listened to Dombrowsky here earlier this month trumpeting her 'Buy Ontario' homegrown foods message; and embraced Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement, which started in Italy in 1986 and arrived in Prince Edward County in November 2005 through the convivium, chaired by Petra Cooper of Fifth Town Artisan Cheese Company near Cressy.
The message Prince Edward County farmers may be poised to send out through council is reminiscent of a famous (at least in the Maritimes) commercial jingle for Saint John-based Moosehead Breweries Alpine Lager: “You’ve got to live here to get it.”
Tourism and vineyards may be ascendant here in the popular imagination, but old fashioned cash crop and animal farming haven’t disappeared either. A year ago next week – May 29 to be exact – County council held a special meeting to “show support for our local agricultural community and to help members of council better understand the impact of the economic crisis in agriculture on our local primary producers, family farms and related businesses.” Leona Dombrowsky, minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, attended the meeting and among those offering deputations that evening were John Thompson, president of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture (and now a councillor as well); Ken Marisett from the National Farmers Union; Wayne Gyde of the Prince Edward-Hastings-Northumberland Landowners' Association; Andy Margetson, president of the Prince Edward Cattlemen’s Association; and Achim Mohseen-Beyk from the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario.
The usual farming woes were cited with the usual suspects named. The gist of the evening, for simplicity’s sake, might be reduced to claims of too few domestic subsidies from the federal and provincial governments (although they wouldn’t be actually called subsidies) and too many (unfair) subsidies (which would be called subsidies) from foreign governments (think American) for their farmers.
None of this is new down here. "Barley Days," as they came to be known, were a heady time for the County, but ended in October 1890, when the U.S. government enacted the ad valorem McKinley Tariff with a rate of 48.4 per cent for imports to give American farmers more protection. Overnight, the price of County barley fell to rock bottom and Barley Days were over. With the end of barley came the rise of the canning industry. The first canning factory was built in the County as early as 1882, but reached its zenith during the Second World War when the “Garden County” shipped a million and a half cases of tomatoes alone in 1941 – 43 per cent of the total produced in all of Canada that year. Corn, peas, pumpkin, beans, and fruit all found their way to the factory, and canning continued as a major County industry until the 1950s until the frozen food industry spelled the gradual end of canning in Prince Edward.
Now, a year after that special council meeting of May 29, 2006, council will be again discussing agriculture Monday night. This time they’ll be voting on whether to accept a $355,000 grant from the Advancing Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food (ACAAF) program to assist in developing markets for Prince Edward County meat and produce in Toronto, Kingston and Ottawa. The ACAAF program, launched in 2004, replaced the Canadian Adaptation and Rural Development (CARD) Fund established in 1995. The money, applied for by economic development officer Dan Taylor, would be used to hire a salesperson to develop sales and distribution channels and build supply relationships with institutions including colleges and universities, hospitals and prisons. An operations staff person would also be hired to manage the office’s administration and finance functions. Under the plan, the grant would subsidize the cost of an office for three years after which local producers will need to fund the plan on their own.
Taking the money at first blush may seem a no-brainer. After all, it was only a year ago council deemed it necessary to hold that special meeting “to better understand the impact of the economic crisis in agriculture on our local primary producers, family farms and related businesses.” But just as there’s no free lunch, there’s no free money either. Under the plan unveiled last week, the county would have to spend $50,000 in the first year, and $25,000 the following two years as their matching funds contribution, although Taylor says a portion of the County’s matching contribution could come in the form of in-kind services and programs already funded through the Harvestin’ the County initiative.
But it seems the even bigger catch is our local primary producers and family farms are despite their “economic crisis” going pretty much flat out and aren’t at all sure they’d have enough produce to meet the demand that might be generated through the ACAAF funding.
The mood going into Monday night’s council meeting might be described as distinctly ambivalent. “I’ve talked to many local producers,” said Coun. John Thompson, president of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture, last week at a corporate services committee meeting, “and they’ve established pretty good markets already, whether going to a market or at the door. They don’t see a lot of surplus product. The question then is: Where will product come? I’m not saying it won’t come but in terms of a business case in setting up this collaborative – before we commit money to it. I think we need to have another meeting with producers and find out how much they are going to commit.”
Seems County farmers are pretty much content to sell any farmgate surplus they might have, well, at the farmgate or roadside. Fact is there’s not even a farmers’ market in Picton. Thompson says “producers say they don’t have any excess product to bring to a farmers’ market. And we can’t produce anymore. So unless some new producers to expand production we are not meeting the demand we have already.”
Most of us know by now that eating locally-grown foods makes for common sense. We’ve read Gary Paul Nabhan 2002 memoir, Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods; listened to Dombrowsky here earlier this month trumpeting her 'Buy Ontario' homegrown foods message; and embraced Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement, which started in Italy in 1986 and arrived in Prince Edward County in November 2005 through the convivium, chaired by Petra Cooper of Fifth Town Artisan Cheese Company near Cressy.
The message Prince Edward County farmers may be poised to send out through council is reminiscent of a famous (at least in the Maritimes) commercial jingle for Saint John-based Moosehead Breweries Alpine Lager: “You’ve got to live here to get it.”
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