This project is close to my heart and to the community where I grew up. I chose to be part of Growing Stronger Together: a Celebration of Oxford County’s Past which was launched a few weeks ago. Grab a cup of your favourite beverage and settle comfortably to read the whole story. Liz Dommasch agreed to be interviewed about the project and I have included my two stories about my parents. If you decide to do your own anthology type book you may find some help here. Enjoy!

Interview with Liz Dommasch regarding Growing Stronger Together

On one of those hot August days a short time ago, I met with Oxford County Archivist Liz Dommasch to hear her behind-the-scenes story about spearheading Growing Stronger Together over the last two or three years.

Elaine:  Liz, I have a number of questions here for you but first of all, thank you so very much for doing this with me, and thank you for what you do here at the Oxford County Archives. I look forward to learning more about it.

Liz:  I’m very excited to show you what we do here.

Elaine:  What was the impetus for this book?

Liz:  It was kind of twofold, like when during COVID we were mandated to work from home, and we were trying to find ways to still interact with the public. So that’s when we started our blog.  A lot of the articles that are in the book were originally from our blog, but I realized a lot of people probably haven’t read our blog per se. As more and more articles came together, I kept thinking to myself, we have the basis of a book on our hands. And then just with knowing that the county’s anniversary is this year–it’s 175th since incorporation, 50 years since restructuring, and then it’s also the archive’s 25th anniversary, it just seemed like a perfect time to have a new book come out. So I feel like all the stars just aligned when this project came together.

Elaine:  Yes, that fit in well. How long have you been working here?

Liz:  I started with the county in 2003. At the time we were located in Beachville at the old St. Anthony’s elementary school. We were there till 2011 when we moved to this building here in Woodstock.

Elaine:  Is the county archives under the auspices of the county itself, or are there other groups that have their fingers in the pie, so to speak?

Liz:  We are a county department, so I report to the county clerk. Our primary function is the county’s corporate records, and we have records back to when we were incorporated in 1850, but then we also have early records from when we were in the District of Brock from 1839 to 1849, and then of course we have earlier land records and such from this area going back to 1798-1799. Those are probably the earliest land records we have for this area.  Although we are the primary accounting department, I also currently take in and am responsible for the travel records of five of the area municipalities: Zorra, Blandford-Blenheim, Southwest Oxford, Town of Ingersoll, and East Zorra-Tavistock. That’s just as a service. We don’t charge anything for that. Then we also take records from the public as long as they relate to the history of the county.

Elaine:  I probably should have come and talked to you when I was doing my Loyalist books. Because, you know, they take you into that whole thing of when this became Canada East and Canada West and all that stuff, you know?  Anyhow, let’s go back to Growing Stronger Together. When did the project get off the ground?

Liz:  We started working on this about two years ago when we pulled together our articles that we had here. We also realized then that, although we know a lot about the county, there are others that probably know just as much or even more and so that’s when we reached out to other contributors such as the municipalities, yourself, and anyone who was interested in getting involved. We had quite a lot of positive feedback when we reached out.

Elaine:  Yes, I was delighted to be asked.

Liz:  And it was great because in that way we were able to get stories from all over the county. We definitely tried to ensure that we reached everywhere and covered every kind of topic and theme.

Elaine:  Anyhow that’s about two years ago. Were there problems with this particular project? The reason I’m saying that is that I wondered what had happened to it because I didn’t hear anything about it after I had done my submissions. I called and I don’t know if it was you I talked to, Liz, but I found out that the person who had been doing it had quit.

Liz:  I lost my previous assistant last fall. Then I was working on my own for a couple of months before I hired our new assistant, Tisha. By the time I got her into the groove about the project my original plan of having this published in the spring couldn’t work. What with the number of contributors and people who kept giving us more stories and us realizing we should probably cover something from here or we didn’t cover something from there the project grew. Trying to finish all of it and then working with our graphic designer to pull it all together took a little bit longer than intended. The same thing happened with the printing.

Elaine:  I was wondering who did the printing for you, because of course I’ve gone down that route with my books.

Liz:  Barney’s printing here in town. Yeah, it’s just one of those things where we had plans and then, you know, life happens. I’m glad we took the time that we did because the end product is very nice. I was amazed to see how big it was, really–a hundred and fifty county stories. I think over 20 contributors. So, it eventually hit a point where I said, “Okay, we have to stop. We have to call it done.” Then we kept editing it and editing it and I hit a point where I was said, “You know what?  There’s probably another typo in there and I’m just gonna let it go.” Of course, as soon as I got my first copy of it, I opened it and the first thing I saw was a typo!

It’s just honestly having a passion for a particular topic and getting the wheels into motion.

Elaine:  It’s a lot like the anthology that I created. So, anyhow, how did you attract so many contributors to the project?

Liz:  Honestly, I don’t quite remember how we did it, but I think we put out a call. I must have got something. Yeah, I don’t know if, it must have petered through because we had reached out to different organizations, so like the different historical societies and the different museums, and I can’t honestly remember if we even put something out online or if it made the paper or whatnot. It’s so long ago since we did it, I don’t quite remember.

Elaine:  Well, I didn’t find out about it until last, maybe September.

Liz:  We reached out to a lot of people we already knew and said, hey, would you be interested in contributing? And we didn’t have anyone say no, and everyone was quite eager and quite excited. We gave some ideas for themes and whatnot, but otherwise we left it to the contributor to decide what they wanted to write about, and I think that was great because we got so many neat stories.

Elaine:  Yes. There was a lady who’s passed away now that I met through writing, you know, and being known in Woodstock. She was living in Cedarview. Anyway, she has written a number of things about this county.

Liz:  Irene Crawford Siano.

Elaine:  Yeah, a funny story about that. I hope we have enough time on here.  But I did a presentation at that facility and Irene was at it. She came up to talk to me afterwards and I got to know her. She invited me to come up to her room because she was having trouble with her printer. Well, I am the computer girl, you know? And anyway, Irene always said that I was the first person she ever met that came into her room and crawled under her bed. Because I had to pull out a computer plug or something like that. Anyways, we laughed and laughed. She was lovely.

Liz:  Actually, I helped her with her last book and she was worried about printing. I advised her to print it herself, so that’s what they ended up doing with her last one.

Elaine:  Anyways, so back on track again. Where did the larger number of contributions originate? From private persons or people working for and with the county archives?

Liz:  The majority of the contributors were members of other local heritage groups, or museum curators, or former museum curators, and a few local historians. The contributors kind of ran the gamut.

Elaine:  Well, it’s nice when you get that happening and it’s not just all one sort of feeling that’s going to be in the book.

Liz:  There’s such a variety of people’s recollections of growing up in the county in the book. It runs from that to something more academic and there’s this nice variety of writing styles.

Elaine:  It makes it interesting for your audience, too, because it’ll attract a lot more people, don’t you think?

Liz:  I mean, some people will probably gravitate to some stories more than other stories, just based on interest.  But I think there’s enough in there that I think everyone will find something to interest them.

Elaine:  I could have written a whole book about my parents. You know, people used to volunteer more for things. They were on this committee and that. And, you know, people stood up and did what they could do. More than we do now, I think.

Liz:  I agree with you there. It was excruciating getting our children to do their volunteer hours. They just wondered why they had to do this when they couldn’t get paid and I’m telling them it’s giving back to your community and it’s learning a new skill and so on.

Elaine:  And how old would they have been, grade 9?

Liz:  No, I was like, you have to do your hours or you’re not graduating. But when our son was doing the hours, he actually enjoyed it.

Elaine:  What was your role as county archivist in moving this project forward to completion?

Liz:  So not only was I a contributor of articles–and you noticed there were a lot of mine in there–it was my responsibility to collect everything.  So, I worked with our graphic designer, our communications department to pull it all together and I dealt with all the financing. And now, since we’ve been doing a lot of promotional work, I’ve been giving talks, I’ve done a few interviews, and the CBC contacted us the other week which was very exciting. That was great.

Elaine:  I was really pleased to see that. We’re so hungry for local stuff anymore since the media seems to be in great big conglomerations and we don’t have our lovely small papers that talk about us.

Liz:  Yeah, I’m really lucky the gentleman who runs the Woodstock Ingersoll Echo, Lee Cranky, he’s contacted me a number of times for things and so we made that paper and the Tillsonburg one, giving us a nice lot of local coverage because of it.

Elaine:  What did you use as a template for the book?

Liz:  Honestly, I don’t know because I did hire a graphic designer so once I literally gave her all the articles all the images, I left it up to her.

Elaine:  I think she did a nice job. When I did the Calhoun book about Terry Fox and others, I had a lot of pictures and I wanted them I wanted them in colour.

Liz:  I originally wanted them in colour, too, but the cost of print was not something I felt like I could justify.

Elaine:  And I can see for this you couldn’t, but it looks lovely just the way it is and it’s good paper that they used. But what I did with my Calhoun book (The Man Behind the Marathons) I really wanted the pictures of Terry Fox, and I don’t know if you know John Davidson from London? I have a funny story about John Davidson of Jesse’s Journey.

Liz:  Oh, right. Yes.

Elaine:  Okay. I had John in my dining room interviewing him for the Calhoun book. I call it the Calhoun book because he’s the central person that was in charge of and the brains behind all those walks and runs across Canada. And so, John was sitting at my dining room table and I was recording everything and didn’t we find out that we were both at WCI (here in Woodstock) in grade nine the same year. Oh my gosh. And we didn’t know each other because you see, I was born in 1946, the first year of the baby boomers. When I got to grade 13, there were four classes of grade 13 students. The year before there had been one class. That’s the baby boom after the war. And John was there, too, but I never met him. There were so many grade nines that year. I think we had home rooms up to 9M or something. It was insane. But we didn’t know any different. So that was kind of fun when we realized we’d been in grade nine together. You never know when you start talking to people.

To get back to you can you tell me what you used as a template for the book?

Liz:  We kind of gave it to her in our themes and the chapter titles. We knew we had one on, you know, government. We had some on black history. We had arts and entertainment and then from there my helper kind of set it all up.

Elaine:  How did you fund the book?

Liz:  Luckily, I did have a budget line for the project.  Every year we have a budget for the county, and this past year with the anniversary, I did have a specific budget line for all the anniversary stuff that we were doing, so that included the book.

Elaine:  Yes, that’s good.

Liz:  We’re expecting sales to be a large part of the budget…Honestly, I was hoping we would just break even, but at the end of the day, the importance was getting it out there, so sales have been good, we’ve been pretty steady. Both Ingersoll and Tillsonburg library branches are collaborating, and the county administration building is selling it, and it’s also available on our website, too.  And we’ve been selling it at different events. The Harrington Heritage Committee sold a few for us at their event this past weekend.

Elaine:  Harrington has been doing a lot of community stuff up there for years.

Liz:  Then I’ll be doing some talks in the fall and I’ll bring the books with me. We’ll lug them out to everything we’re attending to hopefully sell them all. At first I was a little bit worried because we were getting a lot of feedback before the book launch even came out and I was wondering if we would have enough books ordered?

Elaine:  How many did you order?

Liz:  250. So we’re good.

Elaine:  That’s good. Who should buy this book and why?

Liz:  One, I think anyone who has a love of local history. You don’t necessarily have to be from the county or have grown up in the county, I think, to enjoy it. There are a lot of fun folklore stories in there that I think are great.  Different local people who made it big elsewhere, so you might recognize names like Amy Semple McPherson, the baseball player Tip O’Neill. It’s not just Oxford, per se; we do kind of spread out.

Elaine:  I noticed that in the topics. I thought that was good.

Liz:  Yeah, we also include some recipes. We talk about, you know, the history of plum pudding and having it in World War I, and we talk about some of the recipes that we have here and letters written to people by local soldiers.  It’s a whole mishmash of things. If you have any kind of interest in the history, you’ll love this book.

Elaine:  A mishmash is probably a good way to do it because our makeup of the county and of Canada really is a mishmash. I mean, that’s what people are like.

Liz:  Like I said we made sure to cover every geographical area so if you’re from Tilsonburg you’re gonna know there’s information about Tillsonburg but there’s so much more. You can learn about county things that you might not have known before.

Elaine:  Do you have the story in there about Annandale House in Tillsonburg? It was the wonderful old house that was turned into the museum down there.

Liz:  No, I don’t.  You know it’s funny because everyone keeps asking me after, oh do you have this story? Do you have this story? And I’m like, no. Now I feel like we’re literally going to have to start working on a second book.

Elaine: That’s what happened to me when I did my Canada: Brave New World because people said they wished their stories were in there and was I doing another one? Once people see the product, their minds start to churn out more and more possibilities.

Liz:  I was talking to Scott Gillies, the former curator in Ingersoll and I had given a talk back in the spring. I was telling some of the stories about some of the train wrecks that we covered in there. There’s a funny story about this one that happened just outside of Ingersoll and all the lights had gone off. People were trying to scramble out the doors and stuff and this poor woman was trying to climb through a window and a gentleman literally a pushed her so he could climb up over her. He left her behind in the train by herself.

Elaine:  So you used the wrong word there. He wasn’t a gentleman.

Liz:  Gentleman. Long story short, not a gentleman.

Elaine:  You know what you’re doing makes me think of my own case because my first four books that I wrote were historical fiction.  Now I go out and speak about history and related subjects and I always tell them that when I was in high school I hated history.  They can’t believe it and I say because history was learn the dates and what were the six ways of blah blah blah, you know, and I say it was so boring. When I write historical fiction that frees me up to still have the history right but to be able to bring out the stories on a personal level.

Liz:  I find with how they teach history in the school, it’s so much very much the dates, the events, and it’s, you know, confederation and the fur trade. And we need to know that, too. We need to know it, but let’s be honest, a lot of it’s kind of dry.  It’s that social history that people gravitate towards, and once I start telling, especially with my own kids, about more of the kind of people, the humorous kind of stories, that’s what hooks people in.

Elaine:  And my mother couldn’t understand that I hated history when I was in high school because when she would get her history book on the first day of school, she’d take it home and read it cover to cover. I mean maybe their books were different than ours. But I always think that’s interesting that now I just love history. I’ll stop on the side of the road and read something on a sign.

Liz:  Every day I’m kind of learning something new depending on what we’re looking through or what someone’s research request is.

Elaine:  Yeah, that’s funny. I wish in our history we could have discovered that everybody learns differently and so stop doing all the teaching the same way. What would you do differently if you had a chance to do this again?

Liz:  That is a good question. I probably would give myself a little bit more time knowing how big the project ended up being. I think we first started talking about it in like 2022 or 2023. You think you have tons of time and then suddenly it’s halfway through 2025 and we don’t have a book yet.

Elaine:  It’s a bit of a train wreck.

Liz:  Yes, because of a lot of things. As a side note our jobs here have slightly changed so I’m not just archivist anymore. I’ve become the records manager for the county. I also do freedom of information requests. Suddenly I’m going in all sorts of different directions so there are some weeks where I’m not even doing our usual stuff, I’m doing other things. That became a bit of a challenge as well but I’m not stopping. We do have plans for other books.

Elaine: And once you’ve done one…speaking from my experience, when I wrote The Loyalist’s Wife, I fully intended to be traditionally published. And then the more I got into it and the more I found out what the publishing world is like, I just couldn’t see myself doing that.  Yes, I was sixty when I started writing that first book, and it took me until I was sixty-six to get it done. I’m a perfectionist which is a good thing if you’re in this business. And so I published it in 2013, I think, and I published it myself, and I started my own publishing company, but my girlfriend that I met in this journey, she went with an agent and still hasn’t published. I just went wherever I needed to go. I went to conferences in Vancouver, I went to Niagara Falls, I belonged to a big writing club in Ajax, and I just went to learn all I could. And once I wasn’t learning anything anymore, I’d go on to the next thing.  And it was a good way for me because I, as a 4-H kid, learned to do by doing. Exactly.

Liz:  Exactly, it’s funny. So this is actually the third book we’ve done, but it’s the largest one we’ve done. So I think originally when we were doing it I was thinking it was probably gonna be the same size as some of our previous ones so I think my mind was like oh we can do this and then as it grew in volume and contributors and everything else it definitely became more of a challenge.

Elaine:  Did you find though that it probably was every bit as much of a challenge for those smaller books because we didn’t have the technology that we have now? You know, everybody sent you the article already, already typed up and everything.

Liz:  That, yeah, everyone sent me the JPEG or the TIFF image, and the wording.

Elaine:  Is there something else that you would like me to put in this article?

Liz:  I will say, and I mentioned in my introduction, that we are a community archives. We are a county department but we mostly see ourselves as a community archives and not only because we have the community records that we maintain but the fact that we build these community partnerships with contributors and other local history groups and such. This book honestly wouldn’t have been as great if we didn’t have that connection with the community.

Elaine:  And, you know, I’ve come to really take it into my soul, I guess, the idea of how important it is that people write their stories. A couple of years ago, my daughter called me and she said, Grandma would have been 100 this coming fall, and Beth would be 50. And she said, she and her grandma were going to have a party and so on, because it was a big one for both of them, and then my mother died that summer, so we never got to it.  And Beth said to me, “Why don’t we have a party?” And Beth lived on the West Coast, so, I knew, it was going to be a big deal. And I was talking to her on the phone and I said, “Beth, I’ve got Grandma’s pages that she was working on.” My dad had died and she was living in an apartment, and she was a smart lady and needed something to keep her going. And I said, “Why don’t you write a book or write stories or whatever?” She was a lifelong reader, you know.

And then I said, I’m talking to Beth and I’m telling her this, and I said, “I know exactly where that envelope is, because I kept it through all the moves and everything else.” I knew I had a treasure there, but I had never read it. Because you know what your life is like. You’ve got five million things you’re doing, right? And I got it out that week, and I realized my mother had written her mother’s story in a fictional manner, and she had almost finished it, but she hadn’t completed it. So, I got it out and I thought, what do I do with this? And I decided that I didn’t want to really mess around with her writing, because, I mean, she was a good writer. I probably changed about three things. I think it was 90 pages or something. There were sections she hadn’t completed, but I couldn’t write them, because she was writing about her family growing up. I didn’t know the stories. And so I just came in as myself and put in what I knew about the interim parts. I only did that about three times, but it worked. I explained what I knew and carried on with the parts she had written. I ended up with a treasure, 90% my mother’s words. I love it.

Liz:  I love that it’s inter-generational.

Elaine:  I did that book and my family was just so excited about it I decided to publish it for everybody and I did an audiobook as I’ve done for all of my books.

Liz:  That’s good to know.

Elaine: What an interesting tale you’ve told us today, Liz. Thanks so much for spearheading the project and for telling us about your journey.

………………………………

As mentioned in my interview with Liz Dommasch above, I submitted two stories for Growing Stronger Together when I received a request to do so. I come from parents who were very community oriented so I chose to write about them as examples of the many community people in those days who gave of their time and energy to help their communities.

Here is the one about Alice Garner, the mother of thirteen children who contributed in countless ways to her community.

Please Love and Understand Each Other

By Elaine Cougler

Alice Garner was born in 1923 and spent her first years in the Stratford/Shakespeare area. Her ancestors were Pennsylvania Dutch and she came from a singing family. When she was twelve this shy girl walked downtown in Stratford to the radio station and walked out again out with her own weekly 15-minute radio show where she performed new songs across the air waves. For the rest of her life music infused almost everything she did.

Alice was my mother and the mother of my twelve brothers and sisters. She married our father, Ernie, in 1940 and the babies came over the next 25 years. Alice and Ernie taught them all they knew about work and responsibility. If we children didn’t get our chores done, we didn’t get the reward (usually a pleased smile). There was an expectation that each of us would do dishes and make beds, gather our own dirty clothes and tidy up wherever we were asked. My brothers had to shovel up messes in the barn, wash the cows’ teats before putting on the milking machine, drop grain at the head of each cow’s stall, and drive the milked cows back out to pasture. I was the only girl until I was nine so I helped Mom in the house.

This was an exciting time with everyone in our world inventing new things like farm machinery to ease the farmer’s life and tossing out the wringer washer and replacing it with an Easy Spin-Rinse machine. Mom was overjoyed when Dad bought her a clothes dryer and ended the years of hanging 10 loads of laundry three times a week on long, over-burdened lines that were strung from our porch to huge trees way down the lane.

Dad put in a new furnace and our wood stoves disappeared. He bought an electric stove for the kitchen and a flick of the switch on the front would turn on whatever burner Mom wanted. Of course by then he had had a new, deep well dug and we had hot water whenever we needed it.

Mom and her friends were active in the church. They sewed clothes and crafts for bazaars to raise money for church projects. They took over special church services and visited sick people. Mom was on a provincial government committee that was instrumental in helping set up educational programming. She did so much volunteering that I fondly called her ‘Valerie Volunteer’. Everyone worked to better the community.

A pivotal moment for me as a young mother was the night I sat spellbound in the WCI auditorium and watched my mother be nominated as the Liberal candidate for the provincial election in the summer of 1975. As I listened, my mother spoke of her hopes for Ontario, her words interspersed with bursts of applause. I was spellbound. Whether she won or lost she showed me what a respected, clever and amazing person she was. Pride filled me.

In 1984 Woodstock and Oxford County were treated to another of my mother’s terrific ideas. She called a family meeting and discussed having the Garner family perform The Sound of Music. We all jumped on board. By this time there were children and grandchildren of the original thirteen and Mom motivated us all. She played the Mother Superior, sister Linda played Maria and ‘married’ my husband who played the Captain. In 1991, we were on stage at WCI again at Mom’s request. This time we did Pirates of Penzance to more sold out performances. Getting to perform with my nieces and nephews, my siblings and a whole bunch of in-laws made memories to last for all of us.

Mom sang in the Knox United Church choir for over 50 years and must have done hundreds of solos in that time. She taught her children to sing and love music and all of us who wanted them got music lessons. I remember riding my bike the four miles to Embro for piano lessons and then back home again. Of course I always bought some hard black balls at Charlie Beagley’s store on the main corner in Embro.

She led the KUC Junior Choir for a number of years. Every year she helped kids prepare for the music festival. She was an active member of many groups. I remember craft and sewing projects coming to life in our living room for the yearly UCW bazaar. She became leader of the whole UCW.

At sixty-two Mom decided to get a job, the first since she had been a young teenager. She got her real estate licence and sold enough property to buy a new set of furniture with her own money. She didn’t need the money but she was delighted to keep learning and doing and trying.

This amazing woman stepped out to help her community and beyond. She is best known for her roles in the Canadian Cancer Society including Education Chairman of Ontario Division. When my father showed the signs of Alzheimer’s, Mom stepped up to help the local society.

When my mother died, stories filled the funeral home at the visitations and then later at the service at our family church in Embro. Roger McCombe wrote an article in the Sentinel Review and many others sent cards, flowers and glowing remembrances. Thankfully one of my brothers prepared a huge booklet for each of his siblings. It is filled with many mementos of Mom’s life including a letter she wrote that she left for each of her children to read after her death.

“Please love and understand one another. Stay close—have fun together—have a party every once in a while and remember us. Lots of love, Mom.”

In 2023 I found the typed pages Mom had written before she died. I had thought it was fiction. Leading up to her 100^th birthday I got it out and found the unfinished story of her mother, Maggie. What a wonderful legacy she left us. I published it, mostly in her words.

And here is my story about my father, Ernest Garner, a successful farmer, a pillar of the community and the warden of Oxford County in 1961. Along with all of that he raised thirteen children to follow in his footsteps.

A Man, His Family and His Community

by Elaine Cougler

On May 13, 1916, just down the slant road from Cody’s School, a baby boy was born. Ernie was another boy for Frank and Fannie Garner and he would grow up to be a son of whom they could be proud. This is the story of my father, Ernest Francis Garner.

Born during World War I, growing up through the roaring twenties and the dirty thirties, Dad was anxious to make his way in the world and, once he married Mom in Beachville in 1940, to raise his own family. No flowing white lacy gown or perfectly pleated tuxedo for this pair. Their honeymoon was a day trip to Springbank Park in London. For the next five years they lived with Alice’s mother and raised babies, all the while working, planning and saving to buy their own farm.

By the time I was born, Dad had bought his father’s farm on the third line of West Zorra Township. A farmer, he had not gone to war. He raised food crops to feed Canada and the wider world, and even worked for some time in Woodstock making shells for the war effort. He once told me about his vegetable route. He loaded up his first truck with turnips and sugar beets and drove his route down towards Chatham and Wallaceburg to sell his wares.

One Sunday our parents took us to church in Embro. They dressed up all of us children, got us up the many church steps, and into the sanctuary. We were probably well behaved as expected. After the service someone came to Dad and told him that he had put us in that other family’s pew. The next Sunday Dad led us into the sanctuary and marched us to a pew right down front. No one else sat up there. That was our pew ever after.

My parents hardly ever talked about the war. They wanted to get on with their lives. As babies came along, Mom and Dad modelled all they knew about work and responsibility. There was an expectation that each of us would do dishes and make beds, gather our own dirty clothes and tidy up wherever we were asked. If we didn’t get our chores done, we heard about it. My brothers had to shovel up messes in the barn, wash the cows’ teats before putting on the milking machine, drop grain at the head of each cow’s stall, and drive the milked cows back out to pasture. I was the only girl until I was nine so I helped Mom in the house.

Dad enjoyed doing his share in the community. He served on church committees, became a church elder and often visited the sick. When Mom ran for provincial election, Dad went up and down the roads of Oxford County talking to his many friends and acquaintances to help his wife get elected.

My father’s greatest contribution to his community was in local government. He was elected to West Zorra Township Council. In 1961, he became Warden of Oxford County and was somewhat of a favourite in the Sentinel Review. My sister Linda was born that year and a lovely photo of my parents and their twelfth child was featured in the paper. I also remember a photo of all of us smiling children sitting on the stairs and Mom and Dad beside us.

As warden, Dad helped open the newly completed section of highway 401 from Preston (Cambridge) to the Hwy. 2 interchange at Woodstock. He met Fred Cass, there at the time as a government representative, and they discovered they were related.

What I learned about my father as I got older was how good he was at listening to what everyone had to say as we discussed politics, church affairs, family happenings and whatever else came up. He let us all voice our thoughts as he sat watching and listening. When the discussion died down, Dad would quietly sum up with a couple of pithy remarks.

Mom and Dad took their turns entertaining friends, Farm Forum members and councillors at our home. It was a close-knit group and these adults always worked well together to get things done.

When I was going to Cody’s School, a one-room building two miles from our home—yes, we walked there and back every day—a bunch of the fathers in our community built a small log cabin which they hoisted up onto a big wagon. This was pulled by a tractor in the fall fair parade. I was on the wagon in a pioneer costume that Mom had sewn for me and my brother Wayne was one of the costumed natives walking along each side.

In 1956 Dad sold our home farm to the Canada Cement Company. It was where today huge towers light the sky to prevent planes headed for London Airport from crashing into the towers. Long gone are the house and barns and fields of corn, wheat, barley and oats. Instead huge piles of quarried rock and gravel cover most of the two miles of farmland up that road.

The biggest loss to me is the close community where we knew all the neighbours and they knew us. We had presentations, dances, box socials, softball games, and Christmas concerts where everyone came and contributed. If someone needed help, a friend was there immediately.

My dad hired neighbours to pick the sweet corn when it was ready and pack five dozen cobs into each slatted box. Every night of corn season, we would have two huge kettles on the stove full of peeled cobs for supper. Mom and several of us kids would blanche, strip and freeze about twelve dozen cobs for the winter.

Our community surrounding us in the fifties and sixties is probably what made me the friendly person I am today. I am thankful my parents bought that farm and raised us among people who live in my memories still.

You can find Growing Stronger Together in several places around Oxford County while the copies last. The County of Oxford building in downtown Woodstock and a couple of county libraries would be a great place to start.

All of Elaine’s books are available on Amazon.