Blessed to have had a strong, loving and gracious mother

This year on Mother’s Day, I will be hailing in some wonderment, the life of Marjorie Hogg Burns, my mother.

Her life of 85 years, spent entirely in the District of Temiskaming, a three-hour drive north of North Bay, she would think unremarkable. But my perspective and the facts show otherwise.

Her father, Samuel Hogg, from Cobourg, had homesteaded to the north in 1897. Arriving in New Liskeard and finding all the Crown lands along the Wabi River recorded, he went 12 miles away to locate his farm.

He walked to the foot of Lake Temiskaming to a mill for lumber, built a punt and slept under it, while trees were being cut and a little shack built.

In June, 1898, Sam Hogg returned to Baltimore, Ontario for his bride, Alberta Mitchell, who was welcomed to the north in a canoe decorated with wild flowers.

She wrote at the time,” For my first few years in this new land, the torture suffered by mosquitoes and black flies was my most trying experience.”

A first child, Alexander, was born in 1900, and my mother in 1904. Samuel Hogg was elected first reeve of the Township.

There are gaps in my mother’s story. I regret not asking her more fully. I know she won a public speaking contest in 1917 from the Canada Victory Loan Competition. I have the medal; she was 13 years old. Then she went to North Bay Normal School at age 17, and the next year was teaching in a one-room school house, Whitewood Grove in Hilliard Township. She was 18.

The dreadful Haileybury forest fire occurred in 1922, over two days. There were 54 deaths. It swept through 650 square miles.

The curator of the Haileybury museum wrote to me in 2004: “Your mother, Miss Marjorie Hogg, protected her schoolchildren by shepherding them under a small bridge and keeping soaked blankets around them. When the smoke and fire seemed to be advancing rapidly, she had made some trunk calls to parents. “Wait, I’ll run outside and look” said one. She came back to the phone and had time to say, 'Don’t dismiss them; we are cut off by the fire.' The line went dead. If Miss Hogg had dismissed the class, very few would have reached home alive.”

Her parents' home in New Liskeard was destroyed and within it, her hope chest full of embroidered items, her trousseau.

Twelve years later, she was principal of Kirkland West School in Kirkland Lake. A young Catholic lawyer from Almonte, Ontario arrived in town.

My mother had been courted by many young mining engineers who had come in the gold rush, but she chose my father. The religious tensions, Catholic/ Protestant of the time, prevented them, now in their 30s, from marrying there, so they went to Toronto. My father seems to have established the religion of the household, so we four kids were raised Catholic. My mother, the onetime Methodist organist, told me once she never had put her “whole weight” down in that church.

She was a cultured woman, who played the piano for memorable family singsongs; a great cook, whose specialty was cheese straws, and a legendary bridge player.

She encouraged me to read, play sports and run for student council. She suffered a long, undiagnosed illness stoically. Into our home came her elderly, hearing-impaired mother.

Next year, I hope to honour my mother and my Scots Presbyterian heritage, by joining Rev. Bob Root on a pilgrimage to the Church of Scotland mission on the island of Iona in the Hebrides.

We are blessed when we have had strong, loving and gracious mothers.

‘She encouraged me to read, play sports and run for student council’ ROSEMARY GANLEY