FLASH FROM THE PAST
Monday, July 1, 1867 in St. Jacobs — no monster parades, fireworks, picnics and no throngs of visitors. In fact, no one in the new country celebrated Canada Day that year because there was no such day. Not until the next year did Governor General, The Viscount Monck, declare that Canadians should observe the occasion with suitable ceremonies. Eleven years later, 1879, the title Dominion Day was given to July 1 and a statutory holiday declared. It was officially renamed Canada Day over a century later, in 1983.
While industry was growing significantly in St. Jacobs during the 1860s, so too were civic amenities. As described last week, a still-standing, two-room brick building — then a schoolhouse, now a theatre — provides a living link between 1867 and 2017.
Two new brick church buildings were erected in the mid-1860s and each congregation survives to this day albeit not in those exact structures. In mid-century, the future village of St. Jacobs was developing on both sides of the Conestogo River. Partly in expectation that the community’s future was atop the hill on the north side, the Evangelical Association erected a log church building with an adjoining cemetery along what is today’s Hawkesville Road. Attendance growth and St. Jacobs’ southerly expansion meant a new location was soon necessary. Three blocks south of the river, at King Street and Cedar East, a larger white brick church opened in 1864.
On March 8 1914, just days after celebrating that building’s 50 years of service, the congregation tore it down. It was replaced with an imposing red brick $16,000 church and the name Calvary Evangelical was adopted. This 1914 building remains but the congregation has moved on. In 2000, the present Calvary United Church opened on the original site beside the cemetery on Hawkesville Road. The 1914 building has, for the past decade or so, been an independently-owned children’s shop called Toy Soup. Before that it hosted the St. Jacobs Church Theatre. Today’s Calvary United congregation, a direct descendant of the old Evangelical Association, provides a slightly meandering, but very definite, historical link to the Confederation era.
In 1864, a large number of newcomers arriving directly from the German states agitated for a Lutheran church building. Land at King and Albert Streets was purchased and in 1866 St. James Evangelical Lutheran church opened, thus 2016 was the Lutherans’ own “150 Celebration.” However, that “almost-Confederation” church building lasted less than a century. Six months after the final service in November 1961, a new, eyecatching, modernistic building with a free-standing tower featuring bells and a clock was dedicated on the same site. The congregation flourishes still, and its website acknowledges the reality of Sundays in crowded, touristy St. Jacobs: “Planning a shopping trip to St. Jacobs? Why not plan to arrive before 10 a.m. (before the shops open)? All visitors are welcome.” The Lutheran trail back to 1867 is clear-cut.
These two Confederation-era congregations were taking care of spiritual concerns. For physical anxieties, the remarkable Robinsons popped up in St. Jacobs in 1867.
Dr. William O’Dell Robinson was born in 1827 in Leeds County and arrived in St. Jacobs via Drumbo in Oxford County, where son Thomas Manley had been born in 1859. Although not the village’s first doctor, William became first in people’s minds and soon turned into the clichéd village doctor treating anyone for any ailment at any hour. He served as Waterloo County coroner but was best remembered for his special cure for rheumatism, a fact emphasized in his November 1, 1913 obituary. Manley had succeed- ed his father in 1886 and during a career lasting almost 60 years delivered over 3,300 babies including seven in one 24-hour span.
He retired in 1945 and died in 1950. There are St. Jacobites alive today who remember Dr. Manley Robinson and, of course, Manley knew his father William who had arrived in 1867 ... another connection to Confederation 150.
In the “Update” portion of the April 22, 2017 Flash from the Past, the word Kitchener was inadvertently dropped from the phrase Kitchener-Waterloo’s Mount Hope Cemetery.