Sunshine sketches of an all-Canadian town
Orillia, a charmingly quirky place immortalized by Stephen Leacock, was born 150 years ago — just like the country. It has seen boom and bust, and now it’s also trying to face up to the treatment of the original Indigenous inhabitants. In many ways, the s
When the Samuel de Champlain monument was unveiled in 1925, thousands came to Orillia’s waterfront to cheer.
“That’s the outfit he was wearing when he got lost in the bush here,” says Sherry Lawson as she looks up at Champlain, his cloak frozen in a long-ago gust of wind.
The explorer stands on a plinth above a fur trader and missionary, who both have Indigenous men sitting at their feet.
“Erected to commemorate the advent into Ontario of the white race,” the plaque reads, honouring the explorer and “colonizer” who arrived in “these parts” in summer 1615, and spent the following winter with Indigenous people.
“He thought he’d go out wandering because he was a great mapmaker and explorer and he disappeared for two days, and the Indians found him under a tree crying,” says Lawson, the administrator of heritage services for the Chippewas of Mnjikaning/Rama First Nation.
“Are you embellishing a bit, Sherry?” Orillia Mayor Steve Clarke asks, smiling.
Maybe she added the tears. “But it makes it a little more interesting,” she says, laughing on a late spring day.
The colonial sentiment of the statue has not aged well, and the city of Orillia, the Chippewas of Mnjikaning/Rama First Nation and a few other groups, including Parks Canada, are trying to figure out how to tell the whole story. “If you want to celebrate Champlain,” Lawson explains, “he might not have done as well without the help of the native people at the time.”
Canada and Orillia are both turning 150 this year. In many ways, Orillia’s story reflects the story of Canada itself. It is the tale of an ancient gathering place that has persisted through boom, bust and reinvention.
“We don’t have the same perspective,” Lawson later says of the milestone. “We’ll come to the party and eat the cake, but it’s not our anniversary.”
History and humour
In 1856, an American traveller boarded a steamship at a hamlet south of Barrie, to make the journey to Orillia. As a brass band played on deck, he marvelled at the “primeval green islets” of Lake Simcoe and the “lake scenery as the Indian leaves it.”
The summer resort town was still “in embryo,” he wrote in the New York Tribune, but it “will become a notable place in less than twenty years from this.”
Mayor Clarke,161years later, picks up small bits of garbage and puts them in his pocket as he walks along the waterfront where the traveller arrived. He settles on a bench to chat, and with his curly blond hair, he is easy to spot.
First there’s Sue, who comments on the beauty of the day. Then Barb and Jim, just moved from nearby Warminster.
“Oh you saw the light, did you?” Clarke laughs, standing up and shaking their hands.
And finally, there is a man who taps a plank with his foot and asks when the boardwalk is going to be replaced.
“Your point is very valid,” Clarke responds in perfect mayor mode. “We can’t afford to do the project at once, but if there are a few boards that are a significant problem we’ll replace those right away.”
“They’re pretty well all rotten anyway,” the man says, and then: “Thank you.” “I appreciate that,” the mayor says. “Thank you.” Orillia was incorporated as a village in 1867, and the first railway connected the community to Toronto a few years later, beckoning a golden age of commerce and industry.
A 1910 tourism pamphlet enumerated the town’s benefits: 8,000 books in the library, 1,500 telephones, and a municipally owned hydro-electric plant offering cheap power. It was different from Muskoka. The Orillia cottager “was thought to be a more stable breed and better suited to the image of quiet dignity coveted by the town’s establishment,” local history buff Allan Ironside noted in his1984 book. So many visitors flocked here in the interwar years, that hotels often sold out, and homeowners put “tourists” signs in their windows.
In the early 20th century, jobs were plentiful: the ironworks, manufacturing interests, and of course, the Tudhope carriage and car factories. Orillia was a small town with big ideas. In 1912, Mayor William Frost — father of Ontario premier Leslie Frost — introduced daylight saving time as the rest of the province watched the experiment self-destruct in spectacular fashion in two weeks.
The year 1912 was also when the city’s reputation was cemented with the publication of Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches
of a Little Town. Ever since, people have come looking for the lovable eccentrics and the wacky schemes in the book’s pages. So intertwined are Leacock’s Mariposa and Orillia that Clarke mistakenly references the doomed Mariposa Belle — which was known to sink from time to time — when he means to talk about a real steamer.
In the 1970s, when headlines told of plant closures, layoffs and increasing crime, one senior police official made the sombre pronouncement that Orillia was no longer the sunshine town of Leacock’s imagination. But amid the changing times, there was still something of the old whimsy — city council let women ride the city buses for free on Valentine’s Day 1974, hoping to promote transit. In 1975, the owner of an Orillia variety store boycotted the sale of sugar when he was upset by the price. In 1976, council decided to hold a monthly lottery for people who paid their parking fines on time.
In 2017, a few blocks south of the main street, Toronto artist Charles Pachter works away, building his “Yorkville of the north.” A few years ago, he converted an industrial garage into a modernist studio and loft apartment, and now owns two other properties. At 74, he is a late-in-life Orillia evangelist, and part of a key demographic here. Almost a quarter of Orillians are older than 65, compared to a national average of 17 per cent.
As a Leacock character, he would be “this crazy artist who discovered the town,” he says.
For years, Pachter had a cottage on Lake Simcoe, but he was increasingly charmed by Orillia’s people, the elegant Victorian homes, and the butter tarts, so he sold the cottage and moved here. He loves getting in his van and driving north from Toronto. The air is nicer, the landscape is beautiful, and the Home Hardware has “some of the most genuinely pleasant people” he has ever met.
“The Toronto I once knew of Barbara Frum and Pierre Berton, June Callwood and Gordon Sinclair, that’s gone now,” he says. “Toronto is fabulous, but it’s this huge, anomalous, international city. Orillia is kind of retro Ontario WASP funny —‘Grand day today, eh? Hot enough for you, eh?’ ”
‘I am not willing to leave’
As the 20th century dawned in the growing town, Mr. Webber of Borland St. found a string of wampum beads while digging a celery trench in the garden. Mr. Newton found a brass crucifix in his garden near the high school. Mr. Anderson and his family found stone axes, clay pipes and pottery fragments near their boathouse on Lake Couchiching.
Archeologist Andrew Hunter noted the evidence in his 1903 report on “Indian Villages” in the Orillia area, where he uncovered dozens of Indigenous settlements and ossuaries, “thoroughly ransacked for relics by curiosity seekers during the past forty years,” he wrote.
When Champlain arrived in 1615, the Huron-Wendat were the main First Nations group in the area, and became allies with the French. But after wars with the Haudenosaunee and the impact of European diseases, many of the Wendat died or were dispersed. The Haudenosaunee were dominant until the Anishinaabe people, who had been allies of the Wendat, drove them south in bloody battles, explains Ben Cousineau, archivist with the Chippewas of Mnjikaning/Rama First Nation.
The Anishinaabe people remain in the Orillia area today: many of their descendants now live at Rama.
The centre of their world has traditionally been Mnjikaning, called a “charming little strait” by the American traveller in 1856. For thousands of years, Indigenous people fished in the marshy, shallow water where Lake Simcoe empties into Couchiching — now called the Atherley Narrows — using an ingenious system of fishing weirs, made with young birch and pine stakes. It is believed to be one of the oldest human developments in North America, dating back 5,000 years.
The narrows is a place of celebration, healing and reconciliation. Every year, during the spring fish migration, people would camp at this site to feast on the fish that swam upstream into the fish fences.
After the Europeans arrived, the area remained an important juncture for traders and prospectors heading north. The shallow waterway was seen as a danger for ships, and it was dredged in 1857 and in 1902, destroying many of the weirs.
Mark Douglas, a storyteller and a member of the Mnjikaning Fish Fence Circle, says elders from other communities have felt kindness, like a warm blanket around the shoulders, emanating from this place.
So much has happened on this sandy shoreline. On July 31, 1846, government officials outlined their plan for residential schools to local Indigenous leaders here.
“For more than 20 years past, large sums of money have been spent by the government and your missionaries have used their endeavours to divest you of Indian customs, and instruct you in the arts of civilized life, but it has not proved effectual,” Superintendent of Indian Affairs Thomas Anderson said, as the water lapped the shore. He outlined the plan for larger settlements, and manual labour schools where they would “forget their Indian habits.”
Chief Yellowhead sat and listened. His people lived nearby, at Rama, where they had only just settled. “I am not willing to leave my village,” he said.
With the War of 1812 over, the longtime allies of the Crown were seen as “impeding the Progress of Civilization in Upper Canada,” as one colonial official noted. Their traditional connection to the land for hunting and fishing required lots of space, which meant less land for settlers.
Under Sir John Colborne, the Crown had tried an experiment in 1830, bringing several bands, including Yellowhead’s people, together along an old portage route, between Orillia and Matchedash Bay. The “Coldwater-Narrows” was an early form of the reserve system, and saw the bands farming, building mills and homes, and creating the road that would become Hwy.12. It lasted until1836, when Colborne retired and was replaced by Sir Francis Bond Head, who believed Indigenous people should not live near European settlers.
“. . . there can be no doubt that the Acquisition of their vast and fertile Territory will be hailed with Joy by the whole Province,” he wrote about another land surrender in his first year in office. A few months later, in a confusing series of events, the bands at Coldwater-Narrows signed over the land to the Crown, under Bond Head’s urging. “We were not made sensible of the full purport, so that we knew not the nature of the bargain,” they would say in a petition in 1842. (In 2012, this transaction was the subject of a $307million land-claim settlement.)
Yellowhead’s people bought the land that would become Rama, but it was not good for farming. They lost their traditional fishing and hunting rights with a treaty signed in 1923. Those rights were partially restored recently, but the settlement is still going through the courts.
Traffic now roars above the historic shoreline, home to busy marinas, a walking trail and a plaque. The stakes of the fish fence are underwater and unseen. Much like the history of Indigenous people in Orillia and Canada, they have always been there, below the surface.
Like on that sunny day in July 1932, when Orillians celebrated the100th anniversary of the white settlers, parading down the street as “dignified gentlemen of a bygone era.” The Star reported that the pioneers were followed by “bands of wild Indians attired in buckskin suits,” who had been “imported for the occasion from the adjacent Rama reserve.”
It was a happy day to celebrate “100 years of progress.” The story mentioned the “thriving Indian village” of Champlain’s time, but nothing about what came next.
Don’t say you’re from Barrie
During the Second World War, Orillia’s factories cranked out shells, bombs and munitions. Don Whitfield was a poor kid sifting for metal in the garbage with his friends. Whitfield would take the load to Louis Francoz, who had a scrapyard in town. He always gave 10 cents a boy, the price of admission at the theatre. “He made sure we got to the show,” Whitfield says, sitting in a reclining chair in the city where he has lived all but one summer of his 86 years. “You never forget something like that.”
Whitfield made a good life in Orillia servicing typewriters with the family business, and later in property investment, but for some, the decades after the war were difficult. The rise of the car brought even more tourists to Orillia, but
by the late twentieth century, globalization left its mark on the city’s industries. “Good jobs gave way to employers offering the bare minimum,” Dennis Rizzo writes in A Brief History of Orillia.
As Barrie’s population rose, and then exploded, Orillia grew at a much slower pace. The two communities had a historic rivalry that dates back to the19th century, when Barrie was awarded the county seat.
“People were quite indignant,” Simcoe County archivist Peter Moran told the Star in1986. “My dad remembers moving to Orillia to work in a shoe store. He had trouble finding a girlfriend because he was from Barrie. People in Orillia didn’t like you going after their women.”
The rivalry is much friendlier these days, but it is not unusual to hear life milestones measured against patriotic census data, such as “when I was married, Orillia was still bigger than Barrie.” In the first half of the 20th century, it was a horserace to 10,000, but in 1951 — when Hwy. 400 opened — Barrie surged ahead by 404 souls. At last count, Orillia had just more than 31,000, while Barrie had crested 141,000.
While Barrie is bigger, Orillians are proud of their small-town feel and outsized ratio of famous people like sculptor Elizabeth Wyn Wood, Group of Seven painter Franklin Carmichael, and artist Arthur Shilling, who was born at Rama.
When a CBC program profiling the community aired in 1975, residents panned it. The documentary made Orillia look like “the biggest hick town in Canada,” a local MP complained. “I don’t recall any mention of people like former premier Leslie Frost or Gordon Lightfoot,” chimed in alderman Wilbur Cramp.
Most people have a Gordon Lightfoot story. Whitfield took him fishing in Algonquin when he was a young guy. Jean Sarjeant, one of the original founders of the Orillia Museum of Art and History, sang with him in the operetta at high school — “He went on further of course,” she deadpans as she walks around the museum, talking about Orillia’s storied industrial past.
Sherry Lawson worked as a waitress in the ’70s at the Zellers, where Lightfoot’s mother always tipped 25 cents: “She sure was proud of her boy,” she says, walking on a gravel trail beside the Narrows.
Long before he was mayor, Steve Clarke danced to Lightfoot’s “Beautiful” at his wedding. A bust of the folk legend will be erected in front of the Opera House this November, the latest in a handful of commemorations.
“At one point we asked him if we could put up a sign at the city entrance saying ‘Home of Gordon Lightfoot,’ ” then mayor Ted Emond told the Star in 1986. “He was really happy with the idea, so we went ahead, but people started calling his mother and Lightfoot phoned back and asked us to take it down.”
The Opera House raids
The Orillia Opera House, which has been called the “brick and mortar apple of Orillia’s collective eye,” has been a town hall, a lockup for ne’er-do-wells, and a hub of culture since it was built in 1895.
Such was its repute that when it was razed by fire during the First World War, initial rumours held Kaiser Wilhelm and Germany responsible. When it was rebuilt in 1917, an addition to the west end made room for washrooms on the ground floor. In September 1983, Orillia Police held a press conference about the washrooms: after a six-week surveillance operation, they were charging more than 30 men, half of them Orillians, with “gross indecency.”
The arrests followed Toronto’s bathhouse raids in 1981 — but in smaller Orillia, it was the “scandal of the decade,” as Michele Landsberg noted in her Star column, “Orillia washroom arrests a cruel, costly act.”
The police didn’t name the men, and defence lawyers fought to keep the names out of the papers, citing potential job loss, mental anguish and marriage breakdowns.
The naming was granted in court. Families received harassing phone calls, and a crowd waited at the first court date, hurling insults. The Crown’s office said the investigation was not an attack on homosexuality, but a lawyer with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association disagreed.
“Orillia, too is now on trial,” the Daily Packet and Times headlined their editorial calling for maturity and tolerance. On the same page, a letter compared the arrests to the witch hunts of the Middle Ages. “I find your actions to be out of keeping with the compassion enjoined upon us by Jesus of Nazareth,” a local wrote to the police.
Colin Green, director of research and development at the Gilbert Centre, a resource for the LGBTQ community, said that people didn’t come out in this area in the 1980s. “You left,” he says. “The ones that stayed just got married.”
The public washrooms were an outlet. “It says more about society than it does about the guys,” he says.
The Gilbert Centre began as the AIDS Committee of Simcoe County in 1993. Recent studies that the centre has taken part in showed that in a self-reported sample, men in the county who have sex with men are more likely to identify as bisexual or straight than gay.
But it’s “opening up” in some ways, says executive director Gerry Croteau. He hosts a weekly talk show on Rogers Television, talking about LGBTQ issues. There is county funding for trans programs, and a very supportive Simcoe County District School Board. So many positive changes, but Croteau, who lives in Barrie, doesn’t feel like he could hold his partner’s hand at a restaurant. Green agrees. “I could never go, ‘Oh honey,’ in No Frills,” he says.
In Orillia, there are rainbow flags on business doors, a monthly meet-up at Mariposa Café and a youth drop-in at the library. At the bus shelter, an old poster is shellacked to the glass, with a message to “Celebrate Tom of Finland Day.”
Kazek Ciesluk, 48, put up the poster of the gay icon. She identifies as pansexual and non-binary and is trying to create LGBTQ-focused events. So far, everything has fizzled.
She moved to Orillia because it is afford- able, friendly and beautiful. The rainbow stickers and Gilbert Centre programs also helped.
People are nice: the welcome wagon brought by a basket of local goods, and drivers offer rides in the rain. But there is occasionally small-mindedness — same as anywhere. Here, it’s a man who wears a T-shirt with a slogan against gay marriage.
“We have queer marriage, and he’s still wearing the shirt,” she says.
Brandon Rhèal Amyot of Fierté Simcoe Pride hesitates to say that Simcoe County is fully accepting, “but our community is open to listening, and that’s something that has changed drastically over the last number of years.”
At Orillia’s first trans pride parade last August, 125 people carried signs such as “We need more Trans-Friendly doctors” and “I (heart) my transgender child.” Online reaction was definitely mixed, says Amyot, but on the day in question, people watched, cheered and asked questions. Organizers had been prepared for protesters. There weren’t any.
Still dreaming big
Sitting at the waterfront — “the envy of many other communities” — Mayor Clarke knows Orillia faces challenges, including a low average family income, a lack of affordable housing, and a significant incidence of mental-health issues.
Georgian College has had an Orillia campus for decades, and Lakehead University opened shop in 2006. In the 1990s, a new wave of people came to town with the establishment of OPP headquarters and Casino Rama. Built in 1996, the casino helped transform life at Rama. It is the biggest employer in the Orillia area, with more than 2,500 jobs, and one of the biggest singlesite employers of Indigenous people in Canada.
Orillia’s story is one of friendliness and resilience, says Jean Sarjeant. “We’re always struggling to keep going, I suppose,” she says.
There have been big changes around town, including a $24million library built in 2012. The biggest capital project to date, a $53-million recreation centre, is being built on a former industrial site. The city (it became one in 1969) recently closed a deal with Hydro One, selling its distribution model for $26 million, and has an agreement from that corporation to build a technology hub in West Orillia.
There are also plans to build an interpretive centre and a pedestrian bridge over the water at Mnjikaning. The bridge will be the work of Toronto architect Brigitte Shim, who consulted with the Mnjikaning Fish Fence Circle to create her design, which mimics the experience of a fish travelling through the weirs.
Charles Pachter is part of a group of people who would like to transform the former Huronia Regional Centre site into an arts and culture hub, with studios, rehearsal space and performance pavilion. He envisions botanical gardens and housing, and an international sculpture garden honouring the people who lived in the troubled institution, which closed in 2009. The plan has been opposed by some of those same people, who would rather see the building demolished.
“What’s the best way to honour what went on there, if it isn’t to replace misery and suffering with joy and creativity?”
Truth and recalibration
Back at the Champlain statue, a silence falls over the group pondering similar questions of how to remember as Canada and Orillia turn 150. They know the story began long before 1867.
“I thought Trudeau’s request to the Pope was interesting,” Clarke says, mentioning a not very likely apology for the Catholic church’s role in residential schools. “I’m not sure how much I’m holding out for that.”
“Yeah, he doesn’t really report to him,” Sherry Lawson says. “But he’s probably the first one who has dared to say that.”
Lawson says in the last 10 years, the relationship between Orillia and the Chippewas of Mnjikaning/Rama First Nation has changed for the better.
When it was clear the Champlain statue needed refurbishment the city got in touch to figure out the best way forward.
“I think whatever we can do in this community to support (the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission) will also give us a better understanding of how we got to where we are,” Clarke says. When the monument is carted away this fall, nothing will change with the statue physically, but there are hundreds of ideas for what might happen in the space surrounding it, to tell the entire story.
“Our old stories tell us we are in a time of action, we’re not in a time of talking anymore,” Lawson says.
As the group disperses, Lawson reminds Clarke of a few things that need fixing, including the three old black cannons that point northeast over the water, toward her home in Rama. “We’ll look at those,” Clarke says. Lawson suggests: “Just even move them 30 degrees.”
“My dad remembers moving to Orillia to work in a shoe store. He had trouble finding a girlfriend because he was from Barrie. People in Orillia didn’t like you going after their women.” PETER MORAN THE SIMCOE COUNTY ARCHIVIST IN 1986