Previous Issues
A Helping of History
?You don’t really know your home town, they say, until you know how it happened. In other words, you can be as involved as you like in the life of your community, you can support the arts and the Bruins and the local merchants, vote conscientiously in the municipal elections, even attend meetings of Township Council on a regular basis. You can read the Cosmos cover to cover every week, and be on top of everything that’s happening right now, and have a pretty good idea of what’s happening next week or next month. But unless you know the history of your home, some of the important things about its past, you don’t really know its soul.
Perhaps you’re brand new to Uxbridge. Or perhaps you’ve been here a while, but have been too busy with work or school or the house or the yard to pay much attention to Uxbridge’s fascinating past. If that’s the case, you have a golden opportunity this coming weekend to begin to truly understand your home. From 10 to 5 both Saturday and Sunday, up at the Uxbridge Historical Centre on Quaker Hill west of town, you and the whole family can have a ball stepping back in time at Heritage Days (for just a short list of the great things going on, see the ad on page 12).
It’s billed as the 38th Annual, but actually, until this year, it was called Steam Threshing Days. The Uxbridge Historical Society, organizers of the festival, couldn’t reliably get a steam thresher to attend any more, so a name change was due, but the festival had come to be about so much more than steam machines anyway. Especially the last few years, since the 1812 Re-Enactment Team began to attend. That’s something your kids will be transfixed by, whatever their age. Take our word for it.
Even if you haven’t been consciously thinking about history as you’ve travelled around Uxbridge these last few years, we wager the odd heritage-related question has popped into your head. Why “Quaker” Village, for instance? Why do we have a Glenn Gould Crescent? There was all that fuss about Anne of Green Gables last year, but did Uxbridge really play a big part in its author’s life? Why do we have a mini-Taj Mahal a few miles north of town? Is the Library really the oldest building we have? Is Elgin Pond man-made? And who was Elgin? And for that matter, where does the name Uxbridge come from?
The answers to each of these questions is worthy of a chapter in a book (and has been!), or an article in a newspaper (and more of that in a moment). But you can also find the answers, every single one of them, at the Uxbridge Historical Centre. You could also probably get most of them answered this weekend, just by pigeonholing one of the Historical Society’s dozens of volunteers.
So amid the great food and music, amid the noise and pageantry of the 1812 Re-enactors, why not begin your exploration of your community’s soul? You’ll enjoy it, we promise.
Now for a confession. For the first couple of years of the Cosmos, we were fortunate to run a bi-weekly column on Uxbridge history by the man who unquestionably is the foremost expert on that subject, Allan McGillivray, the former curator of our museum. When he retired from that job, he unfortunately also hung up his word processor. And to be honest, we’ve been a little neglectful of history ever since.
We intend to rectify that, beginning now. As of this moment, we’re creating a new column called “Our Fascinating Past”, and it’s going to have a question-and-answer format. You the reader will ask the question about Uxbridge’s history, as distant or nearby as you like, and we’ll get one of our writers to answer it. Occasionally, perhaps, even Mr. McGillivray!
“Our Fascinating Past” begins next week.
