Kleinburg Archives

The Smell and Feel of Kleinburg of the Past

by Pierre Berton (1968)

I remember when I first came to Kleinburg, twenty years ago, on a warm July Sunday, at the invitation of Lister Sinclair who had just bought three acres of property in a co­operative settlement on the east branch of the Humber, which we later called "Windrush".

In those days, Kleinburg was a good hour and a quarter away from Toronto. We came up along Wilson Avenue through Weston and thence by Islington Avenue, which still followed the narrow winding contours of the ancient Indian trail that led down from the land of the Huron Indian nation on the lake.

Kleinburg in 1948 was a sleepy village of 110 souls, confined, as it had been for half a century, to the high ground between the two branches of the river. The main street, with its Victorian architecture and its overhanging verandahs looked like a set for a Hollywood western and was subsequently used for just that purpose. It consisted of a hardware store, a butcher shop, two general stores, one church, a two-room school and a few residences, many of which were nearly a century old.

Driving into town we passed the Victorian Gothic home where the Mitchell sisters lived, constructed in 1852 from bricks made right on the property. Syd Dawson owns it today. Perched above Lister's property on the Humber was the little red schoolhouse which had been opened in 1855 and which served the community for exactly 100 years until Mike Bevan bought it for his family. The general store and post office had been a general store and post office since the days of Kleinburg' s first postmaster and the furniture store next door (it was boarded up when I arrived) had been a furniture store since the days of August Groskurth, who made his own furniture on the spot, and, since he doubled as an undertaker, his own coffins. And, of course, there was Shaw's hardware, a building which had then been in the hands of one family through four generations and had existed even before Charles Shaw Sr. bought it as a wagon implement show room, being constructed of lumber hewn in the Holland Marsh and planed on the site.

The leading citizens of Kleinburg belonged to families who had settled on this land in the days before Canada was a nation. If you look through the yellowing directories of the 'fifties and 'sixties you will see their names: Train, McDonough, Constable, Witherspoon, Wardlaw, Cooper, Croft, Devins, McKinnon, Shaw. You will see them, too, in the tiny graveyards scattered about the environs, marking the sites of churches long since gone. There is one behind the Donneral home, marking the site of the Methodist church ­ Kleinburg's first built in 1852. Lester Pearson's father preached here. His elder brother, Marmaduke, was born there.

So that was Kleinburg when I first came upon it in 1948 a rural village which had been slowly declining since World War One and which seemed destined to vanish entirely as Purpleville, not far away, had vanished and scores of other hamlets throughout rural Ontario.

I had no intention of settling here. I'd just come along for the ride and a picnic on the banks of the Humber. The river trickled beneath us as we sat on the bank and ate our sandwiches. Like the town the river had been declining. There was a time, before the century's turn, when it was three times its present size. Lex Mackenzie has recalled his grand­father's stories of spearfishing for salmon by torchlight along the upper Humber. And the late Earl Shaw once told me that, in his memory, the river supplied enough power to operate six sawmills and a shingle mill in the vicinity of the village (not to mention the powerful grist mill around which the community was founded).

Actually on the day of that picnic we were seated only a few hundred yards from the site of one of these mills (where John Beevor's house now stands) but there wasn't a single relic of its existence. The river, ironically, helped to destroy itself, powering the very machinery that turned the trees into timber and shingles. This relentless stripping off of the forest cover the great red pines, oaks and maples lowered the water table and, on one terrible night made possible the ultimate tragedy of Hurricane Hazel. There were no roots left to hold the water. There are only a few pines left today along the fences that border the concession roads.

After our picnic my wife and I walked up the hill, through the groves of pointed cedars and the orchard of wild apples and hawthomes all second growth and over the old stumps left by the loggers of another century. We reached the unused pastureland which had been part of the old Bell farm and we stood in the tall grass and looked across the tops of the trees for more than a mile to the farms that front on Highway 27 and we decided, right at that moment, to buy the property. It took every penny we had but it was worth every penny we had. In twenty years we have not grown tired of that view.

Nor have we grown tired of Kleinburg, the historic Humber village, now awakening from its fifty year sleep. Suddenly the town has again sprung to life the kind of life it knew back in the 1890's when young Ray Shaw's great great grandfather started the Binder Twine Delivery Nights and the main street came alive with dancing, music and festivity.

To understand what was happening then and to realize what is happening now you have to go back to the very beginning. That was 1847, the year when John Kline, a Swiss watchmaker, built the big grist mill on the Humber's west branch and gave his name to the community. The original town sprang up around that mill in the area where No. 27 Highway crosses the Nashville road. A few years ago you could see the foundations of the historic mill on Walter Griffith's property. Then they widened the roadway, and the bulldozers, in the name of progress, destroyed the only vestige of our beginnings.

From the outset, Kleinburg's nomenclature was hopelessly snarled up. The name was originally spelled "Klinesberg", meaning "Kline's mountain" (as in "iceberg"). The difficulty is that the village wasn't on a mountain or even on a hill but in a valley and my suspicion is that they intended to spell it "Klinesburg", meaning "Kline's town". Especially as there was a separate community on the hill, where present day Kleinburg now stands, then known as "Mount Vernon". Later on, the name was twisted to Kliensburg and by 1890 when the two communities had long since become one and the old town had declined, the present spelling was more or less accepted. When I came to Kleinburg in 1948, the road sign into town spelled it "Kleinburg" but the roadsign out of town spelled it "Klienburg." I think at one time the railway station sign spelled it "Klienberg", a situation that was further confused by a second sign at the other end of the station that read "Nashville".

A salesman once came into Shaw's Hardware and asked why the Kleinburg railway station was so far away from the town. Earl Shaw thought a moment and then replied, in his slow way: "Well, sir, I guess they wanted to keep it near the tracks."

In 1852 Kline sold his mill. The purchasers were two up-and-coming ex-Yankees, H. S. and W. P. Howland, who with a third brother, Fred, already owned thriving mills at Lambton, Waterdown and St. Catharines. The Howlands were examples of the brain­drain in reverse. W. P. Howland later became a minister in the first Dominion cabinet, lieutenant-governor of Ontario and a Knight Companion of the Bath. His brother, H. S., became Kleinburg' s first postmaster, reeve of Vaughan Township, warden of York County, and vice-president, in 1867 of the Canadian Bank of Commerce and first president of the Imperial Bank of Canada in 1875. Besides the grist mill, the Howlands owned a general store and a sawmill in Kleinburg.

A thriving community swiftly mushroomed up around the mill. A cooperage, a stave factory and a shingle mill were needed to supply barrels for the mill which gobbled up as many as two hundred a day. (The Howlands, it is said, had 20 coopers working for them.) Howland's post office and McCutcheon and McFall's general store operated on the northwest corner of what is now Highway 27 and the Nashville road. Here you could buy everything from an axe handle to a violin string.

The community quickly sprawled up the hillside along both sides of the trail that is now the Nashville-Kleinburg road and down the Indian trail we now call Islington Avenue. By 1860 the community had a tanner and currier, a custom tailor, a boot and shoe maker, a carriage maker, a doctor, a saddler and harness maker and an undertaker. There were already two hotels as well as the church and school. By 1870 the population had reached 350, more than three times what it was when I first saw the village. By this date there was also a chemist, a cabinet maker, an insurance agent, a butcher, a Justice of the Peace, a milliner and a tinsmith named Charles Shaw.

Kleinburg had prospered because of its geographical position. The mill was not only the largest between Toronto and Barrie, it was also nearly equidistant from both communities a perfect spot for a farmer to halt overnight en route to market. Moreover, by 1860, the plank toll road had been completed as far as the King town line, putting Kleinburg squarely on the main route to Dundas Street.

By the time Charles Shaw and his son moved their tinsmithing business into Robert Douglas's farm implement showroom (the date was 1891), Kleinburg was a thriving three hotel, two church community with half a dozen local manufacturing industries run­ning full blast. In those days farm implements, furniture, harnesses, clothes, wagons and carriages were all made on the spot and sold on the spot. Before he moved to the present site of Shaw's hardware, Charles Shaw used to make tin pails, boilers, clippers, mugs, plates, lamps and candle moulds on various sites in Kleinburg.

This was Kleinburg's heyday. Three hotels on a single block of the main street ran full tilt, catering to hired men, drummers, transients and visitors. One stood on the corner next to the site of the Kleinburg baker. Another sat between MacTaggart's and Shaw's hardware. A third was across the street in the building now occupied and owned by Miss Merle Hambly.

So what happened? What made a village die?

The story of Kleinburg's decline is the story of the mass deaths of scores of rural Ontario villages and it is all mixed up with the invention of the automobile and the development of mass production techniques in factories and farms.

The motor car made it possible for farmers to go to market in a single hop without an overnight stop. The big factories sounded the death knell of local manufacturing. Massey-Harris helped do away with the hired man. When the trees vanished the sawmills closed. And rural electrification creeping northward from the source of power gave an edge to Woodbridge and the Hayhoe mill. The Kleinburg mill crumbled away. By 1931, Charles Shaw Jr. was dead and so, after forty years, was Binder Twine Night.

And so, in a sense, was Kleinburg itself. What was there to keep a young man living here, with the city calling? What was there to attract new blood?

Well, as it turned out, there was plenty -- but it took a while. I was 28 when I came to Kleinburg, in the vanguard of many more. Significantly, the same kind of technological progress that killed the village, helped to launch the post-war revival movement. In the end, the automobile produced the superhigh­way and the superhighway put Kleinburg within commuting distance of the city. And, in the end, the city became so congested and so big that it lost its lure to young married people who could, once again, live in the country or in a semblance of it. The trickle of the late forties and fifties threatens to become a flood in the sixties, as the fields and valleys of the upper Humber become more and more tempting to young families fed up with asphalt and concrete.

We cannot pretend that it is the same Kleinburg. The village blacksmith is gone and the village gas station can never replace him. The original tree-shaded community is now almost encircled by subdivisions and this encircling process has not ended. And yet, in the centre of the village, on the main street which has changed surprisingly little since old Charlie Shaw began the Binder Twine Delivery Nights we can still smell and feel the past. It is as close as Mike Bevan's school­house home, or the graveyard behind Donneral's or the bricks in Syd Dawson's place or any of the several wonderfully ancient stores. This sense of the past is one of the things that makes our community especially attractive and which distinguishes it from so many pin­new, machine-made settlements which have no history and no tradition and no roots.

Kleinburg has roots. And it has rituals like Binder Twine Night, to remind us of them. These roots and these rituals deserve to be preserved and cherished for they are, in the end, far more permanent than clapboard, concrete block and cinder driveways. We have lost the original mill to the bulldozers, but now that we know what we are and what we've been we have no excuse for not clinging fiercely to what is left.

(Reprinted from the Kleinburg Binder Twine Festival guide, 1968)

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