Kleinburg Archives
Why we have a Festival
By Pierre Berton
(reprinted from the 1968 Binder Twine Festival Guide)
Not long ago, a developer interested in exploiting the Kleinburg area, made the public statement that there was nothing of historical interest in our village and nothing worth preserving from the past. The town, he indicated, could - and probably should - be bulldozed flat.
How many of the thousands who come to the Binder Twine Festival each year, would agree with him? Not many, we would wager. Kleinburg's greatest asset is that it still manages to capture some of the feeling of the rural past and that its citizens care enough about their heritage to commemorate it every fall by reliving the days when farmers bought twine from Charlie Shaw's hardware store to bind their sheaves together. Just as Charlie Shaw entertained those who visited Kleinburg each fall, with music, dancing and entertainment, so we, preserving that long tradition, offer a similar festival to a newer generation.
Our purpose is not to make money. Any profit goes to purchase recreational facilities for the village or to preserve and mark historical sites. Our purpose is to remind people of their past by reliving it, in some measure, for the space of a few hours.
There are many kinds of history. We are conditioned by schoolbooks to think of history in terms of kings, statesmen and great events. Although Kleinburg has nourished one Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson - it is not this kind of history that we mark with our September festival. The purpose of Binder Twine day is to remind us of a time when life did not race past on asphalt highways at 70 m.p.h., when amusements, like furniture, were made in the village and not in some far off television factory, and when most men worked in the fields and not in the smoky cities. This rural past shaped us as a nation and it affects us to this day. Perhaps that is why we still seek the countryside with nostalgia, affection and longing.
Why is it important to preserve this past? Surely it is because we must understand who we are and where we sprang from. If the Canadian identity is blurred, it may be because we have been so busy celebrating other nations' history that we have neglected our own. The Binder Twine Festival, in its small way, attempts to redress some of that neglect.
The physical reminders of our heritage grow fewer with each passing season. Landmarks from a previous age crumble before our obsession with the new and the glossy. If something is old - a house, a store, a barn, even a graveyard - the bulldozers take care of it. Winding lanes are straightened out and covered over; trees fall beneath the developer's axe, the memories of another time become blurred. Even John Kline's original mill, which marked the birth of this community; vanished a few years ago when a highway was straightened.
We cannot of course preserve everything. Nor should we try. But to say flatly that a village which has existed for 125 years has nothing in it of historical significance is to reveal a fatal ignorance of what history really is. To suggest that the bulldozing of a community with as many roots as ours has, is "progress" is to corrupt the meaning of that once noble word.
Real progress involves more than bulldozers, development and sewage. Real progress involves the kind of community understanding and zeal that produced the annual Binder Twine Festival. But if Kleinburg were to be bulldozed away and recreated as just another metropolitan suburb, what point would there be to the Festival? If we destroyed all evidence of our heritage, how could we continue to celebrate it?