Three street dances in the village paid for moving this 75 year old hall into proper position to take part in the revived community life of Claireville
By Gregory Clark, July 16, 1932.
The country has decided to stay home in the evenings.
All over the province, community dance halls are appearing. Not only in towns and large villages but just at wide places in the road.
I am not going to predict the dawn of a new age in country life. Highways are not going to be broken up. Motor trucks are not going to be prohibited. Mail order business is not going to be banned. The return of Merrie England and maypole dancing on the green is not immediately in prospect.
But something is certainly happening to Ontario rural life as the result of eggs at 5 cents a dozen and potatoes at 7 cents a bag.
Clareville1, for example, is a tiny village located just where the country begins outside Toronto. It is not fifteen miles from the edge of the big city. But no adventurous suburban bungalows, the lonely heralds of the big city’s march, mar the purely country scene.
In the night, I stood under the elms with one of the principal farmers of the district, listening the strains of “Darling Nellie Gray” coming from the brightly lighted community hall of Clareville which is now in its first summer season.
“For years,” said this farmer, who prefers to be nameless, “our youngsters have been driving into the city for their evenings. Of course, we older ones have been driving into town for our shopping, so we can’t kick. Anyway, we didn’t know who they were mixing with. They got city manners, city airs and city discontent. We were kind of proud when they got city jobs.
“It was bad. The people they got in with aren’t as good as the people we have right around here. Those city jobs weren’t so good as these green fields, even if we can’t sell anything off them. But here is something good and enduring. That’s why I say that community hall and that music and those kids dancing in there, together are mighty good things.”
These are bad times for a small community to build a community hall. But Clareville didn’t do that. They just shifted an old one to a new position.
When concrete highways come to a village, they often turn the village back-end foremost. Away off the main drag, there stood an old abandoned hall built by the Sons of Temperance2 or the Sons of Rest, or something, in the year 1860.
“We held three street dances,” said Mrs. E. J. Gamble, whose family run the general store, “last summer, and netted $300, which went a long way toward moving that old hall out to the highway. It has been all painted up, covered with that new roofing material, and a maple floor installed.”
Here and there, you can see old beams, withered and weathered, and on them carved initials of men who were boys in the sixties3. Over the stage in the new hall is a quaint old framed sampler that stood, 70 years ago, above the platform of the Sons of Temperance. It says, worked in colored wool, “Welcome to All.” And whether Merrie England and the maypole are returning to Clareville or not, at least Clareville has enough sentiment and humor to replace that old sampler right over the stage where sits an orchestra playing “Oop-boop-a-doop,” and where, in 1932, dance the young people of the townships who, until two years ago, turned their back on Clareville at twilight and fled eagerly toward that dull glow in the skies, Torontowards.
To get our story and photographs, we I went up only the one wandering country highway. At Bolton, we found, in this village of 700 souls, a fine new white dance hall, all windows and glistening floor, run by the Clark Brothers of the Bolton hotel. They call the dance hall Bolton Casino.
“Until we erected this hall two years ago,” said one of the brothers, “you could shoot a cannon up the main street of Bolton on a Saturday night. Now you have to go into second gear to get through at all, if you want to get through.”
Re-Opening the Village Hall
On Wednesday nights they have old-time dancing, with an orchestra from either Toronto or Brampton. On Wednesday nights the entrance is 20 cents for the whole evening. On Saturday nights, it is modern dancing, and admission is free, but dancing costs three for a quarter.
“For miles around,” said the brothers, “people come to town Saturday evening for their shopping and to sit in the hall and see the young people dance and listen to the music. The place is filled with children and old people all sitting and playing around, and 300 people is nothing to have in here. The town is crowded, busy and cheerful. We have city people, strangers, drive up and spend the evening with us. It looks as if the tables were turned: a few years ago we all drove to Toronto for the evening. Now Toronto is coming out to the country for the evening.”
As we drove out the highway, Tom Wilson, The Star Weekly photographer at the wheel, we passed literally of motor trucks loaded with cattle.
They were all stepping at a fast pace. Tom Wilson is a farmer on the side, and knows all about alfalfa and can tell a Durham cow when he sees it.
“What’s all this racing to Toronto with cattle?” I asked.
“You see,” says Tom, “either in last night’s paper or over the radio in the market reports, there was a report of a 15 cents a hundred rise in the price of cattle. So all these farmers are rushing to town at top speed to try and get that extra 15 cents a hundred. All they are doing, really, is to race at top speed to knock the price down, to glut the market, to take off not only that 15 cent increase but to kick the price fifty cents lower than it was yesterday.”
“That’s what highways are doing for the farmer?” says I.
“And trucks,” says Tom.
Coming home from the north that evening we passed the trucks homeward bound. A lot of them still had the cattle in them, and the drivers, the farmers, had a funny look on their faces.
“It’s the same with potatoes, eggs, everything,” said Tom.
“It’s the same with people,” added the proprietor of a curious little dance hall, sanctuary, poet’s corner and hide-away called the Log Cabin located on a lonely road amidst the cedar and balsam woods somewhere cast of Orangeville and somewhere north of Palgrave. “You can get here in an hour and you can get away from here just as fast. In the days when men had to walk, there were many lovely places in the world. Buggies came along, and the places got further apart. Nowadays, the places to stop are few and far between, because nobody stops any more.”
The village of Loretto is situated up on the edge of the sand hills where rises the Nottawasaga river going northward to the Georgian Bay. Few people pass that way because there are so many inviting turns to the east and west on the resolute road to Loretto. Back of the general store, which is of brick, with carved wooden fringes on all its gables, there is a stable, now no longer used, and above it a dance hall that has been reopened, all the old stuff stored in it carted away, and a new maple floor laid.
“The hall has been closed for years,” says the general merchant of Loretto. “Back before the days of motor cars it was busy with meetings of all kinds, dances, lectures. It has been locked and forgotten for twenty years. The last couple of years, we decided we had to have a hall again. And here it is. We don’t have dances every week, but at the rate things are going, we soon will have. Our orchestra are all local boys, from surrounding villages. So far, our local orchestras are made up of one boy from one village with a banjo and one from another village with a saxophone, and so on. But you can get real good orchestras now from some of the towns. It’s just like old times again.”
Barn Dances Come Back
Barn dances, which, in the tawdry twenties, almost passed out of fashion, have I come back with a great rush all over the older part of the province.
“As many as three a week,” says W. A. Irwin, justice of the peace and hotelkeeper of Palgrave. “Most of them are real old-fashioned barn raisings, since the farmers are going in for erecting their own barns with the help of the community, as in the earlier days. When barns were erected by barn companies instead of out of the bush lot, the dances died away. Now the farmers are putting up the barns in the old-fashioned way, to save money, and old-fashioned ways are coming back with them.
“But,” added the justice of the peace, “so successful is the barn-raising dances that there have been some cases of people giving follow-up dances, just for the fun of it. And along north of here, some farmers have actually staged barn dances and charged a small admission and made money out of it. It is unquestionable that something is going on in the country that has nothing to do with the cities and towns.”
The road we followed was not a tourist highway. No mention is being made here of the halls being built at all the summer resorts, at Wasaga Beach, at Thamesford, a few miles out of London, where a handsome new hall has gone up to attract city people out to the country. What is arresting is the fact that at places far off the beaten track, community life is reassembling itself after the scrambling effect of the past couple of decades. It costs so much in gas to drive to a more or less distant resort or town, so much for admission to the larger halls, that an evening for young people will run into two or three dollars a head. And two or three dollars is a lot of eggs or hog on the hoof.
Near Loretto we talked to a young man who had a team doing something to a washout on the road.
He had old overalls, a hay hat, a corn cob pipe and the homeliest looking boots on I ever saw. So perfect a specimen of the city man’s idea of a happy farmer was he that we stopped to talk with him. He wasn’t doing anything anyway; just standing behind his handsome bay team and looking at the morning.
He needed a shave and his face was red and healthy. His eyes were happy and gray.
“Boys,” he said, “you come to the right man. I had a job in the city until six months ago. A mechanic’s job. I was having a fine time, movies, dancing, working for somebody I never saw and thinking I was alive. Just the way you do, I lost my job. I broke my back trying to find another. And then all of a sudden, I saw how silly and cheap the city is, so you should have seen me beat it back here to the country I was born in!
“Listen: the girls are prettier in the country than they are in the city and they’ve got more brains. They’re not checking up on what you spend on them all the time. They know more about work. None of them is dreaming about being either a movie actress or the wife of a millionaire. They’re full of fun. A barn dance! Boys, what a gang, and none of this silly feeling of going around in circles in your good clothes with a girl you don’t respect. When you come into a barn dance you look around and say to yourself, boy, I guess your future wife is sitting in here. You can’t do that in the city! No, sir!
“And work! Every day you can do something to make money or to improve your property. It may be only a little thing and you can take your time about it and there is fun in it. But you know who you are doing it for. Number One.
“I’m tired of city people. Hens in a chicken run. That’s them. Any time I take a girl into town from now on is to show her what a silly bunch of punks they are in the city.”
With great joy he drew a package of tobacco out and filled his corn cob. It was a stage corn cob. This young, happy man was an actor. He was glorying in the feeling of being a farmer. He rubbed his big boots lovingly on the dirt road. He leaned his elbow against the horse, as much as to say, lookit, I got friends. He dropped into a sing-song country voice until he forgot and let the clipped city way of speech emerge.
And when we left him Tom Wilson, the farmer on the side, had a flushed look, and stared about at the fields and farm houses with a curious expression on his face.
“Funny,” said Tom, “but when you talk to these people out in the country you start right away thinking slow, talking slow, moving slow, and everything feels good inside of you.
“I wonder,” says he, “if we haven’t made a mistake?”
And when we passed through village and town in the evening and saw the young people and the old people talking of things we did not know and laughing at jokes we should never hear, we felt a little humble coming on to the straight stretch of concrete that leads down cold and swift into the city.
Editor’s Notes:
- They get the name right in the photo description, but wrong throughout the article. It is Claireville. ↩︎
- The Sons of Temperance was a brotherhood of men who promoted the temperance movement. ↩︎
- The 1860s. ↩︎
