In 1872, a small book appeared in Lindsay with a rather wonderful title:
Poetical Directory of the Town of Lindsay and Business Men of the Surrounding Country.
It was not quite a directory.
It was not quite a book of poetry.
And it certainly was not conventional
advertising.
It was all three.
Poetical Directory of the Town Of Lindsay and Business Men of the Surrounding Country
See Scugog’s powerful waters flow
Through Lindsay Town, Ontario,
And County of Victoria,
In British North America.
Steamboats and cars at angles pass
With guests and commerce, every class,
Sound bells and trumpets as they hail
And stages carry the Royal Mail;
See seven churches standing tall,
Court house, jail and city hall,
Market buildings, market square;
Reeve, sheriff, bailiff and the Mayor,
Lawyers, doctors, clergy, choir,
Judge, council, jailor, clerk and squire;
Three wards and fifty stores that sell;
Twelve landlords ring the welcome bell;
Cabs to carry to and fro
When car and steamboat whistles blow;
Twelve hotels with delicious drinks;
Millinery rose and pinks,
Auction rooms and auctioneers,
Drill shed for the volunteers,
Four school houses and trustees,
Pic-nics, socials and soirees,
Parlor music, band in strain,
And firemen form the gallant train;
Bowling alley, sportsmen’s fun,
And skating rink where sparking’s done:
One house where tons of pork are packed,
One factory for the bark extract;
Two flouring mills standing in a row;
Five saw mills standing in a row;
Eleven steamboats sail in town
And fifty scows run up and down;
Square timber rafts to Lindsay sent
To shun the rapid river Trent,
Transhipped on cars to Hope direct
Then rafted on down to Quebec.
Rich townships round this city stand
Like gardens in the Promised Land,—
Ops, Emily, Verulam, Fenelon wide,
And Mariposa are her pride,—
The wealthy farmers dwelling there
Fill Lindsay’s streets and market square;
They load their carriage and crack their lash,
In Lindsay city they get their cash.
At the court house stand and view
One thousand dwellings old and new;
Read upon the census rolls
Four thousand and three hundred souls.
Six boot shops work with peg and twine,
Four ovens bake the superfine,
Two foundries melt and also mould,
Three chartered banks pay glittering gold
Telegraph to Britain’s throne,
Two presses make the tidings known
That reading millions all may know
This total town in a business show.
Asa Gildersleeve Churchill
Its author, A. G. Churchill, travelled through Lindsay and communities across Victoria County gathering names, occupations, businesses, products and observations.
Then he did something rather extraordinary with them.
He made them rhyme.
The resulting thirty-page booklet was printed here in Lindsay at the office of the Canadian Post. More than 150 years later, it offers us an unusual guided tour through the working life of this community in 1872.
Churchill takes us into stores and sawmills, hotels and foundries. He visits a butcher in the market, a newspaper printer and a steamboat operator. He writes about harness makers and cabinetmakers, millers and merchants. He notices a pattern-maker whose designs allowed other people to manufacture machinery. He pauses, unexpectedly, to write about a woman grieving the death of her father.
Some of the people he names were among the most prominent residents of their communities.
Others left remarkably little behind.
Churchill’s account is valuable, but it is not complete or neutral. We see the community through the places he visited, the people he met and the details he considered worthy of a rhyme. Proprietors are usually named; their employees often appear only as clerks, crews, maids or workmen. Men dominate the directory, while women appear far less often and usually in different ways.
Those absences are part of the story too.
Photography was expensive and far from universal. Newspapers and business records disappeared. Buildings burned or were demolished. Family photographs were scattered, discarded or separated from the names of the people they depicted. Everyday paperwork was rarely created with permanence in mind.
None of Churchill’s subjects could have known that, more than 150 years later, someone might care what they looked like, where they worked, what they made—or why an eccentric travelling poet decided that they deserved a rhyme.
We went looking for them anyway.
Lindsay, 1872
Before Churchill introduces Lindsay’s people, he describes the community he believes they have created.
He sees steamboats and railway cars carrying travellers and commerce. He counts churches, hotels, stores, schools, sawmills and foundries. He notices the market square, the telegraph and the newspaper presses. Beyond the town, he sees agricultural communities whose farms, forests and residents sustain Lindsay’s economy.
He writes:
“Rich townships round this city stand
Like gardens in the Promised Land.”
Ops, Emily, Verulam, Fenelon and Mariposa follow by name.
Churchill’s Lindsay is a place in motion. Farmers and their wagons fill its streets and market square. Timber arrives to be processed. Steamboats travel the waterways. Railway cars connect the town to wider markets. Telegraph messages arrive, and newspaper presses turn information into printed pages.
He estimates that approximately 4,300 people live there.
This is not a detached description. Churchill wants his readers to be impressed. He presents Lindsay as prosperous, productive and connected—a community whose shops, industries and institutions demonstrate confidence in its own future.
Then, on page two, he begins introducing the people who made it work.
Henry Atkinson
Butcher, Lindsay Market
Churchill places Henry Atkinson directly inside the working life of Lindsay’s market:
“Beef, mutton, ham, veal, pork and lamb,
All kinds dressed very neat”
The emphasis is on abundance, freshness and order. Atkinson purchased livestock, prepared meat in different quantities and sold not only individual cuts but quarters, sides and hides. Churchill even notes that lard was stored with ice during the summer—an important practical detail in an era before mechanical refrigeration.
Atkinson’s customers connected town and countryside. Farmers came to sell livestock or buy provisions. Mechanics, merchants and hotelkeepers relied on him for meat. His stall was therefore more than a place of retail exchange: it was one point in a local system of farming, food preparation, hospitality and household consumption.
Churchill was writing promotional verse, not conducting an inspection. His repeated assurances that the meat was clean, fresh and carefully prepared tell us what customers expected a respectable butcher to provide—and what Atkinson wanted them to believe they would find at his stall.
We have not yet located a confirmed portrait of Henry Atkinson. For now, Churchill’s words bring us closer to his working environment than to the man himself. We cannot see Atkinson’s face, but we can see the market stall, the seasonal routines and the network of customers that surrounded him.
Charles Britton
Merchant—and a Witness to Lindsay’s Transformation
Churchill calls him “Charley,” giving this entry an unusually familiar tone:
“Of Charley Britton’s goods they tell,
The choice selections he does sell”
Britton’s shelves apparently contained something for nearly every part of domestic life: cottons, woollens, silks and printed fabrics; hardware, nails and glass; wallpaper, clothing, boots and shoes; medicines, tobacco and perfume. Churchill presents the store as a place of choice and novelty—evidence not only of what Lindsay required, but of what its residents increasingly desired.
Charles Britton had known a very different Lindsay. He came to the community with his family in the mid-1830s, when the settlement was still young and Kent Street bore little resemblance to the commercial thoroughfare Churchill encountered in 1872. Britton later recalled its famously unstable ground, claiming that a twenty-foot pole could be pushed into the street without reaching anything solid. Whether taken literally or as the language of pioneer memory, the story captures the difficulty of building a town on that site.
By the time Churchill entered Britton’s store, the merchant had witnessed nearly four decades of transformation. Lindsay had grown around him, and his name had become attached to Britton’s Block on Kent Street.
Churchill’s portrait is brief, but its confidence is revealing. Britton is not introduced as a newcomer trying to establish himself. He appears as a familiar merchant whose reputation and merchandise are already part of the town’s identity.
Photographs of Britton’s Block survive. We are still looking for Charles himself.
S. & O. Bigelow
Importers, Kent Street
Churchill introduces S. & O. Bigelow as:
“One of the Oldest in the Town.”
That description is supported by an 1861 Lindsay business listing, which places the firm in the White Block more than a decade before Churchill published his directory.
The store sold imported and domestic dry goods alongside ready-made clothing, boots, shoes, hats and accessories. Its selection for women included shawls, gloves, underclothing, artificial flowers and bridal ornaments. Churchill imagines customers dressing for church, picnics and weddings, moving his readers beyond the shop counter and into the social life of the community.
These details tell us that clothing was not simply practical. What people wore could express prosperity, respectability, taste and participation in community life. Imported fabrics and fashionable accessories connected a relatively young Ontario town to much larger networks of manufacturing and trade.
Churchill was certainly promoting the business, but he was also recording aspiration. His inventory offers a glimpse of the appearances people hoped to create and the occasions for which they prepared.
He was not simply cataloguing what Lindsay’s merchants sold.
He was cataloguing what Lindsay’s residents wanted.
R. G. Bell
The Royal Hotel
Churchill names proprietor R. G. Bell, but his poem preserves something much larger than the biography of one hotelkeeper:
“His steward’s ready at the bar…”
From there, Churchill’s attention moves throughout the hotel. Hostlers care for arriving horses. Maids prepare the rooms and tables. A porter welcomes travellers and carries their belongings. Other workers cook, carve and serve the meals. Clean sheets, comfortable beds, food, drink and attentive service all become part of the establishment’s public reputation.
The Royal Hotel depended upon this coordinated workforce. It served people arriving from the countryside, from elsewhere in town and increasingly by train. The hotel was therefore both a local business and a point of contact between Lindsay and the wider world.
Yet nearly all the people who made that hospitality possible remain unnamed. Bell enters the directory because he owns or operates the establishment. The steward, hostlers, maids, porter and kitchen workers appear only through their duties. Even the woman Churchill describes directing the household work is identified by her role rather than her name.
This is one of the limitations—and opportunities—of a source like Churchill’s directory. It draws our attention toward proprietors, prominent men and named businesses. At the same time, its incidental details allow us to glimpse the people working behind them.
Throughout this exhibit, Churchill will introduce us to business owners.
We will also keep looking behind them.
C. L. Baker
Grocer, Wholesaler and Buyer
Churchill’s description of C. L. Baker is less a portrait of a shop than a portrait of movement.
Six clerks weigh and wrap purchases. Teamsters arrive with loads. Goods move between a warehouse beside the railway, a storehouse, a packing house near the market and the store itself. Sugar, syrup, fish, cheese, flour, pork, tea, fruit, salt, crockery and glass pass through the operation. Baker also purchases wheat to supply a flouring mill.
This was commerce on several scales at once. A household customer might enter the shop to buy tea or dishes, while farmers arrived to sell grain and teamsters carried goods between the railway, market and warehouses. Baker’s business connected agricultural production to transportation, wholesale distribution and the everyday household table.
Churchill measures its importance through activity: the number of clerks, the crowd of customers, the movement of supplies and the reach of the operation beyond a single storefront. His Lindsay is not static. It is a town receiving, packing, weighing, buying, selling and transporting.
Baker’s commercial presence also became part of Lindsay’s built landscape. The C. L. Baker Building on Cambridge Street survives as a physical connection to the business community Churchill described.
Here, Churchill allows us to follow an item through the local economy—from a farmer’s wagon, to the railway or warehouse, to the shop counter, and finally into a Lindsay home.
Making Things
Abraham Brooks
Cooper and Stave Manufacturer
Churchill’s visit to Abraham Brooks gives us one of his clearest descriptions of manufacturing in progress.
Approximately ten men worked in Brooks’s operation. They split black ash, prepared elm, dressed barrel heads, shaped staves and assembled the individual pieces into finished containers. Churchill was particularly impressed by the scale of their production:
“One hundred barrels in a day.”
That single line transforms Brooks from a name in a business directory into part of Lindsay’s industrial history. It also directs our attention beyond the proprietor to the skilled workers whose coordinated labour made that remarkable output possible.
Barrels were essential to a nineteenth-century economy. Before cardboard cartons, plastic containers and refrigerated trucks, agricultural produce, foodstuffs, liquids and manufactured goods all needed to be packed, stored and transported. A reliable supply of barrels allowed farmers, merchants and manufacturers to move their products from one place to another.
Brooks and his workers were making physical objects, but Churchill’s description reveals their wider importance. Every stave they shaped and every barrel they assembled helped make commerce possible.
Uriah Boyd
Currier of Leather
Churchill calls Uriah Boyd a *“scienced man”—*a revealing expression of respect for someone whose knowledge was demonstrated through skilled work.
As a currier, Boyd worked with leather after its initial tanning. Churchill describes him shaving it to an even thickness, working oils into its surface, producing the required grain and repeatedly softening the material until it was ready for use.
The finished leather could become shoes, saddles and harness. It could also be fashioned into industrial belting and other practical goods needed by households, farms, workshops and factories. Different purposes required different qualities, and Boyd needed to understand how each hide would respond to his tools and treatment.
Churchill does more than identify Boyd’s occupation. He pauses over the stages of the work, preserving something of the judgement, physical effort and material knowledge involved.
In doing so, he reminds us that making is not found only in the finished object. It is also found in process—and process is where Uriah Boyd emerges most clearly as a maker.
Out Into the Surrounding Country
Churchill’s directory does not remain within Lindsay.
He follows the roads and waterways outward.
Cambray. Fenelon Falls. Coboconk. Glenarm. Rosedale.
Along the way, hotels, mills, stores, post offices, farms and workshops enter his account. Each community has its own working centre, but none exists in isolation. People, goods, timber, grain, mail and information move continually between them and Lindsay.
The booklet gradually becomes more than a directory of businesses. It becomes a small journey through Victoria County in 1872—and through the network of communities that made its economy possible.
M. H. Berkley
Miller, Cambray
At Cambray, Churchill encounters two mills under M. H. Berkley’s direction: a grist mill powered by steam and a sawmill driven by water.
Each served a different part of the surrounding agricultural economy. Farmers brought grain to be ground, while others arrived with logs to be sawn into usable lumber. Through Berkley’s mills, the products of local fields and forests were transformed into flour, animal feed and building materials.
Churchill also records a wonderfully practical instruction: customers should mark their names clearly on their grain sacks so that each could be identified and returned to its proper owner.
It is a modest detail, but an evocative one. We can imagine the mill crowded with sacks delivered by neighbouring farmers, the noise of machinery and the careful work required to keep one customer’s grain separate from another’s.
Small details survive in unexpected places. Through Churchill’s attention to one ordinary instruction, something of the daily rhythm of a nineteenth-century mill survives with them.
John Clendenan
Farmer, Cambray
Churchill’s description of John Clendenan’s farm is filled with admiration. He draws attention to a two-storey brick house, substantial outbuildings, an orchard and livestock—all visible signs of an established and productive farm.
The view itself seems to have impressed him. From an upstairs window, Churchill tells us, a visitor could look across Cambray and see the businesses that served the surrounding community: stores and hotels, bootmakers and blacksmiths, and the workshops of wheelwrights. A post office had also been built on Clendenan’s land.
In Churchill’s telling, the farm and village do not exist as separate worlds. The surrounding farms supported Cambray’s mills, merchants and tradespeople, while the village provided rural families with goods, services, transportation and communication.
From Clendenan’s window, Churchill offers us more than a pleasant view. He gives us a portrait of a community whose parts depended upon one another.
Then, unexpectedly, his attention turns away from property, production and prosperity. He introduces Mary.
Miss Mary Clendenan
“She Signed to Help the Author”
Mary Clendenan is unlike almost everyone else in Churchill’s directory. She is not introduced as the proprietor of a business, nor does Churchill describe goods offered for sale.
Instead, he writes:
“Miss Mary Clendenan. Laments the Loss of her Father; she signed to help the Author. Father died April 15, 1871.”
What follows is personal. Churchill writes of grief and faith, of home, reputation and charity. In a booklet otherwise shaped by commercial exchange, Mary’s entry creates a quiet interruption.
Exactly what Churchill meant when he wrote that she had “signed to help the Author” remains uncertain. Elsewhere in the directory, he refers to people who signed their names and gave him money even when they declined to advertise their businesses. Mary may therefore have subscribed to the booklet or contributed financially toward its production, but the surviving words do not allow us to say so with certainty.
Whatever the arrangement, Churchill did not repay Mary’s support with an advertisement. He gave her something closer to a memorial—one that acknowledged both her father’s death and the daughter who mourned him.
No photograph of Mary Clendenan has yet been located.
We are still looking.
Andrew Calder
Waggonmaker, Cambray
Andrew Calder made the vehicles that kept a rural community moving. Churchill credits his workshop with producing wagons, carts, wheelbarrows, sleighs and other conveyances needed to carry people, crops, supplies and merchandise.
Calder also made coffins.
To modern readers, that combination may seem unexpected. In the nineteenth century, however, the woodworking, construction and finishing skills used by waggonmakers, carriage makers and cabinetmakers frequently overlapped with those required to make coffins. In a community without a specialized funeral industry, the local craftsperson with the necessary tools, materials and knowledge could be called upon to perform both kinds of work.
Churchill’s description reveals the breadth of one rural maker’s responsibilities. Calder built objects for journeys, farm work and daily commerce. When a life ended, he also made the final container in which a member of the community would be carried.
Captain George Crandell
Steamboat Operator
Captain George Crandell receives one of Churchill’s grander introductions:
“George Crandell is the Commodore.”
The title suited the scale of the enterprise Churchill describes. By 1872, he credited Crandell with four steamboats, sixteen scows and another steamboat under construction.
Those numbers tell only part of the story. A transportation business of that size depended upon many people: captains and crews who navigated the waterways, cooks who fed those aboard, and bookkeepers who managed fares, accounts and cargo. As elsewhere in the directory, Churchill names the proprietor while allowing us only brief glimpses of the workforce behind him.
Crandell’s vessels connected Lindsay with Port Perry, Sturgeon Point, Bobcaygeon and Fenelon Falls, linking these communities to one another and to a wider transportation network. Before modern highways and trucks, the region’s lakes and rivers were working routes along which people, news and goods travelled.
A portrait believed to depict George Crandell is known to survive, although we are still investigating its original provenance.
Perhaps more intriguingly, Crandell also used a camera. An 1861 photograph taken by him has been preserved through one of his descendants. We may not ultimately be able to show visitors what George Crandell looked like.
We may, however, be able to show them what he looked at.
Ink, Paper and a Press
Joseph Cooper
Printer of the Warder
Churchill understood the importance of printers. After all, it was printers who transformed his observations and verses into an object that could circulate through the community—and survive long enough for us to read it.
Of Joseph Cooper’s newspaper, Churchill writes:
“The Warder press heralds the express,
Repeats the telegram.”
The lines capture the newspaper’s role in gathering and distributing information. News arriving by express or telegraph could be set in type, printed and placed into the hands of local readers.
Cooper’s press produced far more than newspapers. Churchill mentions labels, business forms, posters, cards, bills and advertisements—the printed materials that allowed businesses to identify their products, keep accounts, announce events and communicate with customers.
Joseph Cooper had learned the printing trade on the Dublin Warder in Ireland. When the Warder was established at Omemee in 1856, its name recalled that earlier newspaper. The paper later moved to Lindsay, becoming part of the town’s growing print culture.
Churchill’s own booklet was printed not by Cooper’s Warder, but by the office of a competing newspaper, the Canadian Post. It is therefore more than a written account of Lindsay’s working community. It is also a surviving product of that community’s printing industry.
Someone composed the type.
Someone prepared the ink and operated the press.
Someone handled the paper and assembled the pages.
The booklet that tells us who made things in Lindsay was itself made in Lindsay.
The Mayor
George Dormer
Lawyer, Mayor—and the Face We Found
George Dormer, September 1871. Photograph by William James Topley. Library and Archives Canada.
At last, one of Churchill’s people looks back at us.
This portrait of George Dormer was taken by photographer William James Topley in September 1871—only months before the publication of Churchill’s directory. Unlike a photograph taken decades earlier or preserved from much later in life, it brings us remarkably close to the moment described in the poem.
Churchill identifies Dormer through both his profession and his public office:
“Municipal in Corporate
Have made him city Mayor.”
Dormer served as mayor of Lindsay in 1871 and 1872. In 1872, he also entered federal politics as the Member of Parliament for Victoria South.
Those positions help us understand why Churchill included him. Dormer belonged to the civic and professional life of the community Churchill was presenting to his readers. Yet his surviving portrait offers something that titles, dates and offices cannot.
For many of the people in this exhibit, we have only a name, an occupation and the words Churchill chose to write about them. Here, for once, we can meet the face of someone who inhabited his world.
This is not merely a photograph of a person Churchill mentioned.
This is approximately the George Dormer Churchill saw.
Manufacturing a Town
James Doran
Cradle Manufacturer
James Doran manufactured grain cradles—the specialized harvesting tools used to cut and gather grain before mechanized reapers transformed agricultural work.
A grain cradle combined a scythe blade with a wooden frame that caught the falling stalks and helped lay them in an orderly row for collection and binding. Making one required an understanding of both the material and the movement of the person who would use it.
Churchill describes seasoned timber stacked and waiting for production. That detail takes us into Doran’s workshop before the work begins: wood selected, dried and prepared to become a tool that would eventually enter the surrounding fields.
No photograph of Doran’s workshop has yet been located. Even without one, the object itself can help tell the story. Its form preserves evidence of the maker who shaped it and of the agricultural labour it was designed to perform.
Thomas Fee
Saw Mill, Planing Mill and Shingle Mill
Churchill encounters Thomas Fee’s mills in full production:
“Sawed shingles, boards, and lath.”
The operation also produced flooring, mouldings, sash, frames, blinds and panelled doors. These were not simply pieces of processed wood. They were the materials from which Lindsay was being built.
Logs arriving at Fee’s mill became walls, floors, roofs, windows and doors. As the town expanded, the work performed there entered houses, shops and other buildings throughout the community.
More than thirty years later, Fee remembered those working years himself. In a 1905 reminiscence, the elderly mill owner sat looking from his window toward the frozen Scugog and recalled the time when logs travelled to his mill and emerged as lumber for a growing Lindsay.
The two accounts allow us to meet him at different moments.
Churchill gives us Fee while the machinery is running, the saws are cutting and the town is still taking shape.
Fee gives us the old man looking across the winter landscape and remembering it.
R. A. and W. A. Goodwin
Sewing Machines and Picture Frames
Churchill catches R. A. and W. A. Goodwin at a particularly interesting technological moment:
“Machines to sew are all the go.”
The sewing machine was becoming an increasingly important tool in homes and businesses. Churchill emphasizes its versatility: these machines could stitch both cloth and leather and could produce decorative as well as practical work.
The Goodwins also made and sold picture frames. Their business therefore brought together two very different kinds of making—one associated with clothing and household production, the other with the presentation and preservation of images.
W. A. Goodwin would later become much better known for another form of creative work: art. His life and artistic practice have already been explored in depth through an excellent Community Stories digital exhibition.
Rather than reproduce that work here, we invite you to continue his story there.
Made By does not need to possess every story.
Sometimes our job is simply to help you find it.
Learn More - Digital Museums Canada - Community Stories: The Life and Art of W. A. Goodwin
John Henderson
Pattern-Maker and Draughtsman
John Henderson may be one of the most interesting makers in Churchill’s entire booklet because his work occupied the space between an idea and the manufactured object.
Henderson designed patterns used by moulders to produce components for threshing machines, seed drills, cultivators, ploughs, grates, weights and other cast-metal products.
Churchill calls him:
“This model man in modern plan.”
The play on “model” is fitting. Before a foundry could cast a metal component, someone had to determine its shape and dimensions. A draughtsman drew the piece, and a pattern-maker translated that drawing into a physical model. Moulders then used the pattern to create the mould into which molten metal would be poured.
Each finished object therefore began with a sequence of skilled decisions.
Someone had to imagine the component.
Someone had to draw it.
Someone had to make the pattern.
Only then could the metal be cast.
Henderson made the objects from which other objects were made. His work may have disappeared inside the manufacturing process, but his name survives because an observant—and decidedly eccentric—poet happened to notice him.
W. Hamilton
Cameron Lake Foundry, Fenelon Falls
Churchill’s description of W. Hamilton’s Cameron Lake Foundry reveals an astonishing range of local manufacturing.
The foundry produced ploughs, harrows and seed drills for working the land; scythes, grain cradles and fanning mills for harvesting and processing crops; and churns and sugar kettles for turning agricultural products into food. Hamilton’s operation supplied tools for nearly every stage of rural production.
Churchill also describes a sawing machine that he claimed could cut forty cords of wood in a single day. Whether that number represented demonstrated output or enthusiastic promotion, it clearly impressed him.
The catalogue of products matters. These implements did not all have to arrive from a distant industrial centre. Skilled people in Fenelon Falls could design, cast, assemble and repair equipment for the farms, forests and households around them.
Churchill’s directory is not merely telling us who was in business.
It is showing us what this region could manufacture for itself.
Johnston & Co.
Inventors and Manufacturers
Churchill promotes what he calls Johnston & Co.’s:
“Celebrated patent right.”
The company manufactured sash, doors and frames and advertised a system intended to make doors and windows airtight. In a nineteenth-century building heated through a Canadian winter, preventing cold air from entering around them offered more than convenience. It promised greater comfort and more efficient use of fuel.
Churchill presents the invention with the confidence of an advertisement. That is itself revealing: his booklet moved easily between poetry, description and commercial promotion, repeating the claims business owners wanted prospective customers to hear.
It also sends us along another Made By research trail.
If Johnston & Co. claimed a patent, was one formally granted? Who designed the system? Did drawings survive? Can its mechanism still be reconstructed?
Sometimes a single line in an old booklet answers a question.
Sometimes it becomes the beginning of another investigation.
Kimball & Makins
Engineers, Founders and Machinists
Churchill seems genuinely delighted by the productive possibilities of the Kimball & Makins foundry:
“These men of wonders melt and mould.”
Their output ranged from shingle and threshing machinery to gears, saw equipment, steam pumps and engines. They also produced cookware, ploughs, harrows and horse rakes.
The breadth is striking. Inside one operation, metal could be transformed into a cooking vessel, a farm implement, a machine component or part of the equipment powering another industry. The same foundry served households, farms, mills and manufacturers.
This is the industrial Lindsay that can disappear when we look only at photographs of Victorian storefronts. The tidy façades along the commercial streets reveal where finished goods were displayed and sold, but not always where they were conceived or produced.
Behind those shop windows was a community that designed, cast, forged, cut, fitted, repaired and manufactured.
Harnessing a Horse-Powered World
James Lovell
Saddler and Harness Maker
Churchill found James Lovell on William Street, making and selling saddles, harness, trunks, whips, brushes, buckles and other equipment.
In a horse-powered economy, these were not simply accessories. They were infrastructure.
Farmers depended upon harness to work their fields and transport produce. Lumber operations required horses to haul logs and equipment. Merchants and manufacturers relied upon horse-drawn vehicles to move goods, while travellers depended upon horses, carriages and stage routes to carry them between communities.
Lovell’s trade brought together skilled leatherwork, careful fitting and durable hardware. Harness had to control and distribute the force of a working animal without causing injury, and it had to withstand repeated use under difficult conditions. Its reliability affected both the horse and the person whose work depended upon it.
Lovell later extended his presence in the community by constructing the Lovell Block on Kent Street and serving on Lindsay council.
We have not yet found his portrait. His buildings—and the essential work performed in his shop—may have to stand in for his face.
Eating, Sleeping, Travelling
Churchill visits hotel after hotel.
The Royal. The Conway. The Railroad. The Evergreen. The Victoria. Murta House. More hotels appear at Cameron, Coboconk and Glenarm.
Read together, the entries reveal how mobile this community already was. Travellers arrived by railway, steamboat, stage and horse. They needed places to eat and sleep, stable and feed their animals, wait for connections, conduct business and exchange news.
Hotels were therefore more than accommodations. They were points of connection within the region’s transportation and communication network.
Churchill was not observing that network entirely from the outside. As he travelled from one community to another collecting material for his booklet, he depended upon many of the same routes, services and places of hospitality that he described.
He repeatedly names the hotelkeeper. Yet if we look carefully, other people emerge from his verses: hostlers caring for horses, cooks preparing meals, maids maintaining rooms, stewards tending bars, porters carrying luggage, landladies receiving guests and servers bringing food to the table.
Most remain unnamed.
Their labour made Churchill’s hospitable hotels—and the movement of people through Victoria County—possible nonetheless.
At the Corner of Kent and William
Malcolm Morison
General Merchant
Malcolm Morison’s store occupied the corner of Kent and William Streets, placing it at the centre of Lindsay’s commercial life.
Churchill describes country customers arriving to shop alongside women from Lindsay. Inside, they found clothing, carpets and blankets; groceries and hardware; millinery and bridal accessories. The range suggests a store serving both practical necessity and personal aspiration, from equipping a household to preparing for a wedding.
Churchill’s description also reveals how he viewed the store’s customers. He notices where they came from, distinguishes town from country and draws attention to the goods he associated with different shoppers. As always, his directory records not only the business before him, but also the particular details he considered worth preserving.
We are still working to establish Morison’s identity with confidence. A name, occupation and location can provide a promising beginning, but they are not always enough to distinguish one person from another or connect scattered records to the correct life.
That uncertainty is also part of historical research.
Sometimes a name opens immediately into a life.
Sometimes it refuses.
W. & J. Matthie
Cabinetmakers, Turners and Valuators
Churchill’s description of W. & J. Matthie moves through the rooms—and stages—of a nineteenth-century home.
They made tables, bureaus, chairs, mattresses, looking glasses, picture frames and bedsteads. They made cradles for infants. They also made coffins for the dead.
Their work accompanied people through nearly the whole course of domestic life. A newly married couple might purchase furniture for a first home. A growing family required beds, chairs, storage and a cradle. Pictures and mirrors were framed and placed upon the walls. At the end of life, the same workshop could be called upon to prepare a coffin.
As cabinetmakers and turners, the Matthies shaped and assembled wood into useful and decorative objects. As valuators, they also assessed the worth of property—perhaps including household contents much like the objects they made themselves.
To modern eyes, furniture-making and undertaking can appear to be separate professions. Churchill’s directory reminds us that trades did not always divide so neatly. The same knowledge of wood, measurement, construction and finishing could serve the living and the dead.
Moses M’Neil
Merchant and Postmaster
By page thirty, Churchill has travelled well beyond Lindsay. At Rosedale, he encounters Moses M’Neil operating a general store, handling the mail and taking in boarders.
Each role placed M’Neil at the centre of movement through the community. Goods passed across his counter. Letters and newspapers arrived and departed through the post office. Travellers found temporary accommodation beneath his roof. His establishment connected local residents to people, markets and information beyond Rosedale.
Churchill also tells us something unusually personal: M’Neil was blind.
The directory does not explain how M’Neil organized his work, whether others assisted him or how responsibilities were divided within the store, post office and boarding house. We should neither ignore his blindness nor allow it to become the whole of his story. What Churchill preserves is a man occupying several positions of responsibility within his community.
M’Neil participated in the movement of goods, information and people through Rosedale.
Then the booklet ends.
The questions it leaves us do not.
Who Was A. G. Churchill?
After meeting all these people, one question remains.
Who was the man introducing us to them?
For years, even Churchill’s identity was confused. The strongest evidence located so far identifies him as Asa Gildersleeve Churchill, probably born in the United States on March 11, 1798.
He was associated with Tioga County, Pennsylvania.
He worked as a shoemaker.
He was also a poet.
An 1883 history of Tioga County remembered him with one wonderfully concise description:
“Asa G. Churchill, the eccentric poet.”
The description appears to have been deserved.
Later accounts recalled Churchill travelling from community to community, working as a shoemaker and improvising verses about the people he encountered. By the 1850s, he was writing about Pennsylvania communities including Mansfield and Wellsboro. A poem about Athens, Pennsylvania, dated April 29, 1856, has also been attributed to A. G. Churchill.
At some point, his travels brought him to Canada.
A Poet on the Road
A photographic copy of a Poetical Directory of Victoria County, dated 1860, is catalogued in the Ross Irwin fonds at Trent University Archives.
We have not yet examined it, and its date and attribution still require confirmation. If both are correct, however, Churchill was working in this area at least twelve years before the publication of his Lindsay booklet.
In 1863, he produced a poetical directory for Owen Sound.
In 1872 came Lindsay.
In 1876, Penetanguishene.
By 1883, Churchill was in Muskoka writing about lumbermen and lumber camps.
Across these scattered records, a pattern emerges.
Churchill travelled from place to place. He observed communities and gathered names. He learned what people made, sold and did for a living. Then he turned what he had learned into verse.
He made communities rhyme.
Poet
In 1878, Churchill married in Ontario.
When asked to state his occupation, the marriage record reportedly gives one wonderfully uncomplicated answer:
Poet.
If the proposed 1798 birth date is correct, Churchill was approximately eighty years old when he gave it.
Shoemaking may have supported him during other parts of his life. His directories may have depended upon advertising, subscriptions or contributions from the people he included. Yet when a public record asked Churchill to identify his occupation, he apparently saw no need to explain or qualify it.
He was a poet.
The Last Journey
By 1883, Churchill was still travelling through Muskoka.
Later recollections described him as a pedestrian wanderer who visited lumber camps and composed verses about the men he encountered there. One later newspaper account claimed that Churchill was struck and killed by a train not long afterward.
We have not yet located a contemporary record that would allow us to establish exactly when, where or how he died.
Memory can preserve valuable clues, but recollection is not the same as confirmation. We will not turn a later story into historical certainty simply because it supplies a dramatic ending.
For now, Churchill disappears from the record.
The wandering poet walks out of view.
What Survives
We have not found a photograph of A. G. Churchill.
Perhaps one survives in an album, an archive or an unidentified box somewhere.
Perhaps not.
We have also failed to find photographs of many of the people he wrote about. That should not surprise us. The nineteenth century did not leave an equal record of everyone who lived in it.
Photography cost money. Paper deteriorated. Businesses closed. Buildings burned. Families moved. Photographs were scattered, discarded or separated from the names of the people they depicted.
No one standing behind a counter or working inside a Lindsay workshop in 1872 could reasonably have imagined that people in the twenty-first century might someday search for their photograph because a wandering shoemaker-poet had written a rhyme about them.
But Churchill’s little book survived.
Because it did, Henry Atkinson is still standing at his market stall.
Abraham Brooks and his workmen are still making barrels.
George Crandell’s steamers are still moving across the lakes.
Thomas Fee’s saws are still cutting lumber.
John Henderson is still drawing patterns.
James Lovell is still making harness.
The Matthies are still furnishing homes.
Mary Clendenan is still remembering her father.
George Dormer, photographed in 1871, can even look back at us.
Churchill’s booklet does not preserve the whole community. It reflects the routes he travelled, the people he encountered and the names he chose—or was able—to include. Proprietors appear more readily than employees. Men are named far more often than women. Many of the people whose labour sustained these businesses remain visible only in groups: clerks, crews, cooks, maids and workmen.
We must listen for those silences too.
A. G. Churchill may have been selling advertising. He may have been entertaining readers or finding an unusual way to earn a living. His verses are sometimes informative, sometimes promotional and unmistakably shaped by his own peculiar view of the places he visited.
Whether or not he intended it, he also created something else.
He made a record of a community at work.
More than 150 years later, we can open his little book and meet some of its people again.
He made their community rhyme.
We are still listening.