Author name: Townships Weekend

Photo courtesy
Husk Scow Ferry

By Nick Fonda

Local Journalism Initiative

Drummond County was at the northwest edge of the Eastern Townships as they were laid out late in the 18^th century.  Unlike most of the Townships, which were first settled by Americans from the New England States, Drummondville was founded by a British army officer.  Frederick George Heriot, who had distinguished himself in the War of 1812-14, was given the mandate to establish a dual-purpose settlement.  This new place would be a farming community, but it would have an armory and a ready militia.  Almost all of the first settlers who followed him to Drummondville were disbanded British soldiers and mercenaries. 

One of those disbanded soldiers who received a 100-acre allotment was John Husk.  Born in 1781 near Plymouth, on the south-west coast of England, he was a married man with a young son when he enlisted and was shipped out to Canada to fight in the War of 1812-14.  He and his fellow soldiers arrived in St. John, New Brunswick and inaugurated their first winter in Canada by marching 1400 km to Niagara, Ontario.  He fought and survived several battles, and at the end of the war, he opted to join Heriot’s colony rather than return to England. His wife, Elizabeth Wood, and son, William, joined him some time later.  The couple had a second child, Mary Ann, whose date of birth is unknown and who passed away in 1881.

The first years, John Husk and his fellow soldiers-turned-farmers had a very rough go of it.  Unbeknownst to them, as they were scurrying to erect shelters and sow crops, halfway around the world the eruption of Mount Tambora was starting to spew so much smoke and ash so high into the atmosphere that the Earth’s climate was changed for the next few years.  Carbon particulate floating ever so slowly downward blocked so much of the sun’s light and warmth that 1816 came to be known as the year without a summer; and 1817 was not much better.  

John Husk’s 100-acre allotment was on the west bank of the St. Francis River, approximately where the Drummondville airport is situated today.  He fulfilled his obligation of building a cabin and clearing a certain acreage of farmland.  Sadly, he was killed in 1823, at the age of 42, while felling a tree.

John’s son, William Wood Husk, perhaps partially prompted by his father’s death, moved upstream to L’Avenir.  Many of the early settlers did likewise as the Drummondville area’s sandy soil—the dried-out bed of the Champlain Sea—was ill-suited to farming.  William moved to another river-front property, a location which would later lead his son to operate a ferry service for almost half a century.   

William Cyrus Husk, son of William Wood Husk and grandson of John Husk, the disbanded soldier, was born on the family farm in what is now L’Avenir on September 8, 1847.  In 1868, when he was 21, he married Sarah Ann Barker and the couple had nine children.  Sadly, in 1884, Sarah passed away.  Five years later, Cyrus remarried and with Mary Selina Harriman he had five more children.  At the time of his death, in 1924, 11 of his children were sill living, some of them as far afield as Saskatchewan and Ohio.

Cyrus Husk played an active role in his rural community.  His death notice in the Sherbrooke Record following his passing on May 27, 1924, reads in part:

A long life spent in the service of other—no duty shirked, no task evaded—warrants the statement that in the death of Mr. Husk, Drummond County has lost one of her outstanding citizens.

The relatively long obituary mentions that Cyrus Husk died of pneumonia following a short illness.  He died on the family farm where he’d been born 76 years earlier and where he’d spent all his life.

Cyrus had played a major role in church affairs and this was reflected in his funeral services.  They were officiated by not one but two clergymen, the Reverends Thomas Knowles and J.S. Dickson. 

The Sherbrooke Record noted:

Mr. Husk ever displayed a keen interest in the work of the church with which he was long connected as a member and an official.  For more than 40 years there was scarcely an activity of the Methodist Church or of the Sunday school of Ulverton in which he did not have an important part. 

The obituary notes that Cyrus Husk was keenly interested in education and served as a school trustee.  He was similarly involved with agriculture, serving for 30 years as president of the Ulverton Farmers’ Club.

What is not mentioned in the obituary is that between 1876 and 1920, Cyrus Husk operated a ferry service across the St. Francis River. 

Cyrus was 25-years-old in 1872 when, following his mother’s death, he inherited the family farm on the first range in what is now L’Avenir.  The farm fronted on the St. Francis River and was only a short distance from the road that ran from Richmond to Drummondville.

Four years after taking over the farm, Cyrus invested in a long steel cable, a scow, and a couple of rowboats—all the equipment he needed to begin ferrying people and livestock from L’Avenir and Ulverton near the west bank of the river and St. Felix de Kingsey and St. Lucien near the east bank. 

A vivid description of the ferry is provided by J. Clifford Moore who, in 1996, when he was in his 90s, published a slim volume entitled The Life and Times of a High School Principal in Rural Quebec.  Moore grew up, and later taught, in St. Felix.

Moore wrote:

The ferry boat was able to accommodate two rigs at $0.25 per rig and $0.10 a person for pedestrians.  I don’t think Mr. Husk adhered strictly to that regimen.  This writer remembers helping his dad drive ten or twelve head of cattle to the river en route to the fair in L’Avenir.  Mr. Husk and his sons were very cooperative, loading about four of the animals on the boat and those of us on shore urging the rest of the animals into the water.  As I recall, when we had safely crossed the river, my dad asked Mr. Husk how much he owed him, and Mr. Husk said, “Forget it,” and that was that.

Moore points out that the ferry was particularly important to the younger generation.  While Ulverton’s two-room schoolhouse offered primary education, it was St. Felix that had a Consolidated School—the first such school in the province—that provided high school courses.  Several families, including the Husks, on the west bank of the river, sent their older children to the Consolidated School thanks to the ferry. 

The scow was moved back and forth across the river by one or two men hauling on the steel cable.  Pedestrians, if there were only two or three of them, were ferried over on one of the rowboats.

The ferry ceased operating when the river started to freeze up, usually in December, and, after the ice was thick enough, people crossed on an ice bridge.  In the spring, after the ice had cleared, ferry service resumed.  This meant that for two or three weeks every year, students from the west bank were unable to get to school.

Cyrus Husk operated his ferry service until 1920 by which time roads and vehicles had improved enough that people found it easier to travel to Richmond or Drummondville where bridges spanned the river.  During its four decades of operation, it was one of a handful of ferries that regularly crossed the St. Francis River.  To the people of Durham and Kingsey Townships, Husk’s Ferry was a vital service.

Family lore recounts one other unusual story about Cyrus Husk.  Along with another man, he was hired by a Montreal merchant, James Millar, to drive a flock of lambs to pasture in Vermont.  The trip took several days and was made with a horse and buggy.

After his death, his farm was taken over by Stafford Husk, the oldest of the children of Cyrus Husk’s second marriage.  Stafford would be the last of the Husks to operate the family farm.

Grest Golden Digger Wasp. Photo: Susan Mastine

By Nick Fonda

Local Journalism Initiative

The neighbour in question lives on the other side of the street, up just a few houses.  His back yard fronts onto the river, and as such, he sees quite a bit of wildlife.  A small telescope set up in his living room that overlooks the St. Francis lets him keep a close eye on local fauna.  This year, he had a resident beaver at the foot of his property for a short while.

Like an expert woodcutter, the beaver felled a couple of trees, dropping them into the St. Francis so they stretched from the riverbank to a small island.  The trees were the starting point for a dam that would have spanned ten metres or more.  Given more time, or other conditions, the beaver would likely have completed the job.  As it was, there were heavy rains, the river rose, and his (or her) hard work was swept downstream.   He (or she) moved on.

Mammals that haven’t moved on, the neighbour said, are the muskrats.  There’s a small colony of them digging tunnels into the bank of the small island.  Eventually, their burrows will hasten the erosion of the river bank and shrink the small island even further. 

The neighbour sees lots of birds.  This year, at one time or another, he has spotted almost 40 different species in his back yard.  He frequently sees two eagles, and he suspects they have a nest nearby.  He has also spotted an osprey fishing in the river.

Still, despite the variety, he says there are fewer birds this year than he is accustomed to seeing.  With the possible exception, he adds, of starlings which are at least as numerous as ever.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, starlings are not native to North America.  The good folks who brought 100 European Starlings to New York City in the 1890s and let them loose in Central Park had no idea how quickly they would multiply and become an invasive species across the city, the state, the country, and the continent.  They thought that, in a very subtle way, they were enriching the culture of their fellow citizens.  They wanted Central Park to have all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, including the starling.   Did any of them know that in Celtic mythology, the starling is a symbol of fertility? 

As for insects, my neighbour hasn’t noticed the same significant decline as he has with the bird populations.

That’s not the case on my side of the street.  In the past, at the right time of the day, our back yard often hummed with insect life. 

Some insects, I consciously hunted and killed.  When I found a wasps’ nest—often up quite high under the eaves of the roof—I resorted to insecticide, a long ladder, and the cover of darkness to exterminate them.  I rationalized that eliminating the wasps would make the garden safer for the bees. 

I now have some regrets.  We had no wasps last year and have not seen any this summer.  As for bees, I have only seen one in our garden this year.  (I’d have seen more had I spent time in the garden in May.)  We still have flies and mosquitoes and other insects, but noticeably fewer than in previous years.

While I am not the resident gardener in our household, I am occasionally called on to help with one small task or another.  In previous years, any job that involved strenuous work like digging was scheduled to avoid peak insect times.  A job might not be finished until the next day because, when the insects got too bad, seemingly not at all deterred by insect repellent, I would abandon my tools and take refuge in the house. 

The other day, I had a couple of small tasks in the garden.  I was not quite finished the first job when I became aware that it had suddenly turned quite hot and it was no longer overcast.  Even before I finished thinking that these were conditions that brought the bugs out, there they were.  No-see-ums are small, black, flying insects that want to get into your ears and eyes.

I was a little annoyed with myself.  I could have started earlier and dawdled a little less.  I could have had both jobs done before the little midges started biting me to death.  I continued on.  If I could finish at least the first job, it wouldn’t feel like a lost morning.  For the moment, they weren’t that bad.  Then, to my surprise, they were gone.  They came back once more, but again didn’t stay long.  I ended up getting both jobs done. 

I know that, in previous years, under the same conditions, the no-see-ums would have driven me into the house.  This year, the swarm that came at me was small, and was disinclined to pester me for more than a few minutes.

Nor is it just in my back yard that there are fewer insects.

It has always been common, in the summer, to return from a road trip with the front of the car encrusted with the remains of insects. 

The other week, a day after getting back from Three Rivers, I decided to take half an hour to give the car an unaccustomed wash.  Because I have an electric car, the front end lacks a grille.  Instead, there’s a solid front panel that stretches from headlight to headlight.

While the sides and back end of the car accumulate a certain amount of dust and dirt, the front end, in the summer time, tends to accumulate a lot of small, dark dots—the tiny carcasses of insects killed by a vehicle travelling at a 100 km/h.

What was surprising, given that the car hadn’t been washed in over a month, was how few insects’ remains I had to scrub off the front of the car.  They were as difficult to wash off as ever, but there weren’t very many of them, not compared to previous summers.

I don’t have any particular fondness for flies, mosquitoes, wasps, and other flying insects.  Scraping them off the front of the car is a bit of a nuisance, even if the water I’m using is hot and soapy.  Having them hover around me like a dark cloud when I’m working in the garden is an impediment that I’m glad to do without.

Still, it troubles me that insects that were once abundant are now scarce.  It doesn’t help that I’m all too conscious of the direct correlation between insect populations and bird populations.

As for the neighbour up the street, it may be that insects are faring better in a riverfront habitat.

Photo courtesy

By Nick Fonda

Local Journalism Initiative

A friend who keeps an eye on a wide variety of topics sent me a link to an on-line article in The Conversation, a nonprofit media outlet.  Written by Misha Teramura, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto, the article had the long title:  Think tech killed penmanship?  Messy handwriting was a problem centuries before smartphones.

My first reaction was to ignore the article.  I already knew that messy handwriting predated smartphones and computers.  I had firsthand experience with messy handwriting dating back to the middle of the last century. 

I was first made aware of penmanship in Grade 5.  That was the year that pupils were expected to make the big step of graduating from pencil to pen.  In September, we were doing all our work in pencil.  At some point in the year, those whose penmanship was judged adequate began writing with a pen.  This was the late 1950s and a pen consisted of a handle and a nib.  Every few strokes, the nib would have to be dipped into an inkwell.  It could be messy.  Hence, our teacher insisted that we had to write neatly and legibly with a pencil before we were permitted to write with a pen.  At the end of Grade 5, I was one of those still writing with a pencil.  (As I recall, in Grade 6, despite my failures in Grade 5, I was writing cursive with a ballpoint pen.)

It was only on second thought that I scrolled down to scan the rest of the text.  It was written in response to an article in the New York Times several months earlier which attributed the poor penmanship of today to the use of laptops and smartphones.

Teramura begged to differ.  As someone immersed in the world of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the professor from Toronto had ample evidence that bad handwriting could easily be found 400 years ago.

Teramura wrote, “In countless letters that survive from the early modern period, writers apologize for their bad handwriting.  Sometimes they blame it on circumstances:  they were groggy from just waking up or tired late at night (“scribbled with a weary hand in my bed” reads one sign-off from 1585).”

At other times, he noted, the excuses for poor handwriting were medical:  a broken arm from falling off a horse, a hand injured in a duel, or stiffening joints from arthritis or gout.  A common excuse—as it still is today—was that the letter had to be written in haste and hence the handwriting was poor.

Teramura described cacography—or bad handwriting—as calligraphy’s evil twin.  He pointed out that there is a long list of famous people who had poor handwriting, including Queen Elizabeth I and the Dutch scholar, Erasmus. 

At the time, before typewriters and laptops, handwritten letters were all that could be sent.  Penmanship was a necessary skill, or at least a useful one.     

Strangely enough, although good penmanship was of benefit to the upwardly mobile, it was cacography that that appealed to the ruling class.

Teramura wrote, “The aristocratic nobility was notoriously bad at writing by hand.  Popular dramatists even made jokes about it.  But bad handwriting may have been deliberate.  In fact, Shakespeare’s Hamlet says just that:  I once did hold it, as our statists do,/ A baseness to write fair, and labored much/ How to forget that learning.”

Hamlet had mastered handwriting, but he now intentionally neglects to use this skill.  It was below those born into power and privilege to write neatly. 

Teramura noted, “Writing carelessly could be a way of asserting one’s social or political clout by forcing others less privileged to struggle to decipher what one had written.”

Today, or at least up until quite recently, the medical profession tended to be associated with cacography.  A few decades ago, it was still commonplace for a doctor (sometimes more that one) to run a general practice in a small town.  Typically, a patient would call the doctor’s office, show up for an appointment, and leave with a prescription for the pharmacist.  In my experience, the prescription was always all but illegible.

Cacography is as close as I got to med school.  Perhaps my handwriting wasn’t bad enough.  Equipped with ball point pens, I remember carrying on regular and even frequent handwritten correspondence with friends through my teens and twenties.  (Of course, I made a point of typing my papers at university.)

Today, on my laptop, I type the stories I send to my editor.  The notes I take during interviews however, are scribbled with my ballpoint pen into my notebook.  My handwriting hasn’t improved with age.  I always try to type up a story as soon as possible after the interview.  Even with a fresh memory, I’m not always able to decipher my hastily scrawled notes.  And reading something scribbled three or four days previously is often impossible.

Teramura reminded me that I was in good company, “The Reformation theologian Martin Bucer allegedly couldn’t even read some of his own manuscripts.  Nor was he alone.  As the preacher John Preston (1587 – 1628) observed in a sermon, “One would think a man should read his own hand, yet some do write so bad, that they cannot read it when they have done.””

Teramura finished his article, “Today, the ubiquity of smart phones and laptops has no doubt played a role in the ways we write.  But for those of us who can’t read our own sticky notes and to-do lists, it may come as a relief to know that bad handwriting is not an unprecedented phenomenon, but has its own centuries-long history.  We’re simply living a new chapter of it.”

A quick inquiry into penmanship in school today makes me wonder if handwriting hasn’t already gone the way of straight pens and inkwells.  Has cursive script already disappeared?

Describing her Grade 5 class, one teacher told me that of her 21 students, only one—a girl—always wrote in cursive script.  All her other students wrote in block letters.

As well as being unable to use cursive script, many young people today cannot read a handwritten text.

In 2019, an enterprising teacher at a local elementary school initiated a local history project for Remembrance Day.  The research material included documents from Archives Canada and handwritten letters from WWII.  One of the difficulties the students met was that much of the old documentation was handwritten.  The students had to learn to read and write cursive script to make sense of their research material.  And then, as would those of us long accustomed to handwritten letters, they had to cope with cacography.  The project planned for mid-November was completed in June.

Handwriting was useful until quite recently because writing in cursive script is much faster than printing out words in block letters.  However, it is not as fast as typing and, in most circumstances, not nearly as convenient as a laptop or a smartphone.

Penmanship, in the form of calligraphy, continues to exist as a minor art form.  For those of us who still do put pen (or pencil) to paper, cacography continues to be an occasional—if not frequent—presence, even on things as innocuous as a shopping list.

Danny Perkins. Photo courtesy

By Nick Fonda

Local Journalism Initiative

The official opening won’t be until mid-May, so right now the interior of the new Perkins Art Gallery is a vast, near-empty, well-lit space with newly sanded floors and white walls.  The renovation work, including the entire electrical re-wiring of the building, was started the first week of January and is now down to the final details. 

The only change to the exterior of the building, aside from signage, is visible only at night, when coloured lights illuminate the spire of the new gallery, a building that for almost two centuries served as St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church.

“We had been looking for a new space for the gallery for about a year,” says Danny Perkins.

“We’ve been in the gallery on the Danville Square since 2020,” adds Rebecca Taylor, the gallery director.  “We only had 500 square feet on the ground floor.  The basement, which was much larger, was useable space but access to it was difficult.  Here, 95 per cent of the building is wheelchair accessible.”

“And here, we have 8,000 square feet of space,” Danny continues.  “The basement is only a little smaller than what was the church sanctuary and the church hall.”

Built between 1841 and 1842, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church had some unusual features, including box pews.

“We had requests for some of those pews,” says Rebecca.  “The Richmond County Historical Society next door kept a couple and a few other organizations kept some as well.”

“We recuperated all the wood from the pews,” Danny adds.  “A lot of it is stored in the basement, and we’ve been using it in our renovations for door and window frames, for molding and baseboards.  We’ve even cut some of it into thin strips to fill the cracks between the pine floorboards.  The wood they used for the pews was butternut and some of the boards are as much as 20 inches wide.  In the long run, it’s all going to be used.  An artisan in Victoriaville is using some to make pens.  Another artisan will be using some to make jewelry.”

The cracks between the floorboards were the inevitable result of the wood shrinking. 

“Two coins were found when the pews were removed,” says Rebecca.  “One with the date 1829 and the other dated 1781.”

The coins, American halfpennies, are about the diameter and heft of a loonie.  They are, understandably, quite worn.  The older coin would have been in circulation for over 60 years if it went lost when the church was first built. 

“The coins will be on display with several other artefacts,” Danny explains.  “We want to acknowledge the history of St. Andrew’s and we’re planning to have an area set aside for a permanent exhibit dedicated to the church.  It will certainly include one of the box pews, some of the organ pipes, and a much-used roll-top desk.”

In addition to a history space, the Perkins Gallery will also have classroom space.

“We are setting up a multi-purpose studio,” Rebecca says.  “We want to host open workshops.  Visual artists who work in anything from ceramic to watercolours would have space to accommodate a workshop of a dozen or more participants.  It could be used for a Saturday morning art class, for example.  It could also be used by an artist from someplace distant who comes here to give a multi-day workshop.”

“Our aim,” she continues, “is to bring people in.  Some people might feel intimidated by the name, art gallery.  We want to be just the opposite.  We want people to feel welcome to come in and look.  We will be displaying the work of 30 artists who span all the spectrums, from emerging to established, from young to old, from local to international.  Similarly, the artwork we sell will go from very affordable—like cards that cost no more that $5—to quite expensive artworks that cost as much as $75,000.”

The Perkins Gallery wouldn’t be the Perkins Gallery if it didn’t include Danny’s artwork, which is now also being exhibited and sold across North America.  As well, his work has found its way to Japan, the Bahamas, and Australia. 

Only seven years ago, Danny was bringing his metalwork to the Richmond Craft Fair and attracting local notice with the three sets of metal gates at the Richmond fair grounds—work he did pro bono.

Since then, he has shown his artwork well beyond Cleveland Township.

“In 2018,” he recalls, “I brought some of my work to the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto, which lasts 10 days.  I’ve been back every year since.  This year, I was asked to prepare an entrance piece—something that will be seen by visitors as they arrive.  I’ve also been asked to prolong my stay.”

In 2022, Danny’s work was exhibited in Miami and in Los Angeles the following year.

“Often,” says Rebecca, “an artist, or a gallery, can apply to attend a show.  Some only take artists, while others only accept galleries, and some are open to both.  If the show likes the samples that are submitted, the artist or gallery will be invited.”

“Other times,” she continues, “we’ve received an invitation to attend.  That was the case at the Hamptons Fine Art Show in New York in 2023.”

“That show was memorable for all the wrong reasons,” Danny adds.  “The area was hit by a violent rainstorm.  We were set up in tents and pavilions.  As the rain continued, we found ourselves standing in several inches of water.  Everybody was told to evacuate but all the artwork was left behind.  In my case, it didn’t really matter if my metalwork got wet, but other artists, those displaying watercolours for example, were not so lucky.”

“Another show we’ve attended is in Perth, Ontario,” he continues.  “It is also an outdoor art show.  In terms of the ratio between investment and return, it has been a great show for me.”

Artwork by Danny Perkins can now be found in widely disparate places including an outdoor sculpture garden in Los Angeles, a gallery in the small town of Ellaville, Georgia, the boutiques of the Royal Canadian Mint in Ottawa and in Winnipeg, and the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.

“Something that’s become popular recently,” Danny explains, “is fingerprint art.  Imagine a small statue, about 12 inches high with all the ridges and whorls of a fingerprint.  I made Darryl Sitter’s fingerprint for the Hockey Hall of Fame.  Typically, I’ll make six copies of a fingerprint, of which one goes to the individual, three stay with me, and the two others are often auctioned off at a fundraising event.”

The first event that is going to be held at the new Perkins Art Gallery will be the Salon Empreinte d’Art.  Last year, the Perkins Gallery held the show in June at Parc Marie-Victorin in Kingsey Falls.  This year it will be held on May 18, 19 and 20 at the old St. Andrew’s church in Melbourne.

“We’ll be holding an official opening on the 17^th as a VIP event,” says Rebecca Taylor.  “The following day the Salon will be open to the public.  After that, we’ll be open on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and also by appointment.  We’re also planning a commemorative event in November for Remembrance Day.”

“The gallery opening is the first step,” Danny Perkins adds.  “Possibly as early as next year we will be installing an artistic garden on the five-acre plot of land around the gallery.”

St. Andrew’s transition from place of worship to art gallery will not be an easy adjustment for everybody.  Just a few years ago the Conseil du patrimoine religeux invested considerable sums of money to preserve St. Andrew’s when it was a church.  There were restrictions on what could be done with the building, for example a prospective investor couldn’t subdivide it into housing units.  Its new vocation as an art gallery had the consent of the Conseil.

In its new incarnation, it will again draw people.  They won’t be coming to reflect on the spoken word, but, Danny Perkins and Rebecca Taylor hope, they’ll be prompted to reflection by the visual art.