The following is a re-print of a past column by former Advertiser columnist Stephen Thorning, who passed away on Feb. 23, 2015. Some text has been updated to reflect changes since the original publication and any images used may not be the same as those that accompanied the original publication.
A young reader dropped around to show me a dog-eared copy of what he thought was an old magazine.
It turned out to be one of the sections of Picturesque Canada, which appeared in print in 1882.
Picturesque Canada is well known to anyone familiar with 19th century Canadian literature. It was a major publication effort of its time. Part history and part travel guide, it helped introduce the concept of Canadian nationalism with its coverage of Canada from Nova Scotia to British Columbia.
Picturesque Canada was conceived as a top-of-the-line effort from the beginning. Principal George Grant of Queens University, who was regarded as the most prominent Canadian academic of his day, served as general editor, coordinating the efforts of writers who actually travelled the country and wrote about what they saw. The most famous of the contributors was Charles G.D. Roberts.
Grant himself undertook many trips in connection with the project, and a few years earlier he had crossed the country as secretary for Sandford Fleming’s first survey of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Picturesque Canada was lavishly illustrated with engravings made from sketches by a half dozen Canadian artists. Lucius O’Brien, who had recently been elected the first president of the new Royal Canadian Academy, acted as art director.
The massive work originally was made available in 27 instalments on a subscription basis. This spread the cost to buyers, and made the work more accessible. The “magazine” my visitor showed me was one of these instalments. Picturesque Canada later appeared in a deluxe two-volume set totalling 880 pages.
I do not have one, but I do have a copy of the reprint published about ten years ago. The reprint, published by offset, lacks the sharp detail of the engravings found in the original.
I had not looked at the books for several years. As my visitor and I flipped through the books we were struck with the coverage given to Elora.
There are seven engravings of Elora, one of them a full page, more than for any other town. By comparison, there are only two illustrations of Guelph, and Fergus rates only a brief paragraph and no engraving.
The publication of Picturesque Canada appeared just as Elora’s first tourist boom was getting under way. The Great Western Railway had mounted Elora photographs by John Connon in its waiting rooms and was bringing trainloads of excursionists to Elora on holidays.
Volunteers had recently cleaned up the gorge and made it accessible with a set of wooded steps. The illustrations depict scenes still popular with gorge visitors today: the David Street bridge, Lover’s Leap, the Tooth of Time.
Unfortunately, the more famous contributors did not visit Elora. The text for this section was written by J. Howard Hunter, and the sketches are the work of F. B. Schell.
By modern literary tastes, the text is excessively flowery, and some passages elicited laughter from my visitor. For example, Mr. Hunter quotes passages of Shelley and Milton to enhance his description of the Elora gorge.
Mr. Hunter visited Elora when David Boyle was nearing the end of his term as principal of the Elora Public School. He praises Boyle’s pioneering work in local geology, palaeontology, and natural history, the products of which could be seen at Boyle’s school museum. The reference works at the Elora library, one of the largest in Canada in the 1880s, are also noted.
Howard Hunter noted Elora was in the heart of the old Neutral Indian territory, and he includes a long digression to explain the Indian conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries. His words record superbly the contrasting views of Indian culture of a century ago. On the one hand, he writes of the Elora area as the “happy hunting ground” amidst an idyllic and romantic woodland.
A paragraph later Mr. Hunter offers a contrasting picture, describing the ghastly and frightening practices of inter-tribal warfare, and the duplicity and deceit of the Indian tribes in their dealings with Europeans and with each other.
A couple of pages give a straightforward account of Roswell Matthews, the first white settler in the Elora area, and of the founding of Elora by Capt. William Gilkison in 1832. This passage was later quoted in its entirety by John Connon in his History of Elora.
Connon noted that the passage had originally appeared, in slightly altered form, in the Elora Observer in 1866, based on reminiscences by Roswell Matthews’ son. The information in this account has been subsequently rewritten several times.
There is a caution here for budding historians. Accounts of Roswell Matthews can be found in a number of published sources, but they all can be traced back to reminiscences of one of his sons recorded almost a half century after the events occurred.
Howard Hunter is very sensitive to environmental degradation, indicating that the consequences of thoughtless deforestation and unsound planning were well known 120 years prior.
He notes that the banks of the river “have been shamefully denuded,” and states that “if municipal councils would but realize that a manifold source of wealth is wasted when they permit attractive scenery to be injured, they would carefully guard these natural resources.”
Picturesque Canada remains a significant milestone in the development of Canadian nationalism. Locally, it offers a sense of the place of Elora in the larger picture. My visitor was disappointed that his instalment of the book did not include the Elora material. Nevertheless, he has an important and desirable historical document.
*This column was originally published in the Fergus-Elora News Express on Dec. 10, 1997.