Storyline: Advantures in our back yard
(Can’t believe it was only a month ago!)
This was a long day. Very long indeed.
There were not that many communities with European names we had planned for the last day; however they were well-spaced and made for a long drive.
The idea was to reach Forks of the Credit (river) and hike there. Given our Pinery experience, it was clear that we were not prepared for hiking in the ice and iced mud. Drop this.
We had a slow start, taking the time to enjoy the scenery and tranquility of the park. Only a small portion of the Riverside campground was open, so there were not many people to disturb the views.
We took off for Dublin, which was the only community named after a UK city on our initial list. As mentioned in our earlier post, there are too many British-named municipalities for it to be an entertaining journey to stop at them. Dublin just happened to be on the route to Brussels, and so was included. The winds died down inland and made for a pleasant drive (our boxy home bounces around a bit when blown by the wind).
Day one and part of day two we were taking videos of every community we drove through. On our last day we skipped a lot of this – in part due to video fatigue, and in part because while Diana drove, Alex’s nose was usually pointed at our map app, looking for interesting alternate routes.
Dublin, like many villages, is not much more than a small collection of buildings either side of a main street – Perth County Road 180, in this case. There is a nice church and a few furniture factories and stores places that we noticed while driving through. The community was known as Carron when the first settler opened a store for area farmers. Joseph Kidd, born in Dublin Ireland, settled there a few years later and when salt was discovered at Seaforth, he piped brine to Carronbrook, where he employed 50 people and produced 200 barrels of salt a day. Later he built a sawmill. A post office was established in Carronbrook in 1854 and yes with the post office’s influence it was renamed to Dublin in 1878.
Shortly after Dublin we entered Brussels. It took us a while, and thanks to Google maps we knew we were in Brussels, since there was no sign from the road we entered on. We stopped at the town centre in front of the LCBO and there on a wall there was a sign with its name. The first settler here was William Ainley from Yorkshire, England in 1852. The community then was named Ainleyville. When the post office opened in 1856 it was renamed to Dingle. However, in 1872 the residents sought a more sophisticated name and choose Brussels, after the Belgium’s capital. With the arrival of the Wellington, Grey and Bruce Railway the community prospered.
Our next stop was Lisbon. We headed south-east. The roads were still empty and picturesque. It took us a while to actually find it. There is a Lisbon Rd. and Lisbon itself is just a cross road with not much else. While doing research we could not find information about this name. Was it a community that disappeared, or farm land with a few houses around? If you know about the origin of its name, please let us know. We crossed the Nith River that we had also crossed on day one in Paris. Yes, Paris and Lisbon are very close in Ontario.
From here we had jotted on our itinerary a few towns very close to each other and close to the big cities of Kitchener (formerly Berlin, another story for another time) and Waterloo, and which we’d avoid as much as we could. We were entering civilization and the roads suddenly became alive. Luxemburg and Baden were shortlisted, after which we’d turn north towards Elba.
Luxemburg was small, although built up with new monster houses overlooking and threatening each other. We just skipped it and decided that we’d have lunch in Baden. We were in Ontario’s Germany after all. There are many Germanic named towns and cities in this area.
And we also passed through Mennonite country in Waterloo County. According to ameo.org, the global Anabaptist and Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, two families from Pennsylvania settled there in 1800, 67 years before Confederation. 28 years later there were about 1,000 members and a further 2,000 “hearers”. And even today, Amish Buggies are not uncommon in Waterloo County.
Welcome to Baden! We had already decided that this will be our last “destination” in Europe. We parked at Castle Kilbride, which is currently a museum and a National Historic Site. It was built in 1877 by James Livingston and was named after his birthplace in East Kilbride, Scotland. The village of Baden was laid out by Jacob Beck from the Grand Duchy of Baden Germany in 1855. With the assistance of Mennonites already settled in the area, in 1820s Christian Nafziger arranged for a number of European Amish families to settle in the area. Baden is known for its Limburger cheese.
We managed to park Doranya at the end of the parking lot which was rather busy. Although the region is in red zone, it looked like the museum was working since many people were going in and out. We didn’t leave our house. Used our batteries to run the microwave and warm our food. After lunch we headed north, but had already decided to skip Elba, not wanting to face exile here, as Napoleon had experienced on the Mediterranean island in 1814-15.
This concluded our European tour without leaving Ontario. If you’ve read all our history blurbs, you’d notice how big the influence of the Post Office was over choosing a name for a community at the time. We didn’t know this until we dug in for our research.
Alex:
Over the years, I have travelled through south and south-western Ontario countless times, usually speeding by on a highway. Even though this is not the prettiest time of year, I enjoyed passing at a more leisurely pace through miles of farmland waiting for Spring preparation and planting. It was refreshing to see a little more of life outside the large urban areas in what is known as the Golden Horseshoe, and where I have lived for over 50 years. Southern Ontario has over 50% of the best farmland in Canada – much of which has been paved over, the highest population density with over 20% of Canada’s population, and the highest population growth. And we continue to bulldoze it over as it’s anticipated that the population of the Golden Horseshoe will grow from 9.3 million to 11.5 million in the next ten years (source: Canada’s Farmland Loss Jan 23, 2020 by Chelsea Eaton-Turner). We already import much of our food (and export a lot of grain from our prairie provinces). But I wonder how we will protect our food supplies in the future, especially if we continue to remove over 20,000 hectares of this important resource every year.
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