Looking for Old Ontario: Two Centuries of Landscape Change

Barbara Robertson is the author of Wilfrid Laurier: The Great
Conciliator and the co-author of The Well-Filled Cupboard.

The focus of Looking for Old Ontario is the open countryside of farms
and towns south of Muskoka and Haliburton, a vital part of Southern
Ontario. This small area has had a placid history—it is practically
inert geologically—and has provided a comfortable setting for
generations of immigrants, beginning with the United Empire Loyalists in
the 1780s. Not that comfort was attained instantly: no one wielding an
axe was able to achieve that. Inevitably, the beginnings lay in
simplicity, but people always aimed for more and—striving
upward—displayed considerable adaptability. The old rural Ontario that
emerged in the 19th century was a progressive conservative society.

Landscape is a comprehensive term, and McIlwraith is appropriately
generous in the subjects he deals with—not only houses, barns,
churches, taverns, and schoolhouses but also surveys, building
materials, water power, mills, and much else. He analyzes various
components of the changing landscape, touching on history, economic
development, aesthetic trends, and technological change. The results of
this examination are often fascinating. We may not be unduly surprised
to learn that the number of operating farms in Ontario fell from more
than 227,000 in 1911 to less than 70,000 seventy years later, but this
decline has been to some degree offset by the car—many city people are
learning the pleasures of living in the country. Adaptability remains a
constant: McIlwraith refers to the auctioneer and house-wrecker as being
“like mi-crobes in compost, engaged in rejuvenation.” But there are
less cheerful matters to ponder as well. As local building materials
have been supplanted by imported manufactured ones, like plastic and
aluminum, garbage dumps have proliferated, because recycling has become
so difficult.

Altogether, Looking for Old Ontario is an extremely helpful guide to
understanding what you are seeing when you view the southern Ontario
landscape.