Come to the church in the wildwood…
Anniversary Celebration: Sunday, August 11, 2024 • 2 pm
Our annual celebration usually includes an historical presentation as well as local musicians and singers. This year’s presentation is by Johanna Zomers, a playwright, poet and columnist for the Eganville Leader who finds much literary inspiration in her memories of growing up on the Opeongo Line.
Get a preview of our annual celebrations by watching this 2010 video from the tenth anniversary celebration, featuring the chorus from the The Church in the Wildwood.
Transcript from Johanna Zomers presentation at the 2024 Annual Celebration:
In Miss Pringle’s Mini Skirt, one of the lines that always gets a big laugh is when Miss P’s arrogant city boyfriend comments on his trip up the Ongo Pongo Rd. “It’s the Opeongo Settlement Road and it was built over a hundred years ago” says Miss Pringle proudly. “And they haven’t fixed a single pot hole since” says the boyfriend, who is then taken down a peg or two when he had to rely on the ‘local yokels’ as he calls them, to fix his damaged car.
The ongo bongo, with its potholes, giant puddles, boot sucking mud and six foot high drifts was the main thoroughfare of my youth as we navigated our way to church, school and on day-long cattle buying expeditions to the hills of Wilno, Hopefield and Halfway. We turned left at Hudders onto the Rockingham Road for the shortcut to Combermere and a stop at Murack’s General Store for Maple Leaf cookies and bottles of Orange Crush pulled from the cold water in the store pop cooler. It was always an exciting adventure to set out in our little blue International half-ton truck with the cattle racks that were barely high enough to contain whatever half-crazed half-wild backwoods cow we might bring home.
My parents were post-war immigrants from the war-torn Netherlands. They came from the fertile flat fields of North Brabant in Holland intent on farming on the hilly stony little fields of Brudenell. Like their Irish and Polish predecessors along the Opeongo, they were determined to eke out a living for their families, many of which had upwards of ten children. There were only five of us kids while we lived on the ‘old Carty place’ just up from the post office and near the historic old Costello house which still stands along what is now Highway 512 in Brudenell.
Unlike our neighbours we had none of the established family or community connections of those large Irish and Polish pioneer families. We were foreigners, speaking only Dutch and learning to muddle our way through a cultural and social maze we didn’t understand. I didn’t speak a word of English when I started grade one at SS#7 Brudenell and Lyndock. The teacher, Mrs Isaiah May, pried me loose from my father’s truck and led me into the schoolhouse. I had so wanted to go to school but when confronted with a yard full of noisy kids who were strangers, my courage failed me. It took a few days but in no time at all I had learned to curse in Polish with the best of them!
In our drafty clapboard farmhouse we had no hydro, no running water, no indoor toilet, no bathtub, no heating except for a black and chrome Renfrew cookstove and a cast iron box stove in the ‘front room’. We were eternally half frozen except for the hottest summer months when we roasted because all the cooking, baking, canning and preserving hand to be done on that cookstove. We didn’t mind the summer heat, although I remember my mother canning applesauce in clouds of steam on thirty-degree August afternoons while we kids played in the cool shade of the apple trees in the orchard. We lived our lives in summer in the great outdoors, out in the hayfields while our parents loaded horse drawn wagons with loose hay, in the dusty barn as that same hay was unloaded, in the garden helping pick beans and peas, in the pastures rounding up sheep and cattle, in the bush, as Dad cut firewood and pulp.
We had no television and only an occasional working battery powered radio. Our few books were read and reread. Both Mary Nolans and Basil Shields general stores in the village had black and white televisions set high up on a shelf where customers were welcome to sit awhile, buy a chocolate bar and a pop and watch Bonanza or the Ed Sullivan Show. We kids were obsessed with Bonanza and very quickly adopted our Cartwright personas. My brother Tony who went on to become a very successful building contractor in Eganville before his untimely death of pancreatic cancer at age 64, was Pa Cartwright. Bossing us around came very naturally to Tony, who also always claimed the role of the Bishop when we played ‘Cormac Pilgrimage’. I was Adam, the black clad reader and writer of the Ponderosa. My sister Mary was Little Joe, and our chubby brother, Bert was Hoss. Little sister Henriette had to stay in our orchard playhouse and make supper as cook Hop Sing as we galloped the cow paths on our imaginary horses.
We were living examples of the old cliche “we were poor but we were happy.” It may sound odd but we had the best kind of poverty…the sort that provides all the necessary raw materials for a good life but demands that you have to do the everyday work to create that life. Even as little kids we had our jobs to do. We helped in the hay field and in the barn. We went to get the cows for milking and to bring in the sheep. We piled firewood and filled the woodbox. We peeled apples and picked potatoes, hoed the garden, shovelled paths and pumped well water. We had plenty of food from the garden and the apple trees and the yearly slaughtering of a hog and a beef. We could go weeks without a trip to the general store to buy any of the essentials such as coffee, sugar, yeast for bread baking, jello powder for the ‘easy modern dessert’ mother would make on hot summer Sunday when it was too hot to bake a cake or a pie. The bi-annual visits from the Watkin dealer were a highlight of the year as were the arrival of the Eatons and Simpson Sears catalogues.
The weeks were predictable, with the work and play varying only with the seasons. On Saturday we had our weekly bath in the washtub on the verandah if it was summertime, in front of the wood stove in the winter. Sunday was a day of rest and visiting. We went to Mass at Our Lady of the Angels in the morning, stopped at the general store for our weekly treat of a shared chocolate bar that mother divided into five pieces and then home to spend the rest of the afternoon hoping someone would come to visit or that we could persuade Dad to take our unreliable half ton truck and drive us to Combermere to visit Madonna House. Madonna House provided endless cultural, religious and literary inspiration for us. We re-enacted various Catholic celebrations, read our way through the lending library at St. Joes, opened our Christmas gifts of second hand toys lovingly selected from the clothing room, spent afternoons eating cookies and listening to Baroness Catherine Doherty telling stories of her youth in Russia. When I was eighteen and determined to see the wider world beyond Brudenell and Eganville, I went to live at Madonna House as part of their ‘working guest’ program which at that time in the early seventies was full of American young people, some of whom stayed to form the first of the ‘communes’ around Killaloe and Wilno.
My writing career started with a ball point pen instead of the ink dipped straight pens we used at school and a pad of lined air-mail paper that I received for my birthday when I was turned seven. I’d already gone through all the books in our little school library and was working my way through all the volumes of the Child’s Book of Knowledge. I read the Family Herald and the Country Guide and the Eganville Leader. I learned to read Dutch and plowed through the Dutch magazines that came in the mail from family in Holland. I read the catechism, Dad’s veterinarian book and the seed catalogues. There was never enough to read and one day, I had the brilliant idea that I could invent and write a story of my own.
We had very few toys and so we had to use our imaginations. A few piece of wood outlined a playhouse or the corral at the Ponderosa. Rolling an old tire down the driveway gave us a car or a truck. Two tires gave us robbers and a car chase. We put piglets dressed in doll clothes in our baby carriage and had funerals to bury dead birds. We played an ongoing saga of cattle rustlers who stole our cows and had to be chased down in the back pastures. And we had the ‘circus rings’—one of the great unsolved mysteries of our lives.
Just behind our log barns there were several perfectly round grass covered circular embankments that we could run around on. We had once seen the circus in Killaloe and we decided these were our circus rings. What they truly were is a family mystery to this very day. Someone has speculated that they were tepee sites used by the Algonquins long before the first settlers arrived. That’s perhaps the most plausible explanation. But much later, I went to Ireland, I saw the ring forts and the many ancient landscape features, that resembled these grassy earthen circles. Our farm was originally cleared by the Irish settlers who came up the Opeongo after the Famine. Did some early Irish family recreate a bit of their Irish landscape on the stony fields which were after all not so very different from their County Clare or County Mayo origins? Or is it all a part of the mystique of the Opeongo—the historic road so often mythologized in story and song? The old stopping places, the lost hamlets of NewFoundOut and the ghost villages of Brudenell. Why not fairy circles or ring forts? Perhaps some local historian like Barry Conway or Bernadette Burbidge can ferret out the facts. Whatever they were, they are part of the fabric of my childhood along the Opeongo when it was still a gravel road leading to adventure and remains an enduring connection to this part of the Ottawa Valley. Barney McCaffrey’s wonderful song Mick Culhane of Rockingham, the stories of the John Watson, the remittance man who founded the hamlet, the legendary waterfall, the cookies at the old General Store, the artisans and musicians who put Rockingham on the creative map, the much loved historic church we celebrate today and which continues as a very real part in many of our lives. My friends Peter and Ritsuko were married here. Well, they had one of their three wedding celebrations here—the other two being along the Ottawa River and in Japan. Like John Watson and Mick Culhane they are part of the larger than life tapestry that encompasses us all.
