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During my undergraduate studies, we obsessively watched “Mad Men”, Matthew Wiener’s celebrated, nostalgic drama about life in the 1960s.
In the pilot episode, a young executive refers to “the thrill of making my father's store what I always thought it should be.”
I was thinking about that line as I drove across town on a beautiful day this week: sunny, with a breeze breaking any lingering heat, showing the turn from summer to autumnal weather. We were with clients of mine in construction who volunteered to examine two of Bradford’s pioneering churches for restoration: St John’s Coulson Hill and the Scotch Settlement.
Let me take a step back and explain this story properly.
A few years ago, I was honoured to join St John’s Presbyterian Church’s board of managers, responsible for supervising the church’s budget and facilities.
But going even further back to nearly 30 years ago, my father came to town, fresh out of divinity school, with my sister, my mum and I to become the minister of the church.
There were 12 members in the pews that first Sunday.
Yet 20 years ago, St John’s opened our new church building on Middletown Road and the 8th Line. From blood-donor clinics to girl guides to seniors’ clubs, the place is always full.
Finally, nearly two years ago, we also opened the Elden retirement home, a state-of-the-art community, which the church is a minority owner of, a place where our seniors can age in dignity – and have a wonderful quality of life.
From 12 parishioners without so much as a phone line in the early 1990s to a thriving congregation involved in countless forms of community service – with a healthy balance sheet and a staff of three – the congregation has come a long, long way.
The church is, in its own way, a testament to how Bradford West Gwillimbury has grown – and yet also stayed a small town, a tight-knit community, with a deep history.
Our church is more than just the elegant-yet-quaint building on the 10th Sideroad; our town is more than its infrastructure: it’s the shared memories and connections across generations, the toasts raised at weddings and the tears shed at funerals, celebrating the local lives lived.
Earlier this year (to complete the story), David Compton – the chair of the board and himself someone who knows what it is like to steward his “father’s store”, the former Compton’s IGA – tasked me with working to come up with a budget and action plan to restore the Scotch Settlement and Coulson’s Hill historic churches and cemeteries.
They are gorgeous 19th century buildings, surrounded by acreage cemeteries, the final resting places of the families who built this town. Names like Sturgeon, Roberts, Lloyd, Stoddart, Ritchie and Curry line the headstones in the cemeteries, some whose birthdates date back as early as the 1780s.
Anyone who knows anything about construction knows renovating heritage buildings is the trickiest of tasks. But that is the crucial job we face today: to care for the history housed in old buildings, and to offer final resting places for a new generation of the families who make this town into our community.
It is a tall order. But there is something subtly wonderful about it: there is a sense of timelessness, of a trust handed down through the generations – exemplified perhaps no better than by the fact that the first restoration contract (after a competitive bidding process) was awarded to the grandson of the couple who have poured their heart and soul into the church and this community for seven decades, and whose ancestors rest in these cemeteries.
Too often in municipal politics, “heritage” can be framed as a burden, something to be born by property owners. What it really is about is stewardship: caring for a legacy handed down by those who came before us.
I realize this is something of an indulgent column. Maybe I’m feeling sentimental, since my little niece was baptized at the church this past weekend, and I was very touched to be the godfather.
But this matters; our history matters. Preserving it – renewing it – is not easy, and no doubt there is more the town can do to support such efforts; talk of property tax credits for heritage homeowners is a good start.
The writer Ray Bradbury perhaps said it best: “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.”
The same, if we’re being frank, is true of our newspapers. My first job was as a weekly columnist with the former Bradford Times; it didn’t pay all that much, but I saved those dollars and it helped a “PK” (pastor’s kid) like me afford to go to Canada's best university.
Recently, I joked to a colleague that this column in Bradford Today “pays my utility bills”. But if I’m being honest rather than flippant, it’s so much more than that. In small towns, communities’ histories are recorded in our newspapers. When I’m feeling cynical, caught up in the hurly burly of my work, it’s really wonderful to receive a kind word from someone who reads these words who taught me to read or play piano (badly) or to value our community.
One of my favourite books is Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. There’s a quote in the book that’s very applicable to this subject. It reads in part: “The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy, and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist...And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something...”
The duty of each generation is to move the ball forward, to make progress, but also to care for the legacy that comes before us. We see this all around us: our mayor – who I admire so much – was elected a few weeks after burying his father, who was in his own day a local town councillor.
Or, to quote the esteemed father of our MPP Caroline Mulroney, “Canada is a land of small towns and big dreams.”
Legacy is a funny business – but it matters.
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Scott responds to a comment regarding one of his latest columns
“I read a column today, and it was arguing Ward 4 is gerrymandered, I’m not sure the young man knows what he meant, but we originally designed that ward as a keystone to tie in West Gwillimbury and Bradford. It wasn’t gerrymandered.”
So said Councillor Gary Lamb in a lengthy speech about ward boundaries at the last meeting of town council, arguing Council should not engage an expert consultant but should instead just set their own ward boundaries.
Let me assure the councillor the “young man” knew exactly what he meant, and it clearly wasn't what the Councillor interpreted. But enough third person: I’m glad to hear I still qualify as a “young man”.
Councillor Lamb argued his original goal in 2009 ward-boundary making was to give a third councillor for West Gwillimbury by linking it up like a puzzle piece all the way into suburban Bradford. Fair enough.
But with respect, that explanation itself actually sounds an awful lot like “gerrymandering” – even though the actual result was to dilute rural ward votes with a faster-growing and larger suburban majority in the ward.
Indeed, as Ward 4 Councillor Ron Orr himself said in 2019 about his own ward: “a realignment of the boundary would be my recommendation”.
