Читать книгу Reinventing Brantford - Leo Groarke - Страница 10

| 1 | BRANT’S FORD

The year 2000 marked the beginning of a new millennium. As the world waited for the Y2K problem to wreak havoc on the world’s computers, others greeted the transition as the dawn of a new age. In Brantford, the end of the old millennium coincided with the arrival of a new university campus. I arrived the following year. The university’s chief academic officer, Rowland Smith, had asked me to apply for the dean’s position at the new campus. When I was interviewed and offered the post, my friends advised me not to go. A close colleague in Philosophy told me he was happy that the university had offered me “my own ship.” Then he laughed and added, “Too bad that it’s a sinking ship.”

I quickly learned that pessimistic views of Brantford were a major obstacle to the success of our new campus. It was troubling to find such pessimism prevalent on the university’s established campus in Waterloo, but much more troubling to find that it was an indelible part of Brantford’s view of itself. Shortly after I moved to Brantford, Holly Cox, the campus’s indefatigable recruitment officer, and I hosted a focus group that discussed Laurier Brantford with local high-school students. In a context in which we needed to attract applicants to sustain ourselves, we wanted to understand why local high-school students showed so little interest in a campus located close to home — so close that it could, at the very least, save their families thousands of dollars in annual expenses.

In the course of our discussion, the local students related a series of profoundly negative misconceptions. Laurier Brantford did not, we were told, award university degrees; it did not have “real” professors; it was not “really” Wilfrid Laurier University; it was not a “real university” at all. We arrived at the nub of the matter when one of the braver students took a deep breath, screwed up her face as though she had inhaled a bad smell, and blurted out, “Your campus is in Brantford, so we figured it can’t be any good.” Her fellow students nodded their heads in agreement.

The student’s reasoning was an enthymeme — an inference based on an implicit proposition. The proposition was the general principle that whatever is in Brantford can’t be any good. In the focus group it precipitated a discussion, not of Laurier’s new campus and its challenges in attracting high-school students, but of Brantford itself — the students resolutely condemning the city in which they lived. It was strange to find myself, the interested newcomer, more enamoured of Brantford than its own inhabitants. Long-time residents I met in the course of my next few months were less surprised, telling me that Brantford had sunk so low that only outsiders seemed to appreciate what it could be.

The attitudes of the high-school students reflected a deep-seated pessimism that has been and is possibly the central theme in Brantford’s recent history. As prevalent as it was, it was strangely out of step with Brantford’s history, which has enjoyed more than its fair share of significant individuals and accomplishments. Even a cursory list is impressive. Among others, it must include Joseph “Thayendanegea” Brant, whose role in the American Revolution ultimately gave rise to Brantford; Charles Duncombe, one of the leaders of the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, who established Brantford’s public library; Emily Howard Stowe, the first woman to practise medicine in Canada; Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone in Brantford¹; the celebrated poet Pauline “Tekahionwake” Johnson; Sara Jeannette Duncan, and Thomas B. Costain, two world-renowned authors;² James Hillier, the co-inventor of the electron microscope; Lawren Harris of the Group of Seven, one of Canada’s most important painters; and Wayne Gretzky, widely known as the world’s greatest hockey player.³

For most of its history, Brantford has enjoyed a proud prosperity. If it was anything, it was self-satisfied and sure of itself (sometimes too sure). Before there was Brantford, the first inhabitants of the region arrived some 11,000 years ago. They were ancestors of the maize-growing villagers who flourished along the flood plains of the Grand River as early as 500 A.D. Their descendants occupied the valley in the first half of the seventeenth century, when the French named them The Neutrals — because they remained neutral in the bloody war between the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois or the Five or Six Nations) and the Huron.

James Hillier, the university’s first honorary degree recipient in Brantford, speaking at the Brantford campus’s first convocation, May 29, 2002.

Despite, or arguably because of, their neutrality, the Neutrals were conquered and assimilated by the Haudenosaunee, who trace their history to “the Great Peacemaker,” Deganawida, who founded the Confederacy of Five Nations sometime in the sixteenth century. This was an alliance among the Oneida, Cayuga, Onondaga, Seneca, and Mohawk nations that brought their warring to an end. The peace he established produced a powerful confederacy which, ironically, became a fearsome military alliance. In 1715, the Five Nations became Six when the Tuscarora were admitted to the union.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, shortly before the events that gave rise to Brantford, the Grand River Valley was the hunting ground of the Mississauga. In Brantford’s very early years, the hill on which the settlement’s first cabin was built (the downtown hill occupied by the Brantford Armouries) was still called Mississauga Hill, a name that recognized it as the Mississauga’s favourite camping grounds.⁴ But Brantford was not an offspring of the Mississauga but of the Confederacy of Six Nations. To the extent that the city can claim to have a founding father, it is Joseph Thayendanegea Brant.

In a globalizing era that has created “hybrid identities” straddling divergent cultures, Brant is a fascinating figure who was, at one and the same time, a feared Mohawk leader and warrior and a British captain and then colonel. In the latter role, he was completely at home in upper-crust British culture and society. His English leanings were nourished early by his sister, Molly Brant, who was the common-law wife of General Sir William Johnson, the British superintendent for Indian Affairs in North America. Johnson arranged Brant’s admission to Eleazar Wheelock’s School for Indians in Lebanon, Connecticut, an institution that became Dartmouth College. Brant attended and studied English, Greek, Latin, mathematics, and religion.

After leaving Wheelock’s School, Brant served under Johnson during the French and Indian War of 1754–63, and received a silver medal in recognition of his service. He subsequently worked as a translator, interpreter, and aide for the British Indian Department. In 1775, he received a commission as captain and visited England, where he was presented at the court of King George III. All accounts suggest that he became something of a celebrity, maintaining his native dress, becoming a Freemason (receiving his apron from the King), and impressively matching wits with literati like James Boswell.⁵ King George promised to support Brant and the Iroquois if they would fight on the British side in the growing American rebellion.

In its initial deliberations on the war, the Grand Council of Six Nations declared neutrality between England and America, but Brant became an impassioned spokesman for the British cause. In military actions, he led Brant’s Volunteers, a band of Mohawk, Cayuga, Seneca, and Onondaga warriors, in sometimes fierce and bloody raids against American settlements. His war record included notable acts of bravery and compassion, but his name and his raids struck fear into the heart of white settlers, who referred to him as “the Monster Brant.” When the Americans ultimately prevailed, they retaliated by invading Confederacy lands, burning villages, and confiscating Six Nations territory in the Mohawk Valley.⁶

Bitter about the end of the war, Brant faced a bleak future in New York. In return for the support he had provided to the British cause, he petitioned the English for territory in Canada. As the talks progressed, he wisely asked for land along the Grand River Valley, close to Seneca settlements in the Genesee Valley, situated between centres of commerce on the St. Lawrence River and the northwestern territories of British North America. On October 25, 1784, Sir Frederick Haldimand, the governor of Quebec, responded to the request by providing “the Mohawks and others of the Six Nations” with a land grant of 273,163 hectares — ten kilometres on each side of the Grand River, from its source to its mouth.⁷ In securing this “fertile and happy retreat,” the Crown paid the resident Mississauga £1,100 in return for their agreement to give up their claim to the land. At Buffalo Creek, New York, the Six Nations clan matrons decided to split the Confederacy. One contingent remained in New York State while Brant led the other to the new land he had acquired in Canada, laying the seeds for future Brantford.

In this 1807 portrait by William Berczy, Joseph Brant strikes a classical pose on the bank of the Grand River, pointing to the land he acquired for Six Nations. Berczy patterned the pose on statues of Roman emperors. Brant’s portrait was also painted by Charles Willson Peale, who is widely known for his portraits of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Brantford is, quite literally, “Brant’s Ford”— the place where Brant and his Six Nations followers forded the Grand River on the way to their new territory. The ford was connected to a thoroughfare used by Six Nations and by travellers, and sprouted a tiny settlement originally known as Grand River Ferry. In 1818, there were twelve people in the settlement, which grew quickly afterward.⁸ One of Brantford’s best-known early residents, James Wilkes, has recounted how Brantford was christened with its official name:

It must have been in 1826 or 1827, when there were two or three hundred people, that the question of naming arose…. A meeting was called, when Mr. Biggar proposed that the name should be Biggar Town. Mr. Lewis, the mill owner, suggested Lewisville, and my father, who came from that city in the Old Land, stood out for Birmingham. It looked as if there might be a dead-lock when someone suggested that as the place was at Brant’s ford this title would prove the most suitable and the suggestion took unanimously. In the natural order of things the s speedily became dropped, and thus we have the “Brantford” of today.⁹

Economically, it was the possibility of trade with Six Nations and travellers crossing Brant’s ford that gave rise to the settlement of Brantford. The key deed was sold to settlers after Brant’s death (on April 19, 1830), but Brant himself had initiated and promoted the lease and sale of Six Nations land. The extent of the sales and the question whether he and others had a right to sell was a matter of difficult dispute then and ever since. Brant had hoped to attract farmers and establish an annuity for Six Nations, but the land that was sold “went for a mere song” and Six Nations of the Grand River Territory lost much of its original land grant. In Brantford, the extent to which it was legitimately acquired by others remains a source of great controversy and dispute.¹⁰

The first log cabin in Brantford was built by John Stalts in 1805. He erected it on a hill overlooking the Grand River, a few hundred yards from Brant’s ford. Today, the site is occupied by a war memorial dedicated to the Brantford men who died in the Boer War. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the location took advantage of the river, the hunting, and the trading opportunities, but the living conditions in the general area, known as Grand River Swamp, were not especially comfortable. In a reminiscence written in 1850, an observer recalled the frequently damp conditions on the low land around the river. The result was “decaying wood, stumps of trees and other vegetable matter,” which “caused from the action of the sun, an exhalation of malarious vapour, which proved exceedingly injurious to the health, particularly of those unaccustomed to it.”¹¹

The noxious air did not prevent the growth of the fledgling settlement named Grand River Ferry. As it grew, it pushed its way down the thoroughfare on the north side of Brant’s ford. The route became Colborne (pronounced Co-bornne) Street, the settlement’s original main street. In the early 1820s, the village of Grand River Ferry consisted of a scattering of frame buildings, log houses, taverns, and trading posts on Colborne. In its early days, the settlement had a reputation as “a turbulent and at times lawless frontier village.”¹² After an 1830 survey, settlers began to arrive in significant numbers. The result was a mix of English, Irish and Scottish immigrants, fugitive slaves from the United States, and Native Canadians and Americans that did not always mix well. The catalysts for conflict included rivalries across different ethnic groups, the easy availability of “whiskey and other spirits at trifling costs” and local gangs of ruffians. One of the latter, known as the “Swampers,” “met on public and market days, and had it out with clubs and axe handles, often joining forces to club quiet citizens right and left.”¹³

Despite its rough early years, Brantford began to prosper. Geographically, it grew north of the Grand River, down Colborne, spreading out on its east and west sides. Its proximity to the river was a key consideration in the nineteenth century, when the river served as a major thoroughfare for passengers and freight. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Grand River Navigation Company built a canal to provide Brantford’s downtown businesses with easy access to the river. The canal, which lay adjacent to present-day Wharf Street, was not successful because railways soon replaced the river as the major means of transport. A farmer’s market, which was formally established in 1847, sold local produce and goods, and was a focus for mercantile trade and gossip. Hotels, industries, businesses, churches, law firms, local government, courts, and retail stores flourished, making downtown Brantford the true centre of the city.

One hundred years after its beginnings, Brantford was a town that was going places. Its success was rooted in the fertile agricultural land that surrounded it and in an entrepreneurial tradition that made Brantford an international centre for manufacturing. In 1877, Brantford officially became a city. In 1901, The Industrial Recorder of Canada ranked it “third of importance among the exporting cities of Canada.”¹⁴ By then, Brantford was a world leader in the production of farm machinery and well-known for the manufacture of many other products — sawmill equipment, paint and varnish, stoves, windmills, and bicycles. The companies that were the basis of the city’s industrial success made up a veritable who’s who of agricultural manufacturing in Canada: the Waterous Engine Works; the Cockshutt Plow Company; Goold, Shapley and Muir; J.O. Wisner, Son & Co.; Verity Plow; A. Harris & Son; and ultimately Massey-Harris.

During the twentieth century, Brantford continued to flourish as a centre of agricultural manufacturing. Cockshutt Plow was bought by White Farm Equipment, which became a central component of Brantford’s economy. Many of Brantford’s other key companies were consolidated. Massey-Harris absorbed Wisener and Verity Plow and became Massey-Harris-Fergus, then Massey Ferguson. In the latter incarnation, it expanded to become the world’s largest manufacturer of agricultural machinery, outperforming its closest competitor, the Ford Motor Company. In Brantford, Massey’s positive economic impact was augmented by the arrival of other businesses. In 1918, the Brantford mayor, Morrison Mann MacBride, met Herbert Fisk Johnson Sr., the head of S.C. Johnson and Son, Ltd., on a train going to Toronto and persuaded him to establish the Canadian headquarters of S.C. Johnson in Brantford. Brantford’s economic punch was augmented by the success and growth of the Stedman Store empire, which began as a single store on Colborne and grew into one of Canada’s largest retail chains by the 1960s, incorporating three hundred stores across the country.

The cover of the 1897 catalogue for the Goold Bicycle Company presents an idealized image of rural living at the end of the nineteenth century. The caption under the stamp reads: Brantford Bicycles Are the Highest Standard of Excellence the World Over. The printing on the barn reads: Brantford. The Home of Good Manufacture.

Ride The Brantford. They are the best.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Massey-Harris was world-renowned for the quality of its products. This advertisement displays a Russian farmer harvesting his grain with Massey- Harris machinery.

Brantford never experienced the growth that characterized cities like Toronto and Hamilton, but it enjoyed a robust blue-collar prosperity until the 1970s. The citizens of Brantford were proud, even self-satisfied. They celebrated their participation in the World Wars; built monuments and parks and grand buildings; established a historical society dedicated to the history of Brant County; honoured Alexander Graham Bell, Pauline Johnson, and other Brantford notables; nurtured institutions like the nationally celebrated Ross McDonald School for the Blind and the Brantford Golf and Country Club; embraced social clubs, fraternal societies, and churches; promoted charities; formed unions; debated local, provincial, and broader issues with intensity; and had their significance (and the significance of Six Nations) repeatedly confirmed by royal visits.¹⁵ In the historical core of the city — the core from which Brantford sprang — stately public buildings, an elegant Victoria Square, and a vibrant downtown reflected the city’s history of success.

The unravelling of Brantford’s self-assured demeanour began with the collapse of its industrial economy in the early 1980s. A history of good fortune began to reverse itself abruptly when a confluence of economic forces undermined the market for agricultural machinery. The casualties included the manufacturing operations that had traditionally defined Brantford. The starkly pessimistic attitudes that Holly Cox and I encountered when we met with Brantford high-school students in 2000 were a direct descendant of a series of developments that sent Brantford’s economy — and with it, its downtown — spiralling downhill.