MEANING, CHANGE AND AMBIGUITY IN CANADIAN LANDSCAPE IMAGERY

HOMER WATSON AND THE PIONEER MILL1

Brian Foss

The subject of landscape looms large for historians of Canadian art. ‘Every damn tree in the country has been painted’, the abstract artist Graham Coughtry (1931–99) famously complained, frustrated as he was at almost every turn by the value invested in landscape painting by Toronto critics and patrons. Canada, the second-largest country in the world and one of the most geographically diverse, has long been defined by its landscape. It informs and shapes everything in the national superstructure. For example, the University of Toronto political economist Harold Innis, in a series of publications, chronicled the country’s economic reliance upon resource extraction to build his argument that ‘the present Dominion emerged not in spite of geography but because of it’. For Innis, Canada’s very size (its extension fully west to the Pacific Ocean), as well as its political structures, can be traced firmly back to its economic grounding in its resource-extraction economy.2

There is also, however, a grim side to the Canadian obsession with geography. Here, too, important aspects of Canada’s superstructure derived – in varying degrees of explicitness – from the omnipresent and sparsely inhabited landscape. In the field of cultural criticism, Northrop Frye characterized Canadians as having an enduring wariness vis-à-vis nature: a ‘garrison mentality’ in which everything that lies outside the barriers that we construct against the ever-threatening natural environment is to be feared.3 Frye thus reversed the more optimistic ‘frontier thesis’ proposed in the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’: an essay that cast the westward march of American migration within an Edenic myth of national self-fulfilment. Novelist, poet and critic Margaret Atwood has identified fear and ambivalence towards the landscape as central themes in Canadian writing,4 and has made those qualities the driving forces in her eerie short story ‘Death by Landscape’, in which the principal character, Lois, collects iconic examples of twentieth-century Canadian landscape painting because ‘she wanted something that was in them, although she could not have said at the time what it was. It was not peace: she does not find them peaceful in the least. Looking at them fills her with a wordless unease.’5 A symbol both of national potential and uniqueness on the one hand, and of suspicion, even dystopia, on the other, the landscapes of Canada have long been an internally conflicted cornerstone of the nation’s thought, celebration, criticism and analysis.

Although my work on Canadian landscape imagery has relied more explicitly on social history and cultural studies than it has on Marxist methodology, it owes much to two key thinkers of the left: Raymond Williams and Andrew Hemingway. Williams’s 1975 monograph The Country and the City proposes a cogent analysis of landscape representation, with English landscape – and its relationship to urban life – dissected by means of a sweeping survey of four centuries of poetry and prose.6 His analysis of the complexities involved in the countryside’s frequent presentation as an embodiment of an idealized past, as compared with the rampant capitalism and social confusion of the city, has been germane to my studies of the Canadian scene. So has his rejection of a dualistic approach to country and city in favour of his stance that the two phenomena are indissolubly related to each other in ways that have everything to do with the definition of landscape’s cultural and economic use-value.

As for Hemingway, his 1992 monograph Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain has long been a crucial book for me. That publication builds upon the proliferation of scholarship from the previous two decades concerning the social construction of British nature and its imagery.7 Much of this body of work was inaugurated by The Country and the City, and is explicitly based upon – or is implicitly inflected by – Marxist methodologies. These are studies that have been taken well beyond formal analysis of the oeuvres of individual artists. They instead situate landscape paintings solidly within the parameters of cultural studies, with all the attention this requires vis-à-vis issues of class, socioeconomic and political contextualization, and questions of labour, power and consumption. How, for example, fine-art representations of landscape exist on a continuum with a range of popular and commercial imagery. How these complementary forms of imagery are promoted to specific audiences or fractions of audiences, and how those recipients may subsequently valorize them as objects of consumption by investing them with overt ideological attributes. How, in other words, an insistence upon the ‘naturalness’ of nature and a taste for fine-art images of that self-same nature are inevitably obscurantist. These are questions that a Marxist approach to art history is singularly well positioned to address.

For its part, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture asks how naturalistic landscape painting – an innovative phenomenon in early nineteenth-century Britain – came to be so central to popular and critical middle-class taste during the years from around 1805 to 1830. The book addresses this question through an exhaustive analysis of published material that ranges from philosophical texts of the Scottish Enlightenment to art reviews in newspapers of differing political stances. This extensive literary research is justified on the grounds that, as Hemingway notes early on in the book, ‘Landscape paintings were produced for use primarily within urban spaces, and what we can know of their meanings comes mainly from texts produced by urban intellectuals.’8 Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture is never reductive in its materialist, documentary probing of evolving ideas about beauty and taste – notably the development of associationist aesthetics, the privileged status such aesthetics gave to middle-class subjectivity in interpretations of visual imagery, the ways in which such interpretations could be linked to modern-themed, naturalistic landscape painting, and the multi-platform means by which these conjoined phenomena were marketed to middle-class publics that were happy to expand their appropriation and consumption of the visual arts. Sophisticated, subtle, grounded in meticulous research and rigorous analysis, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture is a masterful Marxist exploration of the relationships between social class, taste, fine art, popular culture, published texts, and the appropriation and consumption of art. Suffice it to say that the book was within constant reach when I began to examine the work of the Canadian landscape artist Homer Ransford Watson (1855–1936).

Watson was a landscape painter right down to his fingertips. Born in the village of Doon, on the Grand River in Waterloo County of south-central Ontario, he attributed his fascination with landscape to his intense psychological, emotional and physical involvement with the geographical setting in which he had been born and in which he spent virtually his entire life. ‘[G]reat landscape artists’, he proclaimed in a 1900 lecture at the University of Toronto, ‘are no more cosmopolitan than are great patriots, and no immortal landscape has been painted which has not had as at least one of the promptings for its creation, a feeling its creator had of having roots in his native land and being a product of its soil.’9 Watson’s life story, carefully defined and tended by the artist, by his friends and patrons, and by journalists, is a variation on a biographical conceit common since at least the time of Vasari. Born in a backwater settlement, Watson lost his father when he was a child, was reprimanded by the village schoolmaster for drawing caricatures in his school notebook, taught himself to draw based on illustrations in magazines, and won occasional, modest prizes by exhibiting his early paintings at local fairs. Not until he lived in Toronto for several months when he was in his late teens did he actually encounter the work of professional artists. With their encouragement, he visited New York state from 1875 (possibly 1876) until late 1877. His travels there are known in only the vaguest detail, but he probably saw canvases by members of the Hudson River School. Certainly he sketched in the Adirondack Mountains and along the Susquehanna, Mohawk and Hudson rivers: terrain that was central to the Hudson River aesthetic. He got as far as New York City but, as he later recalled, ‘I got so impatient to rush back home and use all this knowledge that I could not stay in the city any longer. So home I went and commenced to paint with faith, ignorance and delight.’10 For almost the entirety of the rest of his long career, Watson would devote himself to recording the landscapes around Doon and along the Grand River.

An essential part of Watson’s reputation was based on the well-publicized fact that other than a handful of lessons from an unnamed New York painter who ‘kindly offered to teach me how to use a maul stick [sic] and spread paint on a palette’,11 he was entirely self-taught. This self-presentation relied, especially near the start of his career, on the cultivation of a backwoods persona cut off from all things urban. Thus, recalling how in 1880, at the age of twenty-five, he had submitted a painting – The Pioneer Mill [1] – to the inaugural exhibition of the Canadian Academy of Arts (which was soon thereafter given permission to add the word ‘Royal’ to its name), Watson described how anxious he had been. ‘Of course,’ he asserted, ‘I knew nothing about painting, and how I got through the job of making a picture … I do not know.’12

This self-deprecation makes for an endearing story, but like many such stories it incorporates fictional elements. By 1880 Watson had already been a member of the Ontario Society of Artists, easily the brightest star in the province’s rather meagre art firmament, for two years. He had exhibited there twice, and had received complimentary newspaper reviews as someone who was ‘very rapidly coming to the front in the estimation both of the public and his fellow-artists’.13 Nor do the dimensions of his paintings from these early years suggest someone who was hesitantly feeling his way. Watson had in fact begun producing large canvases in about 1877, when he was in his early twenties. The Castellated Cliff of 1879 (now in the National Gallery of Canada) measures 88 × 126 cm, and A Coming Storm in the Adirondacks (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal), of the same year, is 86 × 119 cm. The Pioneer Mill – the painting he submitted to the 1880 Canadian Academy exhibition – has similar dimensions: 86 × 127 cm. In short, it seems unlikely that when Watson sent that painting to the academy’s first show he was as trepidatious as he later claimed.

The Pioneer Mill made Watson’s reputation. It was purchased, for the equivalent of his two previous years of earnings, by Canada’s governor-general, the Marquis of Lorne, the husband of Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria. Lorne had bought the painting as a gift for his mother-in-law. Victoria hung it in Windsor Castle, where it remains to this day.14 Nor was Lorne alone in his admiration for Watson’s work. Newspaper reviewers unreservedly approved of The Pioneer Mill. The Globe, one of Toronto’s two most respected daily newspapers, described it as ‘an admirable landscape, wonderfully truthful in design, with rich but quiet colouring; rocks, water, sky and foliage are all strong and realistic’.15 But Watson’s recollection of the Globe’s headline as reading ‘Country Boy Paints Picture Bought by Princess Louise’ sounds almost too good to be true – and that’s exactly what it was. The announcement of the painting’s purchase in the 8 March 1880 issue occupied only part of a single paragraph in what was otherwise a long, multi-column report. Contrary to Watson’s romantically embroidered memory, the article’s title made no reference to him. Nor did the headlines of any other reviews.

Also contrary to Watson’s memory, none of the reviews referred to him as a ‘country boy’. The Canadian Spectator did ask how it was possible that the art of painting should flourish ‘among men who are of humble parentage – men who have not received a classical or liberal education’, but the reviewer was referring to Canadian artists in general, not to Watson in particular. ‘Genius’, the Canadian Spectator’s reviewer wrote, ‘fills a void which education cannot do. Among the founders of the great European schools of painting were men of humble origin, yet men upon whose heads it pleased Heaven to accumulate gifts and graces not generally bestowed upon mortals.’16 That same year (1880), reviewing Watson’s comparably large A Coming Storm in the Adirondacks at the Art Association of Montreal, two newspapers described him as a ‘genius comparatively unaided by culture’ and a ‘back woods’ figure who had enjoyed ‘no advantages for the study of art but those furnished by dame nature’.17 Refrains like these would become central to Watson’s reputation, repeated in published appraisals throughout his long life. A relatively early instance dates from 1902, when Katherine Hale, the author of an admiring article about a visit to his home in Doon, described coming upon ‘a charming old stone house in the last stages of decay, enwoven in vines and orchard-set. Convinced that it is our Mecca we turn for confirmation to a respectable citizen on the sidewalk. “Last house to the right, stranger”, he says decisively, and disappointed we drive on.’18

The success of Watson’s art was thus presented by Watson himself and by others as an exemplification of the cliché of inexplicable, untrained genius soaking up inspiration and talent from ‘dame nature’. The origins of that characterization lay in a confluence of factors: broader aesthetic and cultural trends; the economic development of southern Ontario; relationships between rural and urban realities, expectations and attitudes; and the personal histories of Watson and his forebears. The remainder of this essay considers these interrelated issues, with particular attention to the painting that launched Watson’s career in spectacular fashion: The Pioneer Mill.

Nostalgia and death: Water-wheel mills in North American culture

Abandoned mills driven by water wheels – especially mills powered by vertically mounted breastshot and undershot wheels (the most stereotypically familiar types)19 – feature in several large and small Watson canvases during three decades beginning in about 1879, and also in numerous undated drawings and a large, accomplished etching.20 The latter sold badly: an unfortunate result of the inexperience of Watson’s Toronto dealer when it came to marketing etchings, the high customs duties imposed on imported prints (Watson had made the print in 1889–90 while living in England), and a serious lack of Canadian support for the Etching Revival.21 These reasons had little to do with the appeal of the subject itself, however. Ruskin distrusted representations of decaying mills and other workaday architecture because of what he described as their sentimentalization of human poverty and decay,22 but many laypeople, artists and critics saw that very characteristic as integral to the attractions of the imagery.

In the field of romantic literature, for example, Scribner’s Monthly did nothing unusual when in 1874 it published a long poem recalling the glory days of an antiquated grist mill, and linked the building’s emotional and psychological resonance to its now deceased owner’s home in heaven.23 Mary Dwinell Chellis’s novel The Old Mill, published in Boston in 1884, luxuriates in the travails of a man who, out of despair after the loss of his wife and children, closes down the family’s mill, consigning it to a process of evocative decay. ’Neath the Maple by the Mill, a song published in Toronto in about 1881, associates the titular building with the singer’s wooing of his sweetheart, revealing only in the final verse that their courtship took place long ago and that the beloved is now dead and buried ‘’neath the maple by the mill’. Such unabashedly anti-modernist texts and songs were produced and consumed throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Among a multitude of examples, ‘The Old Mill’ – an undated poem by Ontario native Wilson Pugsley MacDonald – concludes with a description of ‘phantom millers [who] move in rhyme / Even as when in life, and on clear nights / You can behold them toiling as though time / Had never passed the Humber’s silvered heights.’ (The Humber River is one of two waterways flanking Toronto.)

Interest in the associational potential of old mills was not, though, limited to popular novels, poems and songs. North American painters and illustrators also made regular use of the theme, which at least in the United States mutated from a pre-Civil War emphasis on what has been termed an ‘almost daemonic omnipotence’ to a postwar rusticated nostalgia.24 The latter connotation, growing out of the Picturesque aesthetic’s formal and psychological exploitation of mills, was quite unlike the celebration of bourgeois economic prosperity that had characterized the first sustained appearance of mill imagery in European art, in seventeenth-century Holland. During the mid-to late 1870s, the Aldine – a magazine noted for its high-quality engraved reproductions and from which Watson may well have drawn much of his skill in depicting dramatic, stormy skies25 – published nostalgia-invoking representations of small, antiquated, wheel-powered mills in reassuringly pastoral settings. One of these images [2], issued in 1874, illustrates a poem in which the deadness of the season, the decay of the mill and the end of human life are unambiguously conflated: ‘A wreck, beyond repair, the old mill seems, / A type alike of manhood and the time – / Decay o’ercreeping all his busy schemes: / Himself low buried ’neath the winter rime.’26 Other views of water-powered mills from yesteryear, prepared by American printmakers such as the prolific John Douglas Woodward, were used less to invoke death than to suggest a bygone rural simplicity that was out of step with the hurly-burly of the modern world. Woodward’s engravings were included in, among other publications, the hugely popular Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In of 1872–4. ‘Labor mars the landscape it enters,’ wrote O. B. Bunce, one of Picturesque America’s many essayists, ‘but the mill seems to partake in the spirit of its surroundings, to gain a charm from woods and waters, and to give one.’27

George Inness, described by Watson as the outstanding figure in American landscape art, was one of many well-known contemporary painters who depicted this subject. Watson may have met the American when they were both in New York, Inness having relocated there from Europe in 1876. At the very least, Watson could have encountered Inness’s paintings during his New York sojourn of the late 1870s, perhaps at the National Academy of Design, where old mills were frequent subjects in post-1860 annual shows and where Inness enjoyed a well-publicized critical triumph in 1877.

A society in flux

The fascination with the remnants and symbols of a disappearing past was abetted in Ontario by sea changes in the province’s economic and social infrastructures. Its industry at the time of Watson’s birth in 1855 consisted mostly of small businesses, although there was already significant evidence of steam-based technology and, consequently, of industrial expansion and specialization of labour.28 Until the 1860s, however, most mills were powered by water wheels. Only 41 of Ontario’s grist mills were steam-driven in 1854, compared with 569 that used wheels.29

During the 1870s and 1880s, however, many of the latter had fallen or were falling into picturesque decay, among them Doon’s first grist mill.30 Those that were powered solely by water wheels accounted for only about twelve per cent of all industrial establishments in Ontario in 1871.31 And other, related technological changes were also occurring. For example, a grist business in the village of German Mills, midway between Doon and the nearby town of Berlin (the latter would be patriotically renamed Kitchener in 1916), became in 1863 the first in Canada to employ the new gradual reduction, multi-stage grinding technique. Patented in Canada that same year, this technique challenged the single chop, fast-reduction method, which required two traditional grindstones mounted close together. Twelve years later and only a few miles further afield, at his mill at St Jacobs, also in Waterloo County, E. W. B. Snider established Ontario’s first gradual-reduction rolling mill. Rolling mills used corru gated iron (or, from the early 1880s, porcelain) cylinders instead of the grindstones that had been the defining technology throughout the preceding decades and centuries. Rolling mills quickly proved their value: they produced whiter flour, required less supervision, were more easily maintained, did thirty-seven per cent more work than traditional grist mills and needed forty-seven per cent less power.32 Of the six establishments named in an 1884–5 summary of flour mills in Waterloo County, only two were comparatively small-scale concerns that utilized millstones; the others were all large-scale commercial rolling mills.33 Inexorably, the small wheel-driven mills lovingly chronicled by Homer Watson – buildings that had been centres of community life (marriage banns had often been posted on their doors, for example) – were replaced by businesses that were less concerned with building relationships with local farmers than they were with acting as hubs for large geographical areas.

3 Winslow Homer, The Old Mill (The Morning Bell), 1871, oil on canvas, 61 × 96.8 cm. Yale University Art Gallery, bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, BA 1903. Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.

These changes happened quickly, and were usually drastic and always noteworthy. The American artist Winslow Homer, for example, tracked changes in textile manufacture in his The Old Mill of 1871 [3]. In this painting, female factory workers begin to traverse an inclined walkway that leads past an abandoned textile mill (the empty-windowed building on the left of the canvas) to arrive at a new facility just beyond the forsaken structure. The only part of the more recent building that is visible (seen just above the roof of the abandoned one) is a bright, shiny bell, the ringing of which embodied the new tyranny of timed labour: ‘the most distinctive fixture and defining attribute of the new mills’.34 As an 1898 description of an idyllic picnic on the banks of Waterloo County’s Grand River, near Doon, put it:

It seems to me I’d like to go

Where bells don’t ring, nor whistles blow,

Nor clocks don’t strike, nor gongs don’t sound,

And I’d have stillness all around.35

The changes in technology and scale that characterized mills of all types were symptomatic of a larger phenomenon: the increasing urbanization of southern Ontario. During the 1850s, railway incursions by the Grand Trunk and the Great Western led to the expansion of manufacturing in Berlin, Galt, Preston, Doon and other Waterloo County towns. An 1860s gazetteer described Berlin as lacking water power and other resources necessary for industry, but even as that judgment was being published the foundations were being laid for a dramatic economic and population boom that led to Berlin being incorporated as a town in 1871. By then Waterloo County had an industrial workforce of some four thousand: the ninth largest in Ontario’s thirty-seven counties.36 An 1872 observer – with, it should be noted, a fair degree of poetic licence – compared the concentration of industry in the small town of Hespeler (near Doon) to that in the British industrial centre of Bradford.37 Doon itself had a population of only 150 in 1871, but this rose to about 300 in the 1880s (when a resident could justly describe it as ‘a busy and prosperous village’),38 and to 600 by the end of the century. By that time the once bustling but now outdated Grand River canal system had been largely displaced by the urban concentration of large-scale, technology-driven industry that relied on the railways for the mass transport of raw materials and finished products alike. ‘The artist’, according to an 1893 magazine article, referring to visual artists in general rather than to Watson in particular, ‘now delights to haunt its [the Grand River’s] banks and transfer some of its numberless bits of enchanting scenery to his canvas or his paper.’39

Canada officially became a dominion of the British Empire in the final third of the nineteenth century (in 1867), and in this era of nation-building a great deal of faith was invested in economic growth and in the related rise of cities. But that faith was tempered by an increasing association of urban life with noise, dirt, a hectic pace, materialism and artificiality. All of these were blamed for what were claimed to be escalating levels of stress, poor mental and physical health, and the loss of the self-reliance that rural life, trumpeted as an organic social order founded on simplicity and natural virtue, supposedly fostered and symbolized. Chronologically coincident with the fame of The Pioneer Mill, an 1881 book entitled American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences argued that ‘Americanitis’ was creating neurasthenic conditions among urbanites in the United States, and that ‘a restful time away from modern civilization in a park, at a cottage, or in Canada should return the sufferer, at least temporarily, to health’.40 Yet despite Canada’s presumably bucolic character, concerns similar to those highlighted by American Nervousness gave pause to the recently established (1868) Canada First Movement. Beginning in the 1870s, its members, conservative nationalists all, championed the already fragile idea of Canada as a principally agrarian nation. In a related vein, nascent urban moral reform and social-welfare projects were promoted in newspapers as early as the 1880s. Twenty years later, they were complemented by the growth of presumably restful suburbs, the popularity of the village community ideal, and a drive towards town planning. The latter manifested itself as early as 1890 in the town of Waterloo, near Doon, when the municipality adopted Ontario’s Public Parks Act and was thus positioned to acquire land to preserve as salutary parkland. 41

It was under these circumstances that city dwellers became key proponents and consumers of nostalgia for an idealized rural past. The 1880s were marked by North American journalists reaching largely urban readerships (including many Canadians) through such periodicals as Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Atlantic Monthly and Saturday Evening Post. These were magazines that often espoused what a later analyst described as ‘a philosophy which seems in retrospect appropriate only to Outing and Forest and Stream’.42 Previously understood and championed primarily by those who actually lived there, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century the southern Ontario countryside became increasingly understood in terms of its therapeutic relationship to Toronto and other burgeoning cities.43 In this regard, railways supported the most striking travel trend to blossom during the last three decades of the century: a fashion for rural spas and waterside resorts that catered to urbanites. Preston, next door to Doon and much noted for its mineral baths, was one such locale. But city dwellers were also cycling, hiking and boating through non-resort areas, as well as spending time as guests on farms.44 The Grand River was popular with large groups and single day-trippers alike, including artists both amateur and professional.45 Cycling magazine in 1893 specified the attraction of the area around Doon: ‘A number of Toronto waifs … [who were] sent out to breathe the pure air and give a sight of green fields and woods’ had ‘pale pinched faces’ before their arrival; but when they ‘first caught sight of the flowers near the track at the [train] depot they ran and plucked them in the wildest glee’.46 Picnics, too, were a popular pastime along the Grand River. In the words of American art historian Angela Miller, picnics epitomized ‘the contradictory experience of men and women benefiting directly from economic expansion and reluctant to slow the juggernaut of progress yet concerned with maintaining a sense of continuity with the past’.47

This reciprocal relationship between the rural and the urban also played itself out in Watson’s career. The cities of Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa were where his work was most frequently exhibited. Although many of his paintings were initially subsumed into the collections of his friends and admirers in the towns around Doon, his most visible and acquisitive collectors tended to be city dwellers associated with high finance and industry, including railway development. Like John Constable and the Barbizon artists to whom he was compared by Oscar Wilde at the time of Wilde’s May 1882 visit to Toronto,48 Watson dedicated himself to lovingly recording a local landscape with which he was intimately familiar and then selling those paintings to powerful figures whose lives and activities were thoroughly urban, much as cosmopolitan Parisian collectors had earlier been the driving force behind the popularity of the decidedly anti-urban Barbizon artists.49 The same rural/urban relationship characterized the art and audience of the English artist George Clausen (1852–1944), whose paintings Watson first saw at the Goupil Gallery in London and with whom he established a warm friendship after meeting him in 1887. Described by Watson as a devotee of truth,50 Clausen – like his contemporaries Henry Herbert La Thangue in England and Jules Bastien-Lepage in France – espoused a rural nostalgia painted in a painstakingly realist aesthetic that was rooted in a close connection with his immediate milieu and that supplanted Jean-François Millet’s imagery with a more uncritical, and therefore more palatable and ‘timeless’ depiction of old-world country lives, infrastructures and economies.

Like the Barbizon artists, like Constable and like Clausen, Watson offered a view of rural society that actively avoided heavy industry and urbanization, which were expanding throughout southern Ontario during the last decades of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the sentimental identification of Watson’s art as embodying a relationship of both negation and desire between his bucolic world and his patrons’ modern urban lives was referenced by commentators such as the anonymous critic who reviewed the Royal Canadian Academy’s 1892 annual exhibition for the serial publication The Week. To that author, Watson’s ‘romantic pastorals’ exemplified why ‘landscapes [are] the most lastingly soothing of all pictures; they bring the tired and harassed drudge of city life back to the playgrounds of his youthful truant days, and woo the memory away from present care’.51 This rural/urban relationship reached what was perhaps its apogee of verbal expression in 1929. In that year, R. C. Reade, writing in the Toronto Star Weekly, adopted an aggressively anti-modern vocabulary for bringing Watson once again to the attention of Toronto readers. Reade described making a ‘pilgrimage’ to visit ‘the hermit of Doon’, who ‘lives hidden in the woods … because he has no passion for painting rubber plants and artificial palms’. Appropriately enough, Watson’s ‘sylvan retreat’ (Doon: ‘a shrinking violet as modest as its most illustrious citizen’) proved difficult for the adoring journalist to find, ‘[e]ven with the most detailed road directions’.52 Just five months before the cataclysmic stock market crash that would gut the financial security that Watson had accumulated over the course of a career stretching far beyond Doon and Waterloo County, his image remained that of a recluse inhabiting an anachronistic idyll.

Family and pioneer legacies

However, the emphasis that Watson laid on a serene antidote to urbanism went beyond Victorian romanticism, beyond the psychological and social impacts of the changes that were transforming southern Ontario’s industrial infrastructure, and beyond the relationship between rural subject matter and urban desires and expectations. Equally important was Watson’s family history. The two previous generations of Watsons had been bound up with small-scale milling in Waterloo County. Their involvement appears to have led the artist to base the eponymous building in The Pioneer Mill roughly on a sawmill built by his grandfather James following the latter’s emigration to Canada from the United States.53 ‘The fondest recollections I had of the place [Doon] dwelt there [in the mill]’ the artist wrote in an undated and fictionalized autobiographical manuscript. ‘A history was connected with it and the place was now a ruin.’54 The business operated by Ransford Watson (James’s son and Homer’s father) was a combination saw and woollen mill that failed three years after his death in 1864 and was sold.55 An uncle leased the property in 1872 and opened a sawmill and pail factory, at which the seventeen-year-old Homer worked. Sixteen years later, in 1888, the mill was sold a second time. That event, which Watson’s wife described as having made her husband ‘blue for three days’, furnished an indication of Watson’s psychological investment in his family history.56

Small wonder, then, that many of Watson’s images of mills are permeated by a sense of personal longing and loss more profound than the generalized and histrionic Victorian sentiment about the past. The titles of his paintings and drawings frequently incorporate words such as ‘deserted’ and ‘haunted’, the latter term particularly resonant in view of the twelve-year-old Watson having witnessed the death of his older brother Jude in a milling accident. ‘Life and thought hath fled away’ is the regretful inscription below another drawing of a crumbling mill. Indeed, Watson’s progress from the most detailed surviving preparatory drawing for The Pioneer Mill to the painting itself evinces an increasing emphasis on age and disuse, as if the artist’s steps towards the final painting recapitulated the decline in the family’s fortunes from one generation to the next. The drawing includes a male figure carrying an object that may be a fishing pole.57 But in the finished painting that figure has been changed into an elderly man with a long white beard. Rather than carrying a pole over his shoulder, he leans upon a stick or cane for support. The tall, flourishing tree that anchors the left side of the drawing has become a corpse: a dead trunk, exposed roots and a few remaining but lifeless branches. The roof and walls of the mill itself show the damage wrought by time, and the foliage that merely surrounds the building in the drawing now overwhelms it.

These points of transition between the preparatory drawing and the painting demonstrate that The Pioneer Mill, perhaps more than any other art work by Watson, embodies the moral tensions he felt between linked binaries: nature and progress, creation and destruction, civilization and excess. Of those pairs, progress, creation and civilization were closely associated with the whole phenomenon of pioneering. Significantly, throughout his long life, Watson described himself as a proud grandson of homesteading pioneers. ‘[M]y love’, he wrote, late in life, ‘has always been where cultivation went on to furnish a living to men who came out of the pioneer stage to a more refined rural life, where people were growing into what Canada will be more and more.’58

4 George Agnew Reid, Logging, 1888, oil on canvas, 107.4 × 194 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: copyright © 2013 NGC.

This dedication to pioneer activities and values was far from an isolated point of view. Nineteenth-century Ontario was fixated on the figure of the pioneer as the embodiment of enterprise, persistence, resourcefulness and bravery.59 Over the course of the half century beginning in 1850 there appeared hundreds of Ontario pioneer-related fiction and non-fiction publications of every type, the best known today being memoirs by the English immigrant sisters Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, including Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, or, Life in Canada (1852), Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (1853) and Life in the Backwoods: A Sequel to Roughing It in the Bush (1887). Many in this genre cast pioneers as noble warriors felling trees that are described as worthy opponents: as ‘Caesars’ (in Alexander McLachlan’s poem ‘The Emigrant’ of 1861) and ‘kings’ (in Isabella Valancy Crawford’s 1884 poem ‘Malcolm’s Katie: A Love Story’).60 The same themes appeared in art. George Agnew Reid’s sizeable 1888 painting Logging [4] was described by him as representing ‘a phase of the development of Canada which in its main aspects ended about seventy-five years ago in old Ontario, where the farms were cleared by the heaping together of the large and small logs and brush’.61 Nine years later Reid donated two large mural paintings to decorate Toronto’s city hall: The Arrival of the Pioneers and Staking a Pioneer Farm. Moreover, the huge (and hugely popular) Toronto Industrial Exhibition annually included a pioneer-style log cabin, built to order on the site. In 1879, exploiting the truism that pioneer values and skills were all too lacking in modern society, the Mail remarked that the cabin had been built by ‘old men … who are still capable of performing work which, if imposed on young men, would make them wish they never were born’.62

But if the pioneers encapsulated progress, creation and civilization, what followed on from their arrival in southern Ontario also had a dark side. In Wellington County, where European settlement had begun in about 1820, it was estimated in 1881 that the length of time between initial settlement in relentlessly treed bush and the occupation of all the available land and the need to import firewood was a mere twenty-five years.63 There is no reason to believe that the situation in neighbouring Waterloo County was any different. In paintings such as Log-Cutting in the Woods [5], Watson envisioned human economic activity taking place within a natural setting of which it makes use but which it does not push beyond the bounds of sustainability. However, it had been in 1880 – the year The Pioneer Mill was completed, exhibited and sold – that the first warning was raised that the felling of woodlands along the Grand River was resulting in flooding: a new phenomenon in the area.64 Only about a decade later, Watson’s unpublished essays ‘A Landscape Painter’s Day’ and ‘The Village’ were unequivocal about how the sawmill built by his grandfather had eventually undercut its own viability by destroying the trees upon which it depended. ‘A Landscape Painter’s Day’ describes its author’s thoughts when, during a thunderstorm, he took shelter in the by-then abandoned mill:

5 Homer Watson, Log-Cutting in the Woods, 1894, oil on canvas, 45.7 × 61 cm. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, gift of Lord Strathcona and family. Photo: Brian Merrett.

The Pioneer Mill, more than any other of his art works, was the ground on which Watson worked through the tensions between the admiration he and his society had for local pioneers, and his deeply personal awareness of the ultimately destructive relationship between the pioneers and the environment that had originally sustained them.

Postscript

Two decades after writing ‘A Landscape Painter’s Day’, Watson would take very public action to strike a balance between the advantages of pioneer activities and the ensuing loss of the qualities that made rural life so desirable. In 1913 he became instrumental in a successful campaign to preserve a wooded area near his home and studio: a tract threatened by population growth and the corresponding demand for more land to develop. As a key organizer and the president of Waterloo County Grand River Park Limited, he helped to raise funds to buy and preserve the forty-acre stand of trees named Cressman’s Woods (rechristened Homer Watson Memorial Park in 1944), located next to Doon. The site was about to be auctioned and was expected to be purchased by an entrepreneur who was determined to replace the trees with something more ‘civilized’.66 Fittingly, the warning that Watson had tried to convey in The Pioneer Mill about an ultimately self-defeating relationship between civilization and nature was marshalled by him again in 1913, this time to thwart a twentieth-century version of that same menace. In the next year, however, began the war that would employ technology of unprecedented rapaciousness to inflict devastation upon the natural and built environments of Europe. The Pioneer Mill became, more than ever, a symbol of the unrecoverable past.

The years following the successful preservation of Cressman’s Woods were not kind to Homer Watson. His wife Roxa died in January 1918. Deeply distressed, he began to take solace in spiritualist séances and in doctored photographs that showed him surrounded by the translucent bodies of deceased relatives and friends, much as his paintings and drawings of settler life captured fondly recalled but increasingly ghostly rural and pioneer histories. His eclipse as a key figure in contemporary Canadian art was implicit in the rise of the Group of Seven, whose frankly modernist approaches to picture-making he occasionally admired but which he also criticized for proposing too narrow a definition of ‘Canadian’ and for focusing too much on landscapes that rarely contained Euro-Canadian settlements of much significance. (‘Let him [the artist] paint where he can dominate the scene, and not be dominated by the scene’, Watson advised.67) As if to emphasize his outmoded status, the Depression blighted his final years by plunging him into financial chaos from which he never recovered.

In 1957, however, two decades after Watson’s death, the pioneer ethos to which he had been so devoted was made the subject of what was hoped to be a revival. In that year, the Doon Pioneer Village was opened to the public. Its goal was to celebrate the settlers of Ontario and especially those of the Grand River area, commemorating a period in which (according to one proponent of the project) ‘men and women had purpose, perseverance, thrift and sincerity, qualities not as prevalent in our own age’.68 In an almost painful bit of irony, the location proposed for the Village in 1954 was Cressman’s Woods, although that plan was, mercifully, scuttled. Over the next two decades, the outdoor museum acquired large numbers of buildings and artefacts, many with little or no connection to the district around Doon or even to the pioneer era. The driving force was instead a fuzzy, generalized nostalgia for ‘old things’ of every description: an approach very different from the intensely personal presentation of local scenery and architecture by which Watson had established his credibility and reputation. Not until the implementation of a 1979 master plan was this ahistorical tactic abandoned, but at the cost of redefining the museum’s focus away from the pioneer era altogether. From now on, the site, renamed Doon Heritage Crossroads, would present ‘a typical, rural Waterloo County crossroads of 1914’.69 Nineteen-fourteen marked, ironically enough, the definitive arrival of twentiethcentury modernity in the form of the First World War: a phenomenon in opposition to everything for which Watson’s depictions of Doon and its landmarks stood and were valued. By that time, however, Watson’s bucolic but (as in The Pioneer Mill) conflicted imagery had already established itself as a template for the ambiguity that the work of Harold Innis, Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood and others would enshrine as the pervading relationship between Canadians and the landscapes that surround them.

1 An earlier, more detailed version of this essay was published in the Journal of Canadian Art History, vol. 33 no. 1 (Spring 2012), as part of a two-volume homage to the Québécois art historian François-Marc Gagnon. I am very grateful to the Journal, and especially to Sandra Paikowsky, who conceived the project, for their permission to publish this reworked version of that text.

2 Harold Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History, rev. edn (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1977), pp. 392–3.

3 Northrop Frye, ‘Conclusion’, in Carl F. Klinck (ed.), Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1965).

4 Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (House of Anansi Press: Toronto, 1972).

5 Margaret Atwood, ‘Death by Landscape’, in Atwood, Wilderness Tips (McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 1991), p. 102.

6 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press: New York, 1975).

7 For example: John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and New York, 1980); David Solkin, Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction (Tate Gallery: London, 1982); and Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986).

8 Andrew Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and New York, 1992), p. 8.

9 Homer Watson, ‘The Methods of Some Great Landscape Painters’ (1900), in Gerald Noonan, Refining the Real Canada: Homer Watson’s Spiritual Landscape (mlr editions canada: Waterloo, Ontario, 1997), pp. 267–8.

10 Homer Watson to John M. Lyle, 15 February 1933 (Homer Watson fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives).

11 Ibid.

12 Quoted in Jane VanEvery, With Faith, Ignorance and Delight: Homer Watson (Homer Watson Trust: Doon, 1967), p. 47.

13 ‘Ontario Society of Artists: Seventh Annual Exhibition – Second Day’, Toronto Globe, 17 May 1879.

14 Oliver Millar, The Victorian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1992), p. 280.

15 ‘Academy of the Arts’, Toronto Globe, 9 March 1880.

16 Thomas D. King, ‘Fine Arts at the Capital’, Canadian Spectator, vol. 3, no. 12 (20 March 1880), p. 137.

17 ‘Comparatively unaided by culture’: ‘Art Association of Montreal: Exhibition of Works by Canadian Artists’, Montreal Gazette, 14 April 1880. ‘Back woods’: ‘Something To Be Proud Of’, Montreal Daily Witness, 14 April 1880.

18 Katherine Hale, ‘The Art of Homer Watson: A Leading Canadian Landscape Artist’, Canadian Magazine, vol. 20, no. 2 (December 1902), p. 140.

19 The breastshot wheel – the most common North American type – rotated when falling water struck it near the centre of the wheel’s circumference. The undershot wheel – the oldest type, commonly used in conjunction with shallow running water – rotated when water struck the bottom of the wheel.

20 Among the paintings dated 1879 are: The Grist Mill (71 × 56 cm; private collection), Old Mill and Stream (60 × 88 cm; Castle Kilbride, Baden, Ontario) and The Old Mill (34.0 × 60.5 cm; Homer Watson House and Gallery, Doon).

21 Rosemarie L. Tovell, ‘Homer Watson’s The Pioneer Mill: The Making and Marketing of a Print in the Canadian Etching Revival’, Journal of Canadian Art History, vol. 31, no. 2 (2011), pp. 12–36.

22 John Macarthur, ‘The Heartlessness of the Picturesque: Sympathy and Disgust in Ruskin’s Aesthetics’, Assemblage, vol. 32 (April 1997), pp. 126–41.

23 ‘The Brook and the Mill: How the Brook Went to Mill’, Scribner’s Monthly, vol. 8, no. 2 (June 1874), pp. 199–201.

24 Kenneth W. Maddox, In Search of the Picturesque: Nineteenth-Century Images of Industry along the Hudson River Valley (Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Milton and Sally Avery Center for the Arts: Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 1983), p. 19.

25 J. Russell Harper, Homer Watson, R.C.A., 1855–1936: Paintings and Drawings (National Gallery of Canada: Ottawa, 1963), n.p.

26 The Aldine: The Art Journal of America, vol. 7, no. 12 (December 1874), back cover. See also ‘The Old Mill’, The Aldine: A Typographic Art Journal, vol. 6, no. 6 (June 1873), p. 126; and ‘The Old Mill’, The Aldine: The Art Journal of America, vol. 9, no. 9 (September 1879), p. 278.

27 O. B. Bunce, ‘Scenes on the Brandywine’, in William Cullen Bryant (ed.), Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In, vol. 1 (D. Appleton and Company: New York, 1874), p. 222. Woodward’s antebellum mill imagery is discussed in Sue Rainey and Roger B. Stein, Shaping the Landscape Image, 1865–1910: John Douglas Woodward (Bayly Art Museum, University of Virginia: Charlottesville, 1997), pp. 28–9.

28 Darrell A. Norris, ‘Migration, Pioneer Settlement, and the Life Course: The First Families of an Ontario Township’, in Donald H. Akenson (ed.), Canadian Papers in Rural History, vol. 4 (Langdale Press: Gananoque, Ontario, 1984), pp. 130–52.

29 Felicity Leung, Grist and Flour Mills in Ontario: From Millstones to Rollers, 1780s to 1880s (History and Archaeology series, no. 53) (National Historic Parks and Sites Branch, Parks Canada, Environment Canada: Ottawa, 1981), p. 89.

30 Geoffrey Hayes, Waterloo County: An Illustrated History (Waterloo Historical Society: Kitchener, 1997), p. 15.

31 G. T. Bloomfield and Elizabeth Bloomfield, ‘Water Wheels and Steam Engines: Powered Establishments of Ontario’, in Elizabeth Bloomfield (ed.), Canadian Industry in 1871, Research Report, no. 2 (University of Guelph: Guelph, Ontario, 1989), p. 8.

32 On the shift from traditional grindstone to gradual-reduction roller milling, see Leung, Grist and Flour Mills in Ontario, op. cit.; and Leung, ‘Grist and Flour Mills in Ontario: Their Technological Development, 1780–1880’, in Alan A. Brookes (ed.), Fourth Annual Agricultural History of Ontario Seminar: Proceedings (University of Guelph: Guelph, Ontario, 1979), pp. 6–39.

33 Gazetteer and Directory of Waterloo County, cited in Leung, Grist and Flour Mills in Ontario, op. cit., pp. 205–6.

34 Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr, ‘Winslow Homer’s (So-Called) Morning Bell’, American Art Journal, vol. 29, no. 12 (1998), p. 6.

35 ESSIE, ‘A Day with Nature’, Berlin News-Record, 19 August 1898.

36 Hayes, Waterloo County, op. cit., p. 62.

37 Elizabeth Bloomfield, ‘Building the City on a Foundation of Factories: The Industrial Policy in Berlin, Ontario, 1870–1914’, Ontario History, vol. 75, no. 3 (1983), pp. 207–8; Hayes, Waterloo County, op. cit., p. 62.

38 A. O. Kummer, ‘Reminiscences of A. O. Kummer, Early Settler, Doon’, Waterloo Historical Society, Annual Volume, no. 52, 1965, pp. 63–4.

39 Thomas L. M. Tipton, ‘At the Mouth of the Grand’, Canadian Magazine, vol. 1 (1893), p. 350.

40 George Miller Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (1881), quoted in D. M. R. Bentley, ‘Charles G. D. Roberts and William Wilfred Campbell as Canadian Tour Guides’, Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 32, no. 2 (Summer 1997), p. 86.

41 Paul Rutherford, ‘Tomorrow’s Metropolis: The Urban Reform Movement in Canada’, Canadian Historical Association Papers (Canadian Historical Association: Ottawa, 1971), pp. 203–24.

42 Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1969), p. xviii.

43 Allan Smith, ‘Farms, Forests and Cities: The Image of the Land and the Rise of the Metropolis in Ontario, 1860–1914’, in David Keane and Colin Read (eds.), Old Ontario: Essays in Honour of J. M. S. Careless (Dundurn Press: Toronto, 1990), p. 79.

44 Hayes, Waterloo County, op. cit., pp. 99–100; Roy I. Wolfe, ‘The Summer Resorts of Ontario in the Nineteenth Century’, Ontario History, vol. 54 (September 1962), p. 159.

45 The popularity of the area with artists of all kinds is documented in the Berlin Daily Record newspaper, including ‘Town Topics’, 24 July 1893, and ‘Art School’, 27 September 1893.

46 Quoted in ‘Fresh Air Youngsters’, Berlin News-Record, 10 July 1893.

47 Angela L. Miller, ‘Nature’s Transformations: The Meaning of the Picnic Theme in Nineteenth-Century American Art’, Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 24, no. 2/3 (Summer–Autumn 1989), p. 124. Doon area picnic getaways of five and six hundred people are mentioned in ‘Doon’, Berlin Daily Record, 1 November 1894.

48 Primary sources for Wilde’s reaction to Watson’s art include: ‘Oscar at the Gallery’, Toronto Telegram, 25 May 1882; ‘Art Decoration’, Toronto Daily Mail, 26 May 1882; and ‘Oscar Wilde’, Toronto Globe, 26 May 1882. Wilde’s Canadian tour as a whole is the subject of Kevin O’Brien, Oscar Wilde in Canada: An Apostle for the Arts (Personal Library: Toronto, 1982), while his views on art in Canada are discussed in detail in Kevin O’Brien, ‘Oscar Wilde and Canadian Artists’, Antigonish Review, vol. 1, no. 4 (Winter 1971), pp. 11–28.

49 Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape Painting and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York, 1990).

50 Quoted in Wyly Grier, ‘Art Notes’, The Week, vol. 12, no. 11 (8 February 1895), p. 258.

51 ‘Art Notes’, The Week, vol. 9, no. 10, 8 April 1892, p. 298.

52 R. C. Reade, ‘Hermits of Art’, Toronto Star Weekly, 4 May 1929, p. 3.

53 The building in The Pioneer Mill differs somewhat from the one depicted in Watson’s drawing titled My Grandfather’s Sawmill (Sketchbook Z, 7898.18, National Gallery of Canada). The artist later insisted that ‘[w]hen I want to paint a picture I make a number of studies of things I want to put in the composition and when I have these done I sit down in my studio and paint as suits my fancy using the sketches where I feel they suit’ (quoted in R. M. Fleming, ‘Homer Watson, Painter of Canadian Pictures’, Ottawa Journal, 15 November 1913).

54 Homer Watson, ‘A Return to the Village’, in Noonan, Refining the Real Canada, op. cit., pp. 310–11.

55 Elizabeth Bloomfield and Linda Foster, Families and Communities of Waterloo Township in 1861 (Caribou Imprints: Guelph, Ontario, 1995), p. 18; Muriel Miller, Homer Watson: The Man of Doon (Summerhill Press: Toronto, 1988), pp. 22–3.

56 Roxa Watson to Susan Mohr Watson (mother) and Phoebe Watson (sister), 5 May 1888 (Homer Watson fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives).

57 Homer Watson, Sketchbook B, 7874.1v and 7874.1r, National Gallery of Canada.

58 Homer Watson to Arthur Lismer, 30 September [1930], (Homer Watson fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives). This aspect of Watson’s thought is considered throughout Noonan, Refining the Real Canada, op. cit.

59 Michael Bunce, in The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of Landscape (Routledge: London and New York, 1994), argues that whereas the British rural landscape was valued primarily in aesthetic (often picturesque) terms, the North American ideal ‘has tended to value the settled rural landscape more as a symbol of agricultural progress and of bygone lifestyles’ (p. 36).

60 Susan Glickman, The Picturesque and the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape (McGill-Queen’s University Press: Montreal and Kingston, 1998), p. 47. The valorization of pioneer themes in Victorian Canadian literature is also addressed in Susan Wood, The Land in Canadian Prose, 1880–1945 (Carleton University: Ottawa, 1988), and Carole Gerson, A Purer Taste: The Writing and Reading of Fiction in English in Nineteenth-Century Canada (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1989).

61 George Agnew Reid, typed note dated 7 October 1941, in Reid Scrapbook no. 1, p. 132 (Edward P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario).

62 ‘The Industrial Exhibition’, Toronto Mail, 25 September 1879.

63 Elizabeth Waterston and Douglas Hoffman (eds.), On Middle Ground: Landscape and Life in Wellington County 1841–1891 (University of Guelph: Guelph, Ontario, 1974), p. 31.

64 Hayes, Waterloo County, op. cit., p. 189.

65 Homer Watson, ‘A Landscape Painter’s Day’, quoted in VanEvery, With Faith, Ignorance and Delight, op. cit., pp. 61–2.

66 See especially David Brownstein, ‘Early Conservation Efforts in Waterloo County’, Waterloo Historical Society, Annual Volume, no. 86, 1998, pp. 17–31.

67 Quoted in Noonan, Refining the Real Canada, op. cit., p. 27.

68 Mary Tivy, ‘Dreams and Nightmares: Changing Visions of the Past at Doon Pioneer Village’, Ontario History, vol. 94, no. 1 (Spring 2002), p. 84. My entire discussion of Doon Pioneer Village is heavily indebted to Tivy’s excellent analysis.

69 Ibid., p. 93–4.