So Where are Carleton Place’s Comrie Signs? Thanks Jeff Maguire!

Some of you asked after I posted the Comrie/ Carleton Place signs this week where ours were in Carleton Place?

Well thanks to Jeff Maguire we have our answers. Thank you Jeff and Kathy!!

All Photos by Jeff and Kathy Maguire in this section.

Dear Linda:

    As promised, here are photos I took this morning of the Sister City sign on Town Line East. The sign faces people entering town from Almonte. As you will see in the first frame this particular sign is really too far from the road to be clearly seen (read). Not by motorists at least.

     The other two signs in town are located on Town Line West (entering CP just past Dulmage Drive (before St. Gregory elementary school) and on Franktown Road (on the left side as you enter town from Highways 7/15 and just past Alexander St.)

     The sign on Town Line West is easily the most readable for people in motor vehicles. Kathy and I went on a sign reconnaissance mission today, LOL!

      However, the sign on Franktown Rd. is currently totally obscured by overhanging tree branches and other growth (vines etc.). That material needs to be cut down as it is also obscuring many of the service club signs under the Sister City sign. (All three signs are mounted on the same type of frame which also supports several service club signs, as you see in these photos).

      I will say that the existing signs here have stood up very well (they’ve been there for many years) and they are in amazingly good condition. Whoever made them did a very good job.

      Still, that said, we really need much larger signs Linda. Our committee ( Sister City) has talked about that in the past but never acted on the idea. Also, in my opinion, there should be a fourth sign on McNeely Avenue, around the corner from Highway 7. Vehicles move relatively slowly at that location which means it could be easily read. I would also like to see three small flags emblazoned on each new sign – our Maple Leaf flag of course, the Scottish Saltire and the Stars and Stripes.

Photo in Comrie, Scotland

       Also here I have attached a good photo of one of the twinning signs in Comrie, Scotland which I took a few years ago. Their signs are the biggest and best Sister City signs I have seen anywhere Linda and there are four of them as I recall. Franklin, Tennessee has some signs up at entrances to the city as well. But they are roughly the same size as our current signs here. They aren’t very readable as I recall. TOO small! (I have pictures of them somewhere but I couldn’t locate them readily today unfortunately.)

       Anyway, there is a synopsis of our Sister City sign situation Linda. Hope this helps? Have a great Tuesday!

CHEERS – Jeffrey

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Comrie Signs sent by our Carleton Place folk that visited Comrie.

Linda Seccaspina August 1 2022
Today is a special day in Carleton Place-It is our Twin City Anniversary–Carleton Place-Comrie Twinning 30th anniversary. We will be having a ZOOM call with them at 2 pm.
#Comrie #carletonplace #twincities #scotland

Donna Mcfarlane

friends of ours also posed with a sign .. We mentioned to them that my husbands ancestors came from comrie.

Jody Tubman
· Comrie, United Kingdom  · July 29,2022

After a day of leaving Skye, and exploring Eilean Donan Castle and the Highlands between there and here, we have arrived in Comrie!

Fáilte!
— with Ross Tubman at The Royal Hotel Comrie.

Jody Tubman–August 3,2022

  · 

Just a submitted photo that someone wanted to remain anonymous..

Jody TubmanThis handsome boy is Henry. He was with his mum and dad at the hotel’s pub, and he made so many friends that night! July 29,2022-
— at The Royal Hotel Comrie.

2022-August-OMG Happiness is Carleton Place… Thank you for doing this..
Christina Fex Nichols
Hi Linda – The last show for the 2022 Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo was last night. Before heading home to Canada this week, we stopped by Comrie Scotland for a picture, enroute to Inverness!
Wesley Nichols, Christina Nichols, Victoria Nichols & Brady Fleming
#happinessiscarletonplace #Comrie #community

Jody Tubman Comrie, United Kingdom  · 



— at The Royal Hotel Comrie.

— at The Royal Hotel Comrie.

Jody Tubman
 Comrie, United Kingdom  · 


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2001

The kids at Carambeck who wrote pen pal letters to our twin city in Comrie.. Mrs. McDiarmid teacher and I believe Joyce Tennant did the card as she was part of the Twinning Commitee

1980s visit to Comrie?

Sharing Carleton Place memories with Comrie Scotland our twin city–
Linda Berg–I was there 2 years ago…I went to boarding school in Crieff which is the next town. There’s no high school in Comrie so the exchange students go to school in Crieff which I consider my second home.
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Comrie and Carleton Place

Another Segment in the Short Life of Jessie Comrie– Residential Schools –1919

Written in the interests of the Presbyterial of Lanark and Renfrew, and addressed to the members of the Women’s Missionary Society by Miss Jessie Comrie, of Carleton Place.

In a treaty made with our Dominion Government and made with the Indians.

In 1871 there was the promise of schools for their children; to fulfill that promise our Government has undertaken a share in this work and recognizing the necessity of giving the Indians an education under Christian influences gave over the work to the different churches.

The churches have taken a part in the educational work among the Indians, believing that it would afford them an opening for Christian work among these people. The church expects the school to make the Christian work the centre and soul of all the training and teaching of every department. To lose sight of this purpose would be to not only fail In carrying out the plan of our church, but to fail in doing the Indian children any real good.

In 1866 mission work for the Indians was begun by the Presbyterian church among tribes that were untouched by any church, and in 1876 the women of our church were organized for missionary work and since then have supported teachers in the mission-schools for the Indian children.

The spiritual growth is slow as in all pagan lands, but steady advance has been made and present results are largely attributed to the secular and religious training the children have received in our schools. The teaching of the Bible each day and in Sabbath schools, morning and evening family ’ worship and thehourly,- association with Christian workers are no small factors in training our Indian boys and girls for Christian citizenship. 

There are 550 children under our care in the day and boarding schools. It is the opinion of our workers among these people that the boarding school is the best adapted to give the boys and girls a thorough education and best results so far have come from these schools.

Some of the day schools are semi boarding schools, for the children to come long distances. The Government has given an allowance that provides them with a mid-day meal which the missionary teachers make ready with the help of the older children.

The Cecilia Jeffrey Residential school – CLICK

Two of the boarding schools are in Manitoba, two of them in Saskatchewan, two in British Columbia and one In Ontario, named the “Cecilia Jeffrey” in memory of one of our secretaries in Indian work in the early years.This school is forty-five miles from the town of Kenora. In these schools each child, with the consent of the parents, is signed into the school and remains there until he or she is eighteen years of age. 

They study the public school course. The older boys and girls spend only half of each day in the school room, the other half they are being taught to do useful work, and helping to do the work of the institution. The aim is to give them industrial work that will be most useful in after life, the boys to till the ground, and the girls to cook wholesome food and tend to a family.

To be in a position to give this industrial training a few years ago, the Government made a number of new regulations, requiring more accommodation in all boarding schools as well as sufficient land around the school to make such a training possible; it being the wish of the Government  that sooner or later all the children be sent to a boarding school where a better industrial training is possible than in the day school. Our Woman’s Missionary Society has made it possible for the children to be kept in school by sending clothing for them every year. This supply work by the women of the Church, has been responded to generously, remembering our Master’s words:

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these ye have done it unto Me.”

But what is being done for the Indians by Church and State is only a just debt and should never be considered in the light of charity.The fruits of our mission work are seen to-day in the second generation of Indian youth who are entering our schools. Misa McGregor, our field secretary, who taught for eight years in an Indian school, urges us to “Go forward doing what we can to further this work,” because of what has been achieved in the past, and because of its possibilities. Our missionaries have had the joy of seeing many of the young accept a Saviour, who is not of the white man’s , alone, but the Indians, too. Their vision in the not far distant future is a rising generation of Christian Indian citizens in a land once theirs now ours and theirs. ■ JESSIE COMRIE, Carleton Place

Jessie Comrie drowned in Sept of 1928– was it accidental or murder most fowl? READ-

Murder or Accident — Bates & Innes Flume

When the Past Comes A Haunting- Jessie Comrie

Charlie arrived at the Cecilia Jeffrey School, which is run by the Presbyterian Church and paid for by the federal government, in the fall of 1963. Some 150 Indian children live at the school but are integrated into the local school system. Consequently, Cecilia Jeffrey is, for 10 months in the year, really nothing more than an enormous dormitory. And Charlie, who understood hardly any English, spent the first two years in grade one. He spent last year in what is called a junior opportunity class. That means he was a slow learner and had to be given special instruction in English and arithmetic. This fall he wasn’t quite good enough to go back into the grade system, so he was placed in what is called a senior opportunity class. read more here

Murder or Accident — Bates & Innes Flume

When the Past Comes A Haunting- Jessie Comrie

Name:	Jessie Comrie
Gender:	Female
Age:	70
Birth Date:	abt 1858
Birth Place:	Montague, Ontario
Death Date:	5 Sep 1928
Death Place:	Lanark, Ontario, Canada
Cause of Death:	Drowned

*Jessie Comrie- Nurse to all the Muirhead children Death Notice–Mary Gillies Muirhead posted this note on this death card.–From the collection of Linda Seccaspina–

Presbyterian Church 1888

Different Seasons of Witches in Lanark County

Different Seasons (1982) is a collection of four Stephen King novellas with a more serious dramatic bent than the horror fiction for which King is famous. The four novellas are tied together via subtitles that relate to each of the four seasons. The collection is notable for having had three of its four novellas turned into Hollywood films, one of which, The Shawshank Redemption, was nominated for the 1994 Academy Award for Best Picture.

In July of 1995 Stephen King’s Different Seasons became the centre of a hot literary discussion in Lanark County. English heads of the local schools chose this collection of novellas to be the standard senior high school reading list partly on the basis of its  reluctant readers, and later the board of trustees voted to have it removed from the list. Unruffled by it all and maybe thrilled it was on a short banned list King offered free copies to all those who were interested. (Writing Horror and the Body- The Fiction of Stephen King etc.)

Why did they ban the books with supernatural content I asked myself?

Was it because some had remembered the stories of a forgotten feature of Lanark County that was once full of charms, divination and superstitions?  It has been said the folklore came over from the old countries and the goblins and faeries were still seen from time to time.

There were still the tales of children disappearing and substituting faeries in their place in the highlands. Some still thought there were folks that held mystical power  like  poor *Reverend Buchanan was allegedly charged with.  You had to watch your neighbour carefully as the evil eye to make crops shrivel up and cow’s milk dry up was still afoot. Some even tried to end quarrels by creating effigies of clay of their suspicious neighbours donned with pins and then placing it in a stream. If you did it correctly it was said to end the quarrel of all quarrels.

In 1823 ghosts and witches were reportedly still seen in Beckwith and supposedly interfering with maple sap, milk and crops. But the house gatherings continued if there was no local churches to ward off bad luck. The crozier, the holy Quigrich a relic of St. Fillan, which had spiritual and healing  had been dipped into the water of Andrew Dewar’s farm on the 8th concession in Beckwith. It still drew locals to obtain some of the holy water on Dewar’s Farm to remedy sick cattle. Bibles were supposed to be invested with magical powers and the settlers held a trial by ordeal and spun a bible to see who the culprit was in the community was. Farmers would hire strangers said to remove the bad charms or hexs on their cows.

In the 1840s and 1850s  The Carleton Place Herald launched an attack on the continuing belief of the supernatural in everyday life. Editor James Poole was horrified to learn the sheriff consulted The Witch of Plum Hollow on a murder case and made his point in the press.

But eventually superstition gave way to religion and the locals cast their many doubts on churches instead of hexes on cows. The Carleton Place Herald flip flopped from witches over to religion in a fight with the United Church of England and yes once again- Ireland. The paper tried feverishly to distance the Anglicans and the Presbyterians  and pit them against each other. Of course Carleton Place led the foray and one day in 1852 a group of Presbyterians threw a pig in one of the windows of the local Anglican Church.

There were no fewer places to worship there than three in the village: a stone building that was so run down God would certainly pass it over and not venture in the shattered windows and two wooden buildings that the doors were locked and the voice of prayer hushed. Carleton Place was described on Sundays with hardly a living creature seen except for the occasional pig. There were only two things to do on Sunday in town: go to church or enjoy the tales of *Napoleon Lavallee at his hotel who could keep you up to date with the Sciences and Arts and maybe Australian sheep.

Did you know that Carleton Place’s twin city Comrie in Scotland is just 15 miles from where the witches were  mentioned in Shakespeare’s Macbeth?

Scotland fully accepted the Christian witch theory so that when one witch was found, others were hunted out– so it is no surprise the Scots that emigrated here brought their superstitions. Prior to 1590, it seems that witchcraft was seen as a minor issue by those in power in Scotland.  Witches were accused of attempting to drown  King James by calling up a storm while he was at sea with his new wife. Other charges include trying to kill the wing by melting a wax effigy of him (note clay effigy in stream above). They were also accused of performing perverted rituals in a church in Berwick – though it is not clear what this had to do specifically with trying to kill the king. However, it did point the way to witchcraft and it is thought that over one hundred witches were actually put on trial. It is said that a large number were executed but there is accurate no figure for this. I can happily report that no witches in Lanark County were harmed–at least I think so. Your story might be better than mine:)

 

Witches. —Because we are deriving very little and in some cases no butter from our
travelling starved cows, many believe the cream is bewitched by a maliciously inclined
man or woman, supposed to receive power from the devil. It is astonishing how many Protestants, even church members,believe as strongly in superstition than they do in the Bible. We are inclined to ask what Protestant religion is doing when superstition is cultivated to such an alarming extent, W e must be getting back near the time when the witches were burned, and perhaps in our next we can give you the gratifying news of the capture and burning of this one.–Almonte Gazette Pakenham August 6 1880

The relic was actually a filigreed silver case which enclosed the original bronze head of St. Fillan’s staff of 750 AD, and it was here in Beckwith from 1818-1850. Son Alexander, the last Keeper, sold it to the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh Scotland on 30 Dec 1876 for 700 dollars. Rumour was they needed the money, but I can’t even imagine having to part with something that was in the family that long.

With files from Beckwith by Glenn J. Lockwood and Lanark Legacy by Howard Morton Brown

Come and visit the Lanark County Genealogical Society Facebook page– what’s there? Cool old photos–and lots of things interesting to read.

Information where you can buy all Linda Seccaspina’s books-You can also read Linda in Hometown News and now in The Townships Sun

 

*The Gnarled Beckwith Oak

What I Did on Beckwith Heritage Days – Alexander Stewart – Ballygiblin Heroe

Beckwith –Settlers — Sir Robert the Bruce— and Migrating Turtles

Crosier, known as The Coigrich, associated with St Fillan of Glendochart

The Dewar Plaque

The Witches of Rochester Street

Hocus Pocus –Necromancy at Fitch Bay

The Witch of Plum Hollow – Carleton Place Grandmother

The Witch Hollow of Lanark County

*The Napoleon of Carleton Place