by Laurence Hutchman
Place has a significant role in a writer’s life and their works; James Joyce has Dublin, William Faulkner Oxford County, and our own Al Purdy Ameliasburgh to name a few. When I lived in Europe for almost two years in my early 20s, I was very impressed by the architecture and history of major cities. I thought about the place where I grew up, Habitant Drive, as part of the new subdivision, the Humber River surrounded by hills and fields. It seemed to me that this area did not have an important history. Later, when I was attending Western University and universities in Montreal, I almost forgot about this place in North York.
However, my perception of Emery changed in 1987 when I was finishing my doctoral dissertation on the poetry of Margaret Avison, Al Purdy and John Newlove, and living in a stone house in the village of Dewittville in the Chateauguay Valley. Here, overlooking the river and surroundings I was reminded of the Humber and its ravines, and I started to write poems about Emery. One night I dreamed that I was looking at a maquette, a miniature village of Emery with its farmhouses, church and a two-room schoolhouse. It reminded me of that reconstructed village in the attic in the film Beetlejuice. While examining this replica of Emery, I heard a farmer on the other side of a fence calling to me with friendly urgency, “Come and visit us, we have stories to tell you.” I recognized the farmer’s field. It was such a familiar place from my childhood.
In 1992 at the 25th anniversary of the League of Canadian Poets, in Victoria College at the University of Toronto, I was talking to James Reaney and Colleen Thibaudeau. I had become friends with James during my year at Western University when I took over his course in Canadian literature after he retired. His wife, Colleen Thibaudeau introduced me to her sister, Sheila Lambrinos, who lived in the Emery area, and had written a booklet about the history of this community. The historical account began with the arrival of the Devins family, who came with Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe in 1791. Abraham Devins and his four sons, Isaac, Levi, Simeon, and John travelled from New York after the American Revolution to find refuge in a new country. It had the ring of Genesis when Abraham and his family left for Canaan. Accompanying Sheila’s booklet were two maps. One of them was a map of the original settlers of Emery with the dates indicating when they purchased their lots–families such as the Rowntrees, Watsons, Duncans, and Griffiths. If the first map was a more objective map of the history of the families of Emery, the second map was more personal. It contained the places on the map I had explored as a young boy: the Emery station, Emery church and the Emery Public School. I knew the children that lived on those farms, the McCulloughs, the Kilmers, and the Fosters. My experiences were interwoven with these people. And I knew that I would write a book about Emery.
That year in the Chateauguay Valley I had already begun to write poems about Crang’s Pond, Italian Gardens, and Sportsland Park. My friend, Les Kelly and I had spent time cycling out to explore the different parts of Emery. One day after school, we were up on the second ridge of the hill near the old farmhouse when suddenly a man seemed to appear almost out of nowhere with a barking dog and he started to run toward us with a gun in his hand. “Get off my land,” he was shouting. He chased us, and we ran down the steep hill.
A couple of years later Les and I were walking along the railway tracks we noticed that the old house seemed to be deserted. We were cautious. The old door creaked as we opened it and we stepped into a house that looked as if the owner had suddenly just left. There was still furniture, a coal oil lamp, an embroidered sign on the faded wallpaper, “God Bless Our Home.” Among the glass splinters were postcards and in the middle of the room sat a small black chest with a curved top that resembled ones we had seen in old pirate films. We opened the box and inside it was packed with papers about the war, the major battles, photos of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at the Yalta Peace Conference.
GERMANS MARCH TOWARD STALINGRAD
HEAVY FIGHTING IN OKINAWA
It reminded me of the documentary You Are There narrated by the weighty voice of Walter Cronkite. I thought of the stories that my mother told me of Holland, the bombing of Rotterdam, and her family being hungry in winter. I wondered if the old man had been a soldier in the war. The wind whined through the shutters. Next week, unexpectedly in the Gulfstream schoolyard we saw the chest, its lid broken and the papers blowing across the Frost fence.
Slowly the farms began to disappear. One day across from the school, I noticed five yellow bulldozers clearing the vegetation of the land as curtains of dust blew across the empty fields.
I spent three summers in Toronto researching the history of Emery. I contacted Marion Rowntree, Charlie Grubbe, Jack Devins, Ray Devins and Orrie Truman and about fifteen other farmers. I visited them in Nobleton, Snowball, Peterborough, and Toronto. I spent much of my time in the archives at the North York Central Library reading articles in Remember When and I consulted Patricia W. Hart’s Pioneering in North York, Sidney T. Fisher’s The Merchant-Millers of the Humber Valley: A Study of The Early Economy of Canada, Joe Watson’s The History of the Humber, and Kathleen Macfarlane Lizars The Valley of the Humber, 1615-1913.
To write the poem on Florence Nightingale Graham, later called Elizabeth Arden, who was growing up here, I decided to find the site of her original log cabin. Jack Devins told me that the old homestead of the “cosmetic queen” was located on a piece of land on the north side of Highway 7, east of 400. When I got off the bus, I realized that I had to climb a nine-foot fence to get access to the land. I explored the area for an hour imagining how it was for the young Florence Graham growing up here. It was getting colder and darker. Suddenly I noticed two police cars with their coloured swirling lights. The policeman said, “Put your hands up, and don’t move.” I was surprised. “We had a report that you were looking for a dead friend.” I explained that I was looking for the log cabin of Elizabeth Arden, that I was a professor from the University of Moncton. After the policewoman checked my faculty card, they let me go. Later, I read two books about her sister, Gladys Graham, who owned a beauty salon in Paris and was sent to Ravensbrück, a women’s concentration camp for trying to help allied pilots to escape.
As I interviewed the farmers, I started to create lines for the poems. In some of them, which involved historical characters, I used dramatic monologues. I had been interested in this form from reading Robert Browning’s poems at university, Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, or Richard Howard’s poems on famous literary figures. I wanted to give them a sense of the historical events in the poems, “The Journey of Isaac Devins,” “Simeon Devins Dying in a Tent at Queenston Heights,” and “Clairvoyant.”
Some of the poems came directly out of my visits with the former farmers of Emery. Charlie Grubbe drove me back to the land where his farm was situated. Jack Devins gave me a tour of the Pine Ridge Cemetery in Humber Summit and spoke about former inhabitants of Emery. Ray Devins brought me to the barn where he had artifacts from Emery:
Through the furniture we sift, open the carriage maker’s chest of shining tools —these are the tools John Devins employed to make the first Studebaker. Anis uncovers an old commode, "There it is. The sorting box of the Emery Post Office.” . . . What remains of the Devins' and Emery's past in the wagon barn are old barley rakes, wooden wheels, worn saddles, old tusks from an illustration of King Solomon's Mines, I first met Orrie Truman at the end of the 1950s when I delivered The Telegram to his house. He was one of the most unusual characters that I met. He was living now in Nobleton. Aubrey Ella said his half-brother was Orrie Truman. Orrie and Aubrey lived across the road from Emery School. Orrie was punished by the principal because he climbed the schoolhouse tower on the ridges of the bricks and rang the bell. He often played hockey against the local teams on the Emery rink. After the Second World War was declared he signed up for the army. He was in England during the Battle of Britain and in 1942 he was sent to North Africa serving as a medical officer. He described what he saw in the Battle of El Alamein while treating the wounded soldiers. In Sicily after a battle, he came across the body of his friend from Humber Summit, Orval Parkes. He said that he had not talked about this in fifty years.
Around 2009 I started taking art courses at the Université de Moncton and I had the idea of painting Emery, trying to recreate it around the end of the 1950s. I formed a montage of the important places, mostly from my memories. As I was working on the painting the scenes came back: the war monument between the church and school, where we broke our chestnuts, the pump in the schoolyard, the baseball diamond, the pear orchard, the graveyard, and the ravine. I painted three scenes. One was of two boys, Les and I running down into the ravine, being chased by the farmer; I painted us jumping in the Usher barn and rafting in front of Charlie Grubbe’s house. Through these different scenes of the past, the portrait of Emery emerged.
In 1998 I published my book Emery with Black Moss Press. In 2016, I decided to collect nearly all the Emery poems and put them into the collection Two Maps of Emery. In 2017 I became poet laureate of Emery. On the historical marker erected by the Emery Village BIA just up Weston Road from the road to Emery Collegiate, the hill where the farmer chased Les and me, there is the poem “The Farmhouse” printed on a kiosk with my photo.
Laurence Hutchman grew up in Toronto. He received his Ph.D. from the Université de Montreal and has taught at a number of universities. For twenty-three years he was a professor of English literature at the Université de Moncton at the Edmundston Campus. Hutchman has published 13 books of poetry and has also co-edited the anthology Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada and edited In the Writers’ Words. His poetry has received many grants and awards, including the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence, and has been translated into numerous languages. In 2017 he was named poet laureate of Emery, north Toronto.