'Citizen' founder Keith Roulston delivers stirring sermon at Thresher Reunion church service
BY KEITH ROULSTON
“We plough the fields
and scatter
the good seed on the land,
but it is fed and watered
by God’s almighty hand;
He sends the snow in winter,
the warmth to swell the grain,
the breezes and the sunshine
and soft refreshing rain.
All good gifts around us
are sent from heaven above,
then thank the Lord,
O thank the Lord
for all his love.”
That was one of my favourite hymns from my youth. I didn’t sing it for you. I thought I’d save you the pain of my singing voice today.
I think on the farm, when I was growing up, we were particularly conscious of God. Probably farm people still are. I know that most of my neighbours in the country north of town here go to church. It’s why there are still so many churches in our small towns. When you depend on growing a crop for a living, planting the crop in spring, watching it sprout and grow, praying for rain as it gets taller, praying it doesn’t rain too much to prevent it from being safely harvested, being thankful if and when the harvest is completed, it’s all so natural, but when you farm, you can never take it for granted. If you have a job in the city and go to work and just expect that every week, or every two weeks, you will be given a pay-cheque, you can take it for granted, but not with farming.
I remember my favourite church service when I was young, back in the old Anglican church in Lucknow, was the “Harvest Home” service. We had a family that ran an orchard and they brought enough apples to line the wainscotting around the church with an apple every foot or so. There were fancy sheaves of barley or oats and tall stalks of corn and a special loaf of home-baked bread on the altar. And we sang hymns like the one I quoted at the beginning.
When I go out on the grounds of the Thresher Reunion, I can remember what it was like as a kid on our farm north of Lucknow. I see Case and Allis-Chalmers and Massey-Harris tractors like the ones my neighbours had and even Minneapolis-Moline R tractors like the one my father and uncle had to farm our home farm on Concession 4, Kinloss and my uncle’s farm on Concession 6. I grew up on a farm where we threshed (we said thrashed). We worked with the next-door neighbour. My father and uncle helped them, then they threshed us, both on our farm and at my uncle’s place on the next concession. Our neighbour powered his threshing machine with a Case. Our next-door neighbour on the other side and his brother used an Allis-Chalmers tractor-pulled combine. When we went to my uncle’s place, I remember his next-door neighbour powered the threshing machine on his farm with a steam engine.
I remember hearing about the beginning of the Thresher Reunion. I wasn’t interested in those days. I was excited about aircraft and wanted to join the air force. I pestered my parents to take me to the air show at the Centralia Air Force Base, which was on the same weekend as the Thresher Reunion - perhaps the very first one, I’m not sure. I remember watching out the car window for activity as we drove through Blyth.
I lost interest in the air force when I realized I had taken the wrong subjects to get the university course I needed to get aviation training. My mother convinced me to go to journalism school. I graduated and got a job at the Clinton News-Record in 1970 and my wife Jill and I bought the Blyth Standard in late 1971. So, from 1972 on, I have covered the Thresher Reunion.
Back then, things were much different at the Thresher Reunion. There used to be a shed near the entrance where the threshermen’s dinners were held. The old Blyth arena was still on the site. In 1976, came big changes. The provincial government, after a lengthy investigation of the 1959 Listowel arena collapse, decided that every arena must be inspected by an engineer for safety. Most arenas, including the one here, failed the test. The Blyth arena was closed and the community sprang into action. Volunteers demolished the old arena almost immediately.
The Thresher Reunion was one of the big users of the Blyth arena. Blyth was also approaching its Centennial in 1977 and wanted the arena back in use. The decision was to use the old artificial ice plant and ice surface and build a new arena on top of the old one, complete with modern dressing rooms and a new upstairs hall to hold larger dances and dinners than Memorial Hall, downtown, could hold. The new building was completed in months and was ready by the 1977 Centennial and that year’s Thresher Reunion.
Later, craft shows became a big part of rural Ontario events with the one at the Colborne Township hall leading the way. A craft show here was set up in the arena. My mother displayed her homemade crafts and her paintings there a few times back in the early days.
Another big change at the show is the camping. In the early days, a few people who wanted to stay with their equipment, brought various sorts of accommodation to stay in overnight. Later came trailers and motor homes and a camping grounds was set up that now operates for casual campers all summer long.
I knew many of the people who were important in the beginning of the Thresher Reunion. Simon Hallahan, long the secretary-treasurer of the event, became a distant neighbour when Jill and I moved to our current home.
I remember Simon joking about the annual meetings of the Thresher Reunion being held in the Orange Lodge that used to be on Dinsley Street. Simon, and all the Hallahans who were so important in the early years of the Reunion, were good Roman Catholics so, meeting in the Orange Lodge, he chuckled, seemed ironic. It’s a sign of how things have changed over the years that there’s no Orange Lodge anymore. In fact, Simon’s church on Drummond Street is gone too.
The world on the farm around our severed property too has changed. When we moved there in 1975, our neighbour across the road farmed his own farm, plus nearly 250 acres on our side of the road. He had modern equipment for the time, plowing the land and working it, combining the grain or corn. We have a huge hill to the east of us. There used to be a line fence across it at one time, but it was removed when the farms were united. With plowing, there was a lot of erosion and we, at the bottom of the hill, inherited a lot of good topsoil.
As the years passed, the neighbour rented out his land to a huge farming operation. The equipment got bigger and bigger. That 250 acres is generally planted in less than 24 hours and harvested, come fall, in another 24 hours. There are probably one or two days when he sprays weeds or fertilizes but, other than that, we’re left alone. He uses improved breeds of seeds and fertilizer and grows yields of corn or soybeans his grandfather could only dream about.
Sometimes I look out my kitchen window and think back 175 years to when the first settlers came to Huron County. In our neighbourhood north of town, known then as the MacGowan settlement, a whole group of brothers from the same family took up hundreds of acres of bush. Little by little they chopped down the trees, a few acres each year, and planted crops. The “old” farming equipment that we celebrate out on the fairgrounds would have seemed fanciful to them. They cut grain with scythes and threshed with flails. They used oxen or horses to pull up the stumps once they had rotted.
It was such a struggle, but they prospered. They started with back-breaking work, then oxen and horses. Eventually, they had threshing machines powered by steam engines, then tractors and so on.
We prospered so much that we didn’t need as many people growing the crops as we did and the sons and daughters of the men and women who grew the crops moved to the towns and cities and they prospered - to the point that people shop in supermarkets so overflowing with food that they don’t realize that this is because there are people out on the farms feeding them.
The pioneers prospered by hard work. As the hymn I began my talk with said, “We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land, but it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand.”
How blessed we are!
But the people who celebrate the successful harvest of the fruits of our land, as you do here today, as you will throughout the day, know how much we have to give thanks for.