History of Elora

I was walking in the forest this afternoon, and went by the Wampum Cave. It’s not well known, but some time in the 1700s a small team of Hurons hid a wampum belt in a cave in the Elora Gorge. Around two hundred years later, after Elora was founded, some kids discovered it and brought it to their schoolmaster who was also an archaeologist. I turned around and headed to the Elora Public Library, to see if there was a book with a photograph of the belt. Wampum was used, among other things, to seal trade agreements, to record council decisions, and the like. I suddenly thought that in the course of my research travel, I might meet someone who would read and interpret the wampum that was found there.

I found lots of pictures of the cave, and of the schoolmaster who took credit for discovering it. (Must remember to go back again, and take note of his name.) But no picture of the belt itself. Maybe in the county archives, which is not far from here, I’ll find one. But I won’t have enough time to go looking for it before the Ottawa trip.

While spending time in the village library, which I hadn’t done in perhaps twenty years, I found a few books on local history. It was most illuminating to flip through them, looking at grainy old b&w photos of places that are very familiar to me. When I put the books away, even the library itself looked different to me. The building is one of Elora’s original buildings. With its high ceilings and windows, creaking wooden stairs and decor, the portraits and stone busts of the prominent men of the pioneer times, it’s easy to see the continuity over time, from then to now.

We Canadians don’t celebrate our history enough. And why is that? We don’t see that there’s much to celebrate. But it doesn’t take much digging to find an interesting story, one that ought to be re-told.

It seems that the founding fathers of Elora were envisioning a kind of model Protestant town, a complete world into itself, self-sufficient, independant, comfortable, prosperous, and virtuous in both the Christian and the Heroic senses of the term. They wanted a community that would value qualities like temperance and prudence. Yet they also wanted to encourage strength, ruggedness, self-sufficiency, and pride. It seems to have been the rocky cliffs of the Gorge which inspired it: the idea was that anyone who could live around such trecherous places, walk the precarious “Indian Bridge” in any weather, and so on, would have to be an admirable and excellent human being.

Elora even had its own “intellectual awakening”. The aformentioned schoolmaster used to encourage his students to learn woodcraft and wilderness survival skills by day. Then by night he would hold public meetings for the whole townsfolk, to explain Darwin’s newly emerging Theory of Evolution. Apparently there were town meetings to debate the theory: schoolmen like himself on one side, various (mostly Protestant) priests on the other.

As soon as I stepped out the library I got a facefull of car exhaust from a passing SUV. Back in the 20th century, I was. Almost a disappointment!