Barb Sproule Retires from North Frontenac role after 44 years

May 01, 2024

Last week, North Frontenac Council made a presentation to Barbara Sproule to mark her retirement from the township's Committee of Adjustment, on which she sat for 26 years, since the township's inception in 1998.

But sitting on the Committee of Adjustment came after a long public service career in the former Township of Palmerston/Canonto, going back to when she started teaching at the Ompah School 70 years ago, in 1954. She was also the second woman to serve as Warden of Frontenac County, in 1982.

An article on her career as an educator and politician was published in the Frontenac News in 2015, as part of a year-long series marking the 150th anniversary of Frontenac County.

An excerpt from that article is reprinted below:

Barb Sproule is not a lifelong resident of the Ompah area, but she has learned to fit in over the years.

She spent her first seven years in South Porcupine, near Timmins, but when her father was injured while working in a gold mine, the family moved back home to Ompah, where both her parents were from.

After finishing grade 8 at Ompah, she went to the new high school in Sharbot Lake, using the bus service that was also new, and graduated in 1954. By the fall of that same year she was teaching at Canonto School, at age 16.

“I was too young to go to teachers' college, but they couldn't find a teacher for the Canonto school and they knew I was intending to become a teacher so they offered me the job and I accepted it.”

Clarendon Central was a three-room school, and at the start there were 150 students at the school. Barb taught grades 3-5 and had 50 kids in her class.

“It worked out fine. The older children taught the younger ones and everybody helped out,” she said.

Political career 1978-1997

It might not be the case that all politics, in what is now Ward 3 of North Frontenac and used to be Palmerston/Canonto Township, revolves around the fire department, but it doesn't miss being so by much. So it is not surprising that Barb Sproule entered politics in the 1978 election in order to establish a fire department, which is something that the reeve of the day was reluctant to do.

“We had a committee that had gotten together and was working on setting up a fire department and the council of the time would not support us in any way. So, we got some money and some property donated, and we bought a tanker truck and put a motor on it, which they got from emergency services out of Kingston. The reeve went and took the motor out of the truck. So I went to the reeve and said, 'Are you going to support it or not support it?' They didn't give it any support, even support in principle, so I told the reeve I was going to run, and I did, and I won.”

Sproule served as reeve for five of the next terms, losing in one of the elections and winning all the others, and was the reeve during the amalgamation process in the late 1990s.

Like a number of the Frontenac County reeves at the time of amalgamation, she retired from politics instead of running in North Frontenac, although she has continued to sit on the Committee of Adjustment.”

“I enjoyed being in politics, but I like to travel nowadays, and I feel I've done my time,” she said.

During her time as reeve, the first Official Plan for Palmerston/Canonto was brought in. In 1982 she served as county warden, the second woman to hold that position in the 118 years of the county's existence. The first was Dorothy Gaylord from Arden, who served as warden in the late 1970s and was still on the council when Barb had the position.

When amalgamation was forced on the local politicians, there were a number of options on the table.

“Those of us from the north end were really wary of the idea of one township for the entire county, which was one of the options, because we felt those from the south were really dealing with a different kind of community than ours. There was also talk of one township for the seven townships north of Verona, and we didn't like that either because we were worried that more attention would be paid to the townships that became Central Frontenac, because they were bigger, and we thought we might not get our share. So we set up North Frontenac and I think we did the right thing.”

She recalls that the idea of eliminating the county level, which happened in 1998 and was overturned in 2004, was something that the four townships decided to do once they were established.

“They didn't realise that by doing that they would be losing out on grants, so they made the right decision to reverse it, but they wanted to run things without the county interfering; that was the thinking.”

Barb Sproule continues to live in Ompah, in the house she shared with her late husband, and still helps out in the cottage and campground business on Palmerston Lake, that she and her husband started and her retired son now manages.

Although the bright lights of South Porcupine were lost to her when she left (she did get to see the Olympic champion figure skater Barbara Ann Scott, at the arena there, when she was very young) there has certainly been enough going on at Ompah to keep her busy over the last 70 or so years.