Frontenac News - 50 stories/150 year project

Jeff Green | May 29, 2014

To help celebrate the 150th anniversary of Frontenac County, the Frontenac News is embarking on an ambitious story-telling project with the support of Frontenac County Council.

The project will include feature stories in each issue of the Frontenac News in 2015, and on Frontenacnews.ca starting on January 8 and running until December 17. The stories will explore historical topics, and geographical and cultural elements in each and every corner of Frontenac County. Our main focus will be on some of the remarkable individuals who have made their lives in its borders and who have lived its history.

The vast county runs from the top of Vennachar at the spot of the darkest skies in Southern Ontario at Mallory Hill, through Canadian Shield to fractured limestone and some prime farmland. It then bypasses the City of Kingston and continues on Howe and Wolfe Islands, where it ends at the virtual border with the United States. It contains numerous hamlets but no population centres, and has a common thread throughout. It is a waterlogged county, the county of 1000 lakes, from some as small as 53-foot-deep, one-acre-wide Little Round Lake where the water at the bottom gets no oxygen, making it one of the few “meromictic” lakes in the world, to Mazinaw, Bobs, and Crow Lakes, and the county’s largest, Lake Ontario.

At one time people traversed the county by canoe, then by horse and buggy, then rail, then car and truck, and now by the electronic highway. Many of these changes have come about in the last 100 years and some of our residents have lived through them.

In order to make 50 for 150 a success, we are asking the best source we have for all of our stories - our readers - to provide us with leads. If you know of an interesting topic or individual with a remarkable story to tell, let us know as soon as possible as the list of stories is being compiled now and will be pulled together in the coming months.

We are also hoping to have a video component to our 50/150 feature. To contact the News about story ideas, call 613-279-3150, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and put 50/150 in the subject line, or send us a message on our Facebook page.