There were a number of distinguished Frontenac County wardens from the Township of Wolfe Island during the first 133 years of Frontenac County history, and since municipal amalgamation there have been two more from the Township of Frontenac Islands: Jim Vanden Hoek for two years, and the current warden, Denis Doyle.

Although Tim O'Shea was only county warden for a single year, the centennial year in 1967, he was a member of the council for 33 consecutive years as the long-serving reeve of Wolfe Island. He retired from politics in 1991 and died in 1996 at the age of 78.

His son, Terry, who served as the clerk of Wolfe Island and Frontenac Islands for over 20 years, starting in 1986, described his father as someone who enjoyed people and was able to remain calm in tense situations, which might explain why he was able to win election after election.

He worked for most of his life as a hunting and a fishing guide on Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, and in the evenings he tended to township matters. As well as presiding over Council, he was the welfare officer for the islands as well as the manager of the ferry, all part of the functions of the reeve.

Perhaps his most lasting accomplishment was convincing the provincial government to take over the ferry service from Wolfe Island and make it a free service. He also presided over the construction of the first library, medical clinic, ambulance base and fire department on the island. Because of all his accomplishments and longevity, he is still considered to have been the dean of Frontenac County councilors.

One hundred and two years before Tim O'Shea served as county warden, another Wolfe Island politician held the post. The first ever Frontenac County warden was Dileno (Dexter) Calvin, the proverbial self-made man. He was orphaned at the age of eight in Rutland, Vermont.

When he was 20 he moved to the State of New York where he worked as a labourer until he entered into the lumbering business when he was in his mid-20s. He started in 1825, squaring some timber with a neighbour and transporting it by raft to Quebec City. Slowly, he built up the business, and in 1835 he moved to Clayton, NY, and established a lumber transport business. Soon after, he became involved in a company based on Garden Islands, the Kingston Stave Forwarding Company, which was later renamed Calvin, Cook and Counter, and then Calvin and Cook after the men who owned it. In 1844, Dexter Calvin moved to rented land on Garden Island and took control of the company, taking advantage of the island's location, its sheltered port, and the fact that it was within the British rather than the American trading system.

Out of its base on Garden Island, the company maintained agencies in Sault St. Marie, Quebec City, Liverpool and Glasgow, operated 12 -15 ships and employed as many as 700 people in its peak years. It became a generalized shipping company, and also operated a large tugboat service.

The move to Garden Island took place soon after the death of Calvin's first wife, Harriet Webb, in Clayton, New York, in 1843. the couple had been married for 12 years and had six children. He remarried Marion Breck in 1844. They also had six children between 1844 and her death in 1861. His third wife, Catherine Wilkinson, whom he married in 1861 when he was 63, had two children, and lived until 1911. Of his 14 children, only six lived to adulthood.

During the last 40 years of his long life (he died in 1884 at the age of 86) Calvin was a sort of patriarch to the inhabitants of Garden Island. He bought 15 acres of land on the island in 1848 with his partner Hiram Cook, and by 1862 they owned the entire island. Calvin bought Cook’s share in 1880.

Garden Island became a model company town, with its own school, library, and post office. Although it was made up of people from different national origins and religions, it was reportedly remarkably peaceful and well managed. It was also a dry community, under the express orders of Calvin himself, who became a prohibitionist at the same time as his conversion to the Baptist Faith about a year before the death of his first wife.

Since most of the inhabitants of Garden Island worked for Calvin, he was able to shield them from economic turbulence in two ways. For one thing, since he was more involved in lumber transport than buying and selling, the fluctuations in the price of lumber did not affect the business in a substantial way. He also chose to use the company's reserves to shield his employees during serious downturns, such as one that took place in 1873. At that time he cut wages but did not lay any one off, which was as unusual then as it is now. He was strongly opposed to organized labour, however, and when sailors on his ships started a union drive, he hired replacement workers from Glasgow and eventually sold some of his schooners and bought great lake barges to cut down on the need for labour.

His political life, which began when he was in his early 60s, was quite distinguished. He had become a naturalized Canadian within a year of moving to Garden Island. By the time Frontenac County was established in 1865 after the amalgamated County of Frontenac, Lennox and Addington had been disbanded, Calvin was already ensconced as reeve of Wolfe Island and the surrounding islands. He became the first warden of the County, a position he also held the following year and in 1868 as well.

He then took a turn at provincial politics, as a Conservative MPP for the riding of Frontenac. He served from 1868 until 1883, with the exception of the years between 1875 and 1877, when he lost favour with the party. In those days, becoming the Conservative candidate in Frontenac was more difficult than winning the election against opposing party candidates.

He was also one of the first directors of the K&P Railroad.

He was a man who was known for his eccentricities, such as a dislike for short men “for no other reason than that they were short” according to his grandson, as well as men who bit their fingernails (author's note – I'm sure we would have gotten on famously) as well as dogs and people who own them. “When a man's poor,” he said, “he gets a dog. If he's very poor, he gets two.”

Dileno Dexter Calvin died in 1884, and despite his great success in Canada, he was buried next to his mother and his first wife in Clayton, NY.

When Plevna quilter Debbie Emery won the design contest for the Frontenac County 150th anniversary quilt, she knew she was going to have a lot of work to do to translate her design into a finished quilt.

By the time she delivered the quilt to the county in early August, in time for it to be displayed as part of the 150th anniversary celebrations, she had put 650 hours of her own labour into the project, turning the $2,000 prize for winning the contest into a $3 an hour part time job for eight months.

More importantly, the quilt was front and centre at the opening ceremonies of the celebration event in Harrowsmith, and will be available for display at the county offices for years to come.

Using the rail line as a unifying feature, the quilt illustrates the three geographical components of Frontenac County, from the island communities that are surrounded by Lake Ontario, to the farmland in South Frontenac Township and into the Canadian Shield in the north.

The quilt also points to the First Nations heritage of the county, and to activities such as logging, homesteading, tourism and the night skies.

Garlic enthusiasts will be pleased to know that a brand new book titled “Ontario Garlic: The Story from Farm to Festival”, published by The History Press in July, 2015 is now available for those interested in how attitudes towards the stinky bulb have changed.

Toronto author Peter McClusky spent a year and a half digging deep into hundreds of years of archival material to write the book, which explains how garlic arrived in Ontario, and how the attitude towards it has drastically changed over the years. He cites the changes as the result of changing immigration laws in Canada in the 1970s. “At that time people arrived in Ontario, brought their cooking with them and with that... their love of garlic. Up until then we were a mostly Anglo-population with an Anglo appreciation of garlic that was not only very conservative but actually quite negative”.

McClusky gives examples of these negative attitudes in the book. One was taken from the minutes of a teachers' meeting from a school near Sudbury in 1928 where the teachers there were considering if they should be allowed to send children home who smelled of garlic and who in the end decided to do so.

In another example he tells of a woman he interviewed who lived on a farm in small town in Ontario in the 1940s, whose parents were Ukrainian and how she loved to put on a dress and sing. Her one and only opportunity to do so was at her Sunday school but the Sunday school teacher told her she could do so only if she stopped eating garlic. “Imagine what kind of attitude that would put in this little girl's mind and the mind of her parents.”

In the book McClusky looks back further to 10,000 years ago and explains how garlic came from central Asia. He describes how it arrived here and how it was both popular and reviled at the same time. The big turnaround came, as previously mentioned, in the 1970s. “As people in Ontario became exposed to new cuisine from other parts of the world, they realized that this cuisine often included garlic as an ingredient and so their attitudes began to change”.

McClusky also cites changing attitudes towards garlic using a sociological and anthropological perspective and in the book explains that certain experiments show how human taste actually works. “What we think of the taste of something can often be quite different from its real taste and this occurs often from a negative association we may have or may have inherited.”

McClusky, who is from Toronto, had a booth at this year's Verona Garlic Festival and was selling and signing copies of his book. He has been growing garlic near Toronto since 2009, has interned on a farm, and also founded and runs the Toronto Garlic Festival, now in its fifth year. He said he is interested in promoting not only Ontario garlic but also other locally grown produce in the province. “People should get away from only thinking about the price of locally grown food and consider more how good it tastes and how is it is being grown by farmers right in their own back yard”.

McClusky definitely did his homework in his effort to arrive at “a deep understanding of garlic.” He interviewed 150 people for the book, including farmers, chefs, gardeners, older residents, and scientists. The book also includes maps, illustrations plus 40 recipes, many by famed Ontario chefs, with more obscure recipes that include desserts like ice cream and brownies. As well it has tips on growing garlic and information about its medicinal qualities. McClusky said he is very excited about the positive response he is getting to the book, which he said is likely due to the fact that he wanted to write a book that he himself would like to buy and read. The book is available in book stores and online at Indigo and Amazon.

Fred Johnson has lived on Sharbot Lake since the early 1990s, on a property he purchased with his late wife many years earlier.

He retired from a career with the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation and turned a cottage into a waterfront home, as a number of people have done over the years. One of the things that Fred has done over his retirement years has been to put even more of his energy into a pursuit that has always been more than a hobby for him, Rudimental Drumming.

Rudimental Drumming was founded in 1933, when a group of military drummers decided to focus on 13 essential rudiments of drumming. This focus on precision and technique formed the basis for the rudimental drumming tradition, which continues to this day.

Fred Johnson's career as a drummer started in 1946, when he joined the 180th air cadets in Toronto. In the 1950s he branched out as he began to do some writing and drumming instruction while a member of the 2nd Signals Regiment.

Since then he has instructed and composed drumming arrangements and individual solos for 17 drum and bugle corps all over southern and western Ontario.

One of the drum sections he led was the Canada's Marching Ambassador drum section. That section produced two Canadian Individual Champions and five international judges.

He has an extensive resume as a judge in Canada and the United States.

In 1976, he founded the Canadian Association of Drumming Rudimental Excellence (CADRE). The CADRE competition group has been performing in events and competitions ever since. The competition group placed first in The World Drum Corps Associates ensemble championship for five consecutive years, from 2006 to 2010.

Fred was inducted to the World Drum Corps Hall of Fame in 1998, the first Canadian to receive that honour.

The CADRE competition group continues to be active and is preparing for this year's championship in Rochester, New York in about a week. But before they travel to Rochester they are gathering in Sharbot Lake to prepare, and while they are in the area they will be taking over the Sharbot Lake Country Inn. Not only are a number of them staying at the inn, they will be presenting a free concert there as well on Saturday, August 29, from 3 to 5pm. Weather permitting they will be playing outside near the patio; otherwise in the Crossings Pub.

For Fred Johnson it is an opportunity to share his passion with his friends and neighbours.

“The sound of these drums, when played with precision, is something else. It has a power that is hard to describe. You have to hear it,” he said.

Agnes Morrow is 101 years old, and when she was born on March 9, 1914, World War One was still six months away; oil had not yet been discovered in Alberta; and James P Whitney was the Premier of Ontario.

When historians look at the 20th century, 1914 is seen as a pivotal year, because it was the start of the war that profoundly changed the political landscape around the world and in Canada, and left millions dead and millions more displaced.

But in the community of Donaldson, where Agnes Morrow was born in the farmhouse of Louis and Julia Morrow, the third of eight children, world events had little impact in those years. Donaldson, which is now merely an access road to a small number of properties, was at that time a community made up primarily of Morrow family farms.

“There were around 39 Morrows living within five miles of one another. Uncle Neil had a farm; Uncle Louis had a farm; Uncle Henry had a farm; Elmer Morrow had a farm; they were all little farms,” Agnes recalled when interviewed this week from her home near Lavant Station, a few kilometres from where she was born.

Among the first things that Agnes remembers, besides the death of her sister at the age of five, six months after an appendicitis operation left an incision that did not heal properly (the rest of the family lived into their 80s and 90s), was the day in 1919 when her father got his first team of horses, greatly expanding the family's prospects.

One of the things her father did with the team was clear a swamp on the farm in order to create a small hay field. “But like a lot of the work done to clear land it has gone back to the way it was over the years,” said Agnes.

When Agnes was very young, six or seven years old, she started helping to milk the 13 cows that her father, Louis, kept. The cream was delivered to a cheese factory at Lavant Station or the creamery at Snow Road, and in the 1920s there was a bread truck and a meat truck that came around on a weekly basis.

Some of the other memories that Agnes has are about the food that her mother, Julia, prepared for the family.

“Mum and dad were good providers, and mum was an awful good cook. She could take an old hen and make it taste like a spring chicken, and she made the best apple pie. We had an orchard and we picked berries in season, but the apple pie was the best. I made pies all my life, many pies, but never like she made.”

In addition to the orchard, the Morrows grew fields of turnips and beans and other vegetables for fresh eating and for winter storage.

“My oldest brother Alfred was very good to us little ones as well,”Agnes recalls, recalling one event in particular.

“One day mum and dad were off to Perth and Alfred was home with us. A storm came up and it was a bad one. Hail came with it and was laying on the ground in sheets, there was so much of it. Alfred had the little ones gather it up and he got a ten gallon syrup pail and had them pack it with the hail and added salt to keep it frozen. He put a pail of cream in the middle and I flavoured it with vanilla and we started stirring it and shaking it one way and another. It never quite made it to ice cream but it tasted good all the same. We cleaned up and put everything away and thought that was the end of it. But at supper time my little brother John said he wasn't hungry and mum asked him  what was wrong. He said he was still full from the ice cream, and then we had to answer for it.”

Agnes attended school at both Mundel's school near Donaldson and at the Lavant School.

When she was 17 she met Archie Thomas at an event at the Lavant schoolhouse. There was  man who had a bear that did tricks and people had gathered to see his show. Archie was the youngest of a family with 10 children in Ompah.

In 1933, when Agnes was 19, the couple married. They both started working on a farm near Agnes' family farm that was owned by the Ferguson family. Two years later the elder Ferguson died of a heart attack while checking on his cattle, and in 1938 the Fergusons offered to sell the farm to Archie and Agnes Thomas.

To this day Agnes lives on that farm, in the farmhouse, built in 1840, which she has now looked after for 77 years.

In 1938, when they bought the farm, eggs sold for 11 cents a dozen; butter for 15 cents a pound; and syrup went for $2.90 a gallon.

While she does not remember World War One, the Second World War had an impact on Agnes' life, and that of the local community. Dozens of local men went to war; a number came back injured and several died overseas.

The biggest improvement on the farm took place in May of 1949, when it was hooked up with electricity.

“We had all the wiring done for lights in advance, so we were ready for it. The first thing we bought was a washing machine. One of the cottagers sold fridges and he had a second-hand one that he sold to us. I was in hillbilly heaven when we got that washer. Then, when we could afford it, we added a refrigerator. Before that we had an ice box, and had to go to Sunday Lake in the winter to cut blocks of ice, haul it home, and store it in sawdust for the summer. The refrigerator was a big, big improvement.”

Archie died a number of years ago, and the children are living away from the farm, although one of Agnes and Archie’s daughters, Shirley Whan, lives in Sharbot Lake.

But Agnes has never seriously considered leaving the farm. “I wouldn't have lived here for so long if I didn't like it here,” she said. “I've had a good life in this house.”

She has slowed down, of course. In place of the large garden she used to keep she now has a “box garden with cucumbers, beets, tomatoes and carrots” and the house is still surrounded by flowers, including her favourite double impatiens and begonias.

She walks with the help of a cane and uses a speaker to help her hear better, but with the help of relatives and friends, and six hours a week of housekeeping help, Agnes says “I thought about leaving but I decided to stay here for another year.”

She said that one of the secrets to her long, relatively healthy life, has been the fact that she never drove a car.

“I saved all that stress, and here I am,” she said.

(note - an earlier version of this story mistakenly said that Agnes' husband name was Charlie in two places. This version has been corrected)

Heather Woodyard, who has resided in Verona for just three years, never expected that she would enter the retail business. But as the saying goes, when one door closes, another one opens.

It was a lack of jobs in her specific field of study that led Heather to open Verona's newest yarn store, called Ewe Can Knit. Heather returned to school at Loyalist College in Belleville to become a community and justice services worker, but after graduating with a diploma in 2012, she and her 90 other fellow graduates got the news that the Kingston penitentiary would be closing, which meant that hundreds of students would be vying for fewer jobs.

After having no luck at landing a job in her field, Heather decided to create work for herself and was determined to “do something that I love and am really passionate about”. She looked to the past and the years she spent in Toronto working at Lewiscraft, where she had learned to knit and crochet, pastimes that she continues to be very passionate about. “After coming to Verona I realized that there is nowhere between Kingston and Perth to buy knitting and crochet supplies so I decided to open up my own shop.”

The store is located at 6667 Highway 38 in Verona just next to Verona Convenience and it fronts onto Walker Street. The 650 square foot store is bright and airy and has ample parking. Inside, Heather is busy unpacking supplies that have just arrived, and a long stretch of shelving across one large wall displays a veritable rainbow of coloured yarns. She stocks a wide variety of yarns and wools including two major classic lines, Paton's and Bernat and also offers everything from sock and baby yarn to bulkier yarns as well. She sells merino wool and alpaca blends, and will also be carrying fine hand-dyed yarns from Fleece Artist and Hand Maiden of Nova Scotia. Along another wall hang a wide assortment of knitting and crochet needles as well as a variety of patterns designed for hobbyists at various levels of ability.

While Heather said that she has received “a lot of positive response” on her current inventory, she added that she is happy to order other items that customers might want. “I know that people like different things so I am happy to stock different items that customers might request.” Heather has future plans to also offer a variety of all-ages knitting and crochet classes in the near future.

Though the store officially opened on Tuesday, August 4 and is currently open for business, Heather is planning a special official grand opening on Saturday, Sept. 12 from 10am - 6pm. Guests will be able to enter a draw for a gift basket and cake and refreshments will be served free of charge. The store is currently open Tuesday through Saturday from 10am - 6pm and on Sundays from 11am - 3pm. For those who have never knit or crocheted, Heather encourages them to give it a try. “It's a lot of fun and an excellent hobby to start. If I can do it, having taught myself, I am sure that anyone can learn.” For more information call 613-374-3000.

Marilyn Bolender is happier these days. After suffering for five years from a condition that can only be described as a maddening, she has found an experimental treatment that is working.

The disorder she suffers from is not well known, and that is one of the reasons that she has come forward to talk about it after only letting family and close friends know about it for five years.

The condition is called Chronic Ideopathic Urticaria (CIU). It is described by the website e-medicine as “not a single disease but a reaction pattern” that persists for longer than six months.

In lay terms, it is hives or welts that can be as large as three to four inches across. They do not last longer than two hours before receding, but new ones occur regularly.

Like many other skin lesions they are skin irritations and they tend to be itchy.

“It is hard to describe the sensation,” said Bolender, who has now been hive-free since March. She said that she had hives or welts all over her body, except on her face, on an ongoing basis for five years.

“Nothing worked at all. I went to allergists and skin doctors, and tried all kinds of antihistamines and other medications, but nothing touched it,” she said.

Finally last year, she began to see a skin specialist in Peterborough, Dr. Melinda Gooderham, who concluded that in Marilyn's case there was no allergy involved.

A trial for a drug called Xolair, originally developed as an asthma drug but later approved for use on skin disorders in the United States, was undergoing a trial in Ontario and Dr. Gooderham enrolled Bolender in the trial.

“They started me on 150 units, which did not work, then upped me to 300, and that did not work either. When I was told that I was going to be dropped from the trial at that point, I just lost it. I didn't know what to do. Dr. Gooderham said to give her a bit of time, and eventually she convinced the company to put me on a larger dose, 450 units, and after a couple of injections it started to work.”

The drug is expensive, but fortunately Bolender is covered under a drug plan that covers 80% of the cost, and the company that produces Xolair is covering 92% of the extra cost, leaving Bolender with a cost of $42 per month.

“I'm very grateful to have found relief” she said, “and that is why I am coming forward now, since many people who suffer from CIU are unwilling to talk about it because they are embarrassed. But whether they receive the treatment that works for me or another form of treatment, it is important to be diagnosed and to start finding a way forward,” she said.

The company that produces Xolair, Novalis, have put up a website about CIU, called “Itchingforanswers.ca”

The website provides information about CIU and does not talk about Xolair. Instead it promotes the use of a new generation of oral antihistamines (Ni-AH) as a first treatment option.

Xolair, which is expensive and carries a degree of risk, is prescribed only for those for whom anti-histamines are ineffective.

“Our main message is that people who suffer from CIU identify the disorder and seek effective treatment,” said Nick Williams, a communications consultant with Argyle Public Relations in Toronto, a company that has a healthcare and pharmaceuticals division.

It was Williams who contacted the News about Marilyn Bolender's story.

Arthur passed away on June 1st, 2015 at age 99. He was one of seven children born on Antoine Point in Sharbot lake. Arthur was a kind, humble man of many talents.

He was a master carpenter employed by the Allen Brothers Cottage & Livery business, located opposite the now

medical center. This was a thriving servicing business for fishermen and tourists at that time. Arthur moved on to

be the supervisor of a CPR bridge building team for many years. He also built homes and cottages in Sharbot Lake, Perth and Smiths Falls.

My father started coming to Sharbot Lake in 1938 with several fishing friends. We as a family started coming to Sharbot in 1946 and purchased Rupert Island, the small island just off the public beach in 1948. I was 12 years old when I met Arthur at the Allen Brothers location. At that time it was a very active place where you could rent cottages, boats, outboard motors, fishing guides, and purchase bait.

Being a young, impressionable city boy from Rochester, NY, Sharbot Lake with its steam engine trains, sawmill and a country store was a whole new world for me. Arthur was the man. He could do everything – repair boats, engines, fix minnow seines. As I watched him and asked questions, I was enthralled by what he could do. Arthur Antoine became my hero and lifelong friend.

In later years I visited him at his various residences and reminisced about his life in Sharbot Lake. One short story about Arthur goes like this. I asked him how he got to know the location of the deep shoals, which all fishermen desired to find to catch the big one. Arthur simply said, “Pete, my brother Fred and I simply took 25 feet of rope, tied a stone on it, and rowed around the lake, marking each one with sight lines on the shore.” Arthur was a master of all trades. He even mixed herbal plants for a medicine that he took when he was sick. That probably was the reason he lived to age 99.

Arthur Antoine will be missed by his family and his many friends. He was a kind and humble man of great integrity.

The Trousdale family is known for the iconic Trousdale General Store, which is still operating as a gift store, as well as for the Home Hardware and Foodland stores in Sydenham.

However, it turns out that although the family has been in the retail business for a pretty long time - longer than either Frontenac County or Canada have been around - they actually started out in farming.

The family arrived in Canada from England sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century. They farmed near Holleford at first, and there are Trousdales who are still farming in that area to this day.

“One brother went to Tennessee and another moved to Holleford,” said John Trousdale when he and his wife Ginny were interviewed at their home in Sydenham.

The changeover from farming to running stores came as a result of a number of family members who were interested in getting into the baking business.

“There were six boys, and they all seemed to get into baking as a core business,” John Trousdale said, “and that involved buying eggs and cream from farmers. If you are buying flour from Lake of the Wood milling, you could also bring in middlings, bran, shorts, other grains. They got into selling grains to the farmer, and the store grew out of serving the farming community.”

The first Trousdale store, which was also a bake shop, was established around 1836, and for many years there were three Trousdale stores as the brothers competed with each other for customers.

Eventually, John's grandfather Percy outlasted his brothers and only his store survived into the 20th Century.

“They brought in everything that the farming families needed. There were 100 acre farms everywhere on the back roads around here, one after another, and the farmers wanted to get everything in one store so we brought it in - boots, bolts of cloth, hardware, dry goods; it all came in by train when the train came.”

In 1927, Percy Trousdale decided to do a major renovation on the family store.

“Once he got into it he realized that the store was pretty shaky. The renovation turned into a demolition and he built a brand new store. When you look at that building today you see that it was quite a lot of store for 1927.”

The store was built out of concrete, and that is maybe why it survived a fire that burned down a number of buildings across the street, where the Sydenham One Stop, the hair salon and bank are now located.

Percy Trousdale was also the last baker in the family. He used to take his son Nobel on the bread runs in a wagon. There is even a box under the seat of the wagon, where, according to family lore, Nobel used climb in to get out of the rain while his father drove the wagon. Percy also kept up a grain grinding business across the retail store until the 1950s.

After returning from World War 2, Nobel came into the family business and he ran the store until he died in 2004 at the age of 90.

A passionate supporter of the Conservative Party, and the Trousdale family connections to the party go back to its very beginnings when John A. Macdonald did business in Frontenac County, Nobel once credited Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien with helping him to recover from an illness. Chretien called an election and Nobel got himself out of bed to get to work trying to get Chretien out of office.

John, who was born in the early 50s, grew up working in the store.

“I remember when I was six or seven, with my older sister and brother, we used to work in the store all the time. It wasn't a hardship or anything, it was fun, I never wanted to go to school. Everything came in bulk. We used to bag the tea, split 50 pound bags of potatoes into 5 or 10 pound bags - all that kind of stuff. And when people came to shop they stood at the counter with their list and called out the items. We would run and get the items from the wooden shelves behind the counter and put them out for them, and after they paid or marked down what they owed to pay at the end of the month, we would carry their groceries and whatever else they bought out to their car. It was that kind of store.”

At some point, in the early or mid-60s, “farmers were no longer able to sell milk in cans, they had to sell it in bulk. That was a huge change and a lot of farmers went out of dairy. Farms were consolidated and got larger and they began to order grain in bulk, which changed our business and we eventually got out of grain.” John recalls.

In the 1970s and 80s when John came into the business with his father, he realized that Sydenham and the area around it had changed completely. It was no longer a farming community; the train was long gone, and more and more of its residents travelled to Kingston every day for work.

“I realized there was not enough business in the store to support two families, and I also realized that Sydenham was now a bedroom community and the shopping was different.”

In 1985, the property where the Foodland and Home Hardware stores are now located was up for sale. At one time it had been the location of a very large dairy and milk condensing factory where powdered milk was produced, but the factory had been torn down and a dance hall been put up. The dance hall was a free-standing structure, 60 by 100 feet, and John thought it would make an ideal store. So he bought it and opened an IGA store. Three additions later, the store is still selling groceries, under the Foodland banner.

In 1989, the Home Hardware building had been completed and had its grand opening, with a blue ribbon being cut instead of a red one, at Nobel Trousdale's insistence.

As the two stores were running at one end of town, Nobel Trousdale's store was still open, so the Trousdales were competing against each other again, but this time John was really competing against himself as he was still spending most of his time working for his father, and having managers run his own stores.

When his parents died, just three weeks apart, John's business focus shifted to the newer stores, and at that time Ginny became involved.

Although she had been married to John for 25 years at that point and the couple had raised a family, Ginny had never been involved in the family business. She had pursued a career in social work until then. She decided that, instead of letting the General Store go, she would reinvent it as a gift store.

A lot of creative work has gone into bringing in new products and displaying them in the confines of what still looks much like the store did 80 years ago. There are still products from bygone days around, now as display items, and in many of the back and side rooms the old bolts of cloth and crates of soap are still tucked away.

“I don't think they threw anything out,” said Ginny, “and now how can you, since much of what is there is so unusual today?”

John and Ginny's son, Will, has come into the Home Hardware business now, and as Sydenham continues to change, look for Trousdale's to follow suit.

Family businesses do not survive almost 200 years and five generations without seeing around a few corners to always end up in the right place at the right time.

In the Trousdales' case, however, the past is carried along as a reminder.

“One thing that has never changed - from delivering bread to delivering and fixing appliances, it's a service business,” said John Trousdale.

Last year, Wayne Robinson stepped back from his role as CEO of Robinson Asset Management, a company that manages money from across the globe out of an office in Sharbot Lake.

While most of the other Ontario companies that do that kind of work are based in Toronto, and perhaps Ottawa, Robinson's remains based in a small rural community, where it is one of the larger employers.

The company had its genesis managing the retirement income of local teachers by investing in real estate, but has grown into global markets over the last 30 years.

When we interviewed Wayne for this article, we talked in his office, not so much about his company, but about his upbringing on a farm in the Bradshaw area outside of Tichborne, and also about the prospects for communities in Frontenac County and elsewhere in rural Ontario.

Wayne Robinson was born at home on the farm in the late 1940s, the seventh son of a Catholic farming family. When he thinks back to his childhood he considers that he came along at a 'relatively prosperous time' in the history of the region, even though it has always been an economically disadvantaged area.

“There was work off the farm for my father, so while we sort of made a go of it as a dairy and mixed farm, there was other money coming in, which was not the case a generation earlier. My father worked for McConnells and my brothers all got jobs in construction before they went off to do other things.”

He also remembers the way the family finances were handled.

“My brothers brought their pay envelopes home unopened and laid them on the table. My mother made sure they had everything they needed, and spending money on the weekend, etc., and that was that.”

In those days, the small towns in Central Frontenac, such as Parham and Mountain Grove, were self- contained small communities unto themselves

“Tichborne was prosperous, because of the railroad station and the junction between two railways. There was a hotel, a bank, a theatre, four stores. It really catered to travelers.”

With the loss of the railroad and the resulting tendency for people to drive to Kingston or Ottawa to work and shop, the towns in what is now Central Frontenac have maintained their community ties, but are not as strong as they once were.

“Economics have no morals. People will always buy the best product at the lowest price, or what they think is the best product at what they think is the lowest price; there is nothing anyone can do about that. So they drive off to Costco, and while they are in Kingston they have a day out as well.”

But, he says, rural centers can and will survive, even if some of the back room operators in Toronto and Ottawa privately think that there is no future for rural Ontario.

“You take Sharbot Lake, for example. You can live here, and live a good life here. I think it has a future, but it concerns me when I talk to people who are connected to the top levels of government who think that Toronto is the only center of growth in Ontario and that it should be some kind of city-state.”

What they don't understand, according to Robinson, is that goods are created outside of Toronto; food comes from farms and is not made in the store.

“The thing that makes me feel that there is a future is that people can make a go of business here, and what other business people need to do is to let people who are thinking about doing something know that there is support here; that the township is willing to help out. And there are people doing that, with an Internet connection and a good idea and a sense that this is a good place to live.”

One problem is that those businesses cannot be sold easily when the owner decides to stop or to retire.

“We see that with farms and with other businesses like that. There is no one to take over. But still I feel optimistic that there is a future in rural communities as long as we keep encouraging each other to keep going and make sure that people feel we will support them if they take a chance.”