Excerpt from Marjorie's personal history:
"I was born in Cornwall, Ontario, Canada, the 3rd of Aug. l9l3, one year and one day before World War I was declared. I have a feeling I caused it. I was born in our home on Sidney Street. My mother was Margaret Helen Craig. She married Adam Christopher Fetterly and I had one sister older than I, three and a half years older, Helen Virginia. Her birthday was Feb. 25, l9l0.
We lived on Sidney Street right beside our church which was Knox Presbyterian Church which my ancestors really sacrificed to build being Scotch immigrants. My very first memories living on Sidney Street strangely enough are on a trip to Montreal when my father held me in his arms as a little baby or a very small tot and we looked out the window of a door and I don't know why I know it was Montreal except that probably I had been on a long trip in the car. We traveled by car, and I must have been excited about going away and I remember looking out the window of the front door in Montreal. And I don't know what I saw but I just remember being a baby.
And my next memories are living on Sidney Street and being a little tot and since I was born in l9l3, I experienced World War I from that vantage point and you would be surprised what a little child could see of a great war like that. For one thing, we had an epidemic of flu and it came back, you see, from the trenches to us and I watched out the window day after day funerals passing by, one funeral after another. People died from the flu epidemic in quick rapid succession."
Here is a link to a picture of the Knox Presbyterian Church which Marjorie's parents helped to build and which has since been torn down. The brief history recounted next to the picture has some great information. http://www.cornwallpostcards.ca/church-tall.html
Here is a Google Map showing the location: http://goo.gl/maps/CpJLU
If you look carefully, it looks like the rink remains in the backyard which Marjorie mentions below.
For information about the Spanish Flu also which Marjorie might be referring to, see this link: http://www.bytown.net/flu1918.htm
"That house had many happy memories for me. I might add that Cornwall was a town about a mile square, and just about the happiest kind of a town for a child to grow up in. Tree shaded streets, the St. Lawrence River passing by just down the end of the block where it was three miles wide, with Cornwall Island in between Ontario, Canada and New York state.
We had a railroad bridge across the river, across to the reservation. The island was a reservation for Indians. TheCree Indians and some other Indians with some other name."
" We grew up along the river, but while we lived in the house beside the church on Sidney Street, I think I was five when we moved around the corner a little farther away from the church on Second street, which was then the Trans Canada highway. But it was just a lovely residential street in our town; however, we did have streetcar tracks in the middle of it.
But I'm going back to Sidney Street for a few minutes. We had a rink behind the house in winter and I had a stepbrother who lived at home, a younger one. The youngest one, when my mother married my father, was about eight or ten I suppose, so I grew up with a teenage stepbrother and a sister 31/2 years older."
As of October 2014, I can still see what looks like what was the rink behind their house when I look at the satellite view on Google Earth.
The sister must have been Helen Virginia Fetterly.
"Anyway, I grew up there for five years. We went right next door to church and in those days there was a barn behind the church and the people would come to church from the country with their horses and rigs and they'd take them back there and tie them up at the barn, an open barn while they went to church. So, I had wonderful things to watch.
"We had a big porch on the front of the house and an open porch upstairs above it and we slept out in the summer time. We loved that.
"We had a very sad experience sleeping out. A little girl and her father would come up the street from down near the canal and the river and he'd be going to get the streetcar to go to work at the mill and her mother must have been dead because she would follow him to the street corner asking him all kinds of questions what she'd do for the day. We'd hear this so early in the morning. We were only half awake. I think if we'd been awake we probably would have gone out and invited her in. She went at some unearthly hour up to the corner to see him off on the streetcar. We would wake up to this little girl's calling to her father,"Will I put the potatoes on? When will I do the dishes"? all kinds of questions about keeping house. She was very, very little. Now that was a memory that I have of those days."
"We had a car, one of the few families in the town that had a car around the war years. Another memory I have, we had a great big McGlaughlin Buick and the top would go down. At the end of World War I, there was a huge celebration and my father was a very active citizen and we were in the parade and had great big flags out on the front of our car and alot of little girls dressed in white sitting in our car up on the backseat and up on the top where the top folded down and I can remember being in the parade with my white dress on waving a flag and being very important."
This is, I believe, a MacLaughlin Buick:
"Another memory I have of this time is in our town hall. My sister and I used to sing together. I was just a little tot but I did everything she did, and this man (he was our choir director in church, I guess) put on a big pageant and I was the smallest one in it. My sister was in it and we had flag drills. We went through all kinds of drills, little dance steps and things. I just watched what everybody else did and I did it with a vengeance, and I only missed one time. I waved my flag the wrong way and everybody clapped because it was so funny, for this little biddy person up there to keep time and go through the whole thing and just wave a flag the wrong way once. My sister and I sang " Beautiful Isle of Somewhere" and the audience clapped and clapped for us and we didn't know what to do. Nobody had told us that they were going to clap so we just stood there and stared at the audience with our mouths open. We didn't know what to do, we were so surprised when they clapped because we sang at home all the time and nobody clapped. So the lady who was in charge of the concert called us out to the side in the curtains to tell us what to do. My sister went running off and I went running behind her and she told us to go out and sing the last verse again and then the chorus and then come back. So we went running back out again and sang the last verse of the song and went back. I can remember when we went out that night, out the door a gentleman who was the florist in town, walked up to my father and my mother and said, "My, your daughter was the hit of the show." So, I felt very wonderful because I was a little wee thing and that was my first experience on the stage. I haven't been on since."
Here is "Beautiful Isle of Somewhere" sung by Jo Stafford: http://youtu.be/ksfsKUkccms
"But, I had a very, very happy childhood. I don't think you could live in a town that's a mile square with beautiful shade trees, lawns, flowers, vegetable gardens and apple trees and a blue, blue river where you went to swim early, early in the morning with the neighbor children. I don't think you can grow up in town like that and not be very, very happy. We heard very little sadness.
Of course the war brought sadness to us but I was a little young to worry about that and I soon got over my grandfather's passing because I started to school. The school I went to was Cornwall Public School right across the street where I lived. It had a wonderful lawn out in front of it and we were lucky because we lived all around the school with our neighbors, and after all the school children went home we were able to go over there to play. Every evening we played over there. And we played bat the ball and it was like baseball only you used a bat and hit the ball and then you ran around to great big trees that were the goals. Then we played another wonderful game, run sheep, run. We had a leader who would hide us or you might be the leader and hide your people and then you would come back and draw a plan on the ground so the other leader and his men could see the plan and you would make it a very intricate plan and say that you hid your people in this spot. Then they’d start out to find them. The leader would call instructions to the hidden ones whether to move or not which way to go or whether to stay and that was called run, sheep, run because all of a sudden the leader would yell run, sheep, run and that meant everyone was to run to the home base and touch it to get home free. If you were tagged, then you were out and if enough people got tagged then the other team went in. It was a great challenge and we would play that just before dark. So it made it a lot fun and there were wonderful places to hide.
I had a lovely experience at school. I went to kindergarten with a Mrs. Scott. She taught me piano. She taught me music. She named all the notes on the piano beautiful names like candy C, and canary C and then she'd bring your name into it. There was a Fetterly F and we learned with dolls the Fletcher method and I've never heard of it since, but it was a lovely method and I learned to love music early on. I went there (Cornwall Public Schools) for seven grades. I was one of ten chosen in the sixth grade to miss 7th and go right in the 8th. It was a trial run and they chose ten of us to do it to see if we would be successful later on having missed that 7th grade. I missed a teacher that I was a little bit afraid of, a Miss Binny.
There were an awful lot of maiden ladies in my life. Cornwall seemed to be full of maiden ladies. Our church choir, everything in our church seemed to be run by maiden ladies they called old maids. But I liked them all. I had them for Sunday school teachers. I had them for school teachers and you know, I could name them off one after another and every one of them was unmarried. It was strange. I guess there were not enough men to go around.
This Miss Binny who taught the 7th grade was very, very strict, but she was a wonderful teacher. I was overjoyed when I missed her. I thought that was great! But later on when I was at the church she was a wonderful person and my sister told me that she was a wonderful teacher. One day I apologized to her. I said, "You know, I was tickled pink to miss your class, but since I have missed it and I'm in high school, I realize that you taught a lot of things that I missed. She taught the decimal system and I had to pick that up all by myself. I had to pick up a lot of things that were taught in the 7th grade. Many of them were repeated in 8th, but I had to pick up a lot of things that I missed in 7th and I'm not too sure that was such a good idea rushing us through. I got just about straight A's all the way through grade school. I won a history prize at graduation time and I went on to high school. All the while I was in grade school I took piano lessons from our church organist and I had to practice and practice as all little children do and my mother and father were very musical. We had a lot of music in our home."
"We went to church three times on Sunday. We went at 11:00 in the morning. We went home and ate our dinner. We went back at 3:00 in the afternoon for Sunday School, 3:00 till 4:00. Then most families in the town would walk with their children after Sunday School. We'd go for a walk down to the canal, watch boats go through, go down to the river which was just beyond the canal."
Boats going through the canal near Cornwall:
"That was a tradition to go walking with your family on Sunday. And then we would go home and have a very, very light supper and go back to church at 7:00 to 8:00pm. And at 8:00 after church our home was always a music center and it's one of the reasons I met my husband because his grand aunt and grand uncle were our neighbors. We 'always called her Aunt Bertha and always called him Uncle Archie. Little did I know they were going to become my real aunt and uncle because all the children in the neighborhood called him that. We'd always go there Halloween night. We loved them and they loved us. They took great interest in us because they had no children. Our lawns met and so we had a great big, wonderful place to run and play. We were so close and a sister of Aunt Bertha's lived with her, Aunt Annie Taylor and she loved us and she would memorize everything we said when we were little and tell my mother that she heard us saying these things and she thought they were so funny. We had a lovely neighborhood. On the other side we had a woman who was a gossip. She had one of the first phones in Cornwall and she was on that phone from morning till night gossiping. Her husband was a retired colonel from the army, and he was the town engineer and they had 3 children and one was my sister's age. They were the Magwoods and Marguerite was my sister's age. Perin didn't fit in with anybody. Isabelle was five years younger than I but I decided to become a little mother to her. She was grossly neglected. Her mother was a socialite, playing cards and on the phone and they didn't have any religion in their lives and I don't know. Marguerite was a homebody. She was a very good girl. Perin became very wild as a result of this, but Isabelle was my little friend and she would be out without mittens on in the winter and I would bring her in, wash her hands and put cream on them and put mittens on her and I took care of Isabelle. She was my little friend. She loved me dearly and I took her to Sunday School. She went to our Church all the time because of her love for our family. And as I told you, I had a step brother living with us, a teenager and he loved to tease her. She'd wanted to be just like her father and he would tease her and say, “Lulu, you walk just like your mother," and Isabelle would just go up in smoke. We would have so much fun. But we'd all laugh about it and she practically lived with us.
They had a house with a great big porch on just like ours but it just wasn't quite home because of the situation in their home. Their father sat playing solitaire at night in the den, playing cards. He loved his family but he didn't do anything with them."
"Our house was always the meeting place for adults and children, always loaded with people coming and going. I had to do a lot of dishes as a result. My sister hated dishes. She always managed to be in another part of the house. Hamilton, my stepbrother and I did dishes together. I think I was closer to my stepbrother than I was to my sister. We were good good-natured, kind of happy-go-lucky. We enjoyed doing it. However, when we had all these tables full of company , I would start taking their plates out right from under their noses the minute they got their last bite , and whisk them out to the kitchen to get them washed because we knew we would be doing dishes all night. It was a family custom to sit after your main course, and talk. We had good conversation. This is when we would whisk the dishes out because they would wait for dessert. In those days they would drink tea and they would linger over the tea pot and tea cup and a meal was a prolonged event, good conversation, but they didn't have to do the dishes.
Anyway, our house was just like a hotel or Grand Central Station, people coming or going as if it were a bus stop. But that was good in a way. We met a lot of wonderful people. I wish I could tell of all the wonderful people I've met.
Back to my childhood, I graduated from the eighth grade and went to high school in Cornwall which was called Cornwall Collegiate Institute. I worked on the newspaper and the yearbook. I was in the chorus. I was very thin in those days. I was in many events and was very active. We had a teacher who had us make gardens in a vacant lot nearby so I had that experience in agriculture."
Cornwall Collegiate Institute
"In physics I had a teacher who had halitosis. I'm putting it mildly. So when he would go to explain something to me, I was always holding my breath and holding my head away from him and never knew what he said to me, never knew one explanation he made because I was suffering so from this. He would get very provoked at me and keep me in after school. That was the worst thing he could do because I sat in the front seat right at his desk and I still was in the range of this halitosis It wasn't pleasant. I got to dislike science because of him. Isn’t that sad?. One teacher can do it.
I forgot to tell about a very dear friend in grade school, Velma O'Neil. She and I loved to write poetry and stories and we were very imaginative. She had to come to school on a streetcar because she lived west of the town. If I went to play with her I had to go on the streetcar. We would ride on the streetcar and all these Cornwalites would be on the streetcar and the two of us would start talking about our last trip to Paris. These people would all look at us as if we were crazy. We had read so many books about English children and French children and about mammies taking English children to Paris, all these stories of England. We were steeped in this. We talked about it in everyday language as if we were one of them. So we had a lovely, lovely friendship.
I had a letter from her the other day and we are both almost 70. She signed the letter, “Your first little school friend." I was so touched by that. She lives on the canal in Perth, Ontario. She has a beautiful old stone house. I think the name of it is Cedar Bray. She invited my husband and me to come visit her this summer if we go East. She works in a museum, a beautiful reclaimed, colonial house on the main street that's just a beautiful mansion, and she takes the visitors through and talking to them about the old days of Perth. She is my oldest friend and I'm going to be delighted to see her again."
Perth looks like a beautiful place:
"On to high school. We finished high school and she went to boarding school in Montreal and I went to boarding school outside of Toronto for my 1st year of university or 5th year of high school. I wanted to go there. I don't know why. I thought it was exciting! I think I had read about so many English boarding schools and so many little girls who went. So I went to boarding school for a year to Ontario Ladies College. It was an old castle that some wealthy people had built on Lake Ontario. They ran out of money and the church took it over and made a boarding school for girls out of it. I was one of the first to arrive. I will never forget that fall. I thought I must be crazy to leave such a happy home and arrive at this great big castle. It had two wings on it and I was up in a room in one of the wings and it was so lonesome and the girls hadn't come yet."
Ontario Ladies College: History:
History[edit]
The castle was built by Nelson Gilbert Reynolds, Sheriff of Ontario County, as a private residence in 1859. Reynolds was named after Lord Nelson and named his castle Trafalgar in honour of the Battle of Trafalgar.
The castle was the largest private dwelling in Canada until Casa Loma was built. It cost Reynolds $70,000, which was an exorbitant sum; a home at that time was built for $2,000, and a bank complete with vault could be built for $5,000 to $7,000. Reynolds was a colourful character and a gambling man, and indeed it was gambling losses that reportedly forced him to sell his beloved home to the Methodists in 1874 for the sum of $30,000.
The Methodists of that day were very interested in establishing higher learning institutions for young women. Rev. J. E. Sanderson convinced the Town of Whitby that this would be beneficial to its economy. James Holden, Esq. founder of the Dominion Bank, a local politician and businessman (with 5 daughters of his own) supported this idea. Sanderson and Holden were instrumental in raising the money and shares for the purchase of the castle and the establishment of Ontario Ladies' College.
Trafalgar Castle hosted its share of royalty and dignitaries through the years; both as Reynolds' residence, then as Ontario Ladies' College and now as Trafalgar Castle School.
"While they started to filter in I finally met a girl from Cornwall. She was a bank manager's daughter and I had never met her in Cornwall but when she got to boarding school we decided to be roommates. Then I was told I could live in the castle part. I could room in the castle. So I moved all my things from the wing that I had landed in. My loneliness was over.
I really became one of the school seniors and had all kinds of privileges and lived in a room with the highest ceilings and the biggest door in the world. They were castle doors. It was just so thrilling to live in a big place. There were four of us in this one room and our windows went right down to the floor and there was a parapet around the castle. You could get outside your window and walk along on a little ledge. It wasn't very wide, but we had a lot of fun doing that because we would scratch on the screens at night and scare the kids half to death in their rooms.
We had a big staircase that went up two ways, like a circular staircase that went on from there.
And we had to wear school uniforms, little, short navy jumpers and white shirts and black long leotards, and I guess gym shoes. I’ve forgotten. But we had to wear a dress at dinner at night, very formal, because it was supposed to be like a finishing school where girls not only did first year university subjects but they were there from first grade on up I think. There weren't very many girls, about 100, but they represented all these different levels and they were also supposed to be learning the social arts. There was a lovely grand piano in the living room and guests came to visit and we had to greet them and we had to learn how to behave and we dressed in beautiful clothes for dinner every night.
And we had a chapel and I took organ lessons. I was the only one in the school taking organ lessons. And a gentleman came down from the Toronto Conservatory and taught piano, the advanced piano students, and taught me as the one organ student. That was very thrilling because when we graduated, he invited the whole school to come to Toronto on a Sunday night, and he played an organ in a huge church. As we set foot in the church he played our college hymn as we went down the aisle and that I think was one of the most thrilling experiences of my whole life because I was the only organ student and I felt like he was doing it for me. He was doing it for all of us of course.
The ladies in the church had a lovely, lovely supper for us after a lovely fancy affair for us, afterwards with refreshments.
We were allowed to go on weekends to shop in Toronto. We could go on the bus. It was only 28 miles from Toronto and we had privileges and we also went to a little tea room in Whitby and we were allowed to walk down there after school some evenings.
We had a hockey team, we skated, and I was on the second-string basketball team. I had a hernia so I wasn't able to continue. I've been suffering from these silly hernias all my life. It's too bad to say it, but it's true.
Anyway, I graduated from there in June, won the French prize, studied Latin, French, English and got a Mistress of English Literature Degree, a special degree they granted because we studied English with a Dean. I was in the play, the school play, but I went down to Queen's to visit my sister who was at Queen's University in Kingstown and somebody came down with scarlet fever where she (my sister) lived in the residence and I got caught and had to stay there quarantined and couldn't be in my school play."
Queen's University Kingston, Ontario, Canada from the air in 1919:
" But I was active in a lot of things. I was editor of the yearbook, editor of the newspaper and I was very thrilled to go back there with my husband and see my name on the wall as the Editor of the yearbook that year and now they have a beautiful new chapel now, and over time I go back, and Grampy takes a picture of me outside so that I'll remember my student days. I've never gone back to a reunion. Someday maybe I will because I have friends all over the United States and Canada who went there. One hundred girls represented many states in the union, many provinces in Canada and one girl from Japan who is dead now, unfortunately. But I hope someday to see some of those friends again because I have never met one of them since.
I stayed at home one year and then went to McGill University. I don't know, I kind of missed Cornwall. I had a chance to be with my mother and father alone and I went out on many trips with my mother and father. He went out on business trips around the country. Mother and I would go along. So, I had a beautiful year at home with the two of them. And I think maybe it was more important than a year at college because we did so many things together and they had wonderful sense of humor. They loved to travel and they had good conversation, knew a lot of people, and I just had a lovely year."
McGill University, Montreal, Canada:
"My sister had gone to train for a nurse (I think when I was in my last year of high school maybe). She had found it too strenuous and got ulcers and had to come home. So we were at home for little time together there when we were teenagers, but I've got that a little mixed up. She seemed to go to Queens and stay at Queens. Anyway, I went off to McGill the next year and she was in Queen's. Then I was in residence that year.
My 2nd year at McGill, my mother and father got an apartment in Montreal because we had a large home in Cornwall and they spent a lot of money heating it with oil and we had all gone. We had all left home."
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