A History of Kitchener, Ontario

W.V. (Ben) Uttley

Description

William V. Uttley's outline of Kitchener's growth from the 1840's into 20th century [is] shot through with a reassuring consistency and integration of purpose .... The complex of life as we still know it—social freedom and social restraint, economy and ecology—has its genesis here in the account compiled by William Uttley. His work comes as close to a personal anecdotal history of the city as we can hope to retrieve, a spotted chronicle of a community that can never exist again, and one in which almost every reader will find a point where past confronts present as nostalgia tugs against progress.

Sujets

• Regional Municipality of Waterloo

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 1975
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781554588084
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A HISTORY OF KITCHENER, ONTARIO
by W. V. (Ben) Uttley
Reissued with an Introduction by Gerald Noonan
Note on the Text
The major part of this re-issue of The History of Kitchener is a photocopy of the hard cover, 6 x 9, 434 page edition written by W. V. Uttley and published by The Chronicle Press, Waterloo in 1937. It includes a new Introduction and Biography of the author written by Gerald A. Noonan, and a 18-page name-and-subject index compiled by Joyce Lorimer. The new cover design is taken from photographs contained in the original edition.
COPYRIGHT 1975 Mrs. Kathleen Wilken, Mrs. Vera Tanner and Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
ISBN - 0-88920-024-6 (paper) ISBN - 0-88920-025-4 (cloth)
INTRODUCTION
The sound of Hoffman s factory bell rings a pervasive note in William V. Uttley s compiled chronicle of Berlin s building years. The factory bell, installed in 1845 at what is now the Bank of Nova Scotia corner in downtown Kitchener, called men to labor, volunteers to quench fires, pealed for weddings, tolled for funerals, and called voters to the polls on election day (p. 66). The multi-purpose bell suggests a centrality and clearly-defined sense of community that may be attainable only in retrospect. In the immediate present, what many city-dwellers have in common is a sense of the fragmentary artificiality of modern life, a quality generally accepted as an unavoidable consequence of our technological diversions. It is just possible, however, that the breakdown of community is something experienced in every era, a by-product of progress that was accounted as a necessary evil in the first half of the 19th century in proportionately the same way as it is in the last quarter of the 20th century. And perhaps it is only the distancing effect of time that gives the life of yester-generation its satisfying unity.
In any case, despite its own fragmentary nature, Uttley s outline of Kitchener s growth from the 1840 s into 20th century tends, for the contemporary reader, to be shot through with a reassuring consistency and integration of purpose. Now that all in the long run has, indeed, worked out for the best, or at least for the status quo, there is little in the past that will upset us-unless the status quo is also upsetting. Certainly, there are charms associated with the sound of the factory bell, that we hear as if from memory, summoning up what Uttley elsewhere pictures as a town in its shirtsleeves (p. 206), or a town of frame houses . . . with pumps at their front door, and . . . well-kept gardens at the back, strongly-fenced to ward off cows that grazed by the right-of-way (p. 194). From this distance there is a charm too in the hardy settlers who killed rattlesnakes with a whip (p. 22), drank cider from the barrel (p. 23), and plowed the soil with a tree-top (p. 15). Next came German mechanics who, in driving no nails into the air, planted trees for fruit not shade, grew vegetables not shrubs, and cultivated gardens instead of games (p. 31). Soon the frame houses were clustering within range of an increasing number of factories; a town policy adopted in 1874 gave five years tax exemption to employers of 75 or more men, and reimbursed the company s annual building rent as well (p. 193). On that strong manufacturing base, there grew up schools and churches, railways, hotels, city halls, banks, civic fairs, clubs, sports, and sewers. For all of these, Uttley s History has names, locations, the leading spirits, and occasionally photographs.
For those bygone building generations, the emphasis undoubtedly was on material progress. Nothing so multi-purposed as a bell appeared on the village seal of 1854; along with the crown was a beaver, a locomotive, a cross-cut saw, and an axe (p. 97), all clear symbols of work. Local leaders were emphatically clear-sighted in working to acquire, first, the Township Hall (p. 71), and then the county seat (p. 80). In both cases, the issue was won by the prospect of prime land sites on Queen and Weber Streets offered free by Frederick Gaukel, owner of the 1835 tavern-hotel at the King and Queen intersection. When a later owner of the same hotel-site, Abel Walper of Zurich, offered the town a small triangle of land at the intersection to straighten the zig-zag of Queen Street, he asked 500 cash. The councillors in 1892 were still clear-sighted enough to accept, but the citizens objected so strongly to the price that the zig-zag remains to this day (p. 257). A consistent sense of value was still evident early in the twentieth century. For a gift of five acres of land in Woodside Park an American company was induced to move its Canadian plant to Berlin. And the Park Board s compensation price of 6,000 was whittled down by the local Industrial Committee to 1,000 by appealing to their [the Park Board s] civic pride (p. 399). Then, in 1912, when a handsome Federal Square, which might well appeal to civic pride, was proposed for a site between Frederick and Scott Streets, property-owners defeated [the] bylaw (p. 400), refusing to spend the money. In retrospect, therefore, the most consistent note in these civic endeavours suggests a further significance in that pervasive ringing of Hoffman s factory bell. The bell proclaimed, to all who would hear, its predominance over elections, weddings, and funerals; it proclaimed the predominance of factories.
That insight, precarious as it is, may explain a cryptic incident in Uttley s brief account of the bell: One night the bell disappeared and could not be found. At last Andrew Borth espied it in an old well on the site of St. Jerome s College where two workmen had hidden it. Perhaps those whose morning slumbers and daily energies were rationed by the clanging symbol regularly wished its bell-like tones at the bottom of an abandoned well.
Individual response of that sort to the documented tenor of life is, as might be expected, the rarest quality in Uttley s History , as it is in most histories. We do get a glimpse, nonetheless, of the personal lives of store clearks in 1859 when a woman, rendered desperate by the rigors of clerking from breakfast to 10 p.m., goes so far as to write a letter to the editor. And a displeased merchant replies: Is a transition from the legitimate sphere of women s everyday walk to that of contributing to a newspaper an action that will exalt yourself in your own estimation or that of your sex? (p. 104). Less clearly indicated, but poignant in its way, is the plight of the only three German girls of marriageable age in the village in the 1840 s. Hence, reports Uttley without a tremor, young Germans went over to Buffalo, N.Y. to seek for helpmeets (p. 41). It is hard to imagine that, in what had seemed such an ideal market, any of the three single girls left behind, looking through the frame-house window past the pump and the vegetable-garden, would watch those retreating backs of their young men and remain unmoved. It may even be, to return to Hoffman s bell as symbol, that it was the women of those good old days that approved of the factory bell, kept it ringing, and found it, in particular, reassuring. Restricted to their legitimate sphere of women s everyday walk, and outraged worlds removed from the freedom of their own shopping trip to Buffalo, they could take comfort in the audible reminder that their menfolk too had their appointed rounds and their sanctioned roles.
In sum, the complex of life as we still know it-social freedom and social restraint, economy and ecology-has its genesis here in the account compiled by William Uttley. His work comes as close to a personal anecdotal history of the city as we can hope to retrieve, a spotted chronicle of a community that can never exist again, and one in which almost every reader will find a point where past confronts present as nostalgia tugs against progress.
Gerald A. Noonan Department of English Wilfrid Laurier University Waterloo, 1975

WILLIAM V. (BEN) UTTLEY 1865-1944
BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
William Valores (Ben) Uttley was 72 years old in 1937 when he completed and published The History of Kitchener. It is not known how many copies of the book were printed, nor how many years Uttley had spent compiling the pieces of information he included. One story is that he was busy taking pre-publication orders for the book at the same time as he was going about interviewing and researching and recording.
His background suited him for the work. He was, in sequence, a native of Elmira, a resident of Doon, and a prominent newspaperman and civic politician in Kitchener. His own life-span, 1865-1944, linked the Victorian and modern eras, and the village of Berlin to the city of Kitchener.
He was born in Elmira on January 1, 1865, the first son of Samuel Uttley and Mary Taylor, of English and Scottish descent. He grew up there and attended Elmira Public School. Sometime after 1877, when the local directory still lists a Samuel Uttley as resident in Elmira, the family moved to Doon.
Ben Uttley attended Berlin High School, and after graduation, according to H. Lefty Weichel of Elmira, studied shorthand privately and completed study at Toronto Business College. Mr. Weichel, who was born in 1896, and whose son married Uttley s daughter, Kathleen, reports that Uttley began active newspaper work on the St. Louis Chronicle , Missouri. 1
In any case, by 1888 Uttley was living in Doon and teaching at Freeport Public School (possibly known also as Limerick School 2 ) just across the Grand River. The Annual Report of the Inspector of Public Schools of the County of Waterloo lists W. V. Uttley as the teacher at Freeport (at 400 a year) in 1888, 1889, and 1891. (The 1890 Report is not included in the Kitchener Public Library holdings.)
In order to shorten his walk to and from school, Uttley constructed a cable fastened to a