The following is a re-print of a past column by former Advertiser columnist Stephen Thorning, who passed away on Feb. 23, 2015.
Some text has been updated to reflect changes since the original publication and any images used may not be the same as those that accompanied the original publication.
References to the Orange Order, or the Orange Association of British America, to use its formal term, have appeared in this column occasionally over the years. To anyone under 40, this organization is virtually unknown, and to those a little older, it will be remembered as just another fraternal group.
A hundred years ago, few communities lacked an Orange lodge. At the peak of the organization, Wellington County had at least 30 of them. Today it has all but vanished. I believe that lodges still operate in Mount Forest and Guelph, but its influence in society and politics has long disappeared.
The organization is an old one. The first Orange societies date to the Revolution of late 17th century in England, and were formed by admirers of William of Orange. His victory over James II in the Battle of the Boyne secured a Protestant royal family in England. The date of the battle, July 12, 1690, became the focus of the Orange Order.
Orange societies appeared in Canada after 1800, and these organized themselves into a grand lodge for Canada in 1830. Canadian Orangemen claimed they organized “for the defence of Protestant Christianity.” They opposed denominational schools, particularly Catholic ones, and desired to eradicate French as a language of government and business.
The order also undertook much charitable work, particularly for orphans. Other than some minute books for Harriston, it appears that no records for any of Wellington’s 19th century Orange Lodges have survived, at least in any museum or archives. In a way this is not surprising. The Order was a secret society, replete with signs, symbols, passwords and secret handshakes.
Weekly newspapers are the only significant source of information, and the coverage in them is, for the most part, accounts of July 12 activities.
Guelph had a functioning lodge in the 1840s. Others were started in Fergus and Elora about 1850, and no doubt there were more in the area soon after. Activity and support for the Orange cause reached one of its high points during this period. Orangemen held a district meeting in Elora in the first week of January 1858. By 1860 the July 12 parade had been established, along with the practice of one lodge hosting the event and inviting neighbouring lodges to participate.
Alma’s lodge hosted a July 12 parade in 1863, with participation by lodges from Fergus, Pilkington, Rothsay, Maryborough, Peel and Alma. The parade began in Elora, and marched through Salem to the hosting hamlet, where an arch had been erected over the roadway. After a series of speeches, about 1,000 people sat down to dinner. The preparation of the meal fully taxed the facilities of both Alma’s hotels.
The 1863 celebration came off with no incidents. Such was not always the case. July 12 became an excuse for drunkenness and rowdyism, though the Orangeman could not always be blamed. Many Catholics viewed the parades as provocative: often they were routed past Catholic churches or the residences of prominent Catholics.
It is easy to overemphasize the importance and popularity of the Orange Order. July 12 parades usually drew huge crowds, most of whom were not members. Orangemen themselves often lacked enthusiasm. Elora hosted a two-day meeting of Orangemen for western Ontario in February 1867. The event filled all the rooms in Elora’s hotels, but the total number of bedrooms available was only about 60, and very few had to go to Fergus hostelries. Despite the presence of Ogle Gowan, head of the Order in Canada, and other prominent Orangemen, the number present disappointed organizers. A soiree at the Elora Drill Shed drew only 250 people, and half of them were not Orangemen, but rather, locals looking for a good party.
There was a general expectation that the 1890 July 12 celebration would be a major demonstration of Orangeism. This was the 200th anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, and it fell on a Saturday, traditionally the best day for public events. And recent political developments had given the Order a boost. A year earlier, the Quebec government had agreed to purchase, for $400,000, the interest of the Jesuit Order in some 800,000 acres of seigneurial land acquired during the French regime. This development inflamed Orangemen, and they became apoplectic when Sir John A. Macdonald’s government refused to challenge the deal.
Dalton McCarthy, a Conservative MP and head of the Orange Lodge in Canada, resigned from the party to sit as an independent, and began to take steps to form a Protestant political party. During May and June of 1890, the fire-eating element of the Order, and some rabid Protestant ministers, tried to use the Jesuit Estates deal to inflame their own members and the public at large. One assured a Mount Forest audience that the Quebec members of the cabinet received their instructions daily from Rome via transatlantic cable. Another told a Guelph congregation that Sir John A. Macdonald was a Jesuit (he was, in fact, a card-carrying Orangeman).
Rather than provoke a general rising of the public, this extreme talk merely exposed the fractures within the Orange Order. For example, Guelph’s Lodge 1331 scheduled their 1890 church service at St. James on July 6. Less than 30 members showed up, and they presented a rather pathetic spectacle as they marched from their lodge rooms on Wyndham Street to the church. When they arrived they saw that they had reinforcements: 18 members of the True Blue Lodge, another Protestant group.
The minister delivered a half-hour outline of the history of Christianity, most of which described the grasping for power by the Church of Rome. He urged a union of all Protestants to stand up to the encroachments from the Vatican.
On July 12, the Guelph lodge travelled to a celebration in Milton on a special train. Guelph’s True Blue ladies lodge led the parade there. The main attraction, though, was a baseball game between the Milton Olympics and the Toronto Athletics. Several lodges from Erin and Eramosa went to Milton, but the others in Wellington went either to Harriston or Belwood. The Harriston celebration was by far the larger, drawing about 6,000 people, the largest crowd ever seen in Harriston to that time. The Canadian Pacific put on special trains – from Wingham and Teeswater in the west, and from Arthur and Mount Forest to the east. Representatives of 40 lodges participated, but most of those present were not Orangemen, merely curiosity seekers. A few, perhaps, were disappointed that no disturbances took place.
Most of the visitors brought picnic baskets, and they spent the early part of the day wandering around town as fife-and-drum amateurs offered squawking and off-rhythm renditions of patriotic airs. Bunting and union jacks festooned the main street. The mile-long parade began at 2pm, and featured six bands as it wound around town from the market grounds to the fair grounds for a baseball game.
Belwood’s July 12 activities consisted largely of an afternoon of ball games, with visiting teams present from Erin, Grand Valley, and Elora, and a 15-cent admission in effect. The parade was a small one, and the speeches, as at Harriston, formed a minor part of the program, heard by only a minority of the visitors.
Leaders of the local Orange lodges realized that an extreme stance did not play well in Wellington. Their emphasis on activities other than speeches – the family picnic at Harriston and the ball tournament at Belwood – drew crowds that would never have come to hear their politic pitch on its own.
A fascinating side of the 1890 Orange Day was the reaction of the Catholic Church. The Sunday before July 12, Elora’s Catholics brought in Bishop Dowling from Hamilton. He celebrated an early mass at 8am. For the main service at 10:30, more than half the seats were occupied by Protestants, who had come to hear the Bishop speak – he had a wide reputation as a brilliant orator. His sermon, consisting of a clear and logical outline of the Church’s teachings and activities, was aimed specifically at the visitors.
Four days later, on July 10, Arthur’s Catholics held their annual picnic at Cavanagh’s Grove at the edge of town. Father Doherty and Maurice Halley, owner of the Arthur bakery, spent a great deal of time organizing the event, and managed to attract 3,000, about 1,200 of whom were Protestants. Helping to swell the crowd was a raffle, with the top prize a brand-new top-of-the-line binder, just in time for the harvest season. Dancing and games filled the day, as the gregarious and diplomatic Father Doherty circulated through the crowd, welcoming friends and greeting strangers. Halley put together a program featuring addresses by nine speakers, all but two of whom were Protestants. They included the local MPs and MPPs. Arthur’s Catholics had been holding picnics for several years, but this was the most successful ever, raising about $1,900.
Bishop Dowling’s visit and the Arthur picnic were brilliant efforts to defuse, at the local level, what many viewed as an escalating religious confrontation in Canada. But there is also a hint of a political motive, particularly with the Arthur event. Maurice Halley, who organized the speakers at Arthur, was the uncle of Rose Clarke, wife of Charles Clarke, the MPP for Wellington Centre. This was the best known mixed marriage in the county. Clarke himself was the chief speaker at Arthur, and he brought along his colleague Andrew Semple, the MP for Wellington Centre. Also on the program was James McMullen, MP for Wellington North. All were Liberals, and elections at both the federal and provincial levels were on the horizon. All three men possessed astute political instincts. They realized that the soundest strategy was to appeal to harmony, and attract the support of both Catholics and moderate Protestants. It is also significant that all three found they were unable to attend any public events on July 12.
This middle-of-the-road, live-and-let-live philosophy dominated Wellington County in the 19th and early 20th centuries. There were always a few Protestant extremists, and a much larger number who shunned contact, either in business or socially, with Catholics. But serious conflict leading to disturbances and violence was episodic, and not characteristic of the period as a whole.
*This column was originally published in the Wellington Advertiser on Dec 6, 2002.
