The weekly newspaper business has never been an easy path to quick riches.
The newspaper business in Wellington County began in 1842 with the first Guelph weekly.
By the early 1850s three weeklies were published in Guelph, and new papers had appeared in Fergus and Elora.
After 1870 there were quite a number of papers. A town of any size invariably hosted competing papers. For a time there were four in Elora. Smaller places, like Clifford, Hillsburgh and Rockwood, boasted their own papers for at least a few years.
The number of papers reached a peak in the early years of the 20th century.
After the First World War, though, it was clear that the golden period was over. Inflation and rising material and labour costs hit the weekly papers, but advertisers resisted attempts by publishers to increase charges.
The less prosperous papers had two alternatives: merge with the other paper in their town or go out of business.
Despite the financial problems, most of the surviving papers still managed to turn out papers filled with news, and that continued through the depression years and into the early 1950s.
Between 1920 and 1950 Wellington’s weeklies offered a picture of small town life superior to that before or since. Local historians in the future will find all papers of the early 21st century less useful as sources than those from the mid-20th century. Some of them will be virtually useless as documents in the historical record.
This column has, for many months, concentrated on the 1920s. The county’s surviving weeklies of those years have been the main source of information.
There are hundreds of interesting stories from those years that are too short to form the basis of a 1,200 word column. This week I will deal with some of those shorter pieces. Those that follow are all from the third week of July in 1929.
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A couple of readers have told me they had no idea that Gypsies once prowled around Wellington. In July 1929 a group of them, consisting of two men and four women, ran afoul of the law when on the highway between Fergus and Elora.
Bill Allan, a driver for McKey’s Bakery of Guelph, was heading to Fergus along that road. He passed the gypsies, and they motioned him to stop. When he got out of the truck and approached the group one of the men produced a mallet and threatened him.
They made off with about $20 in cash, plus a couple of loaves of bread, presumably for their lunch. Allan returned to his truck and resumed his trip to Fergus. He discovered that Fergus Chief Couling was out of town, following up on another case, so he called the provincial police in Guelph.
Officer Mennie, with an assistant, was immediately assigned to the case, and he was in Fergus in less than an hour. After talking to Allan he began his search, and found the thieving Gypsies within a half hour. He arrested the men, and took them to Guelph.
After a night’s stay in a small room maintained at public expense, the men appeared before Magistrate Frederic Watt. He wanted to rid the area of the Gypsies. He allowed them to go free if they returned the money and agreed to leave the area at once and never return.
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In 1929 there were few effective herbicides available, and farmers strove to eliminate weeds by hand. Determined to fight weed invasions, Wellington County appointed weed inspectors for each of the townships in the county, with powers to immediately order eradication.
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Lacrosse had a huge following in the 1920s, and the strongest team in the area was the Fergus Thistles. A convoy of supporters followed the hometown favourites to the last regular game of the season in Hamilton on July 14. It ended with a 4-4 tie. The Hamilton team included a half dozen men formerly of Fergus. Lacrosse fever gripped the town as the team prepared for the playoffs.
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Noah Elbert of Moorefield took advantage of good weather to make some repairs to the roof of his house. He lost his footing, and plunged some 18 feet to the ground.
Surprisingly, he landed on his feet, but realized he was injured. Soon he was at the Fergus hospital, where Dr. Abraham Groves at once sent him to the X-ray room for a series of pictures. Other than breaks in a couple of small bones in his right foot and some nasty bruises, he suffered no major injuries. The doctor told him to stay off his feet for a couple of weeks.
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The normal early morning tranquility of St. Andrew, the main street of Fergus, was shattered about 3am on July 11, when a motor car climbed the curb and drove through the front window of Foote’s Bakery.
As was the case those days, a small crew was busy at the back of the store, baking bread and cakes for the following day’s sales. The noise startled the crew, but they were unable to go to the front of the store because the door was locked and no one had a key.
One of the workers, Bill Blyth, lived upstairs. He immediately ran upstairs to peer out the front window, but the car had already disappeared.
Investigation the next morning showed the track where the car had left the road and climbed the curb before demolishing the window. No skid marks were visible, and it appeared that the driver did not apply the brakes.
Fergus police Chief Goulding concluded that the driver was either drunk or had fallen asleep. Judging from marks on the window frame, the car had sustained considerable damage, though it made a clean getaway.
Goulding advised local garages to be on the watch for the damaged car, but no suspect was ever identified. Foote carried ample insurance on the building, and glazers had the window repaired late the following day.
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An interesting development was the opening of a stock broker’s office in Fergus, in the new building constructed beside the Fergus library. That was the summer of insane stock price increases that led to the famous crash in October 1929.
The firm, Kiely and Smith, were members of the Standard Mining and Stock Exchange of Toronto. In charge were manager R.R. Coleman and a Fergus native, C.S. Wood. The office had two teletype machines connected to the exchange, and a blackboard to record the most recent prices of mining stocks. The office also had a connection with the grain exchange in Winnipeg.
A stock broker in a town the size of Fergus, which then had a population of about 2,500, was unusual. Little information seems to have survived about the office. It likely didn’t last long after the crash of the fall of 1929.
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Automobile ownership in Wellington County had proliferated quickly during the 1920s.
There was also an epidemic of crashes and collisions. Safety considerations played little part in the design and construction of motor cars of that period, and the roads were filled with motorists who had little ability to drive properly or safely.
On July 13 and 14 of 1929, a normal summer weekend, 21 people died on roads in Ontario, and the number of serious injuries was several times that figure. Among the unusual ones was the death of a taxi driver from St. Catharines.
A Fergus resident who was working in St. Catharines hired a taxi to take him home. Riding with him, apparently, were two girls, who planned to go back with the car to St. Catharines.
On the way back home the driver crashed into a tree and died. The girls, uninjured, left the scene. The case resulted in a number of unanswered questions – none adequately addressed in an inquest.
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These were just a few of the stories printed that week. Those were lively days for newspapermen, and no less so for their weekly readership.