Early Days
by G. William Streeter
This morning I was thinking about the iconic picture of Jubilee Park in the 1930’s with hundreds of people and lots of cars around the ball diamond at a Southampton Fishermen game that was taken from the top of the water tower from when they twice won the All Ontario Baseball Intermediate Championship.
No, I was not there despite what my insulting friends might tell you!
But you will notice in the picture that there is a high wooden fence all around the ball field. Yes, everyone had to pay to go in and watch. The main gate was on Victoria Street close to the water tower. There you could pay and if you drove there, you could bring your car in. There was also a second gate off Palmerston St. that walking patrons could pay at to get in.
And that gate is the focus of this story. If you look in the picture you will see nothing but open farmland behind the left and centre field fences. Grey street is right there, and you can see a barn on the right which is at the Breadalbane and Palmerston corner and more barns close by in the background.
That was the way it still was when I started school in the late 40’s. We lived in a little house on the southeast corner of Morpeth and Grey. I started school in Grade 1 in 1948. The fastest way to school was to walk across the open field kitty corner from our home to the corner of Breadalbane and Palmerston and through the Jubilee Park gate, across the ball field to the Victoria Street gate and north to our school which is now the northern section of the museum.
The younger Nickel kids would be in the group as their dads had small mixed farms at the corner of Grenville and Spence that came down to Grey. The Tasker and Sollers families lived on Adelaide near Grenville. The kids that lived east of Angleisa had to walk to the White School on County Road 3 next to the Saugeen Golf Course as they lived outside town limits in Saugeen Township.
Grey Street was not developed past the house across from Chantry Centre where the Gillies family lived in the grey frame house that is still there. The street was not plowed beyond that but was somewhat usable the rest of the year but was well rutted. Us kids would walk that way some of the time in season.
That would take us along Grey over to Little Lake for exploring on our twice a day walks to and from school.
Sometime in the 60’s some folks started calling the lake Fairy Lake but, all of the land patents for all the properties around it clearly refer to it as the Little Lake Land Reserve. The suggestion remains that someone new to town saw some fog on the lake one morning and concluded that it looked like fairies in the mist. But we know that the real name is “Little Lake”. None of the Scottish immigrants that founded our town would ever have named it “Fairy Lake”. Local mothers would call it Little Lake to differentiate it from the “Big Lake”. This was “discussed” at council on occasion back in time, but nothing was ever done to formally make it one or the other. Today there remain a few of us that use the correct name of Little Lake when referring to it. (Chuckle Chuckle)
Yes, some great memories of a quite different time.
