THE CONTRARIAN
Start with some basics. Local Municipal Governments in Ontario can be called Towns or Cities, which are primarily urban, or Townships, which are primarily rural. To complicate things, our main unit of land division is townships, that is, a geographic area usually six miles square, and these also have names. So we have Township, a local government, and township, a geographical area.
These geographical townships were divided into lots usually a mile north and south, and a half mile east and west, and these were the basic unit of land division here in northwestern Ontario. This ‘lot’, 320 acres, would be quite a large holding in pioneer times, and these lots were usually divided up into smaller holdings.
A few townships were surveyed out quickly when John Dryden set the wheels in motion to develop the farmland here, one being named Van Horne township. The CPR had the right to lay out urban areas along its right-of-way as it saw fit, and they followed up this basic survey by laying out the village of Dryden. This was a small patch of land within Van Horne township (geographic area), sort of like a hole in a doughnut. The CPR of course got to name the streets. They quite commonly used royal designations such as King, Princess, Queen, Duke, Earl, and also the names of royal persons such as Victoria (our queen at the time), Albert (her consort), Arthur (her son who figured prominently in Canadian history). They also used names of CPR senior persons, locally Kirkpatrick, White, Casimir and especially Van Horne.
Building the CPR through thousands of miles of wilderness was a remarkable achievement, and during the 15 years or so it took to achieve it, there were as one might expect ups and downs. During one of those downs, an American Engineer named William Cornelius Van Horne took over the project, and proved to be just the man to get it done; he is generally credited with its successful completion.
The original Dryden village was laid out in the corner of lot 4, concession 5, Van Horne township. In that original plan, its eastern boundary was a street, named Van Horne Avenue, on the township line between lot 3 and 4.
Within a couple of years of the village appearing, the local government of the Township of Van Horne was formed, so we had a municipal government and a geographic township with the same name and boundaries. The village of Dryden, somewhat expanded since its formation so Van Horne Avenue was not the boundary but one of its main streets, was very much part of the Township of Van Horne, the larger municipal government.
After some 12 years, when the paper mill was under construction, the urban core of the Municipality of Van Horne separated itself out and became the Town of Dryden, a Municipality within a Municipality. So we had an urban Municipality, the Town of Dryden, surrounded by a geographically much larger Municipality, the Township of Van Horne. We can wonder why this was done, presumably initiated by the business community to reserve the expected big mill assessment and taxes to their use rather than diluted over the entire Township. It could be argued that this short-sighted decision is at the heart of much of the division that still exists and still holds back progress in our area.
Urban subdivisions developed over time in the Township, surrounding the Town. By 1955 this urbanized area rivalled the town in population, and comprised most of the population of Van Horne Township. It was annexed into the Town of Dryden, and Van Horne Township was dissolved as a municipality. The small population in the larger remaining area of the township of Van Horne then became ‘unorganized’, that is, without local government.
So Dryden was and is a village physically located within the geographic township of Van Horne, and it was a major part of the local government of the Township of Van Horne. Got it?
One of the first roads developed by the Township, (local government), was an extension of the village’s Van Horne Avenue from the village boundary south along the line between lots 3 and 4 almost to the lake, and the Van Horne Avenue name applied to this extension. They saw this as a main artery; they even gave it an extra width road allowance for part of its length.
So Van Horne Avenue is central to our history. Next week’s column will start to tie this into parades.
drydencurmudgeon 