My husband got a job in Stratford, Ont. in 1999, and I was staying back home in Ottawa to work. We were planning to take turns commuting to see each other on weekends; I would take the train, and he would drive.
Before that routine kicked in, I took three months off work to spend the summer in Stratford, population then about 25,000. When you’re living somewhere for three months, you don’t initially know whether you’re a tourist or a resident, or what the differences are from where you’ve lived before.
The first hint of a difference I found in Stratford, Ont. compared to Ottawa, population 850,000, was that shopkeepers remembered me after meeting me just once. I wasn’t as anonymous as I was on Elgin Street in Ottawa.
“I saw you jogging across Ontario Street at 8 o’clock,” said the man at Mailboxes Etc., my regular mid-morning walk destination.
“It’s Louisa from Ottawa!” said Teresa at the Trattoria, my lunch outing.
“How’re you liking Stratford so far?” asked Mrs. Broad at the photo store, a frequent stop because there was so much to photograph.
I was new in town, and they all remembered. And the city’s memory, where everybody knows everybody else, is much longer than that. For instance, my husband found his initial rental accommodation because his admin assistant’s husband was in real estate and knew the travel agent’s wife.
But I couldn’t put my finger on the real difference until I was chatting with a city councillor at a reception for the board of the Stratford General Hospital, where it takes you a much longer time not to be an outsider.
Stratford, Ont., has a long history by Canadian standards, with settlement beginning in 1828. The Grand Trunk Railway and the Buffalo and Lake Huron line arrived in Stratford in 1856. Stratford’s beautiful park system was started in 1870, and the furniture industry in 1886. The first swans were given to the city in 1918, and the Shakespearean Gardens were created in 1939. That’s all a long time before the Stratford Festival opened in 1953 as a bold venture to replace the closing railway shops.
A woman at the reception told me her son, now living in Vancouver, figured it out. It’s that in Stratford – and many other small centres – ‘Mr. Smith’ can live in a house for 30 years – and yet it’s still called the ‘Baker’ house or whoever owned it 50 or 100 years ago. It takes a much longer time to become embedded in the culture and imagination.
The historic flavour of Stratford stems from not just everything Elizabethan from the Stratford Festival, but from the presence of the Mennonite community in their traditional dress, and from the agriculture – “Welcome to Stratford, the Pork Capital of Ontario and home of the Ontario Pork Congress” a sign at the city limits beckons.
