H I L L S
The Orange and the Green A Legacy of Distrust Animus between Protestants and Catholics brewed among early settlers in Headwaters.
COURTESY DORIS PORTER
H I S T O R I C
Huge crowds filled every community on Orangemen’s Day. In Caledon East, c.1900, the Ontario Hotel had to install extra balcony supports for this group photo.
BY KEN WEBER
F
or well over a century, daily life and local politics were dominated by the fiercely Protestant and intensely patriotic Orange Order. Roman Catholics, greatly outnumbered here, had to keep their heads down.
and country (hence the term “papist,” a common Orange smear). On the other hand, Catholics felt shut out. They were a minority without influ ence and, not entirely without reason, believed themselves victims of bigotry.
What was the problem?
The Orange/Green population ratio
A bit of oral history from the early days of Mono Mills might be apocryphal, but it suggests much. Around 1840 the community engaged a highly regarded teacher, a Catholic, for its tiny log school. Before the school year began, a member of the community’s Loyal Orange Lodge (L.O.L. 192) is alleged to have warned him “not to be teaching your Roman numerals,” but “to stick to good Protestant numbers.” True or not, the story illustrates the religious distrust early settlers carried across the Atlantic and fostered here for generations. There was an inherent sense that the other side was just that – the other side. Catholics were suspected, not entirely without reason, of being loyal to the pope rather than to king
Census data and the number of Orange Lodges show these hills were settled overwhelmingly by Protestants, many of whom were Orangemen. Peel County was noted by historian W. Perkins Bull to be “as full of Orangemen as an egg is full of meat,” an assessment echoed in measure, though certainly not in spirit, by the Roman Catholic Mirror which in 1843 described Bolton as “infested with Orange scoundrels.” In Wellington, Simcoe and Dufferin, a count of lodges reveals impressive numbers. In 1905, for example, members of no fewer than 19 lodges came to Grand Valley from just a carriage ride away when L.O.L. 256 hosted Orangemen’s Day, the annual
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12th of July celebration. In 1931, crowds on Orangeville’s main street cheered on 53 lodges in the Glorious Twelfth parade, and in 1962 there were 91 lodges in the march. Catholics living here could join Corpus Christi parades or Rogation Day processions but had to travel to Toronto or Guelph for that, or sometimes Adjala Township and in later years Melancthon Township. Until the later 1900s there was nothing close to an Orange/Green balance. Catholics were too few in number to mount any celebration as impressive as that of their Protestant neighbours.
Parties and patronage Orangemen’s Day was both party and annual general meeting. It was the biggest event of the year in every community, and if Catholics showed up, it was rarely by invitation (and never to official dinners and speeches). Local lodges were social clubs and the local Orange Hall was the ultimate site for making political and patronage connections. In January
1881, following the first county council meeting in brand new Dufferin County, where nearly every councillor was a past or present officer of an Orange Lodge, local papers reported uncritically that the majority of paid municipal appointments went to Orangemen. This kind of patronage was common not just in these hills but around the province, an irritant remembered long after the Orange Order’s influence had declined.
External pressures Despite a range of annoyances, the two sides got along remarkably well in their own neighbourhoods. Most often it was outside forces that stirred the pot. In 1923, for example, in response to the idea that “O Canada” be our national anthem, The Sentinel, an official organ of the Order, fired up its well-oiled, anti-Quebec rhetoric, calling the anthem “a French Canadian racial hymn,” and harrumphing that “until this Dominion becomes a French Canadian republic, our anthem shall be ‘God Save the King.’” The
