ARCHIVES Saint Thomas, Woodlawn Arnprior Deanery A Hidden Story

BY GLENN J LOCKWOOD

Usually when one sees a small country church bearing the name of the patron saint, Saint Thomas, it is not difficult to surmise that there were years of struggle, even doubt that a worship community might survive, let alone thrive. And yet, here we are confronted by a confident, even prosperous looking Anglican house of worship from the early years of the First World War bearing the name of this doubtful patron saint. What are we to think?

Standard sources are of no help in resolving this conundrum. We are told that an earlier frame church was in use by 1874 on land donated by John and Ann Heddley. Leonard Johnson in Faith of Our Fathers: The Story of the Diocese of Ottawa (1957), tells that the building of this church, or at least the funding of its construction, was implicitly miraculous. He wrote:

The present St. Thomas Church, built in 1915, replaces an old frame structure, and was constructed during the rectorship of the Rev. C. Franklin Clarke…. A window in this church symbolizes the high regard for the rector who was responsible for its construction. At the first service in the new church, it was announced that the building was completely paid for. Here pioneer family names were Wilson and Dolan, while the Davis family which moved into the parish from Quebec shortly after the turn of the [nineteenth] century have contributed greatly to the life and development of the parish. Recently five new stained glass memorial windows have been dedicated.

This account implicitly compliments the rector at the time, prominent families and the larger congregation for somehow raising funds so the church was ready for consecration upon opening.

As we ponder this, let us stroll in the Woodlawn churchyard. More lawn than wood, (there is a woodlot nearby) its name arose with the proliferation of rural post offices in the last third of the 19th century, when names were chosen that suggested suburban ease or English prototypes. As we stroll, we notice a further curious anomaly. While this fine house of worship is aligned with the road on which it fronts, the graves in the burial ground are not. Instead, the graveyard has been laid out with the plots facing east toward Jerusalem, so that when the trumpet sounds those buried here will be facing toward Jerusalem when they sit up in their graves.

Some 60 years after Faith of Our Fathers was published, the story as to how Saint Thomas’s Church, Woodlawn was paid for so quickly came out. In 2015, when the church’s centennial was being marked, descendants of the contractor came forward and revealed that he was a Roman Catholic, eager to prove how good a contractor he was, by offering to build the new church gratis as an advertisement for his skills as a builder.

What is not at all clear is why it was such a mystery for the previous century. Indeed, we cannot even be sure that it was or was not intended to be a mystery. Advertising, after all, is all about getting the word out, and not hiding one’s light under a bushel. Could it really have been simply a matter of hiding the fact that the builder of an Anglican church was a Roman Catholic due to denominational bias? Or was it a deliberate strategy agreed upon by contractor and clergyman, that the contractor would only be revealed when discreet inquiry was made by potential further clients looking for a builder for another new church?

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 Food security, from p. 1

BY GLENN J LOCKWOOD

While Crosstalk was unable to survey all rural parish initiatives with similar objectives for this report, it’s clear that many have stepped up their efforts since the pandemic. Another current example of parishes stepping up today, St John the Evangelist Smiths Falls does a Community Dinner on Delivery that sends out between 100 and 120 dinners each month, rising to 160 at Easter and Thanksgiving. Threecourse meals are cooked, packaged and refrigerated on site for delivery, usually the third Sunday of each month.

Local tradition tells us a mission was started at Cornwall in 1784 for Loyalist refugees, and by 1787, a parish was founded. The Rev. John Strachan arrived in 1803. A frame house of worship put up in 1805 prompted Strachan to opine that “Cornwall had the finest church in Upper Canada—and that in the poorest parish.”

St John’s started a breakfast and lunch package for delivery three times a week during the pandemic. It was replaced by the dinner delivery service. It’s financed out of St John’s outreach budget and donations of money and time by parishioners and friends.

Some things never change. Over 60 years later, when the 1805 house of worship was showing its age,

The latest report from Feed Ontario, the food bank network, confirms that need is increasing in rural areas and the shortage of affordable housing is frequently the underlying problem. “All our food banks are seeing that unaffordable housing is an issue, and we saw actually the greatest spikes in housing affordability were outside the Greater Toronto Area,” says spokesperson Ashley Quan.