Rockingham – There is something very nostalgic about sitting in the pews at the Rockingham Church and the annual anniversary service this year added to that feeling with recollections of life on the farm for an immigrant family.
“My parents were post war immigrants from the war-torn Netherlands,” said Johanna Zomers, the guest speaker at the service on Sunday afternoon. “They came from the fertile flat fields of North Brabant in Holland, intent on farming on the hilly stony little fields of Brudenell.”
The Rockingham Church is beautiful and quaint and each year the pews are filled to capacity for the anniversary celebration of the restoration of the church. This year marks the 22nd celebration since COVID created a few breaks. The restoration itself was largely done in 1999-2000.
On Sunday afternoon, there was a break in the rain showers when people climbed the steep hill to the church for the service and a cool breeze kept the building comfortable despite each pew being filled to capacity. The church is dark, with the interior stained in dark wood, dark wood ceilings and dark wood pews. The light is all natural coming in through the windows and even though the service was held on a summer afternoon, it was dark inside, perhaps encouraging participants to reflect on how the early pioneers would have experienced a church service there. With hymns being sung, including the perennial Church in the Wildwood, scripture read and a prayer by Rev. David Trafford, a retired Baptist minister and one of the founding members of The Friends of Rockingham Church, there was a feeling of the church service of old which would have been held there 150 years ago.
Originally built in the mid 1870s, it was known as St. Leonard’s Anglican Church and was the place of worship for a thriving community. Largely abandoned by the 1940s, the building had deteriorated significantly by the time The Friends of the Rockingham Church was formed in 1995. The building had been deconsecrated by the Anglican church and was largely abandoned. The repairs were done and the building declared a heritage site. Since then, a celebration has happened each summer and people of all ages climb the hill to the church, enjoy music and a speaker who usually deals with a topic of history and the local area.
Ms. Zomers spoke about her recollections of life on the farm along the Opeongo Line, quite close to Rockingham, where she lived with her family after they emigrated from Holland. Many of her recollections form the crux of the newest Stone Fence Theatre Production, Miss Pringle’s Mini Skirt. She recalled how one character refers to the Opeongo as the Ongo Pongo Road.
“The Ongo Pongo, with its potholes, giant puddles, boot sucking mud and six-foot-high drifts was the main thoroughfare of my youth as we navigated our way to church, school and on day-long cattle buying expeditions to the hills of Wilno, Hopefield and Halfway,” she recalled.
Her parents came to Canada and settled in the Brudenell area like Irish and Polish families had before them.
“We were foreigners, speaking only Dutch and learning to muddle our way through a cultural and social maze we didn’t understand,” she said. “I didn’t speak a word of English when I started Grade One at SS#7 Brudenell and Lyndoch.”
Their home was a clapboard farmhouse with no hydro, no running water, no indoor toilet, no bathtub and no heating except for a black and chrome Renfrew cookstove and a cast iron box stove in the front room, she recalled.
“We were eternally half frozen except for the hottest summer months when we roasted because all the cooking, baking, canning and preserving had to be done on that cookstove,” Ms. Zomers said. “We didn’t mind the summer heat, although I remember my mother canning applesauce in clouds of steam on thirty-degree August afternoons while we kids played in the cool shade of the apple trees in the orchard.”
There was no television and only an occasional working battery powered radio. So, the children read and re-read books.
“Both Mary Nolans and Basil Shields’ general stores in the village had black and white television sets high up on a shelf where customers were welcome to sit awhile, buy a chocolate bar and a pop and watch Bonanza or the Ed Sullivan Show,” she recalled.
With her siblings, they loved Bonanza and would re-enact the stories and were each assigned a character.
“We were living examples of the old cliché ‘we were poor but we were happy’,” she recalled. “It may sound odd, but we had the best kind of poverty. The sort that provides all the necessary raw materials for a good life but demands that you have to do the everyday work to create that life.”
The children all had jobs to do from bringing in the cows for milking, to peeling apples and shovelling paths.
Madonna House was a special place for the family and provided cultural, religious and literary inspiration, she said.
“We re-enacted various Catholic celebrations, read our way through the lending library at St. Joe’s, opened our Christmas gifts of second-hand toys lovingly selected from the clothing room, spent afternoons eating cookies and listening to Baroness Catherine Doherty telling stories of her youth in Russia,” she recalled.
When she had read all the books in the school library, she moved on to reading anything she could find, including seed catalogues.
“There was never enough to read and one day I had the brilliant idea that I could invent and write a story of my own,” she recalled.
Now a published writer, she is a weekly columnist for the Leader and many of the topics of her column form the stories behind Miss Pringle’s Mini Skirt. In closing, she noted there are still performances to come of the production in September and October.
Music was from the Lyra Ensemble, which conductor Emily Adam said focuses on the beauty of the sacred harp – the human voice. Entirely acapella and featuring rounds with various voices coming in, the musical interlude featured music both old and new. Members include Alex Davies, Peter Ritchie, Beat Ulrich, Louise Stoodley, Lesley MacDonald, Bramble O’Brien and Mrs. Adam.
Each year a special part of the service is the ringing of the bell. However, this year something went a tad wrong when the bell pull broke at the beginning of the service as it was being rung. Hence, this year there was a bit of improvisation required, so a volunteer stood on a chair and rang the bell at the end to the applause of those gathered. Thus, the bells were still ringing in Rockingham for another year.
The Friends of Rockingham Church group is always looking for new members and accepts donations for the ongoing maintenance of the heritage church. Charitable receipts are issued. For more information go to www.rockinghamchurch.org.
