Arts And Cultural Heritage

The Village of Paisley has had many labels--the Friendly Village, the Village of Bridges, the Heritage Village. But perhaps it is most frequently and correctly referred to as a cradle of Canadian culture. Its artists have bome recognition and influence far beyond the pale of provincial concerns. While life in the towns around focused on manufacturing, county politics, or beaches, life in Paisley offered a more reflective and imaginative environment.

Poet Isabella Valancy Crawford who came to live in Paisley at the age of eight with her father the pioneer Doctor from Ireland, is recognized as the greatest mythopoeic imagination in Canadian literature of the nineteenth century. She gave the Canadian landscape the stories by which it could be humanized: Indian Summer, for instance--a season unknown in Europe--she mythologized as the spirit of Summer returning after the first snow, with the ghosts of all the flowers, to promise another return. Isabella watched the Village emerging from the wilderness and recorded the unique pioneer experience in the poetry Canada now recognises as some of its best. She described the scenes she saw around what became the site of the Paisley Town Hall.

Journalist and teacher Thomas O'Hagan, prolific writer, theorist, and public speaker, was the first historian and critic of Canadian Literature. His catholicity and enterprising spirit gave him a voice in the United States as well as in his homeland. During his youth he went to school at Lockerby, but frequented the library in the Paisley Town Hall, and returned often as an adult to discuss affairs with the editor of theadvocate or to visit the librarian with his latest work.

Painter David Brown Milne is an artist's artist, of international fame, and the first in Canada ever to have a complete catalogue of his work published. His works are to be found in all major Canadian galleries, and a new exhibition in Toronto has opened just in time (27 March 99) for the Village's 125th Anniversary. Although David was bom north of the Village near the hamlet of Burgoyne, when he was old enough to go to school the fan-lily moved to Paisley where his brother Jim had built a fine red brick house on Orchard Street. One fall he worked late into the season with his brother, a housepainter and paperhanger, painting the Paisley Town Hall, so that he was late enrolling for a year in High School in Walkerton. Nevertheless he learned very well in the six months what took his classmates the full school year to acquire. He was later to use his prodigious memory in the process of his own painting.