Katherine Day Part 3

Part Three -

Katherine Day - The Artist in Residence in Her Cherished Home, "Hawthornes"

From Katherine Day's 1935 sketch book

     "It is not enough to look out on nature, select a  few colours, and expect to have as lovely a combination in your rug, as you might find in your garden. You see every colour blending beautifully in the garden, and the same colours yelling at each other on your rug, and you are greatly taken aback to say the least."
     The above passage was taken from an unpublished booklet, Katherine Day wrote on the techniques for the creation of hooked rugs, one of her specialties, as was also the design of country quilts. The artist went well beyond the traditional work with paint and brushes, printing materials, and pen and pencil illustrations.
     "The Northern Lights came tonight, piercing the northern sky to the zenith, dimming the stars. A long beam touched the east, fluttering green and mysterious. Changing into a luminous body that stretched faint wings across the sky. Like an angel protecting this earth. This deeply needful earth. Look where it fades to a shadow and deep in the north comes a beam of brilliance again, heavenly search lights, peacefully guarding our northland. Oh heavenly search lights point us to peace."
     The poem above was composed by Katherine Day during the early days of the Second World War, having been most recently studying art in London and Paris a few years previous, before the outbreak of hostilities. She was slowly establishing herself as a full time resident of Hawthorne's in Oro-Medonte.
     Her retreat from the cityscapes of Europe, was at no disadvantage to her creative enterprises, because, as it turned out, the newfound sanctuary was a boundless hinterland paradise, where she found solace in wildflowers, the deep azure sky, the creatures of the woodlands, the smell of farm fields at harvest, the stars in the heavenly night sky, and the joy of the profoundly spiritual four season contrasts.
     "In his description of Huronia, in the 1954 book "Sainte-Marie Among The Hurons," written by Wilfred Jury and Elsie McLeod Jury, it is recorded that, "For variety of scenery the district is unsurpassed. Rolling wooded hills form lovely valleys and far vistas."
     The Jesuit Missionaries in the 1600's "wrote of the world (Huronia) that surrounded them. They described the trees, the shrubs, and the flowers; the animals, fish and birds. They told of lakes and rivers; of falls and rapids. They wrote of the extremes of climate and of the torment of the flies and mosquitoes. But chiefly they wrote of the people. Indians of the Algonquin and Huron Nations."
     In Francis Parkman's text, in the 1900 edition of his book, "The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century," the noted historian writes, "The ancient country of the Hurons is now the northern and eastern portion of Simcoe County, Canada West, and is embraced within the peninsula formed by the Nottawassage and Matchedash Bays of Lake Huron, the River Severn, and Lake Simcoe. Its area was small, - its population comparatively large. In the year 1639 the Jesuits made an enumeration of all its villages and hamlets, with seven hundred dwellings, about four thousand families, and twelve thousand adult persons, or a total population of at least twenty thousand. The region whose boundaries we have given was an alternation of meadows, deep forests, interlaced with footpaths leading from town to town. (Populated by indigenous peoples)."
     Now let us jump ahead three centuries, to the period just before the commencement of the war in Europe. There was another writer, by the name Kenneth Wells, who had lived in Orillia for a period of his childhood, who would arrive in Oro-Medonte, and for his writing prowess, and numerous books, brought about a new focus to the trending fascination for contemporary homesteading. The writer and his artist wife, Lucille Oille, were about to re-create pioneer homesteading in the area of Moonstone Creek, in Oro-Medonte, a short distance, as the "crow flies," as they say, from where Katherine Day had established her residence, on a fifty acre parcel of land closer to Bass Lake. It is yet to be determined which writer, Day or Wells, actually began writing about life in the country first, because for both, it was in and around 1937. Day most likely arrived later on the property, but had initiated writing about living in the rural clime, as early as 1937, with a story-line, that in places, seems remarkably close to the opinions expressed later by Wells, in his first book, "The Owl Pen," published in 1947.
     "In the Township of Medonte, between the Moonstone and the Coldwater valleys, is a flat-topped hill. Small farms, and smaller woodlands, dapple its sides. Trout haunted streams wash its base. A single road crosses it, running with prim straightness past gray rail fences and a magnificent dry stone wall, past venerable maple trees and cloud-fingering elms. The road runs on past a field that is notable now only for the fact that in its exact centre there stands, for no apparent reason at all, a lonely wooden pump," writes Kenneth Wells, a regular columnist in these years, for the Toronto Telegram, as taken from the second edition of "The Owl Pen," that I can proudly admit to having read three times in the past six months. Wells work helped greatly to understand the period of the late 1930's and 1940's, when he and his wife, and as it turns out, Katherine Day were setting up, and operating their fledgling homesteads with considerable trial and error.
     "The pump had a reason for being when Lucy and I first came upon it. Then it was part of all that was left of a pioneer homestead. Then it stood in the midst of a dying orchard, at the foot of a ruined garden, with roofless root cellar beside it, with the poor skeleton of a picket fence around it, and in front of it, between it and the road, the leaning wreck of a house," penned the good Mr. Wells; in the near desperate search for a log cabin that could be spared, moved to a suitable property, and rebuilt into a conserved relic of local history, to serve their future needs.
     Wells was a well appointed newspaper columnist and general writer, who had been living in Toronto with his wife when the idea was hatched to move to the hinterland, to write about all the adventures city slickers could get up to, trying to tame the land for their contemporary agricultural ambitions. It was on the brink of the Second World War, a conflict in Europe, that would eventually take Wells away from the Owl Pen for a number of years, being posted in England as a writer for the Allied effort. Lucille was left to manage the affairs of the new farmstead, and managed to survive quite handily, with considerable progress, as Wells was pleased to report upon his return to Oro-Medonte.
     The decision to re-locate from Toronto to the Orillia area, although a surprise to their family, friends and colleagues, from the city, it wasn't so extraordinary for the author, who had spent a number of years in the City of Orillia, earlier in the century. According to the biographical information on the dustjacket of "The Owl Pen," that as a child, he almost met "his maker" so to speak, while taking a little sojourn at roadside, to admire the good graces of the natural surroundings. "As a child Ken Wells didn't like Orillia. When he was seven, an electric wire fell on him as he sat by the roadside sorting wildflowers. Two thousand volts burned a hole in his head, his hand and his leg. Word went round that the accident was bound to leave him crazy as a coot." It's likely, at this time, Katherine Day would have known about the incident, considering that it was a news item in the local press.
     It worked quite the opposite for the young man, who made great progress in his educational pursuits, onward to considerable acclaim as a respected Canadian author. He, of course, in his own unique, folksy way, put Oro-Medonte "on the map" as the saying goes, in a literary way. His work is still revered and honored in the region, and he and Lucille Oille are both entrenched in its history. And most folks in these parts find it no hardship whatsoever to live with his legacy.
     As this biography continues, the reader will notice many similarities, if they have read "The Owl Pen" collection of stories, and it might even be considered reasonable to consider that Wells knew Katherine Day, because of their work in agriculture and their fledgling relationship with homesteading in the same rural neighborhood. Kenneth Wells most certainly would have recognized the "Day" family name, when he was living in Orillia previously, and it's highly likely Katherine Day had heard about Wells brush with death, when hit by a falling hydro wire as a youngster. Additionally, Isaac Day, Katherine's father, was a prominent citizen of Orillia, and a School Inspector for the region, which stretched all the way from Simcoe County, as far north as Bracebridge in South Muskoka. The Day family home, as I mentioned earlier, is a registered heritage building in the City of Orillia.
     The parallels of their work, especially the art both Katherine Day and Lucille Oille pursued, as a matter of profession, would have given them reason to communicate with one another, and with her penchant for writing, as we will explore in the coming chapters, Day and Kenneth Wells had a great deal in common. Even raising goats, chickens and trying to cope with the habits of bees. They would have experienced similar hardships working their small farmsteads, Day having more acreage than the setting of the Owl Pen log cabin, and been snowed-in at the same times, no doubt finding themselves similarly out of supplies, and feeling forlorned about the isolation when roads were blocked as the storms lingered.
     It is an interesting parallel between Kenneth Wells "Owl Pen," and Katherine Day's "Hawthornes" homestead, and then her second home, built a short distance away (based on her design) known with considerable affection, "Pax Cottage." When you are first introduced to Day's journal, entitled "A Home in the Country," you will notice similarities with the early entries in Well's opening chapter; both writing about the challenges of finding and restoring an old log cabin, on a parcel of land that could be restored to a working farmstead of modest proportion. With of course the potential that it would provide the food necessities to reduce dependence on the outside, city-dominated world.
     So here was a young woman, fresh from the art scene in Europe, having been in company of some of the finest and best known artists in Europe, and having an exhibition with painter Nicolas Eekman, in New York, and Wells, from a stellar career with a major Toronto newspaper, farmsteading in the region of Oro-Medonte, at the same time. What great stories of rural living were created by both writers. With the exception of a few select editorial pieces, one being "The Letters of Captain Steele's Daughters," being "the unpublished paper delivered to the Orillia Historical Society, in 1953," by Katherine Day, the larger portion of her writing, unlike the good Mr. Wells, has been left to this date, a new century, in this fall of 2016; to be offered at last to an enthusiastic audience, I might add, wishing to know more about this curious artist in residence.
     As a preamble note to the material upcoming in the coming chapters, it must be noted of her journals, that she writes very much as an artist paints with colors. Especially so, when she offers detailed explanations about the way her specially prepared and balanced gardens, at Hawthornes, are positioned according to blooming times, and color co-ordination which is, as you will read, a work of art with the partnership of nature. It may seem a little boring at first, but if you consider the artist-gardener's creative protocols, and you appreciate her lively illustrations, of the fanciful style, being fairies and their kind, it may be more apparent she was building a habitat for them all at Hawthornes. She inspired its creation, and it, being the gardens, inspired her in return.
     In our possession, as found in the archives collection, there are, besides a half dozen early sketch books, her 1909 school scribbler, filled with her classroom notes, an unfinished romantic novel, a short story about a court case involving the sale of a lazy horse to an unsuspecting farmer, a complete text on rug-hooking, her lengthy journal entitled "A House in the Country," including two separate accounts of "Keeping Bees," and "Divining a Well", all having strong parallels to the writings of Kenneth Wells, with numerous shared details about the intricacies and failings of farming in their respective Edens. Keep in mind, that in their unedited format, I have had to employ some editorial license, to correct spelling mistakes and other minor sentence structure errors, that would have obviously been corrected by Miss Day, if she had been preparing the copy for publication. I have made every attempt to maintain her copy in its original form, so rest assured, I have not taken it upon myself to modify content, at the expense of losing the integrity and creativity she so carefully applied to her stories. We did have to perform considerable cross referencing, especially to get the correct spelling of plant species she records in her journal, because at times, possibly because of being tired that day, her writing has been difficult to decipher. My research assistant Suzanne, was called upon time and again to help me research a species, or get the correct spelling of a type of flower or shrub that escaped me. I am out of my league when it comes to horticulture and for that matter, agriculture. So please appreciate that we have done everything possible to be true to the manuscript as it was written by Katherine Day, starting as far back as the late 1930's.
     "What you did not realize is that nature has two great blenders of colour influencing us outdoors. The sunshine is one - yellow. The sky is the other - blue. Grass also blends and harmonizes all colour - it is blue and yellow mixed. So you see, no colour is pure, even in nature. All colours reflect both sunshine and sky." Katherine Day. "The Art of Rug Hooking"
     Please join me for Chapter 4 tomorrow.