Thomas Gardiner: The Ghost of Cashmere March 12, 2025

March 12, 2025.  7:00 p.m.    Onsite at The archives and via  Zoom.  

Come to the Archives or tune in via zoom to meet the author, Daniel Perry.  Instead of helping launch a new book, Daniel wants to meet with us as part of the research.  

The material in this presentation is the partial basis of a non-fiction book he is working on, but it’s unlikely to be published (or even submitted to a publisher) by the time he visits.  He will present the work-in-progress to us.  He is hoping that local people will have more stories and clues to fill in the gaps.  

Thomas Gardiner’s younger brother Singleton (1774-1834) is well documented in local history as the effective founder of the vanished village of Cashmere, along the Thames in Mosa Township. But what of Thomas? 

Thomas Gardiner led a life both ordinary and extraordinary. Before his death in Mosa Township around 1840, Thomas served in the Irish Volunteers during the Rebellion of 1798, joined the Lincoln Militia in Canada, feuded with the Anglican Church, taught school, and likely endured epidemic cholera. He documented much of his life in letters to the Executive Council of Upper Canada in the 1830s, now preserved in Library and Archives Canada. But was he a reliable narrator? Missing from his account is, for example, his arrest for leaving Canada during the War of 1812.

Let’s help Daniel Perry unravel the truths and myths behind Thomas Gardiner’s fascinating story.  Read this post for more about this ambitious book project.  

Daniel Perry grew up in Glencoe, Ontario, and has lived in Toronto since 2006. His stories have been short-listed in the Vanderbilt/Exile Competition, have twice earned Summer Literary Seminars Unified Literary Contest fellowships, and have appeared in The Dalhousie Review, Exile Literary Quarterly, The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, The Nashwaak Review, White Wall Review, Little Fiction, NoD, In/Words, Paragon, Ottawa Arts Review, Sterling, the quint, echolocation, The Broken City, Wooden Rocket Press, Hart House Review, Broken Pencil– Death Match IV, and the Stone Skin Press anthology, The Lion and the Aardvark.

He has a great website where you can find links to a lot of his short stories and check out his just published book: Modern Folklore.

Modern Folklore, a horror novella has arrived on Planet Earth in both physical and electronic format. Published by Toronto’s Canada’s hottest new indie horror press and bookshop, Little Ghosts Books, it’s on the festival circuit, gracing Toronto’s Word on the Street and the Mississauga Literary Festival.