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March 12: Thomas Gardiner: The Ghost of Cashmere.
March 12 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Marie Williams: A large crowd packed into the Glencoe and District Historical Society Archives on Wednesday evening, March 12. Following announcements, a brief membership report and some unfortunate technical difficulties, Society president Mary Simpson introduced the evening’s guest speaker, Glencoe native and author Daniel Perry.
Perry spoke about his newest work, a non-fiction memoir focussed on his own research into the life of Thomas Gardiner and Gardiner’s connection to the hamlet of Cashmere in the former Township of Mosa.
Born in 1774 in Ireland, Singleton Gardiner sailed for New York State in 1804. He moved to the Talbot Settlement in 1816 and to Mosa Township in 1825. He built a mill in 1834 on the site of what became Cashmere.
His brother Thomas Gardiner, born in Ireland in 1767, sailed for New York in 1804 and arrived in Upper Canada in 1807. Perry outlined charges laid against Thomas Gardiner which were subsequently dismissed, the connections between Thomas Gardiner and John Parker Jr., tales from the War of 1812, his years serving as a teacher, disputes over land, family friction and his pleas for help as an aging man.
Singleton Gardiner was the first person buried at the Cashmere Cemetery in 1834 but there is no stone marking what could be the grave of Thomas Gardiner.
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.
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.