Wayne Townsend is the curator of the Dufferin

County Museum and Archives. His new book, Orangeville, the Heart of Dufferin County, was flying off the sales table last week when Nancy Frater of BookLore launched it at a wine and finger food reception. Old residents, those more recently arrived and those who have occasional business in the administrative and shopping centre of the county should snap it up in its first edition. A century hence it will still be being read, as is the Revd Henry Scadding's 1873 book, Toronto of Old, long after those who read this have travelled on in the March of Time.

This writer is not sure that the Big Orange, whatever its preeminence, should be styled "the heart" of Dufferin. It is certainly not its heartland. A glance at the map suggests it to be, rather, the fulcrum on which the county balances. A fulcrum is the point of balance of a see-saw. Whatever Orangeville is or will become, it began as both a see and a saw place. Arrivals from the old colonies below the border and those from Ireland came to see what their chances of survival might be here in the bush at the headwaters of three rivers and to saw the dense local forest into houses, barns, mills and shops.

Townsend, whose solidly Anglo Saxon name evokes memories of A.A. Milne's precocious youngster who warned his mother that she must never go down to the end of the town without consulting him, has done the county town a signal service. He takes us to the end of the town and back several times over, sometimes on a slow walk and at others on a historical pogo stick on which the trip is no end of fun. He sorts out for us the complicated Orange Lawrence and Jesse Ketchum family trees and their dual contributions to Orangeville's development. The methodical Jesse was responsible for the town's numbered streets above the Orangeville Broadway. He remembered Little Old New York and favoured a similar grid plan The tangle of streets below it was Orange's fault - or fancy.

There are now some millions of people who see Canada as the kind of country that the United States started out to be but for one reason or another failed to become. They come here still, as they have since the days of Western Indian genocide and the brewing War between the States, in search of "the peaceable kingdom" that accepts all newcomers but doesn't try to build yet another world empire on the backs of industrious immigrants, brave soldiers or impoverished minorities. And there were the homeless folk from places where either the potato or other crops or careers had failed, who hoped to re-invent themselves in a new land.. While so many nations fight and die, is Canada the first post-national country? Some are saying so. We'll have to figure out what that means.

After stones and tree stumps had been torn or burnt out of hundreds of acres in these highlands 1500/1600 feet above sea level, saw and grist mills began to be built. The snowy winters facilitated the drawing of logs and grain to them.. A tannery and a foundry were followed by food, clothing and furniture shops and factories. Thus far the town's development was similar to that of scores of other market centres that grew up in the hinterland of older settlements on the British North American shores of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence waterway.

The construction of the 1848 Toronto-Sydenham Colonization Road through Mono Mills into Orangeville and the 1860 northward reach of the 1860 Prince of Wales Road increased the accessibility of lands that had, since the retreat of the glaciers 10,000 years before, been an almost impenetrable bush. As late as the 1920s none of the roads were easy to travel. It was in that period that Orangeville's gravel streets began to be paved. An Ontario Motor League road book of the time warned against the roughness of Highway 10 north of Claude and the difficulty posed in some weather by the Caledon Mountain.

The arrival of the Toronto, Grey and Bruce Railway in Orangeville in 1871 ended the town's pioneer era. Both passengers and freight began to move daily between Dufferinshire and the lake ports of Toronto and Owen Sound. Orangeville's town hall (1875) and the Dufferin County courthouse (1880) are impressive monuments to the heyday of both the Queen Empress Victoria and of the railroads.

The arrival of newcomers to the area and the departure to places like West Toronto Junction and Hamilton of the children of settlers who had cleared the farms began a demographic change that is accelerating and that will increase in the coming decade. While the county town's population will, it is expected, be capped at about 35,000 there remains the problem of each household owning two, three and four automobiles. Together with the traffic passing by on two provincial highways, an ecological problem looms.

The Townsend book records (p. 85) an undated complaint that Orangeville began long ago to suffer from a traffic problem. A farmer's wife explained in a letter to the press that she foresaw a slow decline for the town. She and her neighbours were afraid to go there "on account of the automobile nuisance". They ran "the risk of being killed". They could, she wrote, send to Toronto (presumably via Eaton's catalogue) for everything other than groceries.

There were other risks involved in visits to town, especially on Saturday shopping nights in the horse and buggy days. Orangeville had more taverns than churches and drunkenness in the streets could, many thought, pose a greater danger than the frequent train wrecks that took place outside the town. In 1910 "temperance' advocates and then, during World War I, "prohibition" drove the public sale of alcohol first out to such unruly places as Grand Valley and then to illegal private production centres.

On pages 215 ad 218 names are spelled different ways on the same page due to faulty editing. But get to BookLore and buy Townsend's informative book.