100 YEARS AGO Thursday, April 2, 1908

• The roads were bad - very bad - and notice of the meeting was rather insufficient. The Temperance people expected the attendance to be very small indeed and the enthusiasm lacking, but delegates came from practically all parts of the county to their annual convention, held in an almost-full Shelburne town hall. President A. D. McKitrick of Orangeville, in opening the convention, was pleased to see such a splendid gathering under such unfavourable conditions, disclosing that he had thought seriously about postponing it. A motion to have a candidate in the next provincial election was carried amidst great hand-clapping and cheering. Nominations were then in order, and a couple of Temperance Conservative stalwarts promptly nominated R. J. Woods of Melancthon township.

Urged on by a prominent anti- Temperance man present, a couple of men nominated C. R. McKeown, the present member. Others nominated were Robert Reid, Mono; John A. Best, Mulmur; George Little, Mono and Fletcher Stewart, Mono. As Mr. Wood, the Temperance candidate in the last election, stepped forward, he was greeted with great applause. He said he wished to express his hearty thanks for the support he had received in the contest last July. In the end, all the other nominees withdrew and Mr. Woods' nomination was made unanimous by a standing vote.

• The Owen Sound Sun reports that the southbound passenger train had a narrow escape on Tuesday afternoon when the tender came detached from an engine running light south of Flesherton and started north. The road is slightly down grade at that point and the tender gained speed rapidly. Markdale station was telegraphed and the regular passenger train was sidetracked just in time to let the runaway tender go by at the rate of about 15 miles an hour. The tender was followed by another engine and was brought to a standstill some distance north of Markdale.

• The council and ratepayers of Dundalk are wrestling with an electric light problem. They held a meeting on Tuesday evening of last week. A deputation from Markdale proposed to light Dundalk from Hayward's Falls. T. R. Huxtable of Horning's Mills gave his proposition at the meeting and showed the benefits of getting their light from Horning's Mills. The gas producer man from Orangeville had been there a few days before and propounded his scheme. The people are badly mixed up with watts, kilowatts, volts and peak loads.

• The first electrical storm of the season, accompanied by severe thunder, started about 10 o'clock Friday evening last and continued about two hours, when it eased up. About 3 a.m. it started again. Both storms were accompanied by heavy rainfall. The only damage we have heard of so far occurred at Riverview, about the commencement of the storm, when a large frame stable owned by James Creary was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. A large bank of snow between the stable and the barn helped in a measure to save the barn. Mr. Creary lost all his sheep and fowl but saved his implements.

75 YEARS AGO Thursday, April 6, 1933

• The Education meetings held in Shelburne, Grand Valley and Orangeville on March 28, 29 and 30 were instructive and constructive. The chief speaker was Mr. V. K. Greer, M.A., Chief Inspector of Public and Separate Schools in Ontario. He outlined our three-fold system - Primary, Intermediate and Secondary - and showed that for many years Primary and Intermediate was taught in the public schools of the province. He showed that during the last 30 years the Intermediate education has, to a large degree, been taken care of by collegiate institutes, high schools and continuation schools, but that in recent years the public schools, by taking up the fifth class work, have again taken upon themselves the responsibility of teaching the Intermediate form of education. He said that recently the fifth classes - the equivalent of the first two years of high school - have been offered in rural schools because parents wanted to reduce the expense of sending their children to distant urban centres, but the result was that far too many students were leaving school at or about 16 years of age. He advocated use of the Township School Area plan as a means of having fifth classes in rural areas offered by a central school with at least two rooms.

50 YEARS AGO Wednesday, April 2, 1958

• A voting landslide Monday returned the Progressive Conservatives, led by John Diefenbaker, to power with a large majority. In Dufferin-Simcoe, W. Earl Rowe received 12,570 votes to Liberal John Bowerman's 5,182.

25 YEARS AGO Wednesday, April 6, 1983

• The Garden Brothers three-ring circus will be in Orangeville May 7.