As I write this piece, it’s the first day of Fall. You wouldn’t know it after the past, several marvelous days and a few more forecast to come. Someone is bound to blame it on global warming !
The Summer was pretty quiet, but for the Heritage Day celebration your Society staged on June 25, 2017, the week before the official date of Canada’s 150 Birthday. We rented the main hall of the Newcastle Community Hall and filled it with “family” tables where long time residents, many with agricultural backgrounds, were able to display family artifacts and history of their family experiences through time. I manned the “Railroads of Newcastle and Orono” table, wearing my genuine engineer’s cap! Everyone appeared to enjoy themselves. One lesson: future events such a Heritage Day will require more robust promotion through the variety of media platforms now available to us.
Your Society Historical Room on the ground floor of the Newcastle Community Hall is open to the public every Tuesday and Saturday mornings between 9:30 a.m. and noon. On September 30, the Room will open at 9:30 a.m. and remain open until 3 p.m., as we participate in Durham Region Culture Days, where the focus is life on the family farm over time. We expect to have at least two antique tractors in the Hall’s parking lot (now being confirmed)!
And, on October 7, the Room will be open from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m., as we participate in the Business Improvement Area (BIA) celebration of the Newcastle Fall Harvest Fair! Both are free events, so do make an effort to visit your Historical Room!
The Fall of 2017 is already looking busy !
At our Board of Director’s meeting earlier this Summer, we adopted a new logo style. It appears in this Newsletter. The new logo is part of an effort to raise our profile with a more professional look. Nothing, though, will take away from the plain, hard work performed by your Directors as the Society makes its contribution to the cultural well-being of the Community. We help make history live!
Following two successful years of the Doors Open event in which your Society played a major role in 2016 in Newcastle and, earlier this year, when the event was held in Kendal, the 2018 event is planned for Saturday, June 9, 2018 in the Newtonville/Port Granby area. I serve on the Board of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario, the Doors Open vehicle, so a number of your Directors will likely be on board to assist with the 2018 event !
Finally, once again, I would like to secure the help of a professional to conduct our annual audit, on a pro bono basis. If you would like to perform this once-a-year task, we would be very grateful. My e-mail address is: ro**********@*****il.ca
Regards,
Bob Malone, President