Renovated: 130-year-old Anglican Church in Dunany

--November 25, 2010

The 130-year-old Anglican church in Dunany has been renovated, its cemetery expanded and its community strengthened as a result of toiling together

Many tears have been shed in this community's cemetery, a clearing carved out of Laurentian bush and bedrock about 130 years ago by poor Irish settlers.

But recently, the cemetery behind St. Paul's Anglican Church was the site of a celebration at which wine and laughter flowed freely. Officially, it was the consecration of an expanded cemetery following a service in the freshly-renovated St. Paul's. But it was really the forging of another link in a chain built by sweat, brotherly love and good times.

"This is our extended family who is buried here," Ross Leslie, a People's Warden of the church, told a gathering of about 150 people. "When you come up here, you are never alone."

That morning, his sister, Sharon Leslie, had placed a fresh carnation on each one of about 96 stones in the cemetery.

There are stones commemorating beloved parents, grandparents and children, some who died in the 1880s when infant mortality was common and lifespans were measured in months, some more lately departed, including a boy whose grave is adorned with Lego pieces and dinosaurs because they were among his favourite things before cancer took him.

Ross figures he knew, directly or indirectly, or was related to, 40 cemetery residents, including a former neighbour who would start making egg nog for his New Year's Day party in November because the only nog worth serving was a nog made the old-fashioned way.

The carnations were the finishing touches on a $75,000 project driven by community involvement, with work completed, more or less, within a year.

Over $35,000 was donated by local residents - many of whom do not attend St. Paul's - to renovate the oldest standing structure in Dunany and expand its cemetery by 8,000 square feet.

Volunteers expended at least 15,000 hours of labour to supplement the paid work of contractors and artisans.

(And labour is the appropriate word.) There was a chainsaw festival of tree-felling. About 40 truckloads of boulders were removed, hundreds of rolls of sod were laid, and extensive landscaping of the cemetery was undertaken.

Marc Carrière, director of the Municipal Regional Council of Argenteuil, which encompasses Dunany, was an early supporter of the project and observed its progress.

It reminded him of U.S. President John F. Kennedy's infamous line: "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."

The community effort served as "a beacon in a society which too often takes refuge in carelessness, indifference, non-interest and non-involvement," he said in a shirtsleeves-and-shorts speech on Sunday.

Project managers Robert Percy and Michel Caron, the latter a relative newcomer to the area, thanked a long list of participating people and associations.

The men, both volunteers, were virtual strangers to one another when the project began. On Sunday, they called each other brothers and shared a man-hug.

The project had clearly succeeded beyond even Percy's and Caron's expectations. But it might not have even begun had not a skeleton of sorts been dragged out of the closet and put to rest.

In 1972, when Dr. Louis Lapierre was looking for country place, his real-estate agent persuaded him to visit on large property in Dunany. Although Lapierre wasn't interested in owning so much undeveloped forest, he was charmed by the property's lakeside home.

"It was like a Walt Disney set, the exterior was green with red shutters and a red roof," Lapierre, the former chief of medicine for Notre Dame Hospital, recalled.

"I fell in love with the place."

That bliss was rudely shattered when Lapierre asked an area resident to tell him about the people living in the community.

"He said to me, 'Oh well, there are no Jews and there are no …" What was left unsaid was French Canadians.

"I was 42 years old . and it was the first time in my life that anything like that had happened to me."

Matters weren't helped when another neighbour referred to a cluster of houses whose yards were filled with junk as "a French Canadian village."

Although the man immediately apologized, Lapierre resolved to maintain nothing more than civil relations with his neighbours, living "like a hermit," entertaining only friends from the city.

And so life went on until the new millennium, when the treasurer of St. Paul's, Dave Freisen, dropped by Lapierre's home.

He wanted to discuss the tangled land deeds pertaining to the church property, especially parcels of land that had been given to the church around 1878 by the first owner of Lapierre's property.

Freisen was soon visiting Lapierre most summer Sunday afternoons to discuss details raised by the various lawyers and notaries handling the case. And to chat.

Lapierre learned that Friesen had had a daughter who, despite serious health problems, lived with her parents and thoroughly enjoyed family summers in Dunany and until her death at 17.

"I think everybody in the community loved Kristin just about as much as we did," Friesen said recently. "She was accepted by everyone in the community and went to just about every event."

Lapierre said that it was during his conversations with Friesen that his "heart opened to Dunany."

He began socializing with neighbours, becoming friends with, among others, Percy and Caron.

As issues around the original deeds to the church were resolved, Lapierre decided to donate about 8,000 square feet of land so the cemetery could be expanded.

He is now considering an additional donation of land near the church for parking space.

"It thrills me to be part of this. I admire these people and I admire their purpose and I want to help them," Lapierre said.
"It's as though I am becoming part of a family."

In many respects, Dunany is "family" more than anything else. It's not a civic entity but rather the name given to a swath of territory - about 4,275 acres - that includes corners of four municipalities, Gore, Brownsberg- Chatham, Wentworth and Lachute and four small lakes strung out along a road named after an area in Ireland.

St. Paul's Church sits at the base of a hill and for travellers approaching from Lachute, it marks the entry into Dunany.

The community's first settler was William Smith, 1775-1866, whose son Samuel had 12 children. In 1936, Samuel's grandson and namesake, Samuel Edmund Smith, donated a stained-glass window of St. Paul to the church in memory of his predecessors.

As part of the recent renovations, the window was taken down, cleaned and repaired. The image of St. Paul, was reversed, so the saint was no longer looking out of the church but inside at the congregation, as originally intended.

On Sunday, as the bluegrass group Mountain Steam played an enthusiastic rendition of the traditional hymn Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Carol Wight counted the descendants of Smith, and their mates, who sat among the congregation.

There were seven, said Wight, including seven-month-old Maddex Edmund Wight, the great-great grandson of the man who donated the window and a direct descendant of the man who blazed the first trail into Dunany.

Knock on the door of Dorothy Gauley's home and you will quickly find yourself in front of a cup of tea, a plate of homemade sweets and a paper napkin that reads "Good Times and Good Friends Make the Best Memories."

Gauley first visited Dunany in 1946 when her family was looking for a cottage. She "fell in love" first with the place and then with Tolbert Gauley, who decades later died in her arms as they were dancing at a wedding.

She is one of the go-to people when things need getting done in Dunany, especially when it involves feeding large groups of people. She was the general in charge of Sunday's luncheon.

In the week before the celebration, Gauley was found reviewing her notes, choosing the fillings for 16 loaves' worth of sandwiches, handing out the necessary condiments (such as her homemade relish) and figuring out how many ironed tablecloths and coolers would be needed.

Among her many files are reams of notes about Dunany's history, many of them typed by her from original documents. A local best-seller, A History of Dunany by Eleanor Hamilton Hammond, lists Gauley as a secondary source for historic material.

Gauley couldn't be happier about the latest developments in her community, which include a canoeing club and, more importantly, the church project. "This has brought everybody together so this is great, just great," she said.

"And what is interesting is Rob (Percy) and Michel (Caron) are not even members of the church and they are doing most of the work."

The way Robert Percy remembers it, the project began with a chance encounter in the cemetery one summer afternoon in 2007.

He and Annabelle Wood, both longtime Dunany residents, were each tending the graves of family members, imaging what their parents would say about the state of the community cemetery.

"Do you think that we could put together a little team to clean up the cemetery and paint the white fence," Percy, a real-estate developer and consultant, recalled saying to Wood.

One meeting led to many involving church and community leaders. Among the issues discussed were Lapierre's offer of additional land for the cemetery and a church in need of a new roof, new windows and a host of renovations including to brick work.

"After animated exchanges of opinions and preferences, agreement was reached and the project (developed) a life of its own," Percy recalled in one of several accounts he has written of the venture.

A key supporter was the MRC of Argenteuil, which, according to Percy, provided $6,500 toward the capital campaign and put the arm on the municipality of Gore to match those funds.

With help from the MRC's Catherine Lapointe and an official with Cultural Affairs Quebec, a plan was developed whereby repairs to the church would be done using era materials or techniques, increasing the possibility that renovated church might gain cultural status with the provincial government and perhaps land special funding if more work was needed.

"I have learned a lot about roofs of the nineteenth century," said Caron, thumping a thick file of documents, neatly organized with coloured tabs. A former pharmacist and retired executive, he did much of the design research, bringing his findings to the church corporation.

Among the improvements he suggested for the church was an aluminum-based metal roof worked in a fashion known as "tole double pincée." An area contractor did that specialized work.

But it was Caron who undertook to make new windows for the church in his garage, which, according to his wife Sheryl, "has become his second home."

It's a long process for a perfectionist, as each window, uniquely sized, comprises two main pieces which together have 14 tennon and mortis joints.

Although most of the renovation work is finished, a couple of windows are yet to be installed. Then Caron will begin work on custom window-fasteners. "I think I figured out how to do them," Caron said, "during one of those sleepless nights."

As the projects began to alter the appearance of the church and cemetery, a notion planted by People's Warden Bob Hay took hold of the community.

Hay had come up with another name for the church. "In modern terms, you might call it branding," he said.

It was on the invitation to Sunday's events. The church's new tag: Spirit of the Lakes.

*This article has been reprinted from the Montreal Gazette.