Discovering Ada McKenzie

I had no idea who Ada McKenzie was. The name popped up in the Parkwood Secretary's Journal 1935 on September 13."Mrs McLaughlin permanent at Francois, then fitting at Ada McKenzie, then Home and School publication meeting".

So in this day and age, I googled Ada McKenzie,Toronto,women's wear.

Turns out that Adelaide was being fitted at a store for women's athletic wear, a store owned and named after Canadian golf darling, Ada McKenzie. I was shocked and ashamed that as a Canadian woman and historian I have never heard of Ada. According to the Library and Archives Canada website,
"At a time when female athletes were few and far between, Ada Mackenzie was looked on as a pioneer. Her achievements are even more remarkable taking into account the general attitude regarding the role of women in society in the first half of the 20th century. If the men's domain was the public sphere, then the women's was definitely the private sphere. If women worked outside the home, it was often while "waiting" for marriage or as a continuation of their maternal role. At that time, it was very difficult for women to promote their skills in a world still strongly dominated by men. That Ada Mackenzie succeeded in asserting herself outside these traditional spheres of activity was an accomplishment in itself and bears witness to her strength of character; that she accomplished this in the sports world was even more remarkable. As she herself said: "I started golfing when women were supposed to know more about a cook stove than a niblick".

Ada went on to win a variety of golf tournaments and titles in her life.

Furthermore, in my research on this new find, this remarkable woman, I learned that Ada inspired by what was going on in Great Britain, and in order to assist young girls and women to play golf, opened the Ladies' Golf and Tennis Club of Toronto in 1924. DING!! DING!! DING!! The brain bells sound and I start rummaging through the archives looking for the golfing images of the McLaughlins, particularly Adelaide, and daughters.

From the Parkwood Archives is a May 1935, Mayfair magazine photo of Eileen McLaughlin with Ada McKenzie, in stripes. So a quick call is made to the Ladies' Golf and Tennis Club of Toronto to see if they have an active archives, and the beginning of my email relationship with Joan, a volunteer archivist at the club who is scouring membership records for me on the McLaughlin women. So far, we can find information from the 1950s and nothing earlier, however, my feelings are, there is something more to the story and we will uncover it one day.

In the meantime, I was pleased to learn that the McLaughlin women supported Ada's business ventures by purchasing their athletic clothes at her store, a venture she began in 1930, closing its doors in 1959.

Please listen to a CBC archives recording from 1949 about Ada's golf course
http://archives.cbc.ca/sports/golf/clips/11697/

Tree Planting with Jim Flaherty and Landscape Ontario

Last week Federal Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty, planted a Canadian Sugar Maple tree near the gazebo in the cutting garden area of the Estate. This tree planting commemorates the inaugural National Tree Day September 21, a new program initiated by the federal government in conjunction with 2011 being identified as the Year of the Forest by the United Nations. The sugar maple is the first planting of the new shade garden in development for this area.

The tree planting coincided with the Landscape Ontario Board of Directors meeting that was held over two days at Parkwood. This meeting included house and garden tours where the Dunington-Grubb gardens were a highlight to this group, who recognise the importance and legacy of the husband and wife landscape design team in terms of early Canadian horticultural heritage.

As landscape designers, the Dunington-Grubbs established a practice that soon became highly successful, especially after founding a much needed nursery to provide ornamental plant material at Sheridan, Ontario, a nursery most Canadians would recognise today as Sheridan Nurseries.
Howard Burlington Grubb was born in York, England, in 1881. He obtained his B.S.A. from the Cornell School of Landscape Architecture before returning to England in 1908 to work for T.H. Mawson as an apprentice. He married another successful young landscape architect, Lorrie Alfreda Dunington, whose name he adopted.  Lorrie Alfreda Dunington-Grubb was born in 1877 in England, she attended Swanley College of Horticulture in Surrey and had founded her own private practice before her marriage in 1911. Drawn to landscape architecture by her love of floral design, she published in both English and Canadian journals and was a founding member of the Canadian Society for Landscape Architects (CSLA) in 1934 and its president in 1944.

Parkwood is fortunate to have some of the last remaining residential work of the Dunington-Grubbs at the site, specifically the Italian Garden & the Sunken Garden area.




While out on the grounds with the members of Landscape Ontario, I mentioned the McLaughlin home movies we have of the property and its evolution and I saw their eyes sparkle. Well folks, watch this space and I will be uploading various aspects of our home movies over the next while.

Consumed by paper in the archives...behind the scenes museum work

Over the last few months, we have been very lucky to have a team of volunteers; Amanda, Ashley and Nicole, working with some of the archival materials, updating collection records and in some cases continuing the accession process of items into our archival systems. The group will continue through the autumn,while other volunteers, Vivienne and Cesar, begin the digitization process of entering the records & photographs for each artefact into our new database, thanks to a grant, Museum and Technology Fund, we were successful in obtaining from the Ministry of Culture. This truly is the behind the scenes museum work that occurs at Parkwood and makes up most of my registrar duties as Curator.

Anyone who has ever visited my office has seen the paper, photographs, blueprints, etc. that often consume my desk. In recent months, due to the HVAC retrofit work that had the closet spaces in my office filled with workmen, I moved the overwhelming amounts of paper to the art gallery space (currently off the tour route), and the volunteers are continuing to use this space for their work area(s).  

This little group of diligent historians work, at their own pace, cataloguing, doing condition reports/evaluations on the items, pH testing of the paper, encapsulating when necessary, and setting aside those pieces requiring additional TLC from me. Often I hear little raps on my office door, or receive excited text messages with photos attached when something is discovered and I love that this group is enthusiastic about the collection and can see the future interpretive material in their discoveries.

I am also discovering great little finds of Canadian history as we rummage (with white gloved hands) through the paper, being introduced to characters  I have never heard of and uncovering new gems of information each day. Parkwood will be sharing these little finds over the next few weeks via our blog and I hope you find them as interesting as we do.