'Call Cobourg a feel good town,' said the consultant brought in to give the town a make-over. 'It's a catchy phrase and will do wonders for your town's tourist image.' She might have given a throaty laugh, but if she did no one noticed. For its part, the town council was impressed and agreed to support this exciting recommendation. His honour the mayor, a stickler for the protocol of Roberts Rules, put the proposed and seconded motion to designate Cobourg a 'feel good town' to the vote. It passed unanimously - and seven rubber stamps hit the deck in a single, resounding crash.

Given this authority, the town managers and directors of departments added another million to the budget in the twinkling of an eye. This was to cover new tourist brochures and gaudy pennants. The pennants were to hang from every lamp post in the down town area to spread the 'Welcome to our feel good town' news. It made the half-educated and old timers want to gag, but what could they do? They were outnumbered. Great, however, was the rejoicing among the newcomers who arrived to gobble up the ritzy harbour condos that they might end their days with a good view of the lake. As numerous studies have shown, a new catch phrase works wonders for people and places suffering from low esteem. It wasn't always like that.

Cobourg, once known as New Amherst, was renamed in honour of the House of Saxe- Coburg-Gotha which came to the British Royal Family in 1840 with the marriage of Queen Victoria of the House of Hanover to Prince Albert, son of Ernst of said Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The only British monarch of Saxe-Coburg was King Edward VII who visited the town in 1860 when he was the Prince of Wales. Unfortunately, the town fathers, who probably blamed the chief clerk, got the name wrong and mistakenly added an 'o' to Coburg; hence the name Cobourg.

This industrious community located on the north shore of Lake Ontario was once a bustling port. In its early days, before the advent of focus groups, out-sourcing and sub-contracted social studies, the people of Cobourg served themselves well. These notes are a tribute to the movers and shakers of the 20th Century who made the town bustle and vibrate with the vigour of their youth, for they were invincible – as indeed each new generation is – and confidently expected to live forever. By the turn of the 20th Century, the social strata of the town was firmly established. At the lower end of the social scale, troublemakers, villains and scoundrels were weekly hauled before the beak and given their just deserts. It didn't take a phalanx of police constables to maintain law and order. Without doing immense research, we can check progress in the field of law enforcement.

The easterly section of the harbour was equally busy. At the turn of the century, the core of Cobourg life centred on its dockside and jetty. The main concrete dock and extension that ended with its lighthouse was also a foundation for a warehouse, customs, the harbour master's and other buildings essential to the commerce and lake traffic that helped sustain the town. The lighthouse marked the beginning of the harbour entrance, which was deep enough to take ocean-going vessels, sail or steam, except that, until construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s, Cobourg catered only to vessels built for use on Lake Ontario. The lighthouse was equipped with a foghorn that sounded whenever fog descended and limited visibility on the lake. Given the brouhaha and dissension arising from the use of train whistles over the past twenty years, one might wonder what residents of the town would have made of the persistent and intermittent drone of the Cobourg fog horn. It was operational until well into the 1970s when the harbour entrance was narrowed by extension with rip-rap of the western breakwater. We know what the residents of the town thought about the foghorn because, like train whistles the length and breadth of Canada, it was a fact of life one came to accept. One wishes the same could be said for the annual waterfront festival, but that's a matter for discussion some other time.

Visitors coming to the harbour just to see what was going on were as common as a barber's chair; it was one heck of a busy place. Two huge ferries connected Cobourg with the booming City of Rochester, New York State, on the south shore of the Lake and, if visitors were lucky, there might even be two vessels in the harbour at the same time. The ferries were more than pleasure vessels, for they carried goods, merchandise and vehicles back and forth in a constant exchange of commerce. They also brought an annual influx of wealthy American families who owned large homes in and around Cobourg and shared in the life of the town for the season. They brought their own culture and, by all accounts, mixed exceptionally well with the natives, providing seasonal work for domestic servants, gardeners and artisans to keep their mansions in good repair.

The harbour area had other activities going on beside those on the eastern quay. The centre pier at the water front had sufficient capacity to berth fairly large lake vessels. It was also equipped with oil pipe lines for connecting small oil tankers to the tank farm that occupied the same ground on which the condominium buildings are now being erected.

King Street – the hub

Most residents of Cobourg know that milk comes from cows and that the 'farmers market' closes for the winter, which is the time for those living in the downtown area to venture farther afield for their fodder. Given the contemporary state of 'downtown Cobourg' with its bargain shops, its consignment and liquidation outlets; its life-style parlours pushing pills and potions for notions and ills; boutiques with nicks and knacks and crocheted toilet roll covers; wellness centres offering, rather I should think, suggestive 'glycolic feels'; pizza parlours with mottled bubble gum pavements; and coffee shops with curbside seating on carpets of cigarette butts, it would be difficult for visitors to imagine that King Street had ever been anything else but Ye olde and quaint made-over village shoppe centre.

You can tell how much downtown Cobourg has changed even from St Peter's Church at the east end of town where a massive $3 million expansion of church property is progressing with the speed of cathedral construction in medieval Europe. That once lovely structure now has an extension in a neo-Masonic temple style. To properly set it off it needs an all-seeing eye and compass chiseled in stone on the new portico. In contrast, Victoria Park opposite has changed, slightly for the better, though without much style. What once passed for a rose garden has replaced the hotel that once occupied the east corner of the park, but now lies ragged, neglected and forlorn. At the west corner there once stood the Chateau-by-the-Lake Hotel, which was demolished and replaced by an elaborately-designed park entrance that would merit an A for effort in any first year landscape architect's course. One must not quibble.

In justice to – if not in praise of – the turn of the 20th Century, facing west, King Street was a far different place from what it is today. This main concourse of our 'feel good town' named King Street, stretching from Hoo Lee Gardens (a Chinese restaurant with uncommonly good fare, not a Chinese garden), at the north west corner of Victoria Park, to the Armouries a block west of Victoria Hall, was once a place of bustling activity. Butchers, bakers, greengrocers and drapers, hardware and grocery – or general provision – stores, banks and barber shops, tailors, men's and women's outfitters, shoe shops, newsagents, carriage-trade jewelers and insurance agents were crowded wall-to-wall in elegant late Victorian buildings in the shadow of town's famed Victoria Hall. Merchants and provisioners supplied customers with food that was entirely organic; unlike today where packaged organic victuals are available at grossly inflated prices to those who can afford the exorbitant prices.

In common with all roads in the county, King Street had an unpaved carriageway suitable for horse-drawn vehicles, but little else. This is obvious in the two photographs of the north side of King Street taken from the copula of Victoria Hall. On the other hand, pedestrians shopping the main thoroughfare were served with a convenience few other Ontario towns enjoyed. That is, the recently-installed concrete sidewalks paid for by the downtown merchants and grudgingly subsidized the town council were the pride of the town. Most every merchant and vendor provided a roll-down awning to protect shoppers from the summer sun as well as rain in inclement weather. The residents had every reason to believe that, like Pangloss in Candide, they lived in the best of all possible worlds.

One would be remiss not to mention Victoria Hall, a magnificent structure designed by architect and civil engineer Kivas Tully whose works with one exception are recognized in the Canadian Encyclopedia, the . exception being Victoria Hall, Cobourg. This might be an oversight or have something to do with the fact that every other community in the Province has its Victoria Hall in one form or another so that Cobourg's majesty was not considered worth mentioning. Homage is therefore here dutifully paid to architect Tully for his Cobourg edifice. The locally famous Victoria Hall was opened in 1860 by the Prince of Wales who, history tells us, "...danced the night away, to the obvious delight of Cobourg matrons." It is all very well what history says about Cobourg matrons. Given Prince Albert's reputation, the town should have been more concerned about its maidens, for rumour persists that he dallied with more than one during his stay and left a lasting legacy in the form – if not as his namesake – of a little Edward whose descendents still surely carry the royal genes.

As earlier recorded, Cobourg was a small community of well under ten thousand souls in those days. It was thriving and, with or without the able assistance of HRH The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII as history records, it was a jolly place which any excuse was used to mount a parade to march the length of King Street from the Armouris to the park. Whilst the town's many forms and customs of entertainment justify separate discussion, there is no more fitting a place for mention of the annual Victoria Day parade than here.

It is as well to mention that as far as all those worthy service and business clubs that are with us today are concerned – Rotary International, The Lions, Kiwanis and the rest – not one was in existence at the turn of the century. Rotary International, for example, had its beginnings in Chicago, Illinois, in 1905, the Lions and Kiwanis later. Although the rise in popularity of the Rotarians as a businessman's organisation – one might say 'an early form of networking' – the movement did not stretch as far as Cobourg for many years to come. On no! In those days, the Orange Order and the Grand Order of Independent Oddfellows were in the top positions of influence in the community. The Order of Freemasons was a flourishing organisation too, but its activities were less overt than those of the Oddfellows and Orangemen. All these organisations – including Rebeka Lodges and church groups – did work in their own way to help the communities of which they were part. The main difference between the Orange Order and Independent Oddfellows was their affiliation. The Orange Order had strong military connections from its origins in Northern Ireland. The Oddfellows was more a fraternity of working class people as compared with the contemporary business community from which the Rotarians get their strength. The Independent Order of Foresters was another important fraternity active in the community.

The purpose of this clarification of the service club movement is to emphasize that at the turn of the century, the Oddfellows held pride of place in the community simply because the Rotarians, Lions and Kiwanis did not then exist. The philanthropic Oddfellows organised the annual Victoria Day parade, hung their banners across the King Street, marshaled the groups taking part, provided refreshments and advertised the occasion. By all accounts, the parade was always a grand occasion that entertained the locals and their U. S. visitors for the summer immensely.

No description of King Street at the turn of the Century would be complete without some mention of entertainment for the town's residents from visiting circuses and fairs. Cobourg was a on a regular circus route that paraded along King Street with musicians atop the wagons to announce their arrival. The circus provided a big-top spectacle of 'wild animals' under a ringmaster, acrobatic performers, scantily-clad women riding the same horses in the tent that drew the wagons through town and, of course, every circus had an over abundance of clowns and therefore more than enough to do around.

(Continued)