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| Peter McArthur 1866 – 1924 |
History Under the Trees
Waterloo Historical Society’s History Under the Trees will remember my great grandfather Peter McArthur. The once-famous author’s birth cabin (and also where he lived for the final two decades of his life) has been a prominent part of the village streetscape at Doon Heritage Village in Kitchener. WHS has invited Professor Adam Crerar of Wilfrid Laurier University to help us rediscover McArthur’s life and writings.
“From 1909 until his death in 1924, Peter McArthur became one of Canada’s most popular writers by describing life on his Middlesex County farm in articles for the Toronto Globe and the Farmer’s Advocate of London, Ontario. That he was able to appeal to both rural and urban readers is interesting in two respects: it suggests that the lines between the country and the city were considerably more amorophous than contemporary rhetoric has suggested, and it provides an example of anti-modernist writing that gave as much pleasure to the “folk” as it did to the urban middle-class.”
-“Writing Across the Rural-Urban Divide: The Case of Peter McArthur, 1909-24” by Adam Crerar, Journal of Canadian Studies, Spring 2007
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| Peter McArthur’s family home, constructed c. 1835 in Ekfrid Township and donated to Doon Heritage Crossroads in 1962. |