Willie, a fine essay and description.

I passed through the area yesterday, on our way to play some music at a retirement home in Orleans. Thanks for making me aware of the history of that part of the city.

Your story reminded me of my grandfather's farm to the west, near Mooney's Bay...on the site of the present Brookfield High School.

Memories from 1955 of a small market farm, fruit orchards, vegetable gardens, barns and a tiny square timber farm house, barely high enough to permit a gawky 13 year old to stand upright... All gone, with no trace left. My son went to the high school now built over it, and and yet there is no way for me to even recognize in the changed landscape where the farm was... I know that cities grow and change, yet it seems we often blithely discard whole areas - and history - in the pursuit of modernization.

I have a small hope that the unique Experimental Farm -several hundred acres of operating farm in the middle of Ottawa - will somehow be preserved as a green space for future generations--- even as the technical functions of the Federal Department of Agriculture there continue to wind down or move elsewhere. This might,in some small way, make up for the continuing and not always welcome changes to our city....

Rich McCarthy