Neil Young From Omemee - Youngtown Jam Video

Omemee, Ontario, Canada is a tiny village of around 1100 people exactly half way between Lindsay, Ontario, Canada and Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.

“You can take the boy out of Omemee, but you can’t take the Omemee out of the boy!”

My “Stephenson” family first settled there around 1869 and became well known as the owners of the local feed and grain mill, eventually known as “Omemee Elevators”, where farmers would congregate on a daily basis bringing in grain to be ground up for feed and then taking it home to feed their animals.

The feed mill was passed down from Stephenson generation to Stephenson generation, eventually being run by my father and his 3 brothers. It ran on water power only, (being right beside the Omemee Dam), using two horizontally mounted 5 foot diameter water wheels, from 1869 until 1967 at which time my father put in a Cummins diesel to assist the machinery inside the mill.

I grew up playing and working in the mill, along with my best friend, David Mansfield, another friend on Facebook, whose father was the Anglican church minister in Omemee.

My father eventually bought out his brothers and became sole owner of the feed mill along with another grain elevator in Omemee at the west end of the village, and also another grain elevator in Fraserville, Ontario, Canada.

In the summer of 1969 he grew tired of the feed mill business and handed the reins over to me for the summer, allowing me to completely manage and run the business on a daily basis, although I was still just a teenager. When I returned to school in the fall, he rented the entire business out to an associate from Fraserville, Ontario, Canada, but retained ownership of the mill itself, and transferred the mill property itself into my name.

I could very well have had a career in the feed mill business, except that the mill burned to the ground on February 19, 1971, probably as a result of poor maintenance of the machinery. It was built entirely out of wood and by that time the wood was over a hundred years old, making it extremely dry and susceptible to fire!

Although I was in Quebec City, Province of Quebec, Canada, on a high school trip at the time I heard that the 5 storey structure burned to the ground in about an hour, and completely melted the solid steel, six foot by six foot, Cummins diesel engine at the back of the mill.

My first cousin Michael C. Stephenson owns and operates an online genealogical research business from his home in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.

Michael C. Stephenson has collected many Omemee Stephenson Family Historical Pictures in his role as a genealogical researcher and I am presenting them here from the link below:

By now you’re probably wondering what this all has to do with Neil Young, the famous folk singer.

The Young family were also Omemee residents. Neil’s father, Scott Young, was a friend of my father and my father knew Neil Young as a young boy. Neil was quite a bit older than me so I never actually knew him but I did have a passing acquaintance with his father, Scott Young, who eventually became a daily columnist with The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Neil’s song, “Helpless”, is actually about his life in Omemee, Ontario, Canada. as a young boy.

Another famous Omemee resident was “Lady Eaton”, (Flora McCrae Eaton), (1880-1970) whose husband was Sir John Craig Eaton, president and heir of the Eaton’s Department Store in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Raised in a large family in Omemee, Ontario, Canada, Flora McCrea moved to Toronto to become a nurse at Rotherham House, a private hospital on Sherbourne street. While working as a nurse, Flora met a young patient, John Craig Eaton, who was the son of Eaton’s department store founder Timothy Eaton. The two eventually fell in love, and were married. They built a massive mansion in 1911 to accommodate themselves and their growing family. Named Ardwold, the home was one of the most lavish ever constructed in Toronto. They were the parents of four boys and one girl with one adopted daughter.

In 1915, John Craig Eaton was knighted, and became Sir John Craig Eaton, and his wife, Lady Eaton.

Flora McCrae was my grandmother Stephenson’s first cousin.

Presently there are two public schools in Omemee, “Lady Eaton Elementary School” and “Scott Young Public School”.

Although not named after him, the famous “Bigwin Island” in Lake Of Bays in the Muskokas was created and founded by Charlie Shaw, of the Shaw family in Omemee.

Bigwin Inn opened its doors in June of 1920, the decade that “roared” in its prosperity. It quickly became the resort of choice for socialites and the upper class who congregated in the grand hall known as the Indian Head Room and the Rotunda with its huge stone fireplaces and large open verandahs. The temptations were all plainly evident – the fine dining and entertainment…the water sports and summer recreation…all with the rugged beauty of the Muskokas as a backdrop.

The Shaw family also started “Shaw Research” in Omemee, a chemical research firm that had many famous products including one that I remember in particular called “Bag Balm”, an ointment that would ease the pain and heal any wound on an animal or a human. It was originally developed as an ointment for a cow’s udder, hence the name “bag balm”, but it was quickly discovered to work equally as well on humans and many people in Omemee had a tin of “Bag Balm” in their home medicine cabinet.

I hope you enjoyed my history lesson today and as has been said before if we don’t remember the past then we will never know the future.

Cheers,

Fred