Georgetown’s founder, George Kennedy, would doubtless have been quite tickled to have Lucy Maud Montgomery in the neighbourhood, but like everyone else, he’d have wondered what the hell Orson Welles was doing there.

After months of effort – well, weeks of effort punctuated by weeks of dawdling – I’ve finally shone a bit of Google Earth spotlight on the place I grew up: Georgetown, Ontario, Canada. The post is here.

I reckon there’s a few errors in it because it’s amazing how 14 years away can make you forget where you left things. Thanks to this new-fangled “Internet” gadget, though, I was able to get reasonably updated from the other side of the world on where stuff is now.

It’s mostly history, but there are also the industries, schools, parks, neighbouring villages and a whole section on the filming in Georgetown of “Never Trust an Honest Thief”, starring Orson Welles.

One of the few Georgetowns in North America not named for a president or a king, this one got its name from George Kennedy, a War of 1812 veteran who joined his four brothers in settling territory purchased by the government from the native. George opened a sawmill, a grist mill, a woollen mill and a foundry. The place has been basically an industrial little beaver burg ever since.

A river runs through it, as they say, and this one is the Credit River, so named by 17th-century French fur traders who each autumn gave the native Mississauga Indians items on credit toward pelts to be handed over the following spring. Beavers!

The Irish-born Barber brothers arrived in the 1830s and went nuts, as overachievers tend to do. They had mills running like crazy all over Georgetown. By the 1850s the Barber company produced more wallpaper than any other in the province, and by 1862 the most in North America.
In 1888 their dynamo generated Canada’s first hydroelectric power for commercial use. It was the first long-distance transmission of hydro power for manufacturing on the continent.

The main guy behind all this, John Roaf Barber, lived in a mansion called Berwick Hall. It was subdivided into apartments in the 1940s and today my buddy Cal lives there. So there you go. We used to sit around there yacking, immersed in history, yet somehow basically inured to it.

Nor did I have any real idea of how different downtown Georgetown looked a century earlier. There was a great big mill pond right across Main Street where fellas used to paddle around in canoes and wink at the girls.

And then there was a railway chugging through downtown from 1917 to ‘31, the Toronto Suburban Railway. The conductors used to fish in the pond while they were in the station.

Cal and I used to sit around yacking at the McGibbon Hotel too, back when we still hoisted a bottle. We knew it had been around since the 1880s – we just wondered how many of the old drunks there dated from that time as well.

When I was in high school I often went into a restaurant down the street from the McGibbon called Stan’s and had french fries and gravy. Quite a lot actually. Then it became a Chinese restaurant called Fong’s, which was pretty good, and then the House of Buddha, which was and still is great.

Around the corner on Mill Street was the Legion Hall, also built around 1880, originally a stable. The first time I ever went in, there was a local rock band playing “Whiter Shade of Pale” and other great ’60s tunes because – it was still the ’60s! Years later I occasionally went to take pictures for the newspaper of stoic old Legionnaires.

I usually took pictures of Legionnaires around another corner, at Remembrance Park on James Street on Armistice Day. This was where I also tended to gravitate on my first few trips abroad into the psychedelic world, just because it was quiet.

Before acid came along, there was Catholicism. Eglise Sacre Coeur, which is today where Georgetown’s French-speaking Catholics worship, was Holy Cross Church from 1884 until the late 1950s, so this is where I did my first confession and first communion and learned to be an altar boy, studying Latin between cuffs upside the head from the priest, Father Zeno, who was impatient as hell. Yes, hell.

Ah, Georgetown District High School. If those walls could talk they’d still probably still be complaining about my first principal, Mr Furlong. Having been raised and educated a polite Catholic, coming here in Grade 9 was quite a culture shock; Protestant kids did a lot of bad things. There were a lot more of them, though, so it wasn’t long before I was drinking and swearing too, and swiftly found my way into the early cannabis echelon.

Much of the drinking took place at the Station House Hotel, which, as the Exchange Hotel, had been wetting whistles for a century.

My Google Earth tour also takes in Normandy Boulevard and the Dominion seed House, complete with a picture of my Uncle Vern walking down Normandy after a day’s work at the Seed House. So that’s nice.

I also had a virtual wander around the housing developments of Delrex and Georgetown South and dropped by the Independent,and there’s a piece on Frank Black, a great painter and buddy of AJ Casson of the Group of Seven. I had the pleasaure of interviewing him at his home in the early 1970s.

I’m still working on a proper post for Dorseyland on “Honest Thief”, packed with location shots – hey, it’s a Hollywood exclusive!

Below, Georgetown high school as seen from space, with Holy Cross School at the top right.