Thresher Reunion 2024: Keith Roulston to deliver Sunday service sermon

BY SCOTT STEPHENSON

On the Sunday morning of the Thresher Reunion weekend, there is always a church service that features a guest speaker from the community, and this year, that speaker will be none other than local man of letters Keith Roulston. Roulston was rather surprised to find himself nominated for the position, as he is neither the most devout member of his congregation, nor the most skilled orator. “I am not exactly a speaker,” he confessed. “So I would not have lined up for this job.” So how did he end up with the Sunday morning slot of the reunion? Well, the honour was bestowed upon him by Annie Pritchard, one of the reunion’s Entertainment Co-ordinators.

 

He may not be the most obvious choice, but it’s easy to see why Pritchard picked him, as he hasn’t just been a big supporter of the Huron Threshers and Pioneer Hobby Association’s (HTPHA) for a good number of years, he really is a true believer when it comes to the subject of preserving agriculture and its history.

 

In fact, his connection to the Thresher Reunion goes all the way back to the very first one. He didn’t exactly attend the event, but he did take a quick look as he was already on his way to an event he was passionate about. “When I was growing up in Lucknow,” he recalled, “I was so impressed with airplanes, so I wanted to go into the air force. They were having an air show at the air force base in Centralia, so we decided to go down there. And I believe it was the same week as the very first version of the Thresher Reunion. I persuaded my parents to go to the air show, and we were driving through Blyth, and I remember looking to see what I could see…. It’s amazing that this has lasted so many years.” Years later, when Roulston and his wife took over The Blyth Standard, they started covering the reunion in 1973. According to their coverage in the paper that year, it was both a “pleasant afternoon” and a “financially successful” event.

 

Of course, the Blyth Campground looked a bit different back then, “They still had the old Blyth Arena at that point, before it was rebuilt, and there was no craft show at that stage, and there was no place in the arena to have dinners.” Instead, dinners were held in a simple shed on the grounds. “In those days, hardly anybody camped there... but then more and more people came and camped, and they bought extra land and built the campgrounds... and down where the Harvest Stage is now - they used to grow crops there, and harvest them.”

 

Roulston has been involved with the local agricultural scene for so long that some of the antique farm equipment on display has begun to look more than a little bit familiar. “When I was a kid growing up on a farm north of Lucknow, we drove an awful lot of the equipment that’s at the show now,” he pointed out. “Not the steam engines though - that was back before my time.” The Roulston family’s grain was processed each year by a neighbour who had a threshing machine, which was powered by a Case. The Roulstons’ tractor was a Minneapolis-Moline, and the neighbour across the road had a Massey Harris, while to the east, they went with an Allis-Chalmers.

 

Back then, it was estimated that one third of people living in cities had rural roots. “Cities got bigger and bigger, with more and more people, and that farm influence has fallen apart,” he said. “The urban-based premier of Ontario, and the urban-based prime minister, they drive through the country, and it seems to them like there’s so much country. So what’s a few acres for urban development? But for 30 years, there’s been something like 250 acres of farmland lost per day to urban development… we have a limited amount of land to grow the food that we eat. It’s so essential to us to have food, because how else are we going to eat? If you walk into any supermarket, it’s just overflowing with food. But that food had to come from somewhere. People in the city never think about how that food came from somewhere. They look at that food and they grumble about the price or whatever, but they don’t realize how that starts on land like this. And on the land they celebrate at Threshers.”

 

Roulston isn’t just thinking about the collective efforts of modern farmers - he’s taking into consideration the total labour required to create what is now known as Huron County’s prime farmland, which wasn’t just ready to plant when settlers showed up in the 1850s. “There was forest, and it had to be cleared,” he pointed out. “Most people had to chop that acreage down, and they cleared about five acres a year. Then they had to plant crops by hand in between the tree stumps that were left. They had to cut the grain with a scythe, and thresh it by hand, and so on, for all those years, until the stumps rotted enough that they could pull them out. When you look at all this land around here - that’s how it was cleared.”

 

Farming isn’t just a matter of combining human exertion and modern inventions - nature has to also be working in the farmer’s favour. “You look out there now and the beans are growing,” he said. “You’ve got to have the dry weather to plant the crop, you’ve got to have the rains to make that crop grow, so it will yield properly, and you gotta have dry weather again when it’s time to harvest that crop. And that’s been going on here for over 150 years.”

 

When he looks at all that goes into growing our food, Roulston can understand why farm people tend to be more religious than non-farm people. “It’s because every crop seems like a miracle.”