Book about New Hamburg’s historic buildings wins provincial award

A book that tells the stories of historic buildings in New Hamburg has won a provincial award.

The five-volume book is called The Historic Buildings of New Hamburg And The People Who Lived In Them. On Wednesday night, it was awarded the Stephen A. Otto Award for Research and Documentation by the Architectural Conservancy Ontario.

Before knowing they had won the award, two of the three authors — Marie Voisin and Kristen Hahn — sat down for an interview on CBC K-W’s The Morning Edition with host Craig Norris.

This third author was Ernie Ritz, the last mayor of New Hamburg and the first mayor of Wilmot Township. He died in March.

The following interview with Voisin and Hahn has been edited for length and clarity. Audio of the interview can be found at the bottom of the page.

Craig Norris: What got you interested in chronicling all of these historical sites?

Marie Voisin: It started in 2012. I used to go for walks and runs and sometimes it would be at night and I would see the lights on in houses and I would think, I wonder what that house looks like.

So that led to deciding to find out which were the oldest houses and who built them. I enlisted the help of Ernie Ritz, who was our leading historian, a wonderful man, and he just passed away this year in March. 

But he was with us through most of this journey to chronologize the people and the buildings. 

Norris: Kristen, 300 pages to five volumes. That is a bit of a jump. What made it so much larger? 

Kristen Hahn: Well, it’s as soon as Marie gathered together this information, all of this research about the owners of these properties, and then she pulled in the archive from the New Hamburg Independent, which goes back to what, 1875?

And it became clear that each of these people had stories. They had tiny little things, whether that’s a lost dog or a issue with the tavern laws, they were tiny stories to each of these lives. 

And so now we have this vast collection of names, of dates, of parentage and all of the stories that then come with it. And the thing just ballooned.

Norris: So this must have been a, I will say, arduous, perhaps undertaking?

Hahn: If you don’t enjoy it. 

Norris: OK, that’s true. Must have been awesome. 

Hahn: It was awesome.

Norris: How did you collect the personal stories? I mean, where did you get your research?

Hahn: Well, Marie spent many years in the archives. And so there’s a lot of the New Hamburg Independent on microfilm there. Thanks to the Township of Wilmot for holding together a fantastic historical record. 

Then from there, through census records, through voters lists, then you start to assemble the people who are married and oh, and also the way they died. We have a massive section in our index of just the way people died back then, which is markedly different from how we die today. 

Norris: How so? 

Hahn: A lot, Well, a lot of things that are cured by vaccines. 

Norris: Marie, there is your personal passion, obviously for this area, right. But talk a bit about why it’s important that we all know more about New Hamburg’s history and heritage?

Voisin: We just are renters of all these buildings over years. I think that people might live for 60, 70 years in the house, but then it passes on to a new generation. And so we don’t know the people that lived 100 years ago, but they’re the ones who established the town and the buildings. 

So this is our way of just acknowledging them, that we’re just going through but the buildings will be there forever. 

Hahn: And I think that also by telling people who it was who lived in these places before, it will hopefully encourage them to take good care of the homes that they have so that they’ll last for another 100 years.

Norris: Marie, tell us a bit more about Ernie Ritz and his role in this.

Voisin: Ernie was my mentor, probably the first person I met in New Hamburg. He never forgot any details, he remembered everything and his mother had the same photographic memory and she lived to almost 107 so she passed on all those details to him, too.

Whenever we wanted to know anything, we would just ask Ernie. He was remarkable and such a kind, lovely man.

Hahn: Very generous with what he knew.

Norris: Kristen, do you have any favourite revelations in any of these? 

Hahn: We dug up some interesting material on the first mayor of New Hamburg.

Frequently when New Hamburg is discussed, we bring up Nithy … Nithy is an alligator that was found allegedly in the Nith River in 1953. Sort of like Nessie. 

It was the chief of police, George Thomas, who said that he found these tracks along the banks of the Nith River. And it became this story that just spread like wildfire. It even got as far as Queensland in Australia that they picked up the story and there was Medicine Hat, Alta., there was some kind of trash talking back and forth about Ogopogo and Nithy. 

But at the heart, at the centre of the story, George Thomas invited this guy named Tuffy Truesdale to come to New Hamburg. And Tuffy was a wrestler. He was a professional wrestler until his ignominious defeat at the hands of a luchador named El Santo.

And then he decided to get into animal wrestling. So he was an alligator wrestler with an eight-foot alligator named Rodney. And the thinking was that he’d set up camp on the banks of the Nith and the sounds that his alligators would make would lure Nithy out of the water and he’d wrestle Nithi to the ground and that would be that. 

But it was, by all accounts, a quiet night … According to his wife, he kept Rodney in a tank of water under the bed. And because he was, like, just a little bit afraid of this thing, anytime the alligator would slosh, he’d wake up in a panic. 

After he received 40 stitches from a sort of a bad tussle with Rodney, he moved on to the questionably safer pursuit of bear wrestling.

Norris: You’ve been nominated for the Stephen A. Otto Award. What would that mean to you if you won it?

Voisin: We weren’t writing these books for a nomination or an award. We’re just gonna be happy if we sell 379 books. 

Norris: Why 379? Is that the break even point on the 

Voisin: That’s how many houses that were in the study.

It would be quite an honour. And I wish Ernie were here to be here for this.

We had a good time during COVID because we just got up everyday and worked for eight to nine hours at our desk. It was wonderful. 

Norris: Kristen, to tell us where can we get these books? 

Hahn: Well, we’re just finalizing the layout of it. So it should be going to print later on this year. At which point it will be available through independent bookstores and we’ll do some online orders as well. 

LISTEN | Book that focuses on heritage buildings in New Hamburg up for provincial award:

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