Rambling at the Farm: Walking Tours, History, Digital Humanities

I recently took my friend Kendall, a PhD candidate in history at Queen's University, on a rambling tour through the Central Experimental Farm. Over the course of an hour and a half and covering 6.5km, we jumped through the Euro-Canadian history of the site. While I didn't have a firm plan about where we'd go and what stories I'd tell, the route wound through some of my favourite spots and included an interweaving of apocryphal local legends, histories of the Farm system and of the city, descriptions of archival collections I've already worked with, and a discussion of the various methodologies I hope to apply as I get into my dissertation research.

Town and City, Fairs and Exhibitions

Continuing from my thoughts about agricultural landscapes, I've been thinking about the places where agriculture intrudes directly into the city. From the point of view of Ottawa, and with the obvious exception of the Farm, the various branches of the Ottawa Farmers' Market are perhaps among the places where city dwellers contact farmers most directly.

Historically, while acknowledging the importance of the various traditional markets in Ottawa (the Byward and Parkdale being the two currently extant, though the Byward doesn't have a requirement for local produce) and the newer trend of Farmers' Markets, there's another site in the city that has hosted agricultural events: Lansdowne Park. In particular, Lansdowne Park used to be the site of the Central Canada Exhibition and the Ottawa Winter Fair, among other events.

Thinking about Landscapes at the Central Experimental Farm

Central Experimental Farm 2013-08-03: Desire lines across a hay field.

In less than a month I'll be moving to Kingston to start a PhD at Queen's University. I'll be exploring the ways that the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa acts as an urban park and how urban residents experience and understand agricultural and rural places in the context of both the Farm and the Canadian Museum of Agriculture and Food--a topic inspired by my own experiences of the Farm in the decade since I moved to Ottawa. In preparation I've been thinking more and more about what these kinds of places and landscapes mean, and how to encounter them.