There are two Kearneys, according to Glenn Reid. There’s the Kearney you see every day, and the Kearney you don’t see unless you stick around a while.
    That is the Kearney, found north of Huntsville off of Hwy. 11, that draws thousands each year to its dogsled races in the winter and its regatta in the summer, not to mention the Creative Changes Art Show and the many smaller community events held there throughout the year. That is the Kearney with a rich history – more than a century of boom times and hard times, and a community pulling together to make the town thrive through it all.
    “If you just drove through the town on a typical day, you’d say ‘no way,’” said Reid. “But it’s there.”
    Reid understands this as well as anyone. The Toronto resident has a relationship with Kearney that reaches back through more than half of its history as a town. He remembers the town’s 75th anniversary, and even its 50th.
    “My family has been going up there since the 1930s,” he said. “Personally, I’ve been going since the 50s.”
    A published author of poetry and magazine articles, Reid was asked to write the town’s history, to be published as a book for Kearney’s Centennial this year. This task has involved considerable research, and much compiling of stories, photos and documents. In addition to the publications committee for the centennial, Reid got some help from one of Kearney’s best-known residents, the late Ralph Bice.
    “The story of Ralph Bice is really the story of Kearney,” said Reid. “He put Kearney on the map as much as anyone.”
    Bice was primarily a trapper and guide in the Kearney area and nearby Algonquin Park, but he was also known as a conservationist, an author, a politician, a student of history (as both participant and observer) and an all-around colourful character. In 1985, he became a Member of the Order of Canada, an honour no other trapper has received.
    Bice’s writings have proven invaluable as a starting point for the centennial book.
    “He wrote a short history for the 50th in 1958, and another, longer history for the 75th in 1983,” said Reid.
    The story of Kearney does not begin a century ago, however, but nearly half a century earlier, in the 1860s. That was when settlement of the area really began. There really wasn’t anything to attract settlers at that time, except for government incentives.
    “Grants of free land brought them as much as anything else,” said Reid.
    The Ontario Free Grant and Homestead Act promised 200 acres to practically anyone, provided they could clear and cultivate a portion of it. There was just one problem – the land around Kearney isn’t all that conducive to farming. The homesteaders tried, but their efforts often failed to pay off.
    “A lot of them didn’t survive, and a lot of them simply turned around and went back where they came from,” said Reid.
    Ironically, that was not the end of farming, which continued for decades in Kearney.
    “Up until the 1940s, the backbone of the town was in farming, even though the money was in lumber,” said Reid.
    Crops might have been hard to grow, but there were plenty of trees, and lumber became big business in Kearney. The coming of the railway in 1895 brought more people to the area, and provided an effi cient way to haul lumber out. The good times had arrived. By the 1920s, there were eight trains a day passing through Kearney, carrying wood and passengers.
    With that prosperity came the need for local government, and just after the turn of the century, the people of the area petitioned the Lieutenant Governor for incorporation as a town.
    “It wasn’t under an act of the legislature,” said Reid. “It was by royal proclamation.”
    The 600-acre town of Kearney, named for William Kearney, an early settler, was officially incorportated on Dec. 31, 1907, making the town 100 years old this year.
    It was home to a few hundred people, and many more in the lumber camps and surrounding areas would identify themselves as being from Kearney.
    Lumber continued to drive the economy, particulary after farming declined in the 1940s, when many young men went off to war, and many of them found other jobs on returning home. Farming was diffi cult and not very profitable, while the thriving lumber industry promised steady work.
    “It was huge,” said Reid. “Over the years, there were probably over 100 sawmills.”
    Mills came in various sizes, and some lasted longer than others. It all depended on what logging rights they could get. The largest of the mills belonged to Peter Thompson and Sons in Kearney. Opening around 1940, it employed 70 people or more, and stayed in business until 1969. But the writing was on the wall long before that. By the 1950s, it was clear that the days of the lumber boom were numbered.
    The railroad giveth and the railroad taketh away.
    “The rail lines were lifted in 1959, and that almost sounded the death knell of the town,” said Reid.
    A few companies continued to haul lumber out by truck into the 1980s, and logging still goes on today, but the industry became a shadow of its former self when the railway left. Unemployment was high. Where the town once had a blacksmith, butcher, baker and tailor, just a general store remained. Attempts to attract new industry failed.
    But once again, Kearney survived, and would soon reinvent itself. The age of tourism was on the horizon.
    Although people had been visiting since the turn of the century, it was in the 1960s that recreation in the north enjoyed a surge in popularity. Development was again on the rise as people bought cottages to spend their free time in Kearney’s scenic surroundings.
    “It’s the land that attracts people, the quiet, an opportunity to see wildlife,” said Reid. “It’s certainly a very different life from a large metropolitan area like Toronto.”
    The general stores in Kearney did a brisk business in the summer, particularly since the roads were not so good that people wanted to go to Huntsville or Burk’s Falls for their groceries. Reid recalls them making deliveries to the surrounding lakes on certain days, as husbands returned to work during the week, leaving their wives and kids at the cottage without a car.
    Tourism didn’t close the gap left by lumber immediately, but it continued to grow with Ontario’s highway system. In the following decades, improved highways brought more cottagers, campers, hunters and fishermen.
    “I can remember when the four-lane stopped in Barrie,” said Reid. “Then it went to Orillia, and then Gravenhurst, and we thought that was great.”
    Kearney’s boundaries expanded in 1979, when the original 600 acres was amalgamated with the surrounding townships. Kearney’s title of “the biggest little town in Ontario” is not just a cute slogan. It’s meant quite literally. Kearney is a town of about 800 year-round residents and a geographic area of 600 square kilometres.
    In the summer, the population quadruples. The August long weekend is particularly busy, as people flock into town for the Kearney Regatta. Started in the 1940s, the regatta has grown into a three-day event with a variety of water sports and other activities, capped off with a fireworks display.
    But Kearney is by no means just a summer destination. The Kearney dogsled races, held for the 14th time in 2008, bring a pack of competitors and spectators to the town every February. It is quickly becoming the biggest event of its kind in Ontario.
    But, according to Reid, Kearney’s most impressive events are the smaller ones, put together by the town’s service clubs, churches and other organizations. In 1990 Kearney built a community centre that many southern communities would be happy to have even today. And they put it to good use. Thinking back to the Flag Day dinner in February, Reid estimates about 300 people attended, out of a population of 800.
    The key to Kearney’s survival all these years, according to Reid, is the people. Kearney is blessed with dynamic and talented people who are committed to making the town thrive. And that seems to have always been the case, as its history is fi lled with dances, sports, dinners and social activities. Reid believes Kearney has survived where other towns have folded due to an above-average sense of community that goes back to the first settlers carving out a hard existence.
    “People just had to pull together,” he said.
    Kearney’s centennial festivities include events throughout the year. The largest of these is a homecoming on the Canada Day weekend. For more information, visit www.kwef.ca/Kcent