At a time when print media are facing unprecedented challenges across the country and local newspapers are disappearing at an alarming rate, the fact that this year marks the 140th anniversary of THE EQUITY is a remarkable achievement.
The first newspaper to be published in Canada was the Halifax Gazette which printed its debut edition on March 23, 1752. Over the next 150 years, hundreds of papers, large and small, were founded across the country to convey local, national and international news, sway opinion, or represent specific causes. In Quebec alone, by 1900 there were 182 different newspapers, including 17 dailies and over 100 weekly publications. Pontiac’s first newspaper, The Pontiac Advance, was a weekly tabloid published by James Thomas Pattison from 1872 to 1913 in Bryson, the county seat at the time.
It was here that two young friends from Fitzroy Harbour, John Cowan and Henry Thomas Smith, learned their trade as newspapermen.
As was common at the time, newspapers openly reflected their political leanings. The Advance was a Liberal paper which, it turned out, was not
well-suited to Cowan and Smith’s more conservative views. So, in 1883, the two men left the Advance to found their own newspaper, THE EQUITY, with the intention of supporting what was still often referred to as the Liberal Conservative Party, the precursor of today’s Conservative Party of Canada.
The first issue of THE EQUITY was published on June 7th, 1883, also in Bryson. It was a weekly paper that came out on Thursdays, with subscriptions costing one dollar per year in advance, or $1.50 on account. THE EQUITY set out to be a thoroughly local paper, avoiding the major national issues that occupied larger publications, focusing instead on the interests of the Pontiac. In their inaugural issue, the original editors advised their readers that “Matters which have no immediate connection with our county or provincial affairs, and with which we do not presume to be familiarly acquainted, will receive such consideration as we deem it prudent to give.”
Four years later, in October 1888, THE EQUITY office and printing press were moved to Shawville for reasons the owners “deemed . . .
expedient in the best interests” of the newspaper. The following year, Smith moved to Ottawa to take a job with the federal government. Cowan stayed on as the editor, working tirelessly at this task until his death on October 4, 1931.
After John Cowan’s passing, his son, William George Cowan, managed THE EQUITY for 17 years before dying of a heart attack on November 25, 1948. Over the next two years the paper was run by the trustees of George Cowan’s estate, often under the direction of James Grey. A permanent owner was found in the autumn of 1950 when Bill Kinmond and his wife, Chris Alexander, purchased the paper. They ran the paper until the spring of 1953 when they sold it to David and Rosaleen Dickson, 70 years after the paper was founded. The Dicksons moved THE EQUITY to larger premises on Centre Street in Shawville where they founded Pontiac Printshop, a printing and stationery business. In a lovely letter to the editors in 2008, former co-owner Chris Alexander reminded readers of how often the paper made its way into people’s lives, reminiscing about taking her lunches to school wrapped in old issues of THE EQUITY during the 1920s.
Soon after the Dicksons bought THE EQUITY, the paper gained royal attention following the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953. When Mrs. Dickson pblished a poem to mark the occasion, a reader in
New Jersey clipped the verse from the paper and sent it to London. A few weeks later, a warmly-worded reply from Her Majesty’s Lady-in-Waiting expressed the new queen’s gratitude, and a headline in THE EQUITY on August 20 recounted the story in an article under a headline that proudly proclaimed “Equity Goes To Buckingham Palace.”
THE EQUITY has, over the years, maintained its focus on local matters. Not to be distracted by events in Europe, for example, the lead news item on September 14, 1939 noted that Mr. H.W. Hodgins, the secretary of Shawville Fair, would be absent from the office that Friday afternoon. Only further down the page – after an article about a change to the hunting season for partridge, and another discussing the number of lumbermen being sent into the forests of Algonquin Park in the coming winter – was the modest headline, “Canada At War.”
Local, of course, does not mean unimportant. THE EQUITY has always paid close attention to the political and economic matters affecting Pontiac residents. This being Quebec, a fairly constant issue has been the politics of language.
This newspaper has consistently advocated for the rights of the English minority in Quebec, never accepting that the need to protect the language and culture of the French minority within Canada should be at the expense of the anglophone minority within Quebec. In April 1971, hot on the heels of the FLQ crisis and concerned over a proposal to redraw the provincial administrative boundaries in a way that could see the Pontiac disappear, the paper’s then editor, Rosaleen Dickson, conducted an informal poll of local residents to assess their desire to remain a part of Quebec. The results of the poll, published on April 28, showed that an astounding 97 per cent of respondents wanted the Pontiac to leave Quebec, with almost half of the 1,232 respondents wanting the Pontiac to join Ontario.
Almost 400 others supporting the creation of a new federal district, and only 36 people wanting to see the area remain in Quebec. In the late 1970s, Rosaleen and David’s son Ross and his wife Heather joined the business and, with the retirement of Rosaleen and David in the early 1980s, assumed ownership. In 1981, they published a second questionnaire seeking the opinions of local residents on the future of the Pontiac. Again, 96 per cent of respondents wanted a change in the region’s status, with roughly 60 per cent wishing to see the Pontiac join Ontario and another 30 per cent wanting to see it established as part of a new federal district.
Sometimes it seemed as if the world was watching this little corner of Quebec and THE EQUITY’s role in the discussions arising from its complex relationship with the rest of the province. News of the 1971 poll, for example, was reported by newspapers as far away as Edmonton and Victoria. The 1981 poll was covered by American newspapers as far away as Hawaii.
Similarly, in May 1982 major newspapers in both Montreal and Ottawa ran articles about THE EQUITY’s then editor, Ross Dickson, receiving a certificate of appreciation from the Montreal-based Freedom of Choice Movement for his support of English-language rights in Quebec. People were interested. They were reading THE EQUITY, and they were reading about it too, sometimes right across the continent.
In the late 1980s, when the PQ government decided to downgrade Shawville Fair in favour of the Papineau Fair, Ross published a questionnaire asking readers to forward their opinion on the matter to the Quebec agriculture minister. After receiving thousands of letters, reportedly ‘more than he’d ever seen’, the minister helicoptered into Shawville to meet the Fair Board, of which Ross was vice-president, to see for himself what this English town was all about.
Instead of being demoted, Shawville Fair was named the regional fair for all of Quebec from Lachute west.
As the world started to shift online THE EQUITY adapted too, setting up its first website in the spring of 1996.
Today, online subscriptions account for almost 20 per cent of THE EQUITY’s readership, bringing the paper to people anywhere in the world.
In 1989, Ross and business partner Jim Creskey founded The Hill Times, a community weekly newspaper covering goings-on on Parliament Hill. Heather ran Pontiac Printshop and THE EQUITY from the ‘90s through to 2013 when she retired and the business was purchased by Ross’s brother Charles. Now in its 140th year of publication, THE EQUITY has now been owned by members of the Dickson family for 70 of the newspaper’s 140 years. For all of that change, the past several years have been difficult ones for the newspaper industry in Canada, as it has throughout much of the western world.
Declining readership and advertising revenues challenge razor thin profit margins while the proliferation of online content sources – reliable or not – has shifted everyone’s attention to laptops and smartphones.
Between 2020 and 2021 alone, 82 newspapers ceased publication across Canada, almost all of them small community papers. Each closure represents the loss of another voice in the ties that bind us together.
If you want to know what’s going on in your community, and learn how to help make it all a slightly better place, you should read your local weekly newspaper, if you are still lucky enough to have one. In the Pontiac, for the past 140 years, that has been THE EQUITY.
Shawn MacWha, originally from Lachute, spends as much time as possible at his camp “up on the Picanoc” north of Otter Lake. He has a keen interest in Quebec’s past and writes a weekly history column for the Townships Weekend newspaper in Sherbrooke. With contributions by Charles Dickson and Robert Wills.
From Letterpress to Offset
In the earliest days of THE EQUITY, the text that appeared in the paper would have been set by hand, a laborious process that involved selecting individual letters made of wood and metal from a drawer of type, placing them in whatever order was required to form words and sentences, paragraphs and ultimately full pages for printing. After printing, the ink would have to be cleaned off the type before the letters were put back in their proper spots in the type drawers. There were two cases of type drawers, one on top of the other. The upper case housed the capital letters while the lower case housed the rest. This was the world of moveable type, essentially unchanged since Gutenberg’s innovations in the letterpress printing process almost 600 years ago.
The next significant advance was the invention of the Linotype machine, so-named because of its ability to produce a whole line of type at a time. Linotype operators would tap out the words on a qwerty keyboard virtually identical to modern computer keyboards, but with a return key that would send the series of selected type moulds into a chamber where they would be filled with molten lead. The resulting hot type, once cooled, would be assembled into a page of text ready for printing. While the Linotype was invented soon after THE EQUITY was founded, we don’t know when it was first put into use here. It might have been a few years before the new technology found its way to the Pontiac, not least due to the fact that the electrical power required to run the machine wasn’t in place in Shawville until 1925. What we do know is that in 1953, when the business changed hands from the Kinmonds to the Dicksons, a Linotype machine came with it.
From the outset, THE EQUITY was printed on-site on a massive sheet-fed printing press, most recently operated by Neil Sharpe. On a separate machine requiring two operators, different pages of the paper were simultaneously fed in and folded together to make one newspaper. This continued through to the late 1960s when the advent of offset printing changed everything. It enabled the abandonment of the hot type process in favour of the so-called cold type process that involved pasting columns of text, photos and ads onto master sheets of paper from which metal printing plates would be made and strapped onto massive presses. Initially, the text was produced on typewriters, followed in the early 1970s by a machine called a CompuWriter, a four-foot metal cube that had a keyboard on one side and would spit out columns of printed text on the other, and in the 1990s by computers from which text is formatted digitally directly into the final newspaper layout. The shift to offset technology spelled the end of in-house printing of THE EQUITY which has since been printed on multi-million dollar presses owned by larger establishments in Renfrew, Nepean, Smith’s Falls and currently Winchester, Ontario. Rather than scrapping the old printing equipment, the Dicksons donated much of it to Upper Canada Village for use in the antique print shop.
Memories of a former editor
Excerpts from Rosaleen Dickson’s recollections originally published in the 125th anniversary issue in 2008:
Producing a new issue of
THE EQUITY every week for 32 years was not only a livelihood, it was a labour of love in every sense of the word.
When David and I arrived on the scene, the equipment was archaic, even for that time in the history of printing. When it first came into our hands we gazed upon it in wonder, figured out how to use it, and set about keeping THE EQUITY going. Over time we updated the system, donating much of the original machinery to Upper Canada Village where visitors now gaze on it in wonder. Then we indulged in the pleasures of keeping up with the rest of the publishing world, which meant buying an endless line of new machinery, which sometimes became obsolete before it was paid for. Printing is a demanding business.
In line with the needs of the community, we kept enough of the old stuff around to publish books, posters, receipts and ledgers, funeral cards, Christmas cards, maple syrup labels, voters lists, ballots, and other essentials, but even those procedures changed from letter-press, to offset, to computers, and dear knows what comes next.
Memories of a former editor Rosaleen Dickson
I never had a problem finding topics for editorials. Advice was always available from Peden Wilson, Harland Rowat, Jack Argue, Jack Tolhurst, Evans Schwartz, Phoebe McCord, Norma Telford, the Drs. McDowell, Powell, and Horner, Orla Young, Hosmer Turner and his kind, hospitable sisters who ran the ice cream parlour where David and I used to meet everyone in town, slurping old style ice-cream sodas and milk shakes, and generous bowls of home-churned ice cream.
Memories of a former editor Rosaleen Dickson
Dreaming about writing the stories of Pontiac people, and their horses, babies, gardens, celebrations; flying around in the little two-seater airplane with Iverson Harris, taking aerial potos of lakes, farms and forests; helping Wyman MacKechnie sort out the chapters in his great series of books — What Men They Were, Well Remembered, and Weathering the Thirties; solving copyright problems for the Rusty Leach collection of Songs of the Pontiac; and the golden hours that David and I spent together, morphing what was happening all across the County into a weekly newspaper. That was a good life.
Commentary from Robert Wills
At 140 years of age, THE EQUITY is especially long-lived for such a publication. Since its inception, it has been a consistent part of the communications landscape of Pontiac County.
Messrs. Smith and Cowan inaugurated the paper in 1883, with its offices in Bryson. In those times, the River was the highway, and newspapers were the mass media. When Mr. Smith left the partnership and, soon after that, offices were moved to Shawville, it was near the time when the Pontiac Pacific Junction railroad line began construction westward from Ottawa, and commerce shifted from the river towns of Quyon, Portage-du-Fort and Bryson to towns along the new rail line.
THE EQUITY would have been involved as a mainstay of community and regional news, and the forum for discussions, pro and con, of the merits of such a huge socio-economic shift. Imagine, if you will, what an incredible expense the building of a railway line entails. For rural dwellers, it must have required a tremendous leap of faith, imagining a brighter economic future, while enduring a shrinking of bank accounts. The medium of communication throughout that turbulent era was the newspaper.
Over many decades, THE EQUITY was owned and operated by Mr. Cowan, then his children, Bill and Ida, then Jim Gray, then Bill and Chris Kimmond. In 1953, THE EQUITY was bought by David and Rosaleen Dickson and has remained in the Dickson family through the 70 years since.
With the Dicksons taking charge, THE EQUITY entered a new era, and moved to a larger building, its present location on Centre Street. The Dicksons’ commitment to the newspaper as a tool for social improvement ruffled a few feathers, but led to several organizations launched into activity, many awards for journalism, and to Rosaleen being posthumously lauded as one of four Notable Women of the Pontiac in 2020.
Among many community projects spearheaded or encouraged by the Dicksons and THE EQUITY were the Pontiac Anti-Nuclear Action Committee (PANAC), later renamed Pontiac Environment Protection, the Pontiac Historical Society and Museum, which grew out of an Opportunities for Youth workgroup, the establishment of CHIP Radio Pontiac, and later, the development of Ottawa Freenet, one of the first chances for Pontiac residents to connect to the new-fangled internet, among numerous other steps forward in the progress of the Pontiac.
In 1977, Ross and Heather Dickson took over management of THE EQUITY. From the 1980s to the present day, editors have included Richard Wills, Sylvia Bakker, Paul McGee, Wilbur McLean, Kim Thalheimer, Andrea Cranfield, Chris Lowrey, Caleb Nickerson, Carole St. Aubin, Zainab Al-Mehdar and Brett Thoms, among others, with members of the Dickson family taking occasional turns as editor along the way.
For the past ten years, THE EQUITY has been owned by Charles Dickson. Now up to 140 years and counting, THE EQUITY bridges the gap between ink-on-paper and pages-in-cyberspace.
Robert Wills was raised in a family that published a weekly newspaper in a rural Kentucky community in circumstances similar to THE EQUITY’s and is president of the Pontiac Historical Society.
Writing the history of the Pontiac one week at a time for 140 years
From the first issue to the latest, we do our best to capture a week in the life of the Pontiac in the pages of this newspaper, just as many have done before us and, we hope, as many will continue to do after our turn is up. We wish to thank you, the readers, letter writers and advertisers who, for 140 years and counting, have made all this possible and worthwhile.
