Dali House

As a smalltown boy I had few chances to meet working artists, but being a smalltown newspaper reporter brought some encounters. Frank Black I’ve invited into Dali House several times, and Robert Bateman has been for a visit. Another artist of my acquaintance was Josef Drenters, a sculptor whose biggest project, it might be said, was giving new life to a near-dead century-old building.

This was the Rockwood Academy in Rockwood, Ontario, a village not far from my hometown. I’m pleased to see that the academy has its own page at Wikipedia, one of the modern age’s rewards for being rich in history.

That history began in 1850 when William Wetherald bequeathed rigid, Quaker-style private tutoring upon young lads who roomed in the vast building, three storeys and all massive, locally cut stone. Among the alumni were JJ Hill, who went on to make a fortune building railways, Sir Adam Beck, who pioneered the use of hydroelectric power, and Arthur Sturgis Hardy, who served as Ontario’s premier. Below is a very old photo of the rear of the academy.

By 1883 the provincial government’s own colleges were good enough to put the Rockwood Academy out of business. The school building pretty much haunted the village for the next eight decades, until Josef Drenters bought it in 1960 and got to work restoring it, as well as a log barn and chapel on the property.

In his remaining 23 years, Drenters drew on his own education in a seminary and the skills he learned in all sorts of tough manual jobs to make the academy a living place once again. The lofty-sounding website RockwoodHeaven.com wondered if the local gossip might be true — that Drenters was Headmaster Wetherald reincarnated to save the building from damnation. See the rest.