Researchers at George Brown College are continuing in their efforts to give a voice to “The Silent Community”.
The Deep River Library’s program room was filled to capacity last Thursday evening as Steffanie Adams delivered an update on work that has been done to date, and the work which lies ahead on a study called “The Silent Community: A case study in lost Algonquin architectural heritage”.
Adams is a professor at George Brown College’s School of Architectural Studies, and the study’s principal investigator, as well as being one of the grandchildren of David and Mary Adams, who raised eight of their 12 children in the log cabin which still stands today at the Deep River Yacht and Tennis Club.
The groundwork for the study started last year with the researchers trying to come up with as much information as they can to paint a picture of what the Indian village by the Ottawa River looked like prior to the creation of the Deep River townsite.
Adams noted during her presentation that much has been written about Deep River focuses on the history of the town after the townsite was established in 1945, when land was expropriated using the War Measures Act.
Even prior to that, she pointed put, stories of the Ottawa River were lined to the fur trade, logging and lumber era and hydroelectricity.
“But Deep River, and this area, is more than that,” Adams said, noting that “very little is written or acknowledged about the people who were there before the Europeans arrived.”
The Adams cabin is the only structure still remaining from that era, but there were many other Indigenous families whose homes dotted the shoreline. The cabin was built in 1928 and is the last of nine cabins which once dotted what is now Deep River’s waterfront…
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(Photo: The late Virginia Adams Hunt wrote a series of articles remembering her childhood growing up in the cabin at the Deep River yacht and tennis club. The articles were published in the NRT in 2006 and again in 2020 under the title, “River of Time.”)
