Recollections
of the
Killaloe Craft and Community Fair |
Story and photos
by: Clark Guettel
Photos used by permission ~ not for reproduction
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| The
Kid's Parade at the Fair circa 1984 |
The Killaloe Craft an
Community Fair was an ad hoc hippie festival
started in 1976 at Fern Zadra's on the Old O'Connor Homestead
on what
they now call Mountain View Road. Fern's original vision was
to promote
a craft show but after teaming up with Gordon Flaegler of the
Bancroft
hippie community, what started as a craft show morphed into
a cultural
hippie community event that for the next three years grew into
a yearly hippie mecca that attracted alternative types from
communities across
Ontario and beyond. After three years the fair had taken on
a life of it's own and
Fern felt it had grown
to big for his farm and told the community
"it's yours, but
you have to find a new location". The fair was moved a
couple kilometers down
the road to a rented piece of property and it's present location
in 1979. The
property became for sale and many voted to purchase it for a
permanent site.
This led to pressure to generate a profit to raise cash. It
was decided to do
this by staging night concerts with a beer garden to attract
the largest
crowds possible. It worked. Large nighttime crowds flooded the
hillside but poor infrastructure, security, lighting and washrooms
were always a problem.
In it's heyday, 1979-1985, the fair was basically
two simultanious events. An evening
concert venue featuring headliners like Doug and the Slugs,
Sylvia Tyson,
Wayne Ronstadt, Mantecca, Graham Townsand, the Lincoln's, Cowboy
Junkies,
Ronnie Hawkins with Lonnie Mack to name a few. Wild nights,
fueled by the flow of beer from the Pyramid bar, hard drugs
and a barely controllable crowd, not necessarily your peace
and love types. The tense festivities more than once punctuated
by a
beer bottle thrown from high on the hill and smashing on the
stage,
fights, bushwacking gate crashers and drunks
stumbling down the hillside rolling over children sleeping on
blankets next to their parents.
Then there was the daytime
fair. The craft area had over 50 covered booths.
Exhibiters were juried for quality. There were demonstrations
in pottery, weaving,
spinning, bronze casting, pioneer crafts, blacksmithing, glassblowing,
canoe building etc.
There were alternative lifestyle workshops in herbs, astrology,
natural healing,
natural childbirth, yoga, organic gardening, wood heat and energy
conservation etc.
plus Native crafts and dancers from the local Algonquin community.
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