NEWS RELEASE
ORILLIA MUSEUM OF ART & HISTORY
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On Wednesday, March 16 at 7 p.m. the Orillia Museum of Art & History (OMAH) welcomes back John Savage as guest speaker with his talk “The War of the Woods.”
Savage is a descendant of Antoine Gaudaur, a renowned fur trader and Orillia’s first non-Indigenous settler. He spoke at OMAH in July 2021 about the fur trade from the viewpoint of his ancestors.
Savage's talk “The War of the Woods” will recount the history of lumbering in our area, its economic dominance, the devastating impact lumbering had on our local environment and Indigenous people.
The lumbermen felled these forests with axes and the lumber barons harvested, milled and shipped the wood to markets. The Visible Past, a pictorial history of Simcoe County said that “Simcoe County, by 1861, was producing 200 million feet of lumber a year – about a third of the production of the whole province.”
The industry cleared much of this land, choked waterways with timber, built strange new infrastructure, waged violence to defend economic interests and severely impacted Indigenous peoples, who used the woods for sustenance. Learn how the lumber industry affected this region and now shapes many aspects of the way we live today.
Click here to register now and receive a link to the talk. Or call Monica at 705-326-2159 or email [email protected].
Admission is free, but donations to OMAH are greatly appreciated.
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