If one could write a love letter to their hometown, Louise Sproule’s book Vankleek Hill At Night would be a perfect example of how to do it.
The new work by the long-time publisher of The Review newspaper is filled with dozens of beautiful evening and nighttime photos of the village she has lived and worked in for more than three decades. But while a picture may be worth a thousand words, it is the brief, heartfelt writings accompanying the photos which illustrate Sproule’s love affair with the village.
“As I walk around town, I think about the businesses that used to be here – people’s dreams and all the hard work that went into them,” says the author, whose nightly walks became more ghostly than ever in the spring of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic forced many local businesses to temporarily close.
“It somehow felt like time was standing still at night. The streets were not busy… it was quiet… there was something different about this summer. I wanted to freeze-frame it, because there probably won’t be – I hope – another time like this in my lifetime. Vankleek Hill just felt very still, and very precious.”
Sproule first fell in love with the village as a teenager. Her family lived just outside of Hawkesbury in the 1970s, but due to a change in school boundaries at the time, the shy high school student found herself riding a bus to Vankleek Hill Collegiate Institute (VCI).
“It completely changed the trajectory of my life,” she says, of the then 14-year-old. “If that (boundary change) had not happened, I would not have gone to high school in Vankleek Hill.”
Separated from most of her friends in Hawkesbury, Sproule found herself leaving the VCI schoolgrounds at lunchtime to go on walks through the unfamiliar streets of the village. She got to know the owners of Pilon’s Bakery, visited other shops in the community and by the time she graduated, Vankleek Hill had started to feel like home.
“At the time, this little town seemed unchanged from the last century,” Sproule recalls. “The tailor shop was still here, all the little lunch-counter restaurants were still here, Pilon’s Bakery, the little grocery store on Main Street called the Red & White.
“That’s where my infatuation with the town began – all these little wire fences and lilacs hanging over the sidewalks. I remember thinking as a high school student in Grade 13 ‘It must be incredible to live in this town – it’s like another world’.”
On one of her walks while in high school, Sproule decided to drop in to The Review offices, where she applied for a job. Landing an after-school part time job there during her last year in high school, she ended up working there full-time for two years before heading off to Trent University, returning to live in Vankleek Hill in the 1980s and later returning to work at The Review. She reconnected with her former boss (Jean Paul Boyer) in 1990, working on a book for the school’s 100th anniversary celebrations. In 1992, she purchased the newspaper from Jean Paul and Thèrèse Boyer.
The author’s memories from her youth are sprinkled throughout the pages of Vankleek Hill at Night. Photos of downtown buildings, which still house the ghosts from the turn-of-the-century businesses that used to occupy the structures, bring back memories of the people she knew who worked there. Sproule’s imagination also dots her writing, as she describes how the buildings make her wonder who lived and died there, and what were their dreams.
“There is a special feeling as you walk down a street where you know that every house within sight has been there for more than 100 years,” reads an excerpt beside a photo of a home on Union Street. “I imagine who used to have a carriage or cart in their driveway.”
“Where were the horse sheds? Who sat on these verandahs? Who grew up here and what married couples moved in here to start a life together? These houses hold so much silent history.”
Vankleek Hill at Night is available for purchase through The Review’s new online gift shop https://reviewshop.ca/shop/vankleek-hill-at-night/. Three dollars from the sale of each copy is being donated to the not-for-profit Vankleek Hill Music Festival.
While she has many ingrained memories of her photographic journey over the pandemic summer of 2020, one location which stands out for Sproule was the look of the Vankleek Hill Fairgrounds just before and after sunset. The writer/photographer walked past the fairgrounds almost every evening and was always encouraged by what she saw. Although the fairgrounds were deserted, Sproule believes the scenes she captured there and around town over the summer perfectly encapsulated what she wanted to depict in Vankleek Hill At Night.
“I don’t know how many photos I took of the fairgrounds, the sunset, the changing light. The fair did not happen this year, so it was a very quiet place. But yet the lights stayed on the whole time.
“Our lights were on and we were home.”
