Wingham:  A town that said yes.

Wingham, On. has been and continues to be a small rural town of around 3000 people in Western Ontario. This is an area of southern Ontario, with few cities but mostly small towns serving the rural communities around it. Generally growth after the late 1800’s has been stagnant of declining for decades with some recent growth propelled by retirement developments and tourism.

This story is like many areas in the world today as the world moved away first from an agricultural one and subsequently an industrial one. Out migration, especially of younger people to more urban areas is the norm.

But something unique happened in Wingham in the middle decades of the 20th century. It was a centre of innovation. The people, or the social capital, of a small town came together to spur on ideas that would influence the national stage in surprising ways.

This blog will begin to pull together the strands of those accomplishments and see how social capital can remake small towns.