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The annual Kleinburg Binder Twine Festival

By Chair, on January 1st, 2005

An annual Kleinburg highlight in September is the Binder Twine Festival. It began in the late 1800′s when farmers came to the community to buy twine to bind their sheaves of wheat together. Charlie Shaw, owner of Shaw’s Hardware Store in Kleinburg, offered food and entertainment to the visiting farmers and an annual celebration was born, continuing until his death in 1931.

In 1967, a small committee revived the concept of Binder Twine as Kleinburg’s centennial project. It was so successful that it once again became an annual event. Occurring on the first Saturday after Labour Day, this exciting festival features juried craft exhibitors, great food and entertainment. It is organized and run entirely by over 800 volunteers from the community. Its success has resulted in benefits to the community, such as Binder Twine Park, support for local schools and clubs, new street signage, Kleinburg New Forest, and much more! There is a very special spirit of cooperation and celebration – “a community brought together with a common goal”

An exciting day filled with unique crafts, great entertainment, Olde Tyme activities and great food awaits the entire family. The entire site is wheelchair accessible. For many, the highlight of the day is a unique Queen Contest where eligible “young ladies” (age 16 to eternity) call a hog, flip pancakes, hammer nails, and even milk a cow! The first official duty of the newly crowned Binder Twine Queen is to draw the winning ticket for the festival’s Quilt Raffle.

Gates open at 9 a.m. Admission prices are $7 for adults, $5 for seniors and teenagers, and $2 for children aged 2 to 12. However, if you come dressed in pioneer costume in keeping with the spirit of the festival, admission is free!

If you are interested in exhibiting your craft at the Binder Twine Festival, please CLICK HERE to download an Adobe Acrobat version of the application form. It should be printed, completed and mailed to the address at the bottom of the form by no later than April 15th. Please note in particular the Terms and Conditions.

See you at Binder Twine!

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Crowning the Queen of Binder Twine

By Chair, on September 12th, 1992

by Pierre Berton (Toronto Star, September 12, 1992)

This afternoon at 5, on the site of Charlie Shaw’s original hardwere store in Kleinburg. we will be choosing the new Binder Twine Queen for 1992-93.

I mention this because, while other queen contests are fading away under the disapproving frowns of feminists, the Binder Twine Queen contest has never been healthier or more popular.

It is the sort of contest that, I suspect, George Bush would love (and Preston Manning, too) for it appears superficially — but only superficially — to hark back to the good old days of Family Values when a woman’s place was on the farm.

After all, the contestants are required to perform a number of tasks far beyond the abilities of Miss Canada or Miss Universe. Can Miss Nude St. Catharines of 1991 saw through a log in half a minute? Can Miss Down Town Businessman’s Association drive four six-inch nails into a board in 60 seconds?

Ms Binder Twine can!

Our contest may have its roots in the past, but it looks steadily forward into the future — a future In which women will no longer be paraded before the public for their physical appearance.

At Kleinburg we’ve never given a hoot about physical beauty. Any woman from 18 to 80 can enter and no one Is asked to don a bathing suit.

Grandmothers have entered and won prizes. So have teenagers. One entrant a few years ago was eight months pregnant. She came second.

The one thing the contestants must have is personality — the wackier the better. It is this that separates the winners from the losers.

They have to be in costume. Most make their own and they arrive on stage with a variety of props that often include Jive animals — dogs, goats, chickens, etc. After all, this is a harvest fair. One contestant came dressed as a cowboy, riding a horse.

They wear wigs, funny hats, ethnic dress, work boots. They smoke pipes. They dress up as men. They shamelessly spoof the traditional beauty contest. Most have a flock of supporters down in front, rooting for them.

Of the dozen or so entrants who parade around the stage, shamelessly flirting with the judges, four are picked as finalists. Now they must compete in a series of tests, some objective (like nail driving) and others subjective (like hog calling).

The hardest test for the judges to call is pancake flipping. Some feel that height is the consideration here. Others vote for stamina. I, myself. favor style and éclat.

Once we had a sheep-shearing test on the stage — how much wool can you gather in 60 seconds?

Unfortunately, the sheep gobbled up all the pancakes from the previous contest. These had been prepared not for flavor or lightness, but for toughness and elasticity. The sheep became violently ill and that particular test has been cancelled.

The catch-a.chickcn contest has also been abandoned. The chickens were too fast and I believe one of them bit a judge. At least there was blood on the stage.

Every year we try to think up one new test, which we keep secret until the actual contest so that the entrants cannot practise for it. Last year, for instance, prospective Binder Twine Queens were asked to take the audience on a verbal stroll around the farm. On another occasion they were asked to demonstrate how to call their husband to dinner. But that was so similar to our standard hog calling test that we cancelled it.

The contest is the high point of an old-fashioned Street festival that goes back more than a century to Charlie Shaw’s day, when Kleinburg had three hotels and was an overnight stopping point on the road from Barrie to Toronto.

On the second weekend in September the village was crowded with hired men, sent to pick up rolls of the tough twine used to bind up sheaves of hay and wheat.

Charlie, who ran the local hardware store, decided to provide some entertainment — food, music, sarsaparilla, and other potables. When I hit Kleinburg in 1950, his store was still being operated by his son, Earl.

When Charlie died back in the ‘30s, Binder Night died with him and the town died, too. The automobile had killed it as a stop-over.

Some people ask why we restrict It to women Why can’t men enter? Well, on occasion they do, suitably disguised.

But they never, never win.

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Why We Have A Festival

By Chair, on September 5th, 2010

By Pierre Berton


(reprinted from the 1968 Binder Twine Festival Guide)

Not long ago, a developer interested in exploiting the Kleinburg area, made the public statement that there was nothing of historical interest in our village and nothing worth preserving from the past. The town, he indicated, could – and probably should – be bulldozed flat.

How many of the thousands who come to the Binder Twine Festival each year, would agree with him? Not many, we would wager. Kleinburg’s greatest asset is that it still manages to capture some of the feeling of the rural past and that its citizens care enough about their heritage to commemorate it every fall by reliving the days when farmers bought twine from Charlie Shaw’s hardware store to bind their sheaves together. Just as Charlie Shaw entertained those who visited Kleinburg each fall, with music, dancing and entertainment, so we, preserving that long tradition, offer a similar festival to a newer generation.

Our purpose is not to make money. Any profit goes to purchase recreational facilities for the village or to preserve and mark historical sites. Our purpose is to remind people of their past by reliving it, in some measure, for the space of a few hours.

There are many kinds of history. We are conditioned by schoolbooks to think of history in terms of kings, statesmen and great events. Although Kleinburg has nourished one Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson – it is not this kind of history that we mark with our September festival. The purpose of Binder Twine day is to remind us of a time when life did not race past on asphalt highways at 70 m.p.h., when amusements, like furniture, were made in the village and not in some far off television factory, and when most men worked in the fields and not in the smoky cities. This rural past shaped us as a nation and it affects us to this day. Perhaps that is why we still seek the countryside with nostalgia, affection and longing.

Why is it important to preserve this past? Surely it is because we must understand who we are and where we sprang from. If the Canadian identity is blurred, it may be because we have been so busy celebrating other nations’ history that we have neglected our own. The Binder Twine Festival, in its small way, attempts to redress some of that neglect.

The physical reminders of our heritage grow fewer with each passing season. Landmarks from a previous age crumble before our obsession with the new and the glossy. If something is old – a house, a store, a barn, even a graveyard – the bulldozers take care of it. Winding lanes are straightened out and covered over; trees fall beneath the developer’s axe, the memories of another time become blurred. Even John Kline’s original mill, which marked the birth of this community; vanished a few years ago when a highway was straightened.

We cannot of course preserve everything. Nor should we try. But to say flatly that a village which has existed for 125 years has nothing in it of historical significance is to reveal a fatal ignorance of what history really is. To suggest that the bulldozing of a community with as many roots as ours has, is "progress" is to corrupt the meaning of that once noble word.

Real progress involves more than bulldozers, development and sewage. Real progress involves the kind of community understanding and zeal that produced the annual Binder Twine Festival. But if Kleinburg were to be bulldozed away and recreated as just another metropolitan suburb, what point would there be to the Festival? If we destroyed all evidence of our heritage, how could we continue to celebrate it?

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