History
At one time, Owen Sound's roaring seaport made it a rowdy town that was known to sailors as "Little Liverpool". Louis' Steakhouse, a popular upscale restaurant just outside of town, was opened by the Gavaris family in the 1980s and the historic building has changed hands several times since. It was originally a brothel where the madam would stand from its castle-like tower and watch the port for a ship to come in, and she would ready her prostitutes to excite the sailors. This reputation for vice and villainy, and the problems that came with it, caused the city to ban all drinking establishments for several decades. The city was "dry" until 1972.
One of the city's most famous sons was World War I flying ace and Victoria Cross winner William Avery "Billy" Bishop, Canada's leading pilot in the war. Bishop is also one of the few to have tangled with the Red Baron and survived, forcing the German pilot to retreat in a damaged aircraft. The Billy Bishop Regional Airport in the nearby Municipality of Meaford was named after him. His modest gravesite can be visited in the city's Greenwood Cemetery by those willing to take the time to locate the stone. His boyhood home is now a museum dedicated to his life and to Canada's aviation history. The town was also the home of NHL Hall-of-Fame goaltender Harry Lumley and the artist Tom Thomson (buried in the nearby village of Leith). Surgeon Dr. Norman Bethune, an avowed communist and pioneer of public medicine who gained notoriety in his innovative medical work with the Chinese army during the Second Sino-Japanese War, is an alumnus of the Owen Sound Collegiate and Vocational Institute. Legendary hockey broadcaster Bill Hewitt was once sports director of the local AM radio station, CFOS. Tommy Holmes, another Victoria Cross winner, was also from Owen Sound, and the city's armoury bears his name.
Owen Sound is home of SummerFolk Festival, a popular folk festival that takes place annually in August. Summerfolk attracts over 4,000 people annually to the shores of Georgian Bay, specifically Kelso Beach Park located on the West shore of Owen Sound. The festival has run continuously since 1977 and is nationally renowned for its music and craft excellence. Many performers who have played there have gone on to great commercial success, such as Leahy, Valdy, The Rankins and Natalie MacMaster. Other more commercial Canadian talent has also graced the stages of summerfolk over the years with the likes of Gowan, Rik Emmett, Blue Rodeo and Bruce Cockburn. One of Summerfolk's most famous and revered performers was Stan Rogers. The Main stage features a memorial to Stan and is dedicated to his memory.
In 2005 Owen Sound became the National Communities in Bloom champion in the cities of 20,001–50,000 category in Canada for its beauty, natural landscape, and strong sense of community.
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—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)