New inductees to Ag Wall of Fame honoured last week

Stratford-Perth Museum general manager Kelly McIntosh, Jean and Richard Smelski and chairman John McIntosh pose during the Rural Urban Dinner on April 16. As part of the evening, the Smelskis were inducted onto the museum’s Agricultural Wall of Fame.

There was a farming couple from Shakespeare and a Mitchell area dairy farmer from the past, inducted last week onto the Stratford-Perth Museum’s Agricultural Wall of Fame.

The inductees were formally honoured at the Rural Urban Dinner, hosted by the Rotary Club of Stratford on April 16.

As reported in the April 10 edition of the Times, Richard and Jean Smelski were inducted. The couple not only sold wagonloads of pumpkins for years from their farm east of Shakespeare but donated all the profits over all those years to the Stratford General Hospital Foundation.

That generosity amounted to over $10,000 from the couple, from which they have sponsored a room in the new cancer wing at Stratford General Hospital.

Many other volunteer activities included the Ontario Pork Congress for both Richard and Jean, along with the Optimist and Opti-Mrs clubs, Probus and Friendship Clubs, and trips to Nicaragua and other third-world countries to help in building schools.

The second Inductee to the Agricultural Wall of Fame was Mitchell area’s

Harvey Ische, a dairy farmer who was also known as an agricultural writer with the pen name Rusticus.

Ische and his large family of seven children were instrumental in bringing new ideas and early technology to the farming community in Perth County. He was also involved in planning as a school board member to build the new Mitchell High School.

Among many other initiatives, he was the first dairy farmer in Perth County to have an operating milking machine using a vacuum pump. It was said by his family, that dairy farming neighbours would come from miles around to see how much less work they could do through it, rather than stripping out cow’s milk by hand.