The village of Wilno, Ontario in Renfrew County, Ontario, is the oldest Polish settlement in Canada. The people who first settled in this area in the 1800s were mainly of Kashubian origin. The town is in the Madawaska valley.
The village was named after Wilno, the birthplace of Reverend Ludwik Dembski, a community spiritual leader.
In 1972, Wilno came into the spotlight as the result of a report "Vampires, Dwarves, And Witches Among The Ontario Kashubs" published by the Canadian Museum of Man, now the Canadian Museum of Civilization. This report appears to have been based more on folklore than local customs.
This means "Greetings from Wilno" in Polish and in the Kashubian language still spoken by the descendants ofthe Kashub pioneers who settled these beautiful but rocky hills in the 1800's.
Their legacy lives on in the names on rural mailboxes, in the Kaplichi or roadside shrines on backroads, in the rousing celebrations of Polish-Kashub Day at Heritage Park on the first Saturday in May and in the colourful folk paintings adorning the log buildings in the Park and in nearby Kashuby.
There is a waterfall rushing down the valley to the remains of a small sawmill, a tumbling down pioneer farm with the Ottawa Valley's distinctive flened cedar logs, a wetland full of cattails and red-winged flbirds, secluded woodland glens along the rail-bed and picturesque little nooks and crannies all over the village.
The village of Wilno, Ontario in Renfrew County, Ontario, is the oldest Polish settlement in Canada.
The village was named after Wilno, the birthplace of Reverend Ludwik Dembski, a community spiritual leader.
In 1972, Wilno came into the spotlight as the result of a report "Vampires, Dwarves, And Witches Among The Ontario Kashubs" published by the Canadian Museum of Man, now the Canadian Museum of Civilization.
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