A look into her family’s past has shown one Waterdown District High School student a connection to Flamborough from before her family moved to the area.
Maisie Bird decided to research the origins of the Carlisle Bluegrass Festival, a large-scale festival that ran from 1973 until 1991 at Courtcliffe Park in Carlisle. Maisie’s grandfather, Don Bird, was one of the organizers.
“He has so many papers and artifacts and shirts and things. We even found tape in my basement that we got restored. That is actual video of it,” Maisie said.
Maisie collected hundreds of scanned photos from family friend David Hiscott, along with video and snippets of radio segments advertising the festival that feature her dad’s voice from when he was a child.
The material will be included in an exhibit at Waterdown District High School’s Museum of Hope.
“I'm going to do a documentary,” Maisie said. The film will run in November.
While the Museum of Hope is focused on displays of wartime history, Maisie said her project is a show of local history.
“Every museum needs some hippies partying,” she said.
Memories of dust and mud
Maisie said the Carlisle Bluegrass Festival was one of the first in Canada. When it started, she said, the festival brought in a few thousand people.
The second year of the festival, around 10,000 people showed up.
But in 1975, with Bluegrass legends Jimmy Martin and Bill Monroe performing, around 30,000 people made their to the park in Carlisle.
“Which they were not prepared for in the slightest,” Maisie said.
“Courtcliffe Park at the time was just kind of a golf course with a pool, which was kind of weird. Otherwise it was mostly an empty plot of land, which was named after the two people that lived in the yellow house right beside it. Court and Radcliffe,” Maisie said.
Travis Bird, Maisie’s father, said he remembers bits and pieces of the Carlisle Bluegrass Festival in the '70s. Travis was around four years old when he first went to the festival.
“I have memories mostly of dust and mud and being backstage. I kind of remember that experience and knowing that it was something special,” he said.
His father was involved in the festival for four years, in the mid '70s.
“He was a producer and an emcee. He would have been instrumental in bringing the acts to the festival,” Travis said.
Lyn Lunsted, local historian with the Flamborough Archives, said the end of the concerts at Courtcliffe was spelled out by the end of the 1980s, but the show went on until the early '90s.
"After 1988 there were substantial legal issues between Court Weaver, the owner of the park, and the Town of Flamborough," she told FlamboroughToday.
Flamborough town council "tried several times to shut the various concerts down," Lunsted wrote.
In addition to the Bluegrass festival, rock concerts had been added to the summer show schedule at the park over the years. A planned 'May 24 Party Weekend’ was delayed while Flamborough council met in an emergency session to finalize the details for the Special Events Permits, which included the Bluegrass Festival scheduled for June 7-9, 1991.
The park was in receivership, meaning it was an asset of Court Weaver to be sold off. Deloitte was one of the companies named receiver of the park, and it announced in 1992 that all concert events were cancelled that year, including the 20th anniversary of the Carlisle Bluegrass Festival.
One of the last concerts held at Courtcliffe Park was The Tragically Hip on July 6, 1991.
Bluegrass documentary memorializes Don Bird
While researching the festival, Maisie said she has felt her family connection to Flamborough.
“My family moved here from Toronto in 2019,” she said, adding the family moved because of her parents' work, not because they felt connected to the area.
“One time we were driving around Carlisle and my dad saw the park and did like a 90-degree skid. ‘It's right here. I spent my whole childhood here and it's five minutes from our house!’” she said.
Travis said the documentary project has been an opportunity to take a walk down memory lane.
"When I found those pictures, it was just a flood of memories coming back," Travis said.
"There's a lot of our family too, and pictures of myself and my sister as young children, which is a hoot to see those. And then you gotta laugh at the styles that my dad was wearing, with some of the crazy outfits and the the twirled up moustache."
He said the project has been a chance for Maisie to connect to her grandpa, who has dementia.
"He remembers the event and certainly the good times that he had," Travis said.
But with all of the interviews Maisie has been able to have with people who knew Don Bird and the work he did on the Carlisle Bluegrass Festival, he said the project has become a bit of a celebration of his dad.
"When I reached out to a lot of the musicians that were in that film, they talk so lovingly of my dad and the kind of the mentor that he was to the bluegrass scene back then," Travis said. "This has been a really nice tribute that we can show my dad once it's all completed."
