Annie Ferguson Playfair was born at Fallbrook, in 1871, and came to a farm near Baldur with her family in 1880.
After beginning a career as a teacher she went into the newspaper business.
Her first forays seem to have been exploratory.
She bought the Baldur Gazette in March of 1909 and sold it in April of the following year, when she bought the Belmont News, again owning for a very short time before selling it and purchasing the Hartney Star, the Minto Packet, and Elgin Lancet.
It was in Hartney that she made her mark as a newspaper woman and a community activist.
Hartney historian Hazel Parkinson knew her well.
“Miss Playfair, a grey-eyed woman of five feet seven inches, was to be seen in her office or on the street in a strictly tailored navy suit, a stiff-collared white shirtwaist and black tie that gave her the masculine appearance she thought necessary for a woman who had to meet businessmen on their own ground. .…Her tailored appearance and deep voice, as well as her business ability aroused disquiet among those who disliked the unusual.“
MIss Playfair had a strong character and decided opinions, especially on questions of education, morality, and religion, and expressed them forcefully through her newspaper.
On Education:
“The time is past,” she said, “for the idea that unless a youth aspires to professional status a good education is not necessary. Today it is an essential for good citizenship…”
“There is a feeling that advanced learning is of no benefit to a farmer, that it may even train him away from the farm, but in reality educational influences are doing much to make farm life attractive.”
On Recreation:
As a strict Methodist, Miss Playfair was opposed to dancing, card playing and all games of chance and she held rigid standards of decorous behaviour.
In a critique of a performance she said,” Rhea Robinson had a wonderful voice for a child but took away from the otherwise good quality of the program by dancing, a sort of platform entertainment that country people on the average, thank goodness, do not appreciate.”
On Gambling:
“Wrongdoing is a disgrace to the individual and the permission of it is a shame to a community. … our indifference and failure to denounce wrongdoing has fostered evil, to the injury of our young people.”
Although many of Miss Playfair’s sentiments found approval, she seldom asked the opinion of others, but took it for granted that all right-minded people should think as she did. There were others who regarded her as something of a crank.
But a crank who did a lot of good things.
Around 1914 she helped form a Local Home Economics society which later became the Hartney branch of the Federated Women’s Institutes of Canada, or WI. At their third biennial Convention in Fredericton, NB, in June 1923, Miss Playfair gave the opening address entitled “Viewpoint of National Women’s Institutes" stressing the need and value of a woman’s division in the Department of Agriculture (See related story on the Women’s Institute also in this issue).
After her stay in Hartney, Miss Playfair attended the North Western Bible School at Minneapolis, Minnesota for three years. She was active in the Temperance movement, and was a frequent participant at Women’s Institutes and Sunday School Conventions. In 1924, she spent several months in England in the Development and Colonization department of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Annie Playfair moved to Winnipeg in 1927,
where she died at her home on 15 July, 1947.
*Sources: Hartney and District Historical Committee. A Century of Living - Hartney & District 1882 - 1982, 1982. Altona. Friesen Printers, 1982. P 221 Parkinson, Hazel McDonald. The Mere Living, Friesen Printers,1957 p.221
Annie Playfair in 1895
Miss Playfair had rooms in the Lewis Building, which still stands alongside the Hart-Cam Museum in Hartney. Like many other “working” women she took her meals at Tens Hopkins’ Boarding House. (See Vantage Points IV)*
