FORT FRANCES – The Cornells have hosted over two dozen events in their barn over the years. The farm, about 20 minutes west of Fort Frances in La Vallee, has hosted celebrations, plays, and concerts featuring bands from as close by as right here in the district to as far away as Australia, where upcoming repeat performer Kim Churchill is coming from.
Pat Cornell counted aloud when asked how many events they’d hosted in the barn, and the number climbed higher and higher. She settled on an estimate of about 28, starting with a barn dance to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Township of La Vallee in 2004 which marked the end of a renovation on the structure.
Churchill was set to perform at the barn in the summer of 2020 but due to COVID isolation rules he would not have been able to get here so this show will make up for that missed performance.
“What happened is Kim Churchill was supposed to come in July of the COVID year and we had to cancel,” Pat said. “He couldn’t get out of Australia, or get back in if he left. We promised that when he came back to Canada he could play in the barn, he had already played in the barn before. He’s a very talented young man.”
Churchill is a singer-songwriter who has built up followings all over the world especially in Canada where he’s performed at the Ottawa Folk Festival, Canadian Music Week and the Montreal International Jazz Festival. The 33 year old has been releasing music since 2009 and first performed in the barn at Cornell Farms in 2012.
Over the years the barn has also hosted plays like a theatre group that came from Ottawa and performed Romeo and Juliet in the round, (with the audience surrounding the performance space) allowing the audience to be part of the action. Other local theatre groups have used the barn setting to their advantage to put on shows with a rural setting. Pat recalled one time a group even used some of the farm’s animals.
“We had two local theatre groups that did a couple of events in the barn, and they were theatre productions,” Pat said. “They worked quite well, because they had rural themes, and used some of our cattle and in them, and we even had, we had chickens at the time in the basement of that production, and so they were going up and down the trap doors in the chicken pen.”
Another year they hosted a recording for a Christmas which was sold to fundraise for the local Salvation Army.
Pat says the barn’s post and beam construction makes for an interesting sound.
“It’s an interesting space because of the post and beam construction,” Pat said. “Cliff (Pidlubny of TOP Productions) does all our sound for us whenever we have concerts and he’s always amazed at the acoustics.”
It takes a lot of work to clean up the space and since they haven’t held an event in the barn for close to five years it’s taking a bit extra this time around.
“To get ready for this one is taking a little more work,” Pat said. “Of course we haven’t done much over COVID. As we speak we’re rebuilding the entrance to the barn, the gangway or ramp that gets up to the barn. Then of course we have to clean out the barn and make sure it’s clean enough and get chairs set up. Then it’s about eight hours (work) on performance day too so, it’s a bit of work.”
Pat says despite being a bit outside of town from the major municipalities of the district in either direction they get a good mix of audience members.
“We have a real interesting mix of people, to be honest,” Pat said. “We have both rural people and Fort Frances people. We have quite a following of loyal participants who come. When we first started people brought their own chairs.”
Rebecca Cornell and her wife Kelsey have taken over running the farm now and are hoping to be able to continue hosting events in the barn even if not necessarily concerts like Rebecca’s parents have done for 20 years.
“We want to use the space,” Rebecca said. “Whether that will be exclusively concerts or community events or like farm to table dinners. We have lots of ideas on utilizing the space. So, what exactly it’s going to be I don’t know but it certainly is going to get used.”
Pat reminisced that their barn concerts started when there wasn’t an ideal venue for smaller shows like the Rainy Lake Square like Fort Frances has now.
“Keep in mind that when we started doing the barn concerts, there wasn’t a Rainy Lake Market Square,” Pat said. “So what happens is your community can only handle so many events. So when the market square started operating with concerts we saw a few of our sales drop off. So you just have to keep in mind that the community is so big that you really have to work together. We owed Kim this concert, but you know there’s so many things that could happen in this barn and that might not be concerts.”
Kim Churchill is performing in the Cornell Farms Barn on May 17 at 7 p.m. The Farm is located at 327 Lavallee Road North in Devlin. Tickets are $25 in advance and $30 at the door. Available through Eventbrite or the Fort Frances Public Library Technology Centre.
Fort Frances Times
