Despite its challenges, Oxford has a positive outlook on 2019

OXFORD, N.S. – As much as the sinkhole and structural problems at its school were the dominant stories of 2018 in Oxford, the town’s mayor said the positive spirit is still strong in her community.

Speaking with the Amherst News in a year-end interview, Trish Stewart said 2018 was a challenging year for Oxford, but there were still a lot of good things that took place in the community.

“It would be easy to be negative considering some of the biggest challenges we faced, but it would also be incorrect to forget there were a lot of positives in our little town this past year,” Stewart said. “It wasn’t all about the sinkhole and the school.”

In late August, the Lions Park in Oxford made unusable when a massive sinkhole opened up on the property. The sinkhole closed the park and prevented the Lions Club from using its community centre and generated a lot of attention on the town.

At around the same time, an issue with the masonry at the Oxford Regional Education Centre delayed its 2018-19 opening until early November with students being bused to Cyrus Eaton Elementary and Pugwash District High School for the first two months of the school year.

Despite this, the community celebrated the opening of its second Habitat for Humanity Home as well as a very successful inaugural Poetry at Large festival and the 100th anniversary of the Cumberland County Exhibition.

The community was also joined by John Bragg in marking the 50th anniversary of the opening of Oxford Frozen Foods in 1968 with a giant party in July that brought back memories of Oxford when the exhibition brought hundreds of people to the community.

“Hats off to John Bragg and his team for putting on such a big show for us,” Stewart said.

Oxford, she said, worked to create more awareness toward its signature fruit the wild blueberry with a reinvigorated blueberry harvest festival and various community events to celebrate a fruit that has been an economic driver for the Oxford area for several decades.

“We had sort of lost our identity over several years,” Stewart said. “We are known as the wild blueberry capital of Canada, but for some reason we sort of forgot that. As a council and a community we decided last year we were going to do something to recognize that again and it went very well. Sometimes you have to look around and focus on what you have and embrace it.”

The town’s International Women’s Day celebration in March was Oxford’s biggest while a pre-Christmas downtown event was a huge success in both traffic and revenue for area businesses.

Looking ahead at the coming year, Stewart said, the town is looking forward to its second poetry festival and continued marketing and promotion of downtown Oxford as a place to do business.

Strewart said the community has benefitted from having its own community economic development officer in Ruthie Patriquin while she said the town will see continued benefits with its new chief administrative officer Rachel Jones.

As for the sink hole, the mayor said, it remains a focus for town council and the Oxford Lions Club. She is pleased to see the club prepared to weather the storm and continue to serve the community while she’s optimistic funding will be received to complete the necessary studies to determine a solution to the sink hole.

“It’s not as easy as just backing up a dump truck and filling the hole,” she said. “Until we know exactly what’s going on underground and what needs to be done we can’t really move on reopening the park. It’s a safety issue.”

Stewart said 50 per cent of the funding has been committed by Municipal Affairs for the study that will take a deeper look underground than the previous study by ground-penetrating radar. She’s hoping the other half will come from Lands and Forests.

She said neither the town, nor the Lions Club, can afford the price tag of additional studies. Both have already incurred tremendous financial cost associated with the sinkhole.

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Twitter: @ADNdarrell