Seaforth 150: Last mayor of Seaforth, David Scott, reflects on his tours
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
Dave Scott is a man of many titles - including the last mayor of the Town of Seaforth - but right now he’s an Ottawa-area native who is in the midst of his “third tour of duty” in Seaforth, a town he so greatly loves.
To further explain the aforementioned title to the uninitiated, Scott was elected mayor of the town in 1997 - an endeavour he undertook half on a whim and half on a dare - and served until 2000, which is when amalgamation was forced upon Ontario’s small towns, villages and townships by Premier Mike Harris as part of his “Common Sense Revolution”. Seaforth would go on to join forces with the Village of Brussels and the Townships of McKillop, Grey and Tuckersmith to create Huron East, a municipality that persists to this day. Lin Steffler was the first-ever mayor of the newly-amalgamated Huron East, followed by Joe Seili and Bernie MacLellan, who sits as the current mayor of the municipality.
So, with no mayor’s position left to be filled with the Town of Seaforth itself, Scott officially retired the position, sitting as the last person to hold it and to wear the town’s chain of office.
Despite being born in the eastern part of the province, Scott had family history in Seaforth. When he was a child, his father, who had been working in the field of aeronautical engineering, was called back to the family farm - Scott Poultry Farms - in the Seaforth area and thus began Scott’s first tour of duty in the town he would come to love.
That farm has a special place in the heart of Seaforth. It was, after all, the host farm of the 1966 International Plowing Match, which became known in Huron County lore as “The Mud Match” due to the heavy rain and impossibly muddy fields. Local legend tells the story of rubber boots from that match turning up in the soil decades after the plows were long gone.
So, as a result, Scott was in Seaforth for a while, attending Seaforth Public School and then Seaforth District High School, an institution that would factor heavily into his story in later years.
But, before that, Scott left the county. He was one of the few from his graduating class that branched out beyond the Kitchener-Guelph-Waterloo and London areas, destined for Toronto because he wanted to get as far away from the town as he could.
He ended up in Toronto, accepted into what was then the Ryerson Polytechnic Institute, where he studied television and radio broadcasting. (A fun sidebar for this special issue in particular is that Howard Hillen Kerr, born on a farm near Seaforth in December of 1900, was the first principal of the Ryerson Institute of Technology, as it was known in the years following World War II.)
He opted for a “degree in three” and graduated in 1987. From there, he remained in Toronto, taking a job at the CBC and staying there for nearly five years. Then, he and his wife at the time wanted to start a family and, instead of staying in the city, they returned to Seaforth in early 1993.
Upon his return, Scott took a job as a reporter for The Huron Expositor, eventually working his way up to the editor before he shifted to the editor of The Lakeshore Advance, within the same organization. That move was necessary when he opted to nip any perceived conflict of interest in the bud when he became the mayor of Seaforth.
As mentioned, he threw his hat into the ring partially due to a dare and, much to his surprise, he would go on to win the election and become the top man in Seaforth - at least for a handful of years.
At just 32 years old, Scott became one of the youngest mayors in Ontario - both at the time and ever - and with two young children at home, he was busier than he had ever been, working his editing job and taking his first steps into the world of playwrighting, penning There’s Nothing in the Paper for the Blyth Festival that same year, as if he wasn’t busy enough.
During that time, Scott was the face of the fight to save Seaforth District High School, which began during his time as mayor. The school he had attended as a teen was slated for closure and the town and its residents fought hard to save it, becoming one of the few schools to be pulled from the brink of approved closure through the tribunal process.
He said that he had his “Jimmy Stewart moment” in an attempt to halt the closure of the school at a meeting in Stratford and it paid off, although the school would eventually succumb to closure years later.
Scott eventually left the newspaper and traveled southwestern Ontario for other opportunities, before returning to Huron County for a visit that has become rather permanent in recent years. He wrote another play for the Blyth Festival, the wildly successful The Ballad of Stompin’ Tom, which premiered in 2006 and was remounted as part of the 2007 season.
He has also since turned his sights on the history of the town, writing two books about the hockey heroes of Huron County and a continuing history series on his Facebook page, which uncovers the less-than-popular aspects of local history that can often fall through the cracks. This “work” follows his passions and the passions of his family, who had kept meticulous records and clippings of the goings-on of Seaforth.
Scott was approached to serve as a member of the homecoming committee, which he did for a time, but he has since stepped back and taken on a reduced role in the festivities. He’ll be pitching in at the campsites, hosting a hockey reunion, creating a manned history display and more for Seaforth’s biggest weekend.