In 2001, the City of Ottawa expanded, amalgamating outlying townships together to form one huge municipality. On the extreme west border of Ottawa lies Ashton, a small town with an enduring self-reliant spirit and a familiar air. There’s a mix of people in Ashton. There’s the new folks who have found the appeal of rural living. There’s also the folks who’ve lived here for years and years, like the Boelsmas, who live in the little house across from the Anglican church.

Out on Jim Boelsma’s front porch is his good friend Mel Fee who is still half-mounted on his bicycle.

“Come on in,” says Jim, 75, and the conversation moves inside to the Boelsma kitchen table, where Jim’s wife Pat is already seated. Street dances, children, grandchildren, exploding tree stumps – the conversation spreads wide and long and friendly. The only hint of bitterness at the table comes when discussing amalgamation. Ashton was already on the border between two townships, but when Goulbourn became part of Ottawa and Beckwith didn’t, the town was split in half along Ashton Station Road.

“Mel is lucky; he’s not in Ottawa,” says Pat.

“He’s on the right side of the road; we’re on the wrong side,” says Jim. “But that’s ok, we’re still living here.”

In a rural area of a city like Ottawa, snow removal is a big deal. Jim complains that the city does less than half the snow removal that the old Goulbourn Township did. The untamed snow only lasts until the city border though.

“Beckwith Township goes both ways with the snow removal on Ashton Station Road, and the roads on its side,” says Mel.

The city won’t deliver salt for the sidewalks in Ashton either, leaving the townsfolk to travel to the next village over just to get some.

“This last year, I said the heck with it,” says Jim. “I cleared the sidewalk and didn’t bother with salt.”

With amalgamation came bureaucracy as well. Jim laments not being able to work on improvements in town anymore without having to worry about rules and building permits.

Soon after the Boelsmas moved to Ashton in 1967, Jim, with other townspeople, built the town a baseball park, which is still in use today. Every winter he would lay down an ice hockey rink for local kids to skate on.

Nowadays the ice rink doesn’t get done anymore. There aren’t enough kids clamouring for a rink for Jim to hear about it anymore, and the parents of those that do want one say they are too busy with work to make the ice.

Before the endless bylaws and the speed of modern living, things were a little different. The townspeople took care of their own problems. They’ve been forging their own way since the very beginning.

The first people to settle in the area now known as Ashton were former infantrymen. After the War of 1812, a group of retired soldiers of the 100^th regiment sought land along the Jock River. They built a cluster of log cabins that straddled the Beckwith-Goulbourn township line that later turned into Ashton Station Road.

It was still called “Mount Pleasant” by the time John Sumner arrived in the mid-1820s. Sumner soon became a prominent citizen, building the first mill, a potashery, and the general store which still operates today. After a little while the village came to be known as “Sumner’s Corners”, until 1840. A post office was established, and Sumner didn’t want to be the town’s namesake. He instead called it Ashton, after Ashton-under-Lyne, his family’s ancestral home.

When the highway and the railway came, so did prosperity. The traffic through town supported two general stores, the potashery, taverns, tanneries, a cobbler, and multiple churches. Truck drivers would stop in for their early morning breakfast before carrying on down the road.

In addition to the first building of the Anglican Christ Church completed in 1845, there was a Presbyterian and a Methodist church as well. In 1915, the Christ Church congregation built a new building in which to worship. By the time the Presbyterian and Methodist churches joined to become the United Church of Canada in 1925, Ashton had four churches, only two of which continue to be used today.

Rev. Jim Kirkpatrick, 59, has been the rector of the Christ Church Anglican Church in Ashton since September 1999. Originally from Carleton Place, he took the post in Ashton after a number of stints in churches around Ontario following his ordainment in 1982. Taking over after a one-year gap in parish leadership, Kirkpatrick found that the congregation was still running. Rather than move to another church when left without a priest, the worshippers made do with what they had.

“They had a layperson who led worship half the time,” says Kirkpatrick, “and they brought in another priest to do services the other half.”

Makeshift services don’t seem like much of a stretch in Ashton. For over 150 years, families from Ashton and the surrounding farmland have come to Christ Church for Sunday service. The biggest difference now is that the cars are pulled by engines instead of horses.

On a quiet day you can just barely feel the rumble of nearby Highway 7 while standing on Flewellyn, one of the two main streets in Ashton. Workers have been toiling on the widening of the highway since last year, with a projected completion date sometime in 2010. Ashton’s just off the expanding road, and it might once again become a stop for early-morning truck drivers, but there’s really no telling what more traffic will bring to the village.

Kirkpatrick and the Boelsmas aren’t expecting much, but Susan Barnes, co-owner of the Cycle Master Motorcycle shop on the Ottawa side, predicts that change will rumble in sooner rather than later.

“The time is going to come when it will build up,” says Barnes. “I honestly believe this is going to be a strip mall one day.”

“When the city took over, a lady from business development was out, and we were joking with her,” she says. “I said ‘in 10 years, this’ll be a Tim Hortons’, and she said ‘it won’t even be that long’”

Back at the Boelsmas, it seems like everything needs its fair share of red tape these days. When the city needed a shed put next to the baseball park to store a snow blower, Jim ran into the same kind of trouble he’s been running into since amalgamation.

“Ok, I’ll bring in the guy tomorrow with the backhoe,” said Jim. No, the city insisted that they would need a plan.

“This is the plan,” he said. “We dig a hole, we build the shed. Let’s get it done, let’s do it.”

The city told Jim that that’s just not how it works anymore. There need to be plans and permits in place.

“That’s the trouble,” said Jim. The shed took five years to plan and build.

It’s unlikely that Jim’s alone among rural residents of the city of Ottawa. For years, people in villages like Ashton have gotten things done on their own terms.

That’s how it’s always been in Ashton. And maybe that’s how it ought to be.