Stratford, Ontario, the largest community in Perth County, is a great place to visit, and tourism is an important part of the local economy. There’s the Stratford Festival, yummy restaurants, a lovely parks system along the river connecting public gardens, one-of-a-kind shops. You might get a takeaway picnic and enjoy an afternoon by the river, nibbling and reading and dreaming while a pair of swans swim by. And for many of us who move to Stratford to make it our home, we love doing all those visitor things, without having to pay a nightly rate at a hotel or B&B.

There is another Stratford that lives parallel to, and often intertwined with, the one visitors see and enjoy on a seasonal basis. And this series of Teahen Tales in 2026 will take you backstage, if you will, to see parts of the city’s life away from the Festival Fanfares.

I’ve lived in Stratford full-time for nearly 15 years, albeit in two stints, and part-time for another three years when working in Toronto but having a house here that we rented during the season to Stratford Festival artists. My father, Ted Teahen, grew up in nearby St. Marys, Ontario and my early childhood featured regular drives through Perth County to reach my grandparents. Ken, my husband Chris’s father, grew up here and Chris’s mother Ruth grew up on a farm in Perth County, attending high school in Stratford. While work took them elsewhere in Ontario for most of their adult lives after their marriage, they retired back home to Stratford.

That makes us local-ish, but not truly local. Neither of us was born or raised here, although Chris spent part of his childhood and teenaged summers on the family farm with his cousins. A few of the tales shared here will be rooted in his recollections.

We go for walks regularly with Ken in Stratford’s older downtown neighbourhoods when there’s no ice or snow on the ground, and he has a story for every street and, sometimes, for every building. In his childhood, there was a sharp divide between the families whose adults worked at the Grand Trunk Railway, later Canadian National Railway (CNR) Shops, where steam locomotives were serviced, and those who laboured in the furniture factories. The Mooreheads were clearly in Camp Railway: Chris’s grandfather was a blacksmith at “the shops” and Ken and his older brothers all worked there before rail engines switched to diesel from steam, and the massive repair shop was no longer needed. The facility was finally shuttered in 1964.

In the first half of the 20th century, according to the Perth County archives, Stratford was once one of Canada’s key furniture manufacturing cities. In 1929, Stratford was responsible for one-sixth of the total output of furniture in Canada: major manufacturers included Kroehler’s, Imperial Rattan and McLagan. These factories employed more than 1,300 skilled workers, making the furniture industry one of the largest in Stratford, second only to the railway, which at that time employed 40 to 50 per cent of the community’s workers, depending on which historical record you consult.

All that’s gone now. The buildings remain; some repurposed, others empty and awaiting either a wrecking ball or a revisioning. There still are manufacturing plants in Stratford, agriculture-related industries (hey, the Ontario Pork Congress has to be somewhere), some growth in digital industries, health and education employment, plus the service and hospitality workers entwined with the arts and culture offerings. All these things sustain the economy for Stratford residents. There is resiliency in diversity, although there are ongoing concerns that the community doesn’t have enough young workers, who find it hard to find affordable accommodations in a place where wealthier visitors can pay top dollar for short-term rentals.

Our backstage tour of Stratford throughout 2026 will take us everywhere from an arena to a water pollution control plant. Many Canadian cities have these too, of course, but these come with unique Stratford twists and turns.

Oh, there may be a swan or two. There may be some music. And even a garden. But you’ll read stories of why these things thrived in this small city, and are important warps and wefts that weave together to form this community we now call home.