Don’t miss the Annual Dundas Cactus Festival the third weekend in August for family fun, live music and entertainment and great food and vendors!
Why Cactus?
“The Cactus Festival was named in recognition of the Ben Veldhuis Ltd. cactus greenhouse, one of Dundas’ most thriving businesses at the time Cactus Fest began.
Barend ‘Ben’ Veldhuis immigrated to Canada from Holland in 1927 and settled in Dundas in 1951. Purchasing the Peterson greenhouses at 154 King Street East, he built the small business into a massive operation specializing in African violets, cacti and succulents, and bromeliads.
By the mid-1970s, Veldhuis was selling between three and five million cacti a year, giving Dundas a reputation among horticulturalists worldwide. His ads declared Dundas to be “The Cactus Capital of Canada”, and letters arrived in Dundas from around the world addressed simply “Cactus, Canada”.
For the rest of Dundas, the 1970s were a time of slump. Many of the town’s largest employers, such as Bertram’s Machine Tools, Grafton’s Clothing, and Lennard’s Knitting Mills, had recently closed down after almost a century of operation. Several local landmarks, such as the Desjardins Canal turning basin and the House of Providence, had been demolished, and others, like the Carnegie Library and Dundas Post Office, had uncertain futures. The Veldhuis greenhouses provided a rare success story of a business that was unique to Dundas. It was for this reason that the cactus theming was chosen for the first Cactus Festival in 1976.
Veldhuis eventually retired in 1988 and sold the business to employees Dianne Woods and Frank Nucciarelli. Even after the greenhouses eventually closed, the Dundas Cactus Fest continues to this day as a quirky celebration of Dundas and its “Cactus King.””-– Dundas Museum & Archives.
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