For more than fifty years, the social event of Barry's Bay was the annual St. Hedwig’s Summer Picnic. Launched by a young Father Peter B. Biernacki in 1912 to help build his St. Hedwig’s Roman Catholic Church in 1914, this little village picnic quickly outgrew even his wildest dream. It became so widely known in Eastern Ontario that special nine-coach excursion trains would arrive, adding to the thousands of people who were already there for the premier church picnic of the Ottawa Valley.