Harold Adams Innis (; November 5, 1894 - November 8, 1952) was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory, and Canadian economic history. Despite his dense and difficult prose, Innis was one of Canada's most original thinkers. He helped develop the staples thesis, which holds that Canada's culture, political history, and economy have been decisively influenced by the exploitation and export of a series of "staples" such as fur, fishing, lumber, wheat, mined metals, and coal.

Harold Adams Innis was born in 1894 on a small livestock and dairy farm near the community of Otterville in southwestern Ontario's Oxford County. As a boy he loved the rhythms and routines of farm life and he never forgot his rural origins. His mother, Mary Adams Innis, had named him 'Herald', hoping he would become a minister in the strict evangelical Baptist faith that she and her husband William shared. At the time, the Baptist Church was an important part of life in rural areas. It gave isolated families a sense of community and embodied the values of individualism and independence. Its far-flung congregations were not ruled by a centralized, bureaucratic authority. Innis became an agnostic in later life, but never lost his interest in religion. According to his friend and biographer Donald Creighton, Innis's character was moulded by the Church:  The strict sense of values and the feeling of devotion to a cause, which became so characteristic of him in later life, were derived, in part at least, from the instruction imparted so zealously and unquestioningly inside the severely unadorned walls of the Baptist Church at Otterville.  Innis attended the one-room schoolhouse in Otterville and the community's high school. He travelled 20 miles (32 km) by train to Woodstock, Ontario, to complete his secondary education at a Baptist-run college. He intended to become a public-school teacher and passed the entrance examinations for teacher training, but decided to take a year off to earn the money he would need to support himself at an Ontario teachers' college. At age 18, therefore, he returned to the one-room schoolhouse at Otterville to teach for one term until the local school board could recruit a fully qualified teacher. The experience made him realize that the life of a teacher in a small, rural school was not for him.

Ask a question about this article.
What was his rural roots ?