FoodTrust - Connections

“It would storm for 3 days without letup! I remember one winter we coasted a sleigh from the roof of the barn right out onto the road. That was deep snow! We weren’t worried about cars - there was no cars then! After the storm was over farmers broke the road with horses and we got out the shovels!”

Vernon McCarville was raised on a farm in the tiny P.E.I. hamlet of Shamrock and Thistle, as it was called back in 1915 when he was born. No snow-blowers, except for the northwest wind when Vern was a lad. The storms of the past two weeks have given me a new appreciation for all the shoveling that went on in those days. And the next person who says “Old-fashioned winter” to me is getting whacked with an old-fashioned shovel - the one glued to my hands.

Speaking of complaining, did none of my ancestors who emigrated here not take note of this 1606 Samuel Champlain complaint, “There are 6 months of winter in this country. Snow came on the 6th of October. Our liquors all froze, cider in casks was handed out by the pound.”? Well, welcome to the Maritimes, Samuel! He soon left the fellowship of Port Royal for the much warmer climes of Quebec.

“I was quite experienced in the snow business because starting in the 1950s I plowed snow for the government. We were asked to open the road between Charlottetown and York corner - that’s not very far. We had to be careful to not break the wires, the snow was that high. Just imagine this now: there’s this place where the road is supposed to be and the snow is level with the telephone wires. Took us a week to go four miles! At the same time the government had their own snowplow at York corner. It got stranded there on its way to town the night of the storm. The government then hired me - my outfit (MacKay Construction Ltd) - to send a bulldozer to plow the snow to get that machine back to town. Took us a week!”

Those are the words of Sterling “Ginger” MacKay from Parkdale, born in 1918. Somehow Ginger parlayed his knack with horses learned on the family farm in Canavoy into a life’s work with big machines. He told me that right into the 1960s people put their cars up on blocks for the winter. Farmers kept a horse or two in the barn to hitch up to the various sleighs - box, wood, or jaunting - needed to get the daily chores done around the farm.

Mac Dixon is a horse man from way back. The first thing he did upon arriving home after serving overseas in the army in the 2nd World War was buy a horse with his savings. For 3 generations the Dixon family ran flour, grist and woolen mills in South Melville, on P.E.I.’s south shore. Regardless of how high the snow drifted, farmers showed up by horse and sleigh to have their wheat and oats ground at Dixon’s Mills.

“It was a pretty good outing for them. They not only got their grist ground but got their horse fed and got fed themselves. Everyone that came to the mill got a meal. My grandmother told me that she has fed as high as 14 in one day. That was the free part of the deal! You’d wonder how they ever made a living out of it!

Maybe the Dixons were paying back neighbours and customers who in years previous had assembled 20 teams of heavy horses and sleighs to help the Dixons haul home a new steel roller mill shipped by rail from Ontario. The nearest railway station was Hunter River, a good 30 mile return trip across roads and through fields piled high with snow.

Some of that grist was fed to pigs. One farmer who hauled pigs 14 miles to the old Davis and Fraser Meat Plant (later Canada Packers) in Charlottetown’s east end told me it was the coldest work he ever did. Not to mention keeping two 350 pound live pigs from flipping the sleigh as he cut through the snowdrifts.

And when the pigs finally made it safely to town there were loyal workers waiting to turn them into hams and sausages. After a blizzard in March of 1961, the Charlottetown Guardian reported that two Canada Packers employees - Ken Callaghan and Francis Kelly - walked the 15 miles to work from their homes in Lake Verde. Another employee walked from Long River, thirty miles from town, through waist-high snow!

Well, I’m rested up for another go at the snow on my roof. I just read in the 2008 Farmer’s Almanac that “5% of the world’s precipitation falls as snow”. FIVE PER CENT!! Who do they think they’re kidding! Certainly not many Maritimers! Now, where did I put that shovel? Forget the shovel, chip me off another pound of cider.

Dutch