FoodTrust - Connections

“I remember going down by horse and sleigh and crossing Belle River. It was warm and the water came up into the sleigh. It’s amazing the horse didn’t go down. We got wet but we had a buffalo blanket. We’re lucky we didn’t go through.”

The horse was named Maud. A “buffalo” was a warm quilt, originally a buffalo hide. I was helping my pal Mary Stuart Sage put together a profile of her father Hector Stuart, born in 1894, a man who served in both the First and the Second World Wars. After the 1^st WW Hector bought and operated a general store in Wood Islands. He also ran a sawmill and built fishing boats – for $75 finished, and made wooden boxes (caddies) for shipping Hickey and Nicholson Black Twist chewing tobacco. Maud the horse carted potatoes and eggs to the nearby railway station, and puncheons of molasses and groceries from Carvell Bros.Wholesalers, back to the store.

Talking to Mary reminded me that every winter the rivers and bays were once the highways on P.E.I Mary’s the ideal person to talk about traveling on ice. She was born on the 1^st day of 1923 during a blizzard.

1923 went on to become known as “The Year of The Big Snow”. Everyone who lived through the winter of 1923 says it with capital letters. It was also the year of the Big Cold - people ran out of firewood and burned the stalls of their barns and fence posts. Neither human nor horse could get through the deep snow to the woods.

The good news was the rivers and bays froze early that year making traveling easier. The ice was “bushed” with 15’ tall spruce trees jammed into the ice, a path that was followed assiduously to avoid the dangerous spring holes and freshets. Falling in could mean death for horse or passengers, and sometimes both.

The ice was bushed across Hillsboro Bay from Earnscliffe to Tea Hill, the route Malcolm Irving traveled for many years, hauling potatoes and pigs into Charlottetown. “Nine miles and it took 300 bushes, 150 on each wood sleigh, do ya see ? About every 60 yards you had to throw a bush off and punch a hole and stick it in the ice. It was quite a job - cold day, cold trip, cold work. Took a whole day, yeah. $20 for the job. $20 wasn’t too bad back then, ya know, yeah.” Not bad I guess if you were born in 1902 like Mac Irving. (Photo: a slightly more modern ice road)

The Hillsboro River runs northeast from Charlottetown to Mt Stewart. In January 1932 when the local flour mill was down for repairs, John W.MacEachern, a farmer and boat-builder from Cherry Hill decided to make a day of it and left with a sleigh load of wheat for Scott’s Mill in Parkdale, now part of Charlottetown.

“We left around 4 o’clock in the morning…know how cold it was? 29 below on the old scale! 21 miles in…we got in about 10 o’clock, pit our loads off and went uptown and put our horses in the livery stable. Had our dinner, then about 2 o’clock loaded up and headed back home again. I’d like to see them sitting out on a sleigh 29 below today! They don’t know what cold is, what!” John told me a full meal cost 25 cents at the King Edward Hotel where Tim Hortons is now on Kent Street. When they got home after dark John’s bay-coloured horse was white with frost, but safe.

One of Malcolm Irving’s cousins wasn’t so lucky. His sleigh wandered off the bushed trail and went through the ice at the wharf at Pownal. “A man and two women. The horse went through the ice and he couldn’t get him out alone so he started off walking and the horse whinnied when he seen him going. The man felt so bad he went back and the horse pulled him into the water and he drowned. Yeah. That’s a long time ago.” The horse then drowned, this tragic scene witnessed by the two horrified women passengers whose day had begun as an exciting excursion to town. The only way to save a horse that went through was by a choking method called “bloating”. The frantic horse, hooves chopping at the edge of the broken ice hole was choked around its neck with the reins; its lungs filled and the horse floated briefly, allowing several men to pull it up onto the ice. Sometimes it worked.

Ice travel went on into spring as long as possible to avoid the impassable muddy roads of April. A dairy farmer who rotated with his neighbours the task of hauling a sleigh load of 80–pound milk cans across the frozen harbor to Central Creameries in Charlottetown told me that in 1922 they started hauling before Christmas and the ice was still thick enough as late as April 15^th. That’s April 15^th, 1923 - the Year of The Big Snow…and Big Cold!

Dutch

“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

It’s mid-November and I’m forking eelgrass that had washed up the Hillsborough River into the back of my truck. I was thinking about my 94-year old cousin Kay from Lot 11 in the western end of PEI. She said they too always banked their house for the winter with seaweed. I was talking to Grace Swan before Remembrance Day and she told me her father Frank Watts, a 1st World War veteran, wounded in battle, always seemed to be banking the house on Nov. 11th. She said he’d put down his hay fork at 11 o’clock and bow his head.

Because we’re an island, there’s always been an overlap between the sea and the soil. Eighty years ago most Islanders were farmers who fished a little, or fishermen who farmed a little, getting by as best they could on both land and sea. Mussel mud, fish offal, kelp, and even lobster bodies were mixed with animal manure to fertilize the fields.

As a girl Cousin Kay planted potato sets with a herring or mackerel for fertilizer, as did Arthur Hughes who farmed in Millcove ten miles NE of Charlottetown. Arthur was born in 1913, the same year as Cousin Kay, and he said the hard part was keeping the cats and crows from digging up the fish.

This spring one of my neighbours laid down several rows of eelgrass, planted his potatoes on top of the eelgrass and then covered them with a mixture of soil and more eelgrass. Best crop in years. I didn’t tell him it’s all been done before. What is different today are the potato varieties being grown. Who grows Jenny Linds or Blacks anymore? Where have all the Calicos and Early Roses gone?

“When Mum sent us down to the cellar to get potatoes for supper we always got white potatoes - (Irish) Cobblers or (Green) Mountains. Unless it was fish day -then we brought up the Blues (McIntyre)”, says Cousin Kay. “There were 3 bins - whites and blues for the table, and a bin of red potatoes to boil up and mix with oats for the animal mash. We’d grow 3 acres - red, white and blue. And everyone grew parsnips and left them in the ground all winter. They’d be lovely and fresh in the spring. Mum would put them and the potatoes in the oven beside the roast to cook. I never hear of anyone growing parsnips anymore.”

Something else almost erased from our collective memory are the starch factories that once dotted the Island.

“Malpeque for beauty
Darnley for pride.
Only for the starch factory
Baltic would have died.”

(Mrs. W J Harrington in “History of Baltic Lot
18″, compiled by the Baltic W.I.)

The Baltic Lot 18 starch factory is long gone - as is the one in East Baltic which was unique in being water-powered. The mill dam is still there across from the old schoolhouse. There were starch factories in Bristol near Morell, up the bay in St. Peters, and on the riverbank in Murray Harbour. The starch was used in the New England cotton industry as “sizing.” The last starch factory on PEI was run by Colonel Full in Hunter River, on the stream beside the train station. It survived until after the 2nd World War.

Some farmers grew a coarse potato variety called Star especially for starch, but usually they brought in culls of any variety. Colin “Doctor” MacDonald - son of the legendary Dr Roddie - was born in St Peters in 1898 and lived to his 100th year. Like some of the bigger farmers he grew 5, 6, and sometimes 8 acres of potatoes and took the culls to the St. Peters starch factory: “The factory didn’t go all the time - it was only when potatoes was cheap - and that was damn cheap mind you! I remember one spring there was an awful glut - potatoes weren’t worth anything. They paid us only 18 cents a hundredweight. Eighteen cents! But we were glad to get it to be rid of the potatoes.”

I just looked out the window - snow flurries. Better get the eelgrass out of the truck and banked around the house. One thing hasn’t changed - cold weather!

Dutch