FoodTrust - Connections

“Herring and taters, the food of the land;
If you don’t like it, you can starve and be damned.”

That old P.E.I. saying pretty well sums up what was on many dinner tables back in the Dirty ’30s. In the Great Depression money and variety were scarce but there was always an abundance of salt fish and potatoes. I once asked 108-year old Ann Byrne - born in 1897 and at the time PEI’s oldest citizen - if they ate fish on Friday when she was growing up in Lake Verde. She laughed and said, “More than on Fridays! We ate salt fish and blue potatoes and drank buttermilk to take the edge off the salt herring.”

McIntyre Blue potatoes - “Blues” to most Islanders - were once the most common potato grown on P.E.I.. They are a long potato that one man told me he, “carried to the house in the crook of my arm like firewood”.

My friend Gus Gregory from Souris remembers salt herring and blue potatoes being used as a spring tonic and cure-all when he was a boy back in the 1920s. “McIntyre Blue potatoes…the herring had to be salted in the fall, head and tail on. Then we cut the herring in two and boiled it. You had to soak it overnight in cold water to take some of the salt out. A feed of that was a cure for sick people.”

On the Gregory farm in Chepstow they grew old potato varieties like Irish Cobbler, Early Rose, McIntyre Blue and a variety Gus knows only as “Blacks” – a deep purple-hued potato. “Stars” were also grown to feed animals or to take to the starch factory in East Baltic.

Like many Islanders of his generation - he was born in 1918 - Gus grew up on a farm and fished on the side. His grandfather Dan Gregory passed down home remedies like the blue-potato-and-salt-herring cure. Grandpa Dan always sowed and harvested his crops by the phases of the moon. Root crops like potatoes and turnips were planted in the “dark” phase of the moon or when the full moon was waning. Conversely crops that grew on the surface like grain and corn were planted on the “light” of the moon - just before the moon was full. “The day he sowed wheat the wind had to be southwest, and in the light of the moon.” Lumber and firewood were sawn in the dark phase of the June moon. The branches were left on the trees to draw out the sap.

“Everybody made their own (wooden) shingles…the shingles would wear out before they’d rot.”

Up at the other end of the Island, 94-year old Amy Adams-Bryanton from Kensington learned the same customs from her grandparents. Amy was the first person to tell me about putting salt herring on the soles of your feet to cure a fever and pneumonia. I thought she was kidding me until 50 other people told me the same cure, which inevitably concludes with… “and in the morning my fever was gone and the fish was cooked !”

When I asked Amy about the McIntyre Blues and salt herring tonic she told me that’s the type of food that kept people healthy. She doesn’t remember anyone having the “stomach and bowel” ailments so common today.

You grew your own food - everything was local except the tea and sugar. Grandma Caseley used to sing a little song:

If iron tonic you need

Eat more spinach, beet and swede;

If your nerves are all awry

Lettuce and onions try.”

Dutch

I was having breakfast this morning - toast made from western wheat, coffee from Costa Rica, and orange juice from Florida – while I read the Sept. 13, 1962 Family Herald magazine, published in Montreal and shipped by rail across Canada. So much for the “100-mile diet”…

Back when I was a kid the Family Herald was inevitably in the pile of newspapers on every kitchen couch. That was back in the days when most Prince Edward Islanders still called themselves farmers, even if they only kept a few milk cows and 20 laying hens.

What caught my eye in the old Herald this morning was the story “Elevator Agent - a Job in Transition”, about the vanishing grain elevators on the Prairies in 1962. A similar story could have been written about another vanishing job here in the Maritimes - the schoonerman. A friend of mine, Captain Tom Trenholm, 97 years old and living on the shores of Murray Harbour, is the last of those schoonermen.

This is the time of year when Tom and his wife Mary would have their schooner the “Vera Marie T.”, parked at a P.E.I. wharf - Matthew & McLean’s in Souris, Hayden’s on the Hillsboro River, or maybe Forbes’ in Vernon Bridge - filling the hold of their old schooner with turnips. They’d pour McIntyre Blues, Irish Cobblers, black oats (for the pit ponies), and turnips into the hold to take to the mining towns in Cape Breton and Pictou County. They’d bring coal back to P.E.I. for the long winter ahead.

Murray Harbour was one of the last active ports for the schooners. Dozens would be lined up at the wharves loading potatoes, in bulk or in bags, and 2-pound cans of Ray Brooks’ honey to sell as well.

One old schoonerman told me that by late November, after two weeks parked at the wharf in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, selling off his P.E.I. produce, he’d throw in a can of honey for free to anyone who bought five 100 pound bags of spuds.

Eighty years ago Georgetown was a booming town with the old P.E.I. railway, Parker’s Foundry, and the shipyard. A ferry ran to Pictou, Nova Scotia, and it was home port for icebreakers like the Minto and Stanley. Along the wharves, schooner masts stuck up like a forest.

For many years the druggist in Georgetown was Seymour Knight. Like the rest of the mercantile entrepreneurs who built and kept Georgetown running in the same league as the big boys like Charlottetown and Summerside, Seymour had his fingers in several pies. He owned schooners which he filled with turnips grown on his own farm. Seymour himself sailed around the world, and if he had wanted to, he could have worn gold earrings to show he’d sailed around Cape Horn. He would have needed 12 ears for the number of trips he reportedly made as a young sailor.

Friday Walker is now 97 years old. He grew up in Georgetown and told me his first two jobs as a lad were helping his grandfather make harnesses for horses. Farmers grew a specific type of rye for him because rye straw was the best to pack into the horse collars. Fridays’ other job was loading turnips onto Seymour Knight’s schooners. The turnips were huge and were nicknamed “whompers”. Friday says,” You could almost walk across the harbour on the decks of all the schooners!”

Schooners are so rare these days that if one comes to port we all get a day off work. The only things the same as they were 80 - 90 years ago, back when Captain Tom and Friday Walker were boys, are the fields of PEI potatoes and turnips….

… And the memories.

Dutch

Well, you’re finally going to start hearing from someone else on this blog. We’re starting a new series about agriculture, and life, on P.E.I. in the early 1900’s.

Dutch Thompson will be writing the series. What? You haven’t heard of Dutch!!

Dutch is a local historian with over 900 hours of recorded stories from Maritimers (eastern Canadian’s) born between 1894 and 1920. Dutch has a passion to save these stories of occupations and practices no longer in existence. He also tries to capture the many “firsts” that people have seen, like the first cars, radios, and telephones.

Dutch is best known locally for his series on CBC radio called “The Bygone Days” which airs on the afternoon show “Mainstreet”.

He has received three P.E.I. Heritage awards for his work and has had stories on national and regional radio and in “The Island Magazine” . Dutch also served as the Historical Script Advisor for the series “Emily of New Moon”

His first post will arive soon so check back often.

Scott