Maintaining the Household: Subsistence Farmers on the Little Clay Belt, 1900-1930
David Rolf Battista
Master of Arts in History
2014
MAINTAINING THE HOUSEHOLD: SUBSISTENCE FARMERS ON THE LITTLE CLAY BELT, 1900-1930
DAVID ROLF BATTISTA
SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORY
NIPISSING UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES NORTH BAY, ONTARIO
© David Rolf Battista August 2014
I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this Thesis or Major Research Paper.
I authorize Nipissing University to lend this Thesis or Major Research Paper to other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research.
I further authorize Nipissing University to reproduce this thesis or dissertation by photocopying or by other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research
Abstract
Current scholarship views agriculture in northeastern Ontario, happening predominantly on the clay belt, as a failure. Yet what failed was the creation of commercial, market-oriented farming. Historians have neglected the complex nature of clay belt society during its initial, government-propagated settlement period, from 1900 to 1930. Focusing on one area of the clay belt, the Temiskaming district, this paper shows the ways in which farmers used subsistence farming, commercial sales, wage labour, domestic chores, and reciprocal work bees as strategies to advance the household. They were neither fully a part of the capitalist economy, in the sense that they were not utterly dependent on the market for survival, nor resistant to capitalism, because the market was used. Instead, farmers incorporated multiple dependencies to sustain their households.
Acknowledgements
I would like to recognize those who have helped me accomplish this Major
Research Paper. Above all, I would not have been able to succeed without my supervisor,
Dr. James Murton, whose valuable guidance, critiques, and counsel continuously advanced my analysis of the little clay belt. I am especially appreciative of the Master of
Arts in History course instructors, who instilled in my mind the importance of studying history. I also acknowledge the many professors at Nipissing University who offered helpful advice throughout my research.
Table of Contents
Introduction………………………………………………..……………………………... 1
Methodology and a New Outlook On Clay Belt Agriculture…………...... 3
Agrarian Capitalism and Pre-Capitalist Society…………………………………………. 5
Why Do Farmers Farm?...... 7
Liberal Order and the Government’s Ideal for the Little Clay Belt…………………….. 14
Settlers Move to the Land………………………………………………………………. 23
Subsistence or Capitalist Farmers?...... 28
Household Work Apart From Farming…………………………………………………. 35
Reciprocal Work Bees….………………………………………………………………. 44
What Did Farming, Logging, Domestic Work, and Work Bees Accomplish?...... 49
Conclusion: The Failure of Commercial Market-Oriented Farming……...……………. 51
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………. 53
1
Introduction
Charles Cobbald Farr emigrated from England to the little clay belt (Temiskaming
Shores, ON) in 1873. The little clay belt is one of the only areas of fertile soil in northeastern Ontario.1 Farr moved to Temiskaming to work as a clerk for the Hudson’s
Bay Company (HBC). Upon seeing the agricultural potential of the land, however, he relinquished his post and took up farming full-time in Haileybury Township.
Commenting on the lack of settlement to the little clay belt, and the preference by
Ontarians to immigrate to farm in the Prairie Provinces, Farr said, “It takes a capitalist to start in the North-West; here a man can start with a strong pair of arms and a willing heart.”2 Little clay belt farmers, as Ruth Sandwell has suggested of Canadian Shield farmers more generally, operated in an environment where capitalist markets and subsistence production co-existed, in a situation of what Gerard Bouchard calls co- integration between peasant and market means of subsistence. Historians have typically characterized clay belt farming in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a failure. This shows a misunderstanding of the nature of farming in this country prior to
World War Two. Little clay belt farmers were, in fact, representatives of a common and long-lasting form of rural life.
The little clay belt was resettled starting in the early twentieth century by the
Ontario provincial government as a result of its desire to create a fully functioning agrarian capitalist region. Using railway pamphlets, the government propagated an
1 Nancy and Robert Wightman, “Changing Patters of Rural People in Northeastern Ontario, 1901-1941,” Ontario History 92, 2 (2000). 2 Denis Maclean Watson, Frontier Movement and Economic Development in Northeastern Ontario, 1850-1914 (British Columbia: University of British Columbia, 1971), 188.
2 individualistic, laissez-faire settlement plan that stressed the clay belt’s ability to support commercial farmers. By 1931 these advertisements had lured enough people to the little clay belt to make 11,911 farms, covering two million acres devoted to agriculture. By
1961, however, there were fewer than half that number, 5,058, with approximately one million acres devoted to agriculture.3 Scholars have used these statistics as evidence that agriculture on the clay belt was a failure. What actually failed was the creation of market- oriented commercial farming. The farmers who stayed on the clay belt after 1931 were the product of a community that reproduced itself apart from the governmental ideal. This
Major Research Paper analyzes the settlement period on the little clay belt from 1900 to
1930 to show that the farmers who stayed on the clay belt were the ones intent on maintaining their households. What really failed in northern Ontario was the conversion to agrarian capitalism, not farming itself.
From 1900 to 1930, little clay belt farm families incorporated a variety of strategies to sustain their households. Oral histories given by the children of the original settlers indicate farm families sought land for familial independence. Indeed, for the entire period under study, mixed subsistence farms that produced a variety of crops and livestock primarily for home consumption dominated the agricultural scene. The capitalist economy was used; product was sold off the farm, and men partook in off-farm employment, typically in the logging industry. But households used the market as a subsistence tool, an opportunity to further acquire their basic needs. They were not subservient to the market. In fact, farmers developed deep communal bonds, in the form of reciprocal work bees, which created a somewhat autonomous society. By “diversifying
3 Government of Ontario, Northeastern Ontario Region Economic Survey, 1966 (Ontario Department of Economics and Development, 1966), 50.
3 their dependencies,” little clay belt farmers reproduced a household-centered community that operated outside a system of capitalism.4
Methodology and a New Outlook On Clay Belt Agriculture
This paper relies on oral histories given by the children of the original settlers who moved to the Temiskaming district at the turn of the twentieth century. These describe the intricate details of a farm family’s life. These interviews were undertaken in
1984 by the University of Guelph’s Dr. Alan Brookes, as part of his study titled “Farm
Work and Farm Life in Ontario Since 1890 Oral History Project”. The Ontario government sponsored this project in order to celebrate the bicentennial of European settlement in the province. When the interviews were conducted, participants’ ages ranged from 61 to 93. Thirty-three interviews were completed for the Temiskaming district: 17 women and 16 men. Interviewers asked a variety of questions relating to farm life, on topics such as “types of farms and crops, farm houses and barns, chores and farm routines, school and childhood memories, family life, leisure time, and adult involvement in the community.”5 These sources give better access to settlers’ farm motivations and behaviour than sources relied on by previous histories.
The demographics of interview participants from the Temiskaming district are very similar. The ethnicity of most interviewees is British; many have at least one parent
4 Gerard Bouchard, “Marginality, Co-Integration and Change: Social History as a Critical Exercise,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 8 (1997), 26. 5 Archives of Ontario, “Farm Work and Farm Life in Ontario Since 1890 Oral History Project”, RG 16-200, DVD 545, Ministry of Agriculture and Food. Interviewee names are confidential. Each interview is labeled NL1, NL2, NL3, etc. In order to humanize these labels, I assign each a pseudonym. For a complete description of this oral history project see Archives Descriptive Database, “Farm Work and Farm Life in Ontario Since 1890 Oral History Project,” http://ao.minisisinc.com/scripts/mwimain.dll/74/1/1?RECLIST&DATABASE=DESCRI PTION_WEB_INT
4 born in England, Scotland, or Ireland, and the other from various places around southern
Ontario. However, two interviewees have at least one parent born in Quebec. The dominant religion among interviewees is Protestant, with many identifying as
Presbyterian, Anglican, Methodist, or Jehovah’s Witness. However, six participants are
Catholic. The quantifiable data above could indicate that the majority of early twentieth century farmers on the little clay belt were Protestant and had a British ethnic background.
Current scholarship views the provincial government’s resettlement of the clay belt in northeastern Ontario as the result of the need for farm produce to supply the burgeoning mining towns and logging camps in the vicinity.6 And indeed, prospective settlers were told that they would be able to commercialize their operations and reap vast economic reward by selling farm product to these local resource markets. However, when the promised commercial profit was not achieved, many settlers left.
Beginning in the 1960s, to explain this mass out-migration, historians began to argue that the provincial government moved inexperienced farmers to the clay belt, did not give proper financial incentives, and encouraged exploitation of timber on the land.7
6 This argument has been advanced by public histories, such as John and Monica Ladell, A Farm in the Family: The Many Faces of Ontario Agriculture Over the Centuries (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1985), and Roman Brozowski, Keith Topps, and David Rees, “Agriculture and Settlement,” in A Vast and Magnificent Land: An Illustrated History of Northern Ontario, ed. by Mat Bray and Ernie Epp (Thunder Bay and Sudbury: Lakehead and Laurentian Universities, 1984). 7 In the 1960s, George McDermott, “Frontiers of Settlement in the Great Clay Belt, Ontario and Quebec,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 51, 3 (1961), and Jon Kent, “Agriculture in the Clay Belt of Northern Ontario,” The Canadian Geographer 10, 2 (1966), presented this information. It was reinforced by historian Peter Sinclair, “Agricultural Colonization in Ontario and Quebec: Some Evidence From the Great Clay Belt, 1900-45,” Canadian papers in Rural History 5 (1986), and historian
5
Their conclusions have been drawn from policy documents, census records, newspapers, government employee letters, and interviews with farmers who left. These sources show that farmers abandoned their land when they were not able to commercialize. However, does this mean all clay belt farmers, from resettlement to mass out-migration, had a capitalist attitude? The repetition of the same argument is due to the fact that there have been no sources used that address the resettled farmers who persisted on the clay belt. My research shows that there was a community of farmers not motivated by profit, but who instead used commercial sales as one strategy, of many, to advance their households.
Agrarian Capitalism and Pre-Capitalist Society
The oral histories consulted here reveal, above all, a complex relationship with capitalism. In invoking capitalism, I wade into the treacherous waters of a vast and contentious literature. I do not have the space here to review it fully, nor would that advance this project. But I can at least be clear what I mean by the term. Following political scientist Ellen Wood, I argue that capitalism occurs when participation in the market is an imperative, not an opportunity.8 When the market is completely relied on, is the exclusive source for survival, capitalism is present.
According to Wood, “everything in capitalist society is a commodity produced for the market…[and] both capital and labour are utterly dependent on the market for the most basic conditions of their own reproduction.”9 A dependence on the market creates the “imperatives of competition, accumulation, and profit-maximization, and hence a
David Wood, Places of Last Resort: The Expansion of the Farm Frontier into Boreal Forest in Canada (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006). 8 Ellen Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (New York: Verso, 2002), 75. 9Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 97.
6 constant systemic need to develop the productive forces.”10 Capitalist forces dictate farm production strategies, which causes farmers to lose control over their labour and resources. The market determines what farm practices are curtailed or increased, and generates the need among producers to compete and accumulate profit. This entails the enslavement of their production to market forces (in other words, the market establishes what and how to produce).
In pre-capitalist societies the market was used as an opportunity to sell or trade product to acquire other goods, but it was not a person’s sole source of subsistence.11
Wood summarizes Karl Polanyi, who argues that a “distinction must be made between societies with markets, such as have existed throughout recorded history, and a ‘market society’”12 In feudal England, peasants and landlords did not depend directly on the market for survival.13 Peasants had a non-market, customary ownership of land. They had use-rights on the land. This meant, for example, that some could gather wood from one area, and apples from another; lands were farmed and grazed in common.14 In this way, peasants were able to produce a lot of their basic needs, such as food and clothing, but they also sold surplus product at local markets to attain other goods.15 However, they had no compulsion to use the market. In Wood’s words, they did not “enter into market relations in order to gain access to the means of life.”16
10 Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 97. 11 Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 11. 12 Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 21. 13 Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 80. 14 Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 107. 15 Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 78. 16 Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 7.
7
As will be shown in subsequent sections, little clay belt farmers maintained a society that did not fully align with the capitalist system. If we use the definition that capitalism occurs when the market is a person’s sole source of subsistence, making their participation an imperative, than we can see how independent from a market society little clay belt farmers were. Settlers were able to take advantage of free land granted under the government’s pre-emptive system, which gave them full ownership after certain improvement requirements were met. This readily available supply of free land enabled households to provide their subsistence by farming a variety of crops and livestock.
Product was sold, but farmers did not specialize in production for the market.
Participation in the logging industry supplemented farm production, but it was just another tool of subsistence, like growing mixed grains for livestock feed, or selling surplus dairy products after household consumption was met. Farmers were concerned with advancing the household, not profit-maximization.
Why Do Farmers Farm?
My research contests the contentious market revolution debate that occurred among historians in the 1970s. At this time, historians debated the mentalité of pre-Civil war rural American farmers, arguing the existence of a capitalist or moral economy.
Market historians, like James T. Lemon and Winifred B. Rothenberg, argued early
American farmers were capitalist in the sense that they were predominantly dependent on the market for survival, which caused them to orient their labour and resource production towards the market.17 Social historians, in contrast, argued that farmers lived in a moral
17 James T. Lemon, “Household Consumption in Eighteenth-Century America and Its Relationship to Production and Trade: The Situation Among Farmers in Southwestern Pennsylvania,” Agricultural History 41, 1 (1967), says southwestern Pennsylvania
8 economy, which was a system dominated by mixed subsistence farms and the local reciprocal exchange of goods or labour.18 For market and social historians there was no middle ground. They saw the capitalist and moral economies as two completely separate, incommensurable systems. My research on early twentieth century little clay belt farm society, however, shows that the market could be used as one means, among others – including reciprocal work and goods exchanges- to sustain the household.
Social historian Christopher Clark argues that pre-Civil War American farm families fulfilled the majority of their basic needs from their own land, and anything else they required was received through the trade of goods or labour with neighbours or kin.19
He says, the “frequent exchanges of goods and work with neighbors, kin, and others…[was] the fabric of their lives.”20 Farm families traded food for labour, tools for food, or labour for clothing, which allowed them to rely on the efforts and resources of their kin and community networks, not on profit or the free market, to ensure their subsistence. This, historian James A. Henretta argues, created social relationships that
widows were dependant on marketing surpluses for survival. Winifred B. Rothenberg, “The Emergence of Farm Labor Markets and the Transformation of the Rural Economy,” Journal of Economic History 48 (1988), explicitly says the moral economy, in eighteenth century Massachusetts, existed in the form of “wage-and price-fixing, bookkeeping barter, personalized and kinship exchanges”, but this “may signify not that the market principle was inapplicable so much as it was being held at bay.” (539) She goes on to say that during the last decade of the century, agriculture in Massachusetts “transformed by and under the subtle dominion of emerging regional and interregional markets for labor, farm commodities, and capital.” (561) 18 Alan Kulikoff, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,” William and Mary Quarterly 46 (1989), 122. 19Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 28. 20 Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, 27
9 curtailed, or, in his words “inhibited”, the “free play of market forces.”21 Henretta asserts that farmers were not concerned with increasing profit, but were more focused on the
“meeting of household needs and the maintaining of established social relationships within the community.”22 Historian Michael Merill provides a similar description of early
American rural society, saying, “individuals constantly cooperated in their work; indeed their cooperation in work governed the character of their product exchanges.”23 Historian
Greg Nobles insists that a moral economy was very important to early American rural households; sharing and reciprocity between neighbors was a necessity.24
Social historians thus mounted an argument against the market historians’ view that capitalism has always been present in rural America. Henretta directly challenged
Lemon who, writing on late eighteenth century rural southeastern Pennsylvania, said liberal farmers, “‘[placed] individual freedom and material gain over that of public interest…the people planned for themselves much more than they did for their communities’”.25 Henretta says profit was significant to pre-Civil War American farmers, but it was not their first priority. He contends farmers were primarily concerned with satisfying their family’s annual subsistence.26 Historian Alan Kulikoff disputes the liberal ideology market historians place on early American farmers, and believes colonists went
21 James A. Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (1978), 15. 22 Henretta, “Families and Farms”, 16. 23 Michael Merill, “Cash Is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,” Radical History Review 3 (1977), 55. 24 Gregory Nobles, “Capitalism in the Countryside: The Transformation of Rural Society in the United States,” Radical History Review 41 (1988), 167. 25 Henretta, “Families and Farms”, 3, responds to James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1972). 26 Henretta, “Families and Farms”, 19.
10 to America “to escape capitalism”. They acquired land to “reject the dependence of wage labor and sought… to devise economic relations…[to preserve] some of the communal and hierarchical ethos characteristic of local communities in feudal England.”27 Indeed,
Merill believes farmers chose to remain non-market oriented even when a market for their goods existed. Farmers were content with their moral economy, and the “absence of commercial farming would then be explained by more than just the absence of conditions favorable to such farming; it would be explained by the presence of traditions, secure in their own ‘rationality’, which resisted a commercial orientation.”28 Clark acknowledges farmer activities that made them appear market-oriented during this period: they participated in more long-distance trade, prices became more fixed across greater distances, and there was more wage labour.29 But, still, he says, “if there was a rural
‘labor market’ it was shaped by familial concerns and had not yet become dominated by the existence of a large class of workers with nothing to sell but their labor.”30
Supporters of the moral economy have ubiquitously said that capitalist culture was transmitted to rural American farmers during the mid-nineteenth century. Clark contends that a number of factors contributed to the decline of the moral economy, such as reliance on distant trade, population growth, land shortages, and a release of certain women’s duties, like home textile production –which allowed them to take off-farm work and do the dairying.31 However, the main precursor to capitalism, he argues, was the
27 Kulikoff, “The Transition to Capitalism”, 124. 28 Merill, “Cash Is Good to Eat”, 45. 29Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, 59. 30Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, 64. 31 There was not a stark divergence to capitalism, which Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, defines as the moment “labor is commonly divorced from the ownership of the land, tools, or materials that form the means of production…labor power is commonly
11 increased economic power of merchants, such as traders and storekeepers. Traders transported primary resources to communities, like palm leaf, which farmers developed into finished products, such as hats, and sold to storekeepers.32 In this way, merchants organized the production of hats, clothing, buttons, and brooms. Farm families started to depend on the profit earned from product merchants brought to their communities, which allowed merchants to achieve “greater power and influence…they helped alter the rules of exchange in the local economy.”33 Henretta likewise argues that merchants started to dominate the agricultural trade by handling the products of farms, and setting the “terms of exchange in order to gain a greater share of the growing wealth of the society than was warranted by their entrepreneurial contribution.”34 Nobles believes that merchants created a consumer culture with the primary resources they brought to rural communities. This, he argues, “had a significant impact in creating new patterns of consumption.”35 Social historians contend that a transition to capitalism occurred in the countryside when farm families became market dependent.
hired for wages by the proprietors of land or industrial enterprises, and there exists in society a significant number of people whose principal means of livelihood is the wage work they can obtain.” (14) Clark also believes that the importance of distant trade put a strain on kinship and community relations. Creditors feared cash repayment would not be received from manufacturers and farmers who relied on distant markets to sell their goods, so they took people who owed them money to court (127-128). Long-term obligation to kin and neighbors disappears in a market capitalism system that demands immediate payment. Clark also says that when women no longer focused on textile production in their homes, between 1815 to 1830 (141), the result of the import of wools as opposed to the laborious process of making their own linens from flax (140), this resulted in women doing other work, like the dairying, which saw them “exchange items with local stores.” (145) 32 Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, 182. 33 Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, 190. 34 Henretta, Families and Farms, 25 35 Nobles, “Capitalism in the Countryside”, 169.
12
Where the market revolution social historians see a relatively complete transition to capitalism taking place around the mid-nineteenth century, Canadian historians have more recently charted a more complicated picture of household economies, with the transition to capitalism happening much later. Historian Ruth Sandwell’s study of
Saltspring Island, British Columbia, from 1881 to 1891, shows the complex nature of settler behaviour, illustrating how they survived through a “wide variety of activities, including waged work [especially men working in the logging industry], commodity sales, and self-provisioning”.36 Island residents were neither capitalists nor peasants, because they had no concern with profit maximizing. But neither were they fully self- sufficient.37 Saltspring Island residents “sit awkwardly on the margins of historical representation,” in the sense that they used peasant and market means to sustain the household by achieving a “minimal, but relatively secure living.”38 Historian Beatrice
Craig draws a distinction between a commercial and a capitalist farmer. In her study of
Madawaska farming in the nineteenth century, Craig defines a commercial farm as any that had a “surplus equal or higher than 60 per cent of production”.39 During this period, the majority of Madawaska farms were commercial, but “marketable crops were grown in addition to those the household could consume, not instead of them”.40 These farmers produced for subsistence, but also adapted and sold product to local and international
36 Ruth Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space: Land Policy and Practices of Resettlement on Saltspring Island, 1859-1891 (Toronto & Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press), 158. 37 Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space, 157. 38 Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space, 157. 39 Beatrice Craig, Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists: The Rise of a Market Culture in Eastern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 156. 40 Craig, Backwoods Consumers, 167.
13 markets.41 Moreover, using the 1871 census, Craig illustrates that commercial farmers, out of 875 total farms, often did not incorporate new technologies. Twenty-five percent did not even use a plough, and they used similar methods to their non-commercial neighbours.42 Indeed, she asserts that the majority of farmers had “no new crops, little machinery, and [used] almost no…purchased seeds and fertilizer.”43 Craig argues that
Madawaska farmers were traditionalists who maintained a farm lifestyle that was similar to their grandparents.44 Historian Gerard Bouchard similarly argues that from 1880 to
1930 Saguenay farmers lived in a world of co-integration. These farmers behaved similarly to those that Sandwell and Craig have studied, because they “maintained numerous close and regular ties with the extra-regional capitalist economy, but did so without converting to its specific ways and means.”45 Saguenay farmers had mixed farms, which depended on family labour, and off-farm work (which he terms multiactivity), and ultimately were driven “by dynamics of reproduction based on family and community solidarity.”46 Participation in capitalist markets could be used as another subsistence strategy for the family without the family becoming fully dependent on the market for its subsistence.
Canadian historiography on household economies has used micro history as a method to show that mentalité alone is not enough to determine behaviour. These historians have shown the multiple factors at play that made farmers act the way they did.
The accessibility to free, or cheap, land, the small amount of cleared trees on new land
41 Craig, Backwoods Consumers, 177. 42 Craig, Backwoods Consumers, 172. 43 Craig, Backwoods Consumers, 178. 44 Craig, Backwoods Consumers, 178. 45 Bouchard, “Marginality, Co-Integration”, 26. 46 Bouchard, “Marginality, Co-Integration”, 27.
14 plots, local resource markets, and the availability of family labour all contributed to farmers’ behaviour. Similarly, little clay belt farmers did not make a choice to accept or reject capitalism; several factors caused them to use the market, alongside other means, for subsistence.
By examining the intricate everyday aspects of little clay belt farmer life, I am able to extend the work of Sandwell, Craig, and Bouchard to northern Ontario. In doing so, my argument shows that farmer participation in the market economy does not necessarily mean they were capitalist. Not fully capitalist, nor resistant to capitalism, little clay belt farmers offer an example of societies that historians have studied in other
Canadian places.
Liberal Order and the Government’s Ideal for the Clay Belt
At the end of the nineteenth century, Ontario’s north was perceived by the provincial government as a potential resource frontier. But farmers were assumed to be an essential part of the region’s development. The government crafted a plan that began by moving small-scale family farmers to the land; agriculture was the crux of settlement, because family farmers provided the foundation for an economically independent society.47 Farmers’ petty commodity production was supposed to facilitate the industrial growth of the north’s mining and logging industries. In turn, agriculture was projected to become a commercially viable sector as well. The government wanted northern Ontario’s development to result in a fully functioning capitalist society.
The Ontario provincial government believed farmers were the key to unlocking northern Ontario’s economic promise. Although Temiskaming was first colonized by
47 Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space, 35.
15
Northwest Company (NWC) fur traders in 1686, the 1821 merger of the NWC with the
HBC ensured the latter’s establishment of a fur trading post on Lake Temiskaming.48 By
1840, however, the declining fur trade at Temiskaming was replaced with the budding logging industry.49 According to historical geographer Denis Watson, in the early 1870s,
“famous names in the Ottawa River lumber trade had developed large operations in the
Lake Temiskaming district”.50 However, due to a lack of adequate transportation, the logging industry suffered from its inaccessibility to readily available supply commodities.51 In 1893, to fix this problem, the Ontario government, after realizing the agricultural potential of the bountiful clay belt, decided to open five townships in the area so that farmers could supply the logging industry with food.52 By 1901, 1,039 people settled the area, and increasingly more would come with the promise of a railway.53
It could be said that the north’s settlement was explicative of what historian Ian
McKay calls Canada’s “coherent process of liberal rule.” 54 McKay argues that Canada from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1940s, operated under a belief in the
“epistemological and ontological primacy of the category ‘individual.’”55 During this period, liberalism, or the individual’s right to liberty, equality, and private property, was
48 Watson, Frontier Movement and Economic Development, 171. 49 Watson, Frontier Movement and Economic Development, 172. 50 Watson, Frontier Movement and Economic Development, 173, includes large operators such as J.R. Booth, Robert Klock, Alux Lumsden, and Rinaldo McConnell. 51 Watson, Frontier Movement and Economic Development, 173. 52 Watson, Frontier Movement and Economic Development, 182, says the provincial government opened the Townships of “Bucke, Dymond, Hudson, Harris, and Casey—all adjacent to the northwestern shore of Lake Timiskaming.” 53 Watson, Frontier Movement and Economic Development, 184. 54 Ian McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,” Canadian Historical Review 81, 4 (2000), 623. 55 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 623.
16 ingrained into Canadian society.56 This liberal philosophy, with its persuasion of hands- off, individualistic, laissez faire policies, explains the way in which the Ontario government settled northern Ontario. Historian David Wood argues that settlement on the clay belt “was motivated by business principles more than a desire to colonize”, which explains the lack of financial aid given to settlers, and the “heavy weighting of government expenditure… [on] roads and bridges that could also encourage forestry and mining.”57Historian Peter Sinclair contends that clay belt settlement plans’ were
“individualistic”, and the government had “no clear idea of the type of society that it wished to develop other than the general one of material progress.”58 He says that the
Ontario government gave settlers no monetary incentives to clear land, whereas in the
Quebec government’s settlement schemes in the adjacent area, premiums were given to settlers who increasingly improved their land.59 Instead, the Ontario government believed that the best way to realize the north’s prosperity was to construct a railway. This was articulated in its “Report of the Survey and Exploration of Northern Ontario, 1900”:
the immense natural resources of the newly-explored tract of country are bound to contribute largely to the growth and prosperity of the Province. When the territory has been opened up by a railroad, a nucleus will be formed around which the lumbering, mining and agricultural industries will develop with rapidity, thereby inducing the settlement of these regions60
The intention was to make resource areas accessible, and then allow the free play of market forces to take over and facilitate the growth of an industrial economy.
56 McKay, “the Liberal Order Framework,” 623. 57 Wood, Places of Last Resort, 84. 58 Sinclair, “Agricultural Colonization in Ontario”, 106. 59 Sinclair, “Agricultural Colonization in Ontario”, 112. For Quebec settlement plans, see McDermott, “Frontiers of Settlement in the Great Clay Belt”, 272. 60 Watson, Frontier Movement and Economic Development, 198, quotes the “Report of the Survey and Exploration of Northern Ontario, 1900”.
17
The Ontario government’s plan started with the settlement of small-scale family farmers. According to historian Christopher Clarkson, in mid-nineteenth century British
Columbia, liberal reform-minded politicians feared what could become of a society dominated by laissez-faire capitalism; they believed its “individualism threatened the existence of social and familial ties.”61 If everyone pursued “his (or her) own rational self-interest, what would prevent competition from escalating to the point where self- gratification and instinctive self-preservation overruled altruism, morality, and social cooperation?”62 To counter the effects of capitalism, reformers in BC attempted to settle independent small-scale family farmers, because they would “tame otherwise unregulated desire.”63 The reformer idea was to create a class of independent producers who were family oriented, not a part of the landless proletariat, or motivated by individualistic principles. Historian Ruth Sandwell says that this is the reason behind the BC government’s pre-emptive land grant system, which gave free land to settlers who met certain improvement criteria during initial years of homesteading.64 It would appear this was the case in early twentieth century Ontario, because settlement in its north was directed towards family farmers, and encouraged with pre-emptive land grants under the
Free Grant and Homestead Act of 1868.65 Indeed, during the 1911 provincial government
61 Christopher Clarkson, “Property Law and Family Regulation in Pacific British North America, 1862-1873,” Histoire Sociale 30, 60 (1997), 391. 62 Clarkson, “Property Law and Family Regulation,” 391. 63 Clarkson, “Property Law and Family Regulation,” 391. 64 Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space, 35. It should be noted that the pre-emptive land- grant system gave free land to settlers, but they only received full ownership certificates if certain improvement requirements were met, and a below market price per acre paid. See Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space, 64-65, for a detailed description. 65 H.V. Nelles, The Politics of Development: Forest, Mines & Hydro-Electric Power in Ontario, 1849-1941 (Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada, 1974), 44. One railway pamphlet, Temiscaming and Northern Ontario Railway Commission, The Great Clay Belt
18 election, the liberal party stated that “the development of New Ontario [was] one of the supreme opportunities and most urgent obligations of the Government…We recognize that agriculture is the basic industry of this province”.66 The Ontario government was influenced by the contemporary notion, as outlined by Sandwell when she refers to nineteenth century BC, that land was the “basis of security and wealth in society.”67 This was expressed in the Ontario government’s railway pamphlets. The government owned
Temiskaming and Northern Ontario (TNO) railway used pamphlets that propagated the idea of agrarianism, the philosophy that land ownership and independence was the greatest wealth, as a tool to instigate settlement.68 One of these reads as a first-person narration, like a diary, with an anonymous male writer who advertises the little clay belt’s capacity to support family farmers. In one section, when the writer decides to take account of the profit he made after his first year of homestead, he writes: “It was not a year since I first arrived in the country, so one evening we sat down at the table to see what we had made in the year…[Cash] Increase in one year…$850.00”.69 The writer goes on to say that “This is only the beginning…it has abundantly proven to me, that a man from the city with health, courage and ambition can succeed in this country…He has no
of Northern Ontario (Toronto: Ontario Government Railway, 1913), details the process a clay belt settler had to go through to receive ownership of land given under the pre- emptive system, saying, “The regulations state that the applicant must reside on the lot at least six months in the year…he must erect a habitable house sixteen by twenty-four feet and must clear at least two acres each year for the first two years, and at the end of three years have sixteen acres, one-tenth of the area of his farm, under cultivation. By making a declaration at the end of the three years he is entitled to his title or patent to the lot.” (11) 66 Peter Sinclair, “Agricultural Colonization in Ontario”, 111. New Ontario was the name given to northern Ontario at this time. 67 Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space, 31. 68 Nelles, The Politics of Development, 52. 69 Temiscaming and Northern Ontario Railway Commission, A Plain Tale of Plain People: Pioneer Life In New Ontario (Toronto: Ontario Government Railway, 1913), 24.
19 boss to tell him that his services will not be required after this week; no landlord to threaten him with eviction if his rent is not paid by a certain date”.70 Another one of these pamphlets publicized to farmers the little clay belt’s ability to support self-provisioning and marketable crops:
Invariably every settler has his little flock of poultry and a number of hogs, and at least one cow; thus, with this stock, milk and butter, pork, eggs and fowl are furnished. A half-acre patch of garden will provide a sufficient quantity of potatoes, cabbage, beets and other table vegetables for the average family for a year…it is easy for a settler to save money. His bank account swells quickly because he has so little expense, and the returns from his crops, aside from what is wanted for clothing and other incidentals, is added to it.71
These pamphlets promoted the clay belt’s capability to sustain family farms. However, if land was the basis of security and wealth, this meant that farmers were supposed to expand other resource industries in the vicinity. According to Sandwell, in BC, colonial observers understood that small-scale farmers would grow a capitalist economy: “‘Get
[farmer-] settlers into British Columbia…and they will raise provisions, make roads, and generally develop [sic] the resources of the country.’”72
Farmers were supposed to aid the industrial development of northern Ontario’s logging and mining sectors. Logging had occurred in the Temiskaming area since 1845.
By 1870, according to historical geographer Denis Watson, the lumber trade was suffering from its isolation and the difficulty inherent in transporting foodstuffs to the region.73 To fix this problem, the provincial government crafted the route of a potential railway to start in North Bay, where it would join the existing Grand Trunk line from
Toronto. From there it would pass through the little clay belt, and go onwards to future
70 A Plain Tale of Plain People, 31. 71 The Great Clay Belt of Northern Ontario, 8. 72 Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space, 31, quotes the Weekly British Colonist. 73 Watson, Frontier Movement and Economic Development, 173.
20 logging and mining sites. Watson says the railway was designed to facilitate “the exploitation of the pine forests of the Timagami area…[and] the mining of a variety of precious and base metals”.74 This route allowed for the extraction of resources, gave a direct means for food shipments to northern mines and logging camps, and allowed the transport of resources to southern Ontario. This was expressed in an excerpt from the
1902 Toronto Globe:
the new railway will be operated solely in the interests of this Province…Toronto, together with the whole commercial and manufacturing area of southern Ontario, will be directly benefited by a railway connection with the northern country, and it is in the commercial rivalry between Montreal on the one hand and the commercial centres of Ontario on the other that the advantage of this railway will be most apparent.75
It was assumed that farmers would help grow the north’s logging and mining industries, but, in turn, these local resource markets would facilitate the farmer’s industrial growth too.
The government wanted farmers to orient their operations towards the market.
This is similar to what Sandwell has found with regards to Saltspring Island. The BC government encouraged settlement by advertising the island’s ability to support agriculture. This was done to supply resource industries with food, but Sandwell says,
“Saltspring Island was perceived from its earliest days as a community that could, and would, realize its potential as a commercially successful farming settlement.”76 In one railway pamphlet, the Ontario government illustrated the exact same result for the little clay belt:
74 Watson, Frontier Movement and Economic Development, 188. 75 Watson, Frontier Movement and Economic Development, 200, quotes the Toronto Globe. 76 Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space, 44.
21
It is the business side that the visitor and prospective settler places before all else. Records of 105 bushels of oats per acre; hay at 3 tons per acre, the latter this year selling as high as $18 per ton; milk at 14 cents a quart, and an adequate supply unavailable even at that price; eggs selling as high as 75 cents a dozen in winter and a market that is never satisfied-all this does not fail to awaken the business instincts of the visitor and illustrate what the possibilities really are. It is common to see truck loads of cans of milk at the stations of Latchford, Cobalt, Haileybury and even New Liskeard and Porcupine that had been shipped all the way from Toronto to supplement the local supply. Think for a minute what would be the possibilities of a farmer with a herd of high producing cows.77
Clearly, the government wanted farmers to focus on market sales and commercial profit.
In fact, the pamphlet goes on to say, “It is almost a safe prophecy that there will come a day in the not distant future when New Ontario will be as a prairie dotted over with cheese factories and creameries, and be known as one of the foremost dairy districts in the world.”78 Northern Ontario’s agricultural future was planned within a development scheme that culminated in a capitalist mode of production.
The agrarian capitalist objective inherent in the government’s agricultural settlement plan was most likely influenced by the increased capitalization of farms in other North American places. At the turn of the twentieth century, industrial farms were on the rise; farmers were willingly directing their operations towards the capitalist market. For example, historian Deborah Fitzgerald argues that American engineers, politicians, and bankers propelled its farmers to mechanize into mono crop factories.79 It appears farmers accepted, because, in many states, the creation of the tractor allowed
77 The Great Clay Belt of Northern Ontario, 6. 78 The Great Clay Belt of Northern Ontario, 7. 79 Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003). Fitzgerald quotes the United States secretary of Agriculture in 1926, in the context of his speech regarding the enormous economic growth of the American manufacturing sector, saying, “It seems to me that in this matter agriculture must follow the example of industry.” (108)
22 them to clear millions of acres of land. 80 Other inventions, such as mammoth incubators for chickens and new driers for hay, were likewise created to increase production.81
Historian Paul Voisey argues that farmers in Vulcan, Alberta chose to remain mono-crop oriented, even when urged otherwise.82 Although Dominion officials advocated the benefits of mixed farming, Voisey says, “wheat constituted three-quarters of the seeded acreage in 1911 and increasingly more thereafter, as the acquisition of tractors eliminated the need to raise oats for horse feed.”83 Farmers in this region were able to take advantage of the barren landscape, unlike the tree-covered terrain clay belt farmers had to work with, which allowed them to increase profit by specializing in wheat.84 Historian
Margaret Derry similarly argues that, by the 1890s, southern Ontario farmers industrialized their production of cheese and butter. 85 Traditionally, dairying in Ontario was a job done by women, but upon realizing the profit to be made from the newly opened British market, male farmers took it over and capitalized its operations. Derry describes new technologies, such as the Lisker Milker and the centrifugal cream
80 Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory, says that by “1928, six great plains states had greatly increased their acres under production. In Texas, five million more acres were planted, in North Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, and Minnesota another one million acres in each state, in Colorado five-hundred thousand acres, and in Kansas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota three hundred and fifty thousand acres each. With the simultaneous decrease in the number of farmers, it was nearly impossible to operate…without using industrial methods.” (109) 81 Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory, 115. 82 Paul Voisey, Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 80. 83 Voisey, Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community, 83. 84 Voisey, Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community, 85. 85 Margaret Derry, “Gender Conflicts in Dairying: Ontario’s Butter Industry, 1880-1920,” 90, 1 (1988), describes the way in which the Ontario government promoted a shift in dairying towards its factorization through “agricultural colleges and the minister of agriculture’s travelling dairy.” (33)
23 separator, which farmers used to increase production.86 Thus the Ontario government’s assumption -that the settlers who moved to the clay belt wanted to maximize profit- was in some ways reasonable.
Settlers Move to the Land
To understand why settlers moved to the little clay belt to farm is not an easy task.
Why did settlers move to the little clay belt? Did they see themselves as future market- oriented commercial farmers? Since the children of the original farmers gave the interviews used for this paper, and some were not born until years after their parents moved to the land, the actual motivations of their parents are not easily known. If we take what the governmental discourse says, then it could be assumed that settlers moved to the north to eventually become commercial market-oriented farmers. But this will not do.
The children of the original settlers make no mention of a desire to maximize profit.
Settler behaviour indicates that they migrated to the little clay belt with the intention of supporting the household with land. Even though the plots of land they selected upon arrival to the little clay belt had barely any trees cleared, probable proof that an agrarian capitalist objective was unlikely, the 1921 Census of Canada details a fast settler land clearance rate, and an ample amount of improved land; this could signify farmers wanted to maximize profit. However, oral testimonies indicate families chose to remain non-market focused with mixed subsistence farms that produced a variety of crops and livestock to meet their basic food needs. In fact, in many cases, parents’ settled children on their land, or close by, as a way to create interdependent kin networks, which
86 Derry, “Gender Conflicts in Dairying”, 35. Derry also states that the centrifugal cream separator was called “the most significant invention of the dairy industry in over one hundred years.” (38)
24 may suggest a reason for the fast land clearance rate. Some of the actions of little clay belt farmers suggest their movement to the little clay belt was family-centered.
When settlers immigrated to the little clay belt the plots of land they selected were covered in trees. Many moved around the first decade of the twentieth century. Bill
Gibson’s parents went in 1900; John Smith’s in 1904; Scott Montgomery’s in 1909; Bob
McDermott’s in 1910; Stacey Sanders’s in 1912; and Elizabeth Sorkin’s in 1912.87 When asked about his parents’ settlement date, James Dilbert says, “1904 or 1905, [it] was the earlier years, that’s when most of them came.”88 Gary Boyd says his parents’ farm was
“all bush when I was born.”89 On the 100-acre farm Montgomery’s parents selected through the pre-emptive system, only three quarters of an acre was initially cleared.
Gibson indicates his parents only had half an acre cleared after their first year homesteading. It was the farm man’s job to clear the land of trees, and during the first few years of settlement this consumed most of his time. Connor Simpson says his dad spent many years clearing land, and “only started active farming when I became a teenager.”90 Obviously, it would have taken a long time to turn these tree-covered plots of land into profitable operations. Indeed, Gibson recalls his father receiving a pre-emptive
160-acre plot of land, but he needed to hire a crown land agent for 15 or 20 dollars to assist in his selection. He goes on to say, “if you’d have seen it than you wouldn’t think it was worth that much.”
87 Interview of Bill Gibson (NL5), John Smith (NL2), Scott Montgomery (NL1), Bob McDermott (NL17), Stacey Sanders (NL9), Elizabeth Sorkin (NL10). 88 Interview of James Dilbert (NL21). 89 Interview of Gary Boyd (NL23). 90 Interview of Connor Simpson (NL4).
25
The 1921 Census of Canada makes it appear that farmers had profit-maximizing aspirations. I quantified data from this Census, and found that from 1905 to 1921, families in select little clay belt townships, with 160 acres of land, probably cleared around 2.8 acres of trees each year.91 After 16 years of settlement, farm families had roughly 45 acres cleared. Historian Peter Russell asserts that pioneers in Upper Canada knew how many cleared acres were needed for a farm family to support itself, and argues one settler could clear about one and a half acres of land each year.92 He says contemporaries “considered that to feed a family and raise enough of cash crops to purchase necessities, a farmer needed about 20 acres.” 93 Of course, little clay belt
91 According to the government railway pamphlet, The Great Clay Belt of Northern Ontario, 11, 160 acres was the standard plot size granted to settlers who moved to the clay belt. Further, interviewee Stacey Sanders (NL9) says that “most of the farms were divided up like that [160 acres]”, and the Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Sixth Census of Canada, 1921: Volume V Agriculture (Department of Trade and Commerce, 1924), 159, shows that most townships in the Temiskaming district had farms listed under the 101 to 200 acre category. This Census shows the percentage of improved and unimproved land in Townships listed under the Temiskaming District (246-249). At this time, improved land referred to any land productively used for farming, and unimproved meant non- productive land (land that was wasteful, or not cleared of trees). Using 1905 as a base settlement year (this is the average of the dates listed above that interviewees gave regarding their parents’ settlement year), I applied the improved land percentage from the Townships of Harley, Hilliard, Hudson, and Harris (since these were a few of the main Townships that interviewees say their parents’ settled) to a 160 acre plot. I found that a 160-acre farm in Harley Township had 44.16 acres cleared; Hilliard 28.8; Hudson 49.76; and Harris 57.4. The average from these figures was 45, which equals 2.8 acres cleared each year for 16 years. 92 Peter Russell, “Forest into Farmland: Upper Canadian Clearing Rates, 1822-1839.” Agricultural History, 57, 3, (1983), 328. 93 Peter Russell, “Emily Township: Pioneer Persistence to Equality?,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 22, (1989), 323, argues that Upper Canada was advertised as a territory where settlers could become prosperous farmers through “landownership…[and] the expectation of eventual economic success.” (338) But he goes on to say that “long- term clearing rates offer an effective measure of just how lengthy that road was.” (339) In Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space, one of the ways she proves that settlers were not commercial farmers was with the fact that they had a slow rate of clearance. She says, “we can infer settlers’ goals and aspirations from the rate of land clearance, the slow rate
26 farmers had access to tools Upper Canada pioneers lacked, but if Russell’s pioneer logic can be applied to the little clay belt, 45 acres cleared in 16 years was a pretty fast land clearance rate when only 20 acres were needed for a viable mixed farm. An extra 20 acres of land could suggest farmers wanted to maximize profit.
Regardless of what the land clearance rate may indicate, during the period under study, settlers chose to keep family-oriented, mixed subsistence farms. If their drive was to increase capital, they would have specialized production for the local resource markets, which had a need for hay and grain to feed horses and workers, and family labour would have played a “marginal economic role”.94 In fact, Connor Simpson says, “it was all mixed farming, there was no one I knew that depended on grain alone…if you had a crop failure you lost everything”. The original settlers, and their children when they had farms, grew mixed grains -barley, oats, and wheat- and kept a variety of livestock -cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, turkeys, and geese- and a vegetable garden -typically composed of peas, carrots, turnips, potatoes, and cauliflower. It will be shown in the next section that a variety of crops and livestock were grown to provide most of the family’s food.
Settlers sought land on the little clay belt to provide for their children’s future.
Russell contends that “there is more to the economy than production; there is more to life than producing.”95 He says pioneers sought “an ample supply of land (almost always wild lands) to set up their sons or sons-in-law with the beginning of farms of their
of island clearance suggest that settlers’ ideology differed in some respects from that articulated in the dominant discourse [that advertised commercial prosperity].” (99) 94Peter Russell, How Agriculture Made Canada (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 18. 95 Russell, How Agriculture Made Canada, 25.
27 own.”96 The fast land clearance rate on the little clay belt may be indicative of the fact that the original settlers wanted to provide land for their children. Bill Gibson’s testimony illustrates that this may have been the case:
Well, he was raised in that environment that the farm was handed down, the families were kept together. That was the old method on family farms and he [his father] tried to do the same. When my brother came back from World War One [dad] bought the neighbors farm across the road and he wanted me to stay home and the three of us all worked together and then after I got married…he gave me the north end of the homestead and that’s where I started …I spent 25 years the best time of my life, and then I had to go buy another farm, and we did work together
Indeed, when Scott Montgomery got his own farm, he ended up settling his son. He says,
“we never lost a crop in our lifetime until 1956. My son built a barn on the corner of my place that year, and we were a little late to getting it finished, and that delayed harvest for ten days.” Upon their movement to their own farms, children were also given tools or livestock by their parents. Jason Armstrong says his father gave him and his wife a cow when they got married.97 Parents sought land on the little clay belt to provide for their children.
The little clay belt was an incongruous society. Farm families had a fast land- clearance rate, but were not concerned with maximizing profit; the land was a farmer’s means of existence, but in some cases fathers gave portions of their properties to their sons. Settler mentalité alone is not enough to determine why little clay belt farmers acted this way. Characterizing their actions as a choice denies “one of the richest premises of social history, namely that any society is made up of a set of interacting components
96 Russell, How Agriculture Made Canada, 17. 97 Interview of Jason Armstrong (NL11).
28 producing a complex equilibrium.”98 In the case under study, little clay belt farmers were the product of certain circumstances: free land received under the pre-emptive system, the tree-covered nature of their land plots, close markets available in mining settlements and logging camps, and a large labour force available in each family. Settlers may or may not have desired to become market-oriented commercial farmers, but a variety of factors determined the way in which little clay belt society functioned.
Subsistence or Capitalist Farmers?
Little clay belt families farmed to attain the household’s subsistence. Farm jobs were organized by gender. Men were responsible for the fieldwork, which meant growing the hay and mixed grains, and women had priority over growing a vegetable garden, poultry related tasks, and dairying. Product was primarily for home consumption, but a surplus was sold to the market in order to acquire basic needs. However, as shown above, using the market does not mean a full conversion to the market economy; the market was used as an opportunity, as another subsistence strategy, similar to the way mixed grains were grown with the intention of feeding the cattle, which, in turn, were used to produce dairy products for family use.
Before 1930, fieldwork on a little clay belt farm, which involved ploughing, sowing, and harvesting the hay and mixed grains, was done predominantly without machinery. While new farm implements, such as tractors, thrashing machines, and binders, were slowly introduced in the 1920s, farmers mostly used horse-drawn equipment. Elizabeth Sorkin says, “my dad never had a tractor…my husband never had a tractor either, [they had] horses.” Adam Follis adds that “tractors became quite popular in
98 Bouchard, “Marginality, Co-Integration”, 27.
29 the later [1920s]…1928, they were getting quite popular around that time.”99 Although thrashing machines became more prominent in the 1920s, they were communally used.
Connor Simpson says that a thrashing machine “would come to each farm in turn, it would take 6 to 8 men to operate it, and you would help your neighbours as it went around.” Interviewees mainly detail the way their fathers cultivated the soil with horse- drawn ploughs and spring tooth harrows, and used cradles and scythes to harvest.
Farmers generally started the seeding around the end of May, although John Smith says that his father sometimes planted the seeds towards the end of April. This was not an easy process, because Stacey Sanders says that her dad
walked behind the horses with a plough and the seed drill, they didn’t have anything that they rode on, except perhaps a land roller, but, perhaps, a little later they did get a disc they could sit on, but before that they had to walk behind everything, I often wonder how he did that, many miles it would be in a day.
The hay was harvested first, around the middle of July. Bill Gibson describes this strenuous process quite well, saying,
the hay, you cut it with a scythe…when it got dry you raked it up and put [it] into a coil…a coil is a pile of loose hay like an igloo…and of course you have a big field with coils all over the field…and then you, you go along and pitch it on your hay rack with a team [of horses], and take it to either, if you have a barn, your barn, if not if you have a stack, to the stack…that’s when you work[ed] for your living.
The grain was harvested in September, and this process was no easier than the haying.
Gibson explains how the farm man would cut the grain with a cradle, and the farm woman would tie it into sheaths. He says, “before the thrashing machines came they’d have a barn floor…[it would be put] on the floor and thrashed with a flail.” Even though
99 Interview of Adam Follis (NL12).
30 men were responsible for the fieldwork, women assisted whenever they needed help. It is difficult to imagine doing all the fieldwork devoid of machinery.
It should be mentioned that interviewees reject the notion that climate affected their crops. In the majority of interviews, farmers are asked if they ever lost a crop to frost, if the short growing season hindered production, or if farms were poorly drained.
Interviewees give reluctant answers, almost as if they are trying to brush the questions off. For example, when asked how the weather affected his dad’s crops, Bill Gibson says,
“most crops you’d lose from bad weather…[but] my father always said that the good
Lord would provide, and he always did.” When asked the same question, Connor
Simpson says, “usually we didn’t lose the full crop, but I remember losing two crops on account of extreme weather.” Adam Follis recalls his father losing one crop of barley in the 1930s to heavy rain and frost, but he goes on to say, “that was the only time, that was just the barley, it didn’t affect other grains.” Actually, when the interviewer presses Follis about the short growing season affecting crops, he replies, “no, I don’t think so. We couldn’t grow apples, or a lot of things that grow in the south, but as far as grain…and hay, they were, we always done well here”. As it will be shown further below, farmers supplemented a poor harvest by logging their land. The amount of timber marketed from a farmer’s land depended on how good or bad the farm season was.
Fieldwork was done mainly for on-farm consumption. The mixed grains and hay were grown to feed the livestock and the family. Connor Simpson, moving on to his own farm in 1933, says that “we [him and his wife] had mostly oats…on our own place we grew mixed grain, because we grew it for feed not for sale…[at dad’s place] his land was
31 pretty much the same”. Throughout Gary Boyd’s testimony he proudly remembers his parents’ farming everything they ate:
Well we had oats, we grow a lot of wheat at that time…we used to get wheat in the fall of the year after the thrashing was done, we’d clean up a couple of bags of wheat, take it to the grist mill and get the flour made…we used to have our own flour all winter, and oat meal, couple of bags of oats, and we’d have our oat meal porridge and stuff…[dad] might make one, maybe one trip…[every] four months to the store if we run out of some little thing, tea or sugar or something…we didn’t have to buy very much stuff, it’s not like today.
Similarly, when discussing the type of farm his parents’ had, Adam Follis says they were self-provisioning subsistence farmers, and boldly claims that they rarely sold anything to the market:
it was mixed crops, it was hay and grain, grain used to consist of barley, and wheat, and oats…and then, we used to take, my dad used to take the wheat to the mill, and have it made into flour, and the other grain was used mostly on the farm, used to have it chopped for the cows…and the horses, use the oats for the horses in the winter time… it was all pretty well used right on site for the home, not very often anything was sold off the farm.
Interviewees did sell their product, and Connor Simpson says that his father would take hay “to the railways so it could be sold to the bush camps, for the horses that worked in the bushes bringing out logs.” However, farmers were not market oriented, and off-farm grain or hay sales were used as an opportunity to further furnish subsistence. For example, in 1923, when Scott Montgomery’s parents had enough acres cleared, he says,
“my idea was, and it worked alright, we would sell enough grain…to pay for the bags
[grain bags?] or whatever there might be, and any hired help that we had, we bought very little stuff from outside”. Montgomery’s testimony illustrates how money was used to maintain the farm. Farmers did not have a goal of profit-maximization.
Farm women provided a lot of the family’s food by doing the dairying, poultry tending, and vegetable gardening. The farmer’s wife had under her control the vegetable
32 garden, the chicken coup, and the dairy cattle. Most interviews with women discuss how mothers provided milk, butter, cream, cheese, eggs, poultry meat, and garden vegetables
(such as carrots, turnips, potatoes) for their family. The significance of this provisioning should not be downplayed. During the 1930s, historian Cristine Bye says, women’s barnyard work “allowed families in parts of the province [Saskatchewan] to meet almost half their own food needs, and made a substantial contribution to the province’s overall economy.”100There should be no doubt that little clay belt farm women provided a lot of the family’s food.
Female Interviewees are very descriptive of the dairying work on the farm. Lucy
Simpson, her family moving to the little clay belt when she was five years old in 1901, describes how it wasn’t her job to do the milking, but her mother “would milk the cows and she would never sit down to do it”.101 Stacey Sanders remembers helping her mother make the butter, “we had a round barrel churn that worked with a crank on one side. You were supposed to get butter in 15 minutes, but sometimes it would take an hour”.
However, she also states that her mother had priority over the milking, and only “about three times…[Stacey] had to milk all the cows”. Jessica Martin only did the milking when her mother was busy doing other work.102 Elizabeth Sorkin was very vocal about the fact that her mother “made butter, a lot of butter”, even saying that she loved helping her mother do this because she got the chance to eat the butter straight from the churn.
Indeed, when daughters got married, their job was to do the dairying. Simpson, married
100 Cristine Bye, “‘I Like to Hoe My Own Row’: A Saskatchewan Farm Woman’s Notions about Work and Womanhood During the Great Depression,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26, 3 (2005), 139. 101 Interview of Lucy Simpson (NL3). 102 Interview of Jessica Martin (NL16).
33 in 1916, says, “I always had to milk a cow or two, and feed the pigs, when my husband was working away from home”. When Sorkin got married, the dairying became her responsibility. Marie Lacroix similarly says, “after I was married I made butter.”103These accounts elucidate how important the dairying was on a clay belt farm.
To provide basic necessities, farm women sold or traded surplus products at local markets. Historian Nancy Osterud, referring to the farm woman’s sale of product she produced in Nanticoke valley during the 1870s, says, women were “actively involved in the most highly valued form of farm labor… women’s work was as integral to the earning of farm income as it was to the provision of family subsistence.”104 On the little clay belt,
Stacey Sanders recalls her mother making “[butter] pound prints for sale.” She remembers her mother going to Cobalt, a town that sprang up from the discovery of silver in 1903, at least once a week to trade and sell butter, eggs, and chickens.105 Kaitlin
Lyndon also describes how her mother churned “the butter and sold it in town.”106 She says the butter would be traded for other groceries as well. This is very similar to
Elizabeth Sorkin, who says her mother went to the Cobalt market with “a few chickens, and ducks.” She even adds that on a good Saturday at the market her mother would make
15 to 20 dollars. When Sorkin married in 1921 her farm role functioned similarly to her mother’s, and she found herself going to Cobalt by train to sell product. The significance
103 Interview of Marie Lacroix (NL20). 104 Nancy Osterud, Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth- Century New York (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 156. 105 Watson, Frontier Movement and Economic Development, 204. Watson says, “After 1904, with the opening of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway…production from Cobalt mines increased rapidly, and the number of producing mines rose from five in 1904 to a maximum of thirty in 1908 and 1909. In 1914 twenty-seven mines were in production.” (209) 106 Interview of Kaitlin Lyndon (NL19).
34 of this money should not be downplayed. Historians Deborah Fink and Dorothy
Schweider show, in the United States of America during the 1930s, that “farm woman’s home production was typically 40 to 50 percent of the total household budget.”107 The income that women generated with their sale of surplus product was “used for the everyday expenses of maintaining the farm household”.108Women were crucial in supplying the family’s subsistence. Bye says, “it was women who kept their families on the land [during the 1930s]”.109
There is a sharp distinction between using the market, and becoming subservient to the market. Little clay belt farmers owned the means of production, the land and farm tools, which allowed them to produce crops and livestock for home consumption, and to market surpluses to acquire other products. But political scientist Ellen Wood says that
“throughout recorded history and no doubt before…people have exchanged and sold their surpluses in many different ways and for many different purposes.”110 However, until
“the production of the means of survival and self-reproduction is market-dependent, there is no capitalist mode of production.”111 In itself, selling product to the market is not capitalist. On the little clay belt, farmers were not market-dependent, in the sense that they did not specialize production for the market, but used the market as a subsistence strategy, alongside farming a lot of the food they ate.
107 Dorothy Schweider and Deborah Fink, “Iowa Farm Women in the 1930s,” Annals of Iowa 49, 7 (1989), 574. 108 Fink, Schweider, “Iowa Farm Women”, 574. 109 Bye, “‘I like to Hoe My Own Row’”, 139. 110 Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 96. 111 Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 140-141.
35
Household Work Apart From Farming
Apart from farming, little clay belt farmers used domestic and off-farm work to sustain the household. After the farming season, at the end of September, farm men worked in the logging industry, engaging in what historian Ruth Sandwell terms occupational pluralism, as a subsistence tool to ensure the provisioning of necessities during the winter months. In the house, women did the cooking, cleaning, child rearing, dish washing, sewing, firewood gathering, and any other job concerned with the family’s daily routines. Both of these jobs were equally important, and complemented farming by contributing to the household’s subsistence.
The logging industry offered farmers a crucial avenue to ensure their family’s survival during the winter. Men would sell timber from their lots, or work in lumber camps for a few months before the farming season started in May. Similarly to what
Sandwell has shown of late nineteenth century Saltspring Island farmers and their involvement in seasonal work, oral histories indicate little clay belt farmers were not primarily concerned with maximizing or accumulating wealth.112 In fact, Scott
Montgomery remembers his father selling just enough timber to guarantee the acquisition of basic goods until the next winter. When discussing the amount of logs sold from his parents’ property, Montgomery says, “you didn’t take any more money than you needed, you bought your tea and coffee, whatever, tar paper…we’d take out about 500 dollars worth of timber each winter… and we bought our basic things… we would make about
500 to 600 dollars a year, now that would keep us, that would carry us through until the next winter.” Actually, Bill Gibson states that the amount of timber he sold from his land
112 Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space, 156.
36 depended on the harvest from the previous farm season. When the interviewer asks how he survived the winter after a bad harvest, he replies, “you’d cut your stock [of timber] according to what grain or hay you did get.” This is a significant statement, because it shows that Gibson logged to supplement his farm provisioning, not to increase profit.
This was, however, a volatile industry, because Montgomery goes on to say, when discussing an instance his parents’ sold wood, “we shipped one car load and it went to
Thor[?] and one to Stray[?], and never got a cent for it, now this wasn’t uncommon, this happened to a lot of the guys…you just forget about it or move on.” Clearly, the gamble involved with selling logs off one’s property illustrates that it was not a guaranteed route to riches. Bill Gibson articulates the vagaries quite well in his description of the sale of timber from his dad’s homestead. He recalls helping his dad cut logs off his property, and their transportation to the buyer:
logs, spruce, jack pine, what ever they had, cut them into logs or pulpwood, either one, take them to the river or streams, [in the winter] dump them into the bank, and [in] the spring dumped [them] into the water and floated down to the mills, whoever were buying them….logs had to be drove, what they called a river drive… a big game of men, the company that was buying the logs, they generally paid a gang of men to drive the logs down…to keep them moving.
Dumping logs into a river and hoping that they reached a buyer was a risky endeavor.
Although logging was an unpredictable industry, when asked by his interviewer how his parents survived the winter, Gibson replies, “I dunno,” with a slight chuckle, “selling wood I guess.”
Since the logging industry was a necessity for subsistence, it was also a family affair. In the gendered arrangement of little clay belt farms, sons did jobs that followed after their fathers, ensuring the reproduction of family farm roles; it should come as no surprise that they participated in the logging. In some cases, as that of Adam Follis, sons
37 were expected to work away from home in a lumber camp, and to turn wages over to their parents. When asked about the first time he worked away from his parents’ homestead, Follis replies, “well the first time I worked away from home was in 1924 or
25…when I was down working on the highway…I’d be about 17 then…we used to work in the bush or farm, and my dad used to get the contracts from the lumbering companies, taking out the timber in the wintertime”. Bill Gibson also articulates this nicely, saying, “I went to a lumber camp when I was 14 and took a man’s place on the crosscut saw.” John
Smith says his parents made him do road construction during the 1920s in order to pay their taxes. Sons were expected to assist their fathers, but women were supposed to help them too. Elizabeth Sorkin recalls her mother and grandmother sawing the logs her father would chop down. She says, “dad used to draw the logs in and granny used to saw them with a crosscut saw and she had dad going to town every other day with a load of wood…yes they sold it, they used to get two and a quarter, two fifty for a cord of wood.”
The main thing we should read from the above testimonies is that participation in the logging industry was necessary for survival. Every family member had to participate.
Logging their land offered a little clay belt family direct access to their own building materials, heating supplies, and an additional resource for barter. Oral histories describe the ways in which buildings on homesteads, typically stables, barns, and houses, were made entirely from the farmers’ own trees. The first house Bill Gibson’s parents had when he was born was a sixteen by twenty-four foot log shack they made themselves. In later years, Gibson remembers his father carrying logs through the bush for two miles to build a new roof and floor. This was the norm for early settlers. It was common for families to build additions to the original buildings (maybe adding a second floor, or
38 another room), but they would sometimes build new buildings altogether. Connor
Simpson recalls his dad chopping wood during the winter for firewood, but he also says logs were cut with the foresight of using them to build in the summer: “The winter cutting was mostly done for firewood, and yes, we took out logs in the winter, not a great many, but enough to make a building that we planned such as a henhouse or a machine shed or what have you the next year.” This was also the case with John Smith’s parents.
After they presumably constructed log buildings upon their move to Dymond Township in 1904 or 1905 (his memory is a little foggy), Smith’s parents intended to build afresh frame dwellings from lumber they had saved, but this took more than a decade. This was mostly due to unforeseen circumstances, because his parents gave their lumber to neighbours in need: “we had lumber saved up to build the house, and twice there, some of the neighbours house got burnt, and we didn’t get building our own house until 1922, and the barn 1918…”. In fact, when Smith married his wife in 1931 they moved to a new plot of land in Hudson Township, and they lived in an old cowshed until they built their house in 1933. Interestingly enough, the wood from a family’s lot was also traded. Kaitlin
Lyndon remembers her father trading the wood off their lot during the early 1920s: “I can remember my father taking a load of wood to town and he traded it for a gramophone.”
Lyndon also remembers her father bartering goods for pork, and other necessities. The trees on a little clay belt farmers’ property had multiple uses.
Participation in the logging industry allowed farmers to make more money than what was required for their immediate needs. In historian Beatrice Craig’s study of
Madawaska farmers, she concerns herself with determining how these farmers participated in markets, and if their involvement could be labeled as capitalist. One of the
39 ways she attempts to prove they were not capitalists was with the fact that they did not invest in machinery to increase productivity.113 Now in the case of little clay belt farmer
Bill Gibson, he did invest in machinery. Around 1921, after working in a lumber camp,
Gibson used the money he earned to buy a tractor. He says, “my first tractor, 1921…I worked in other lumber camps, and that’s how I bought my tractor, I worked all winter 45 dollars a month top wage, and come out with about three hundred dollars, that’s something. I bought a tractor, I made a down payment, I went to work with that tractor day and night… and I paid for it in the first year.” This testimony appears to conflict with the idea that the logging industry was not used to maximize profit, because Gibson may have bought a tractor with the intention of accruing a larger profit from farming and logging. However, when Gibson bought this tractor he was still living with his parents, and they continued to have a mixed subsistence farm. In fact, as shown in a previous section of this paper, when Gibson married in 1924 his father gave him the north end of his homestead, and he ended up having his own mixed subsistence farm. Gibson made a profit in the logging industry, but his actions indicates that profit was secondary to advancing the household’s independence.
Interestingly enough, and further evidence of their family-centered values, was the fact that little clay belt farmers cooperatively logged their kin’s land. In many cases, when sons moved onto their own farms, their family ties afforded an environment that allowed its members to work reciprocally in logging teams, intermittently logging each others land for lumber contracts, and most likely splitting the profits. In 1927, when Scott
113 Craig, Backwoods Consumers, 174.
40
Montgomery lived on his own farm, he and his brother accepted a contract from a logging company in Pennsylvania. He says,
we took a contract with an outfit that [made] telephone poles in Pennsylvania, for a thousand telephone poles, a few were 18 feet, twenty feet long…the big ones were 45 feet, we were three weeks taking that out in march, we would take the horses out with the skid at night, my brother did the drawing and I did the skidding, the highest one was a cedar about 50 feet long…we done that in three weeks and took stuff to the [railway station].
Montgomery and his brother provided logs for their contract by working together, and we can assume they logged both their lots. This was not a unique occurrence, because Bill
Gibson recalls the same thing: “my dad and older brother had two farms on the Montreal river, that they located at that time in [1913-1919?]…we used to timber back there”. This was also something that John Smith remembers quite well: “My brothers, two brothers they got farms there, and we all worked together for haying or harvest, and cutting wood in the winter time…there was a while there when we run out of wood and we head to
Quebec, further west, and get government wood lots…1926 we got a wood lot.” When they worked in the logging industry, farmers maintained their family-centered customs.
Occupational pluralism was used as a subsistence strategy to maintain the household. Bouchard contends that a farm community that engages in multi-activity
“manages to perpetuate itself by taking advantage of various sources of by-employment and cash offered by the capitalist economy (seasonal or part-time work, sale of products off the land)…without truly converting to [its]…ethic or structure.”114 He goes on to say that surviving through off-farm work and self-provisioning, “gave farmers a sense of independence that would have been compromised by specialization or monoculture.”115
114 Bouchard, “Marginality, Co-Integration”, 25. 115 Bouchard, Marginality, Co-Integration”, 26.
41
Little clay belt farmers were what Sandwell would call semi-proletariats, in that they associated themselves with markets, but did not become “fully fledged urban proletarians…or owners of successful agri-businesses”.116 They used the logging industry to support the household, similarly to the way in which they kept chickens to provide the family’s meat and eggs.
Crucial to the preservation of the household was the work farm women did inside the house. Oral testimonies make it clear that only the farmer’s wife and her daughters were involved in household tasks. One daughter, Stacey Sanders, gave an interview detailing her childhood on her parents’ farm in Harley Township. Her parents moved to the area in 1912, a result of the 160 acres given to them through the pre-emptive system, and she describes the role she had on the farm, which typically followed after her mother’s. She says, at the age of ten, “I washed dishes, swept the floor, set the table, peeled potatoes, any of those chores. Sometimes I had to bring in the wood.” Stacey also describes how she learned to make soap from grease and rinds by following after her mother. Another daughter, Elizabeth Sorkin, explains how her mother provided the family’s clothing by knitting socks and sweaters. She says, “mother used to spin her yarn and make it in to whole. And her and granny would knit socks and mitts and sweaters…we had a few sheep…my dad [and] my brother used to shear them.” Sorkin’s mother also enlisted her daughters’ help to gather firewood and wash the dishes. These household chores were fundamental for the farm’s daily running.
Gender was the determinant of what job a person did on the farm. When daughters got married their role on the farm followed after their mother’s, which
116 Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space, 155.
42 evidently guaranteed what role their future daughters would have as well. Sorkin, marrying her husband in 1921, shows this. Moving just a few miles away from her parents’ homestead, Elizabeth became responsible for the household chores when her husband got their farm. Kaitlin Lyndon, six years old when her father started building their house in Sutton Bay, gives a good indication of what we are now seeing as the inherent role of the farm woman. She says, “I never thought of these things as chores, you never think about it.” These jobs came naturally to her. She goes on saying, “[I] learned to bake, and sew, and knit…I brought in wood, do dishes…My regular chores were sweeping up, doing dishes…look[ing] after the toilet”. While these accounts illustrate how ingrained gender roles were on little clay belt farms, they also show the priority given to maintaining household principles. Domestic work kept the household functioning; therefore it was reproduced from generation to generation.
Unequal power relations were perpetuated on little clay belt farms. Men did not consider the farm woman’s work inside the house important. It was only the accounts given by daughters, not by the sons, which reveal what work was done inside the house.
Sons say nothing about the knitting, cooking, dishes, or anything else mentioned above that their mothers did. Testimonies given by the daughters clearly describe the role of their fathers on the farm, because women were expected to help men when they needed it.
It is interesting to note that this did not happen the other way around; men were not expected to help with a woman’s domestic chores if she was overworked. Interviewee’s make no mention of anyone other than the farmer’s wife and her daughters doing the chores that allowed the household’s daily routine. Indeed, one of the male interviewees,
Bill Gibson, says, “no boy likes to work in the house.”
43
Historians have been adamant in their descriptions of the unequal power relations within rural families. In her study of Nanticoke valley farm families in the late nineteenth century, historian Nancy Osterud contends that women were overworked, and they had little respect or power within the farm family.117 She says, “patterns of authority within families determined the allocation of tasks among family members.”118 Historian
Marjorie Cohen, with regards to rural household structures in nineteenth century Ontario, argues that men “rarely performed duties regarded as women’s work. Tasks relating to child-rearing, cooking, and cleaning were strictly women’s work and however burdensome…men were not expected to help.”119 She goes on to say that men had
“priority over labour in the household, and when this required extra labour, women and children were expected to [assist]”.120 Historian Cristine Bye, writing about farming on the Canadian Prairies during the early 1900s, similarly says, “prairie farm families…[valued] ‘men’s work’ more than ‘women’s work’”.121 Adding that women
“were expected to serve men-to make it possible for them to do their work-rather than vice versa.”122 Perhaps a further testament to the rural family’s value of men’s work over women’s could be seen in historian Ruth Sandwell’s study of Saltspring Island. She says that in “spite of numerous indications that Saltspring Island women were an important part of an economy rooted in the farm and household, information on women’s
117 Osterud, Bonds of Community, 144. 118 Osterud, Bonds of Community, 141. 119 Marjorie Cohen, Women’s Work, Markets, and Economic Development in Nineteenth- Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 71. 120Cohen, Women’s Work, 71. 121 Bye, “‘I like to Hoe My Own Row’”, 135. 122 Bye, “‘I like to Hoe My Own Roe’”, 147
44 contributions to the island economy is very difficult to find…silence…defines women’s work in the primary sources”.123
Domestic work was essential for a little clay belt farm family’s preservation.
Historian Jane Errington argues that without “a wife, a new settler” in early nineteenth century Upper Canada “had a difficult, if not impossible task establishing [a farm]”.124Errington uses diary accounts that detail the remarkable amount of jobs Upper
Canada farm women did each day. While many of these jobs were similar to what oral accounts indicate little clay belt farm women did, such as the cooking, cleaning, and child rearing, Errington describes others, like rationing the summer’s harvest for the winter, and preserving butchered meat with salt, which shows just how important women were to a farm family.125 Domestic work, like the farm man’s participation in the logging industry, was vital to the household’s subsistence.
Reciprocal Work Bees
Little clay belt farmers relied on reciprocal work bees to ensure their farms’ annual maintenance. A bee was a gathering of farmers who “worked together industriously with the bustle of bees in a hive.”126 They would raise barns, clear land, harvest crops, and thrash wheat. Farm families’ used bees as another dependency to ensure the survival of their households’, and their participation preserved social relations with neighbours. However, my evidence indicates that the deep communal bonds of the
123Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space, 124. 124 Jane Errington, Wives and Mothers, School Mistresses and Scullery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada, 1790-1840 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 81. 125 Errington, Wives and Mothers, 94. 126 Catharine Wilson, “Reciprocal Work Bees and the Meaning of Neighbourhood,” Canadian Historical Review 82, 3 (2001), 443.
45 bee symbolized the little clay belt farm community’s desire to ensure each of its members subsisted; bees were not primarily an individualist, self-interested endeavor.
Historian Catharine Wilson writes on nineteenth century work bees in what is now southern Ontario. She details how they involved a gathering of farmers at certain times of the year to do jobs that would have taken a lot more effort, and time, to complete if done alone, and it was “understood that the same effort would be returned”. 127 While the only immediate payment was “meat and drink”128, farmers realized that participation in a bee was essential for social bonding; if farmers did not participate they were shunned in the community.129 Wilson says Marxist historians “view reciprocal labour as evidence of the moral economy and the antithesis to capitalistic farming systems.”130 However, she does not agree, and argues farmers’ participated in bees to advance their families’ individual prosperity. For example, barn-raising was “a momentous achievement in an individual family’s measure of material success…[and] symbolized…their material wealth”.131 On the little clay belt, farmers viewed reciprocal work bees as an integral part of their community. However, while bees may have fostered a family’s prosperity, oral accounts indicate that they also represented a cooperation that was sustained for the sake of strengthening the community.
Little clay belt work bees involved jobs integral for a farm’s upkeep. Men typically participated in jobs they would do on their own farms. Scott Montgomery describes how he enlisted the help of his neighbors when he built his barn in 1934. John
127 Wilson, “Reciprocal Work”, 440. 128 Wilson, “Reciprocal Work”, 437. 129 Wilson, “Reciprocal Work”, 442. 130 Wilson, “Reciprocal Work,” 433. 131 Wilson, “Reciprocal Work”, 461.
46
Smith similarly explains how neighbours helped build his farm, and there was “a lot of barn raising [bees] at that time.” Stacey Sanders, her parents moving to the area in 1912, says all the men built her parents’ house. Elizabeth Sorkin could remember the bees very well, and she describes the ones her parents participated in during the 1910s. This interviewee is very outspoken about the bees. One can hear in her voice a clear longing to relive the experience. She says “the neighbors helped, they helped one another, even clearing land, had clearing land bees, and wood sawing bees”. It’s obvious that work bees were an important part of a farmers’ life on the little clay belt during the early twentieth century. Wilson even comments that work bees made farmers dependent on each other, possibly creating whole neighborhoods that were self-sufficient.132 Male farmers assisted their neighbors with jobs they did on their own farm, and women were heavily, and equally, involved in reciprocal work bees at jobs they did on the farm.
Farm women participation ensured the continuation of the bees. Farmers participating in a bee expected food, drink, and entertainment.133 This was the farm women’s responsibility. Wilson says the “women’s role in preparing and executing the feast and festivities…were essential components to any successful bee, the first installment in the pay-back system”.134 Additionally, historian Nancy Osterud asserts that women’s involvement in reciprocal relationships, exchanging work and supplies, ensured the long-term existence, and maintenance, of neighborhood networks.135 Farm women in the community understood that they were supposed to assist the woman hosting the bee,
132 Wilson, “Reciprocal Work”, 439. 133 Wilson, “Reciprocal Work”, 443. 134 Wilson, “Reciprocal Work”, 452. 135 Nancy Grey Osterud, “Gender and the Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,” Agricultural History 67, 2 (1993), 28.
47 and they would receive the same help in kind. Scott Montgomery comments that they had to feed over 150 people after their barn-raising bee. He says all the “women in the community come and brought something”, and the people were fed with the beef and pork from the farm. Bill Gibson mentions that his wife provided a “barn raising supper”, and everyone helped each other out back then. During a thrashing bee, Stacey Sanders says her mother needed help from other women to make “pies for the meals…[and] to be sure there was water enough for the steam engine”. Similarly, Elizabeth Sorkin describes the large suppers when bees were over, remembering one that culminated in a large dance for everyone. Women preparing feasts was an important contribution to, and sustained, the community during work bees in the early 1900s.
Wilson argues that bees declined in southern Ontario at the end of the nineteenth century, because “many people chose to leave the obligations and inconvenience of cooperative work behind for other ways over which they had greater control.”136
According to Wilson, the common complaint regarding bees was that the host found it difficult to control the helpers. There were some helpers who participated “with the attitude that the host was lucky to have them and they drank and ate heartily while leaving little in the way of quality workmanship.”137Further, sometimes a bee was called at an inopportune moment for a farm family. Even though they had their own work to deal with, they felt they had to contribute since a debt was owed.138 When southern
Ontario farmers realized that hiring wage labourers was more efficient, bees died out.139
136 Wilson, “Reciprocal Work”, 461 137 Wilson, “Reciprocal Work”, 461. 138 Wilson, “Reciprocal Work”, 462. 139 Wilson, “Reciprocal Work”, 463.
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On the little clay belt, though, work bees continued well into the twentieth century. None of the oral accounts consulted for this paper indicate the host of a bee ever had a problem with lazy, idle, or inefficient helpers. When describing the bees, Sam
Harris says, “that was a constant going on in the community…barn-raising, they used to get the main frame up and then they’d choose up sides; half would work on one half of the barn, and half would work on the other side, and then they’d race to see who would get their side up first.”140 Actually, when recounting the bees, Connor Simpson, with a laugh, says, “we worked hard and ate heavy.” The problems that Wilson’s Upper Canada farmers had with bees do not appear to have affected little clay belt farmers.
When little clay belt farmers enlisted the help of others, it was understood that a non-cash payment would be exchanged for the helpers’ efforts, and the helper would be paid back in kind when needed. Bill Gibson says, “if they [farmers] had a barn-raising or logging bee, [you would] just go around and tell the neighbours your having a bee, they all came, nobody was paid, but when they wanted help you go around and help him, that’s the way they should be yet by rights.” Gary Boyd, born on his parents’ farm in
1905, was very nostalgic about the communal atmosphere on the little clay belt. When recounting how his father slaughtered livestock, he says, “we’d always have neighbours you see, neighbours at that time they would help one another, you wouldn’t have to do it alone. You’d get two [or] three neighbours hand in, then you’d go help them do something. We worked together then, like ordinary teamwork.” These significant statements show that farmers were obligated to reciprocally participate in bees. But this obligation does not appear to have been tracked. It was understood that community
140 Interview of Sam Harris (NL18).
49 members were supposed to participate. When describing the binding reciprocal nature of bees, James Dilbert says,
in this thrashing bee, now if your neighbour had three days thrashing and you only had one and a half [days], or one day, it didn’t make no difference. You went and helped until he was done, and he helped you until you were finished. There was no thought for extra time that anyone owed one another. If you had a piece of machinery that your neighbour needed, he was welcome to it, and you were welcome to anything he had141
Dilbert’s testimony indicates that some little clay belt farmers did not track obligations in market terms -that is, they did not keep a record of hours worked, or the monetary value of labour. I believe that this shows little clay belt farmers did not primarily participate in bees with the idea of advancing their families’ individual prosperity. In other words, if farmers did not track debts, they did not participate in a neighbour’s bee to enforce that neighbour’s repayment at a future bee. Instead, there appears to have been a general desire by farmers to work reciprocally to ensure each community members’ subsistence.
They preserved their community relations for the sake of the community itself.
What Did Farming, Logging, Domestic Work, and Work Bees Accomplish?
Little clay belt farm families’ were neither “fully capitalist nor fully peasant”; rather, they integrated both strategies to advance the household.142 I have shown the multiple dependencies of a little clay belt farm family. They grew hay and mixed grains for livestock feed; slaughtered cows and pigs for home consumption; sold and traded farm product to the market to acquire basic needs; participated in the logging industry to
141 Interview of Tim McNeely (NL21). 142 This quote is from Ruth Sandwell, “Notes Toward A History of Rural Canada, 1870- 1940,” in Social Transformation in Rural Canada: Community, Cultures, and Collective Action ed. John R. Parkins and Maureen G. Reed (British Columbia: University of British Columbia Press, 2012), 22, but used in the context of her description of rural populations in Canada pre-1941.
50 earn money that provisioned subsistence during the winter; heavily depended on domestic work to continue daily farm routines; and relied on reciprocal work bees to annually maintain the farm and preserve the community. Farming, logging, domestic work, and work bees were subsistence strategies. As in the case of Sandwell’s Saltspring Island farmers, Temiskaming district farmers were not primarily concerned with profit- maximization, and they used “a wide variety of activities, including waged work, commodity sales, and self-provisioning,” to continue to reproduce a household-centered, independent community.143 Little clay belt farmers did not have a sole dependence on the market, nor were they self-provisioning subsistence farmers, but they used both means to support their families, which allowed them to operate outside a system of capitalism.
The little clay belt fits into what Bouchard calls “co-integration”. Actually, according to Bouchard, the distinctive features of co-integration, “remoteness, underdevelopment, multi-activity, strong local solidarity, [and] maintenance of so-called traditional collective traits”, were not unique to the Saguenay farming community.144
Indeed, he argues that “multi-activity, seasonal work and family service have been
[unknowingly] identified by a number of authors”, including those writing about English
Canada.145 The findings of my research illustrates that little clay belt farmer behavior functioned identically to the ways in which Bouchard’s Saguenay farmers operated.
143 Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space, 156. 144 Bouchard, “Marginality, Co-Integration”, 30. 145 Bouchard, “Marginality, Co-Integration”, 31, lists many publications, such as Janine Roelens and Kris Inwood, “‘Labouring at the Loom’: A Case Study of Rural Manufacturing in Leeds County, Ontario, 1870,” Canadian Papers in Rural History 8 (1992), Robert Marvin McInnis, “Marketable Surpluses in Ontario Farming, 1860,” Social Science History 8 (1984), Joy Parr, “Hired Men: Ontario Agricultural Wage Labour in Historical Perspective,” Labour/Le Travail 15 (1985) Marjorie Cohen, Women’s Work, Markets, and Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century Ontario
51
Conclusion: The Failure of Commercial Market-Oriented Farming
In 1961, George McDermott did a quantitative study of clay belt agriculture, focusing on the period from 1931 to 1957. His project contains valuable information regarding what type of settler stayed on the clay belt amid the mass out-migration that started in the 1930s. McDermott says the clay belt was characterized by farms on “the brink of abandonment and the care of a garden or a cow… [was] the extent of the settlers’ agricultural endeavor.”146 He says, “settlers have at one time cleared and cultivated enough land, about fifteen acres, to obtain a patent, but now keep only a cow or two and cultivate a garden”.147 This is noteworthy information, because it shows that the farmers who persisted on the clay belt had mixed farms. McDermott also details how some of the enduring settlers survived by mixing farming and off-farm work: “[the] settlers who remain derive very little of their income from farming, but work at jobs elsewhere while continuing to live on their farm lot.”148 He says, “three-fourths of the settlers in Cochrane and Abitibi [towns on the great clay belt] have found it necessary to couple farming with forestry or some other occupation…The present part-time farming-forestry occupance of the Great Clay Belt is viewed by Ontario officials as a temporary, yet essential, phase in the sequence of occupation leading to full-time farming.”149 After 1931, McDermott’s study suggests that clay belt farmers subsisted through mixed farming, some farm sales, and participation in the logging industry. The picture McDermott paints of little clay belt
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), Ruth Sandwell, “Rural Reconstruction: Towards a New Synthesis in Canadian History,” Historie Sociale/Social History 27 1994, and many others. 146McDermott, “Frontiers of Settlement in the Great Clay Belt”, 266. 147 McDermott, “Frontiers of Settlement in the Great Clay Belt”, 270. 148 McDermott, “Frontiers of Settlement in the Great Clay Belt”, 267. 149 McDermott, “Frontiers of Settlement in the Great Clay Belt”, 271.
52 farmers agrees with the picture I have drawn in this paper. Though McDermott has classified the type of farmer that remained on the clay belt a failure, we can see how his concept of success relates to profitable or not.
We need to rethink how we view agricultural success and failure. McDermott, like many after, does not see the farms that survived on the clay belt as a success, because these farms were not making a significant profit. But the failure of market-oriented commercial agriculture does not mean all farming was a failure. This is the wrong way to look at agriculture; not everything is about increased production, maximizing profit, and material gain. I believe the overall purpose I had in writing this paper was to give respect to the early little clay belt farmers that primarily concerned themselves with maintaining their households. These people, like many rural people across Canada doing similar work, did not think that they were failures.
53
Bibliography
Oral History Interviews
Ontario Archive Center. RG 16-200, DVD 545. “Farm Work and Farm Life in Ontario Since 1890 Oral History Project”.
Interview of Scott Montgomery (NL1).
Interview of John Smith (NL2).
Interview of Lucy Simpson (NL3).
Interview of Connor Simpson (NL4).
Interview of Bill Gibson (NL5).
Interview of Stacey Sanders (NL9).
Interview of Elizabeth Sorkin (NL10).
Interview of Jason Armstrong (NL11)
Interview of Adam Follis (NL12).
Interview of Jessica Martin (NL16).
Interview of Bob McDermott (NL17).
Interview of Sam Harris (NL18).
Interview of Kaitlin Lyndon (NL19).
Interview of Marie Lacroix (NL20).
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Interview of Gary Boy (NL23).
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Dominion Bureau of Statistics. Sixth Census of Canada, 1921: Volume V Agriculture. Department of Trade and Commerce, 1924.
Kulasekera, Kumuduni. “Census Farms Classified by Industry, by County.” Ontario
54
Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. http://omaf.gov.on.ca/english/stats/census/cty35_11.htm
------“Census Farms Classified by Economic Class and Total Value of Sales, by County, 2011.” Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs. http://omaf.gov.on.ca/english/stats/census/cty35_11.htm
Temiscaming and Northern Ontario Railway Commission. The Great Clay Belt of Northern Ontario. Ontario Government Railways, 1913.
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Bouchard, Gerard. “Marginality, Co-Integration and Change: Social History as a Critical Exercise.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 8 (1997): 19-38.
Brozowski, Roman, Topps, Keith, Rees, David. “Agriculture and Settlement.” In A Vast and Magnificent Land: An Illustrated History of Northern Ontario, edited by Mat Bray and Ernie Epp, 109-126. Thunder Bay and Sudbury: Lakehead and Laurentian Universities, 1984.
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