I had the pleasure of attending a presentation this morning on the progress of a written history of the village of Tyne Valley. My friend Carolyn McKillop, who grew up in Tyne Valley, has been doing research for years, and has amassed a jaw-dropping collection of photographs and information. It was a nerdy delight to see her incredibly well-organized records.
She has joined forces with Gary MacDougall, another Tyne Valley native and former editor of The Guardian, Charlottetown’s daily newspaper. The meeting was as well organized as Carolyn’s research, and both of them gave an excellent overview on what they have accomplished.
Item Five on the agenda, “Dreaming of time”, had Gary’s name next to it. He said he had been thinking a lot about time recently, perhaps because he is getting older. He admitted what he was going to say might sound a bit “out there”, but he went on anyway, as he was amongst family and friends, and said he feels that the people and events from the past are still here with us somehow. He called it the Cosmic Filing Cabinet, how the memories and events of the past are just filed away, waiting there for us to discover them. In the midst of a meeting of the practicalities of creating a community history, he offered a short, beautifully poetic aside about trying to understand his place in time.
Now, Gary is my second cousin, so perhaps there is some genetic resonance at play here, but I’ve also been thinking about time a lot as well, and in a similar way. I find myself time travelling, almost forgetting that those I love who are no longer physically here actually are. I’m not seeing ghosts, nor am I lost or having delusions (I hope!). Time is bending, and I find myself pulled from it, suspended and observing it, and then dropping back down into the stream of time.
It started one winter night a couple of years ago while I was driving home from another meeting in Tyne Valley, as it happens. Warm light was glowing through house windows, and it struck me that the light I was seeing was more or less the same kind of light I would have seen 50 years ago when I was a child being driven along the same road. The houses had memories, were doing the same things as they always had, looked the same way. Different people inside, in most cases, but that wasn’t evident from the road. It could be 50 years ago, it could be now, it could be 75 years in the future. Time didn’t matter.
I passed a house that had belonged to one of my great-uncles and pictured him sitting inside it watching television. I passed the store and house that had belonged to my parents and could see them in both, quick flashes of them as young people. Then our immediate neighbours doing their evening chores in their barns and kitchens. There were no figures in the windows, but the light was timeless and transported me away.
If I’m feeling out of sorts, discouraged or overwhelmed, I have learned to open what I guess I’ll have to start calling my Cosmic Filing Cabinet and pull out a good, warm memory. I can put myself back in my childhood bedroom, all Barbie pink and filled with stuffed toys, my ginger cat asleep at the foot of my bed, listening to adults murmuring and laughing in the living room after a dinner party. I know where every light switch is in that house, what was in every drawer, how the basement smelled, what could be seen from every window. I can go back and be there and find the security and comfort I was so fortunate to have as a child, no worries or concerns.
As Gary said, a human lifetime is but a blip in the history of the universe, but it matters. We are creatures who are bedevilled by the knowledge that our time is limited, but who look for meaning in spite of that knowledge. We just need the key for that filing cabinet.
Freeland Presbyterian Church, December 24, 2021. Generations of my family have worshipped here, their prayers and songs clinging to the fine polished wood interior.
Earlier this week I changed the tagline for my blog to Always looking for connections. When I’ve been asked what I write about on my website, I’ve said it’s about community and family history, a bit of DIY, anything that has caught my interest, really, everything and nothing.
But I realized recently that what I get most from writing here is figuring out how I’m connected to other people, both alive and dead, how the past is connected to the present, how one thought leads to another. Writing this blog helps me find my place in the midst of churn and the passage of time.
News is spreading across, well, the world of the death of Leo Cheverie, a widely-known and hugely loved Islander. I met Leo 7 years ago when I was working on an outdoor theatre show. He had volunteered to help park cars, cheerfully donning a safety vest and capably Tetrising vehicles to make the best use of the space available. We got chatting and quickly we connected the dots: he knew my neighbour’s nephew, perhaps a vague connection, but that’s enough here. I know you. We are connected.
When I asked Leo if he was going to stay to see the show, the only real perk of volunteering for a sold-out show, he said he wished he could, but he had just come from volunteering at another event and had promised to sell 50/50 tickets at a concert later that evening. Three volunteer roles in one day was probably not unusual for Leo, which is how he was known everywhere.
I bumped into Leo a few times since then: at a rally, at a meeting, and on social media. The last time I saw him was in December 2021, when he and I joined a mutual friend who was visiting PEI and staying at a beautiful Summerside inn. The heritage home was decorated for Christmas, and we had a lovely time talking, drinking tea and eating Christmas cookies in the inn’s parlour.
The afternoon slipped away, snow started to fall and I had to start for home. I hugged Leo and made him promise to visit me during his summer solstice trip, when he and a friend would start their day at the East Point lighthouse and drive across the province to end up in North Cape, stopping to visit folks along the way. I’m not sure he was ever able to make that longest-day pilgrimage again as he was diagnosed with cancer in spring 2022.
I can’t claim any deeper connection to Leo than what I’ve written here, but I admired and liked him so much, and his example makes me want to do more, do it cheerfully, do it tirelessly. To nurture old connections and find new.
Was digging through our archives (a grand word for the loosely-organized piles of boxes in our basement!) and found this article about my great-uncle Everett Hardy. He was a lovely fellow who was able to rhyme off stories, facts and figures nearly to the end of his 94 years. He was from another age, steeped in stories of the sea, both tales of his own escapades and from the books and National Geographic magazines that he read.
My mother says the local doctor of her youth, John Stewart, said that if Everett had been able to have a good education, he could have been a lawyer (high praise in a time when lawyers were still mostly universally respected). As his parents aged, Everett gradually took over much of the business side of their cannery. He had a head for numbers, and remembered lobster prices and catch sizes decades after the fact.
The reporter who captured Uncle Everett’s tales was Debbie Horne of the West Prince Graphic weekly newspaper. She left the paper quite a few years ago, but was a fixture in West Prince for a long time. If something was happening in our area in the 1980s and 90s, you could be sure Debbie would be there, along with the West Prince reporter for the (then) daily Journal Pioneer, Eric McCarthy. How lucky we were to have that amount of coverage of our small communities. They had to cover everything, from fishing and farming to crime and human interest, and they both did it well.
I have a poor recording of Uncle Everett from about a decade after this interview, which I transcribed a few years ago. He used phrases and pronunciations that have died out of common usage today, as does my mother. He mentions a type of ship called a schooner in this article, but he never pronounced to rhyme with “tuner”, more like “gunner”…it’s difficult to describe. Ask me sometime and I’ll say it fer ye!
His deep interest in the natural world filled him up to the brim, so much so that in his later years, his love of the world and all that was in it would choke him up as he spoke. No gentler, kinder man has ever lived, and I’m glad someone took the time in 1983 to record his tales.
The photo of Uncle Everett from the newspaper article, colourised with PhotosRevived, also part of Setapp. Uncle Everett usually wore dark work clothes, so the colour of the shirt and homemade walking stick is remarkably accurate. As this photo was taken in March, I see his long-sleeved undershirt peeking through his sleeve, though the house was always boiling hot from a wood furnace!He was sitting in his bedroom, where he spent many hours in a rocking chair looking out at Freeland Creek below his house. On top of the dresser to his left was a globe, and he kept Wrigley’s chewing gum in a drawer to give to us children.
A technical note for anyone who transcribes newspaper clippings: I’ve been using TextSniper for the past few weeks to capture text from PDFs and photos, and it is a helpful little app that sits patiently in my menu bar waiting to be triggered. I recently found the toggle to prevent it from adding line breaks, which has saved me a lot of editing when copying text from newspaper columns, and now I love it even more! It’s part of Setapp, a subscription plan I ignored for years but decided to try when RapidWeaver came up for renewal and I realised it was part of Setapp. There are 240+ fun and useful tools that all seem to work really well. I’m just sharing my Setapp experience – I don’t monetize anything on my website, so you won’t make or break me if you do-or-don’t click!
I’ve spent the past few days immersed in the history of Cedar Lodge, the log cabin that sits next to our house. The man who had it built, Senator Creelman MacArthur, marked the grand opening 90 years ago today with a big party.
Someone put the date on the outhouse wall!
Almost everything I’ve been reading, including the newspaper report of the opening I’ll add to this post, talked almost exclusively about men: the various owners of the land, those who built the cabin, those who participated in the opening day event.
To be fair, a rustic log cabin designed to be a hunting and fishing lodge had manliness baked into it. I’m not sure what furnishings and decorations were in Cedar Lodge on August 30, 1933, but when my parents acquired it there was a stuffed moose and deer head leering down from the wall, rifles and fishing rods on racks in the corner. The pine floor was pretty beaten up by the time I came along 33 years later, so it probably had become a fair target to spit tobacco juice on during the years it was rented out to hunters and fishers. The huge stone fireplace was a perfect spot to gather around and tell tall tales, kerosene or gas lamps pushing out moody, flickering light. A man cave for men in flannel and rubber boots and wool caps.
The Cedar Lodge grand opening activities had been scheduled to kick off at 3 pm with the ladies from nearby St. Peter’s Anglican church catering a tea. Had my mother’s mother, Thelma Hardy, lived a few more years, she would have been one of those ladies, and no doubt my 11-year-old mother, Vivian, would have been there, but that wasn’t to be.
So at about a quarter to three this afternoon, my mother and I talked what would have been going on in the kitchen 90 years ago. We imagined the efficient bustle of the women who would be pumping water, stoking the wood burning range, moving dishes and setting up tables. We guessed they served sandwiches and sweets, rather than a meal, but can’t really know.
One thing I would bet money on is that just before 3:00 there would have been a pause in the preparations. A big pot or urn, filled to the brim with the sweet water that came out of the hand-dug well, would have been the first thing placed on the stove when the women had arrived and started the fire in the stove. Once boiled, it would have received a homemade cotton bag filled with loose black tea.
When it had steeped for a while, one of the women would have ladled a bit of tea into a china cup, and the women would have stopped what they were doing and gathered around to look in the cup.
Is it too weak? Too strong? Opinions would be offered, and if it looked okay, a dash of milk would have been added and the cup reexamined to see how the brew held up to the milk. If thought to be the right colour, the woman holding the cup would have had a sip, declare it to be fine, and the tea bags promptly pulled from the pot.
How can I be certain of this one detail, as sure as if I’d been sitting in the corner watching this take place? Because every church supper, tea or reception I’ve ever helped with in my 56 years has had the same ritual. It is a holy rite, an echo of the eucharist, the priestess drinking the remaining tea with a tip of her head, washing the cup, wiping it dry to use for the main event.
So hooray for Cedar Lodge, and the men who built it. My family have enjoyed taking care of this unique structure for 67 years, and have made so many lovely memories sheltered within its cosy walls. I’m in it now, typing by candlelight, as heavy rain pours loudly onto the uninsulated roof while the thunder roars.
And hooray for the unnamed women who fed the crowd that day, who were quietly in the kitchen performing secret, holy rites.
Three of our friends doing dishes after a party in the Cedar Lodge kitchen, 1965
From The Charlottetown Guardian September 7, 1933, page 2
The historical old home of Hon. James Warburton at Freeland, Lot 11, was the scene of a happy gathering on Wednesday afternoon and evening for the opening of Senator Creelman MacArthur’s new Lodge.
This beautiful estate once the scene of great activity in the old shipping days once more rang with the laughter of a happy care free throng enjoying the many pleasures provided by the Senator.
In the old days when ships would be launched at the very spot where the Senator has his Lodge, no doubt the villagers enjoyed themselves in just such a fashion.
One old gentleman, Mr. Thomas L. Murphy, recalled that on one occasion, when Charles McKinnon, a large shipbuilder, was in such a hurry to get a ship named Silver finished and ready for its ocean voyage to the old country, that he had her full rigged on land and when the ice broke and she was launched, she proved to be top heavy and toppled over and about a hundred people were nearly drowned. This was a three masted schooner, one of many schooners built at Foxley River in those days, rigged on sea and loaded with produce for England. Upon their arrival in the old country they were sold. Many old tales were told, by the old inhabitants of the district, of the activities in those days. The old store kept by Michael Kilbride in 1843, which was later moved down the ice to John Yeo’s place at Port Hill, and which is still standing in the yard of Roy Ing’s, was mentioned. Records in the books of the store have the names of many of the first settlers of that vicinity. Among the records is an account of articles purchased for the Officers Mess of the Rifle Brigade of P.E.I. amounting to £4, 7. 4 1-2.
Mrs. William Palmer, daughter of Alexander McKay who ran the mill on the Warburton estate, is the only person now living who was born on the estate. She told how when a little girl she would sit on the shore and herd the cattle for her father.
This old place presented a pretty scene at twilight with the sun setting over the water and the Lodge, decorated with spruce and fir, lit up with many coloured lanterns.
At seven o’clock a dance officially opened the lodge and the visitors to the strains of a fox trot enjoyed the hospitality of Senator McArthur and his daughters, who extended a cordial greeting to all. During the afternoon the visitors strolled about enjoying and admiring the beautiful scenery. Many took advantage of the boats placed at their disposal, and went for a sail on the river.
The ladies of St. Peter’s Anglican Church served tea on the grounds.
After the opening dance at seven, Mr. James McLean, of Freeland, the Senator’s right hand man, called for speeches.
Among those speaking was Mrs. Oscar W. McCallum, of Saskatoon, daughter of the late Donald Nicholson of Charlottetown, who said it was a great pleasure for her to be asked to speak at this historical place, one of the beauty spots of her native land.
Other speakers were Mr. Herman Bryan, former owner of the property; Mr. A.. E. McLean, MP.; Mr. A. J. Matheson, O’Leary; Judge Inman, Judge of the County Court of Prince County; Mr. J. F. Arnett, Summerside; Mr. A. A. Ramsay, a native of Freeland; Mr. Reginal Bell of Charlottetown, and Mr. Thomas L. Murphy of Freeland.
All spoke of the generosity of Senator McArthur, who had shown a very cosmopolitan spirit in throwing open their lovely grounds to the public; which in these times of depression is the right example to set, to any one who has the means and opportunity to do so.
Senator McArthur in response to the three cheers and tiger that went up from the crowd when he came forward, said that he had purchased the property for the benefit of the community and not for any commercial gain.
He intended to stock the waters with trout so that trout fishing could once more be enjoyed as in days gone by.
The grounds would be at the disposal of any community or church of any denomination to hold picnics and social gathering at any time. He wanted all his neighbours in Freeland to feel that they could come and enjoy the quiet walks and bathe or dig clams whenever they chose, and he added, that he especially wanted the mothers and children to come and spend many happy afternoons in his spacious grounds.
This concluded the formal part of the program.
A huge bonfire was now set on fire which lighted up the country side for miles around.
The crowd then gave themselves up to the entertainment of the evening and dancing in the lodge was in full swing.
About 11 o’clock when the harvest moon was shining over the waters, another bonfire built like a haystack in the stream was set going and made a never to be forgotten sight. The dancers paused as if fascinated, the moon on the water with the reflection from the fire lighting up the woods in the background, making an enchanting scene. The merriment was kept up until quite late and closed with singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
Besides the people of the surrounding districts, friends from Charlottetown and Summerside were among the visitors. —S.
Sunset view on the shore next to Cedar Lodge, August 28, 2023
Deborah and Mike Scholes have been in Sussex, New Brunswick for weeks waiting for the right weather conditions to allow them to start their journey across the Atlantic in a hot air balloon. Today was the day, and they lifted off at about 9:45 am local time.
I checked their live tracking system and their initial path from Sussex had them heading to Moncton, then Shediac, and if they stayed on that course it looked as though they would be passing close to Tyne Valley, not far from where I live. Never one to miss the opportunity to stare at something going overhead and wave at it, I gathered my camera and zoom lens and got ready to head off just after lunch to find them.
When I checked the map one more time before I left, they had started to head slightly more to the east, which meant I had a bit further to drive than I had planned. I decided to go instead to Union Corner Provincial Park, and the tracking map later confirmed I had picked the right spot! I made good time, but arrived a few minutes too late to see them. It was also pretty cloudy.
I hopped in the car again and headed towards Summerside. As I zipped along Route 11 in St. Nicholas, I looked up and there they were, 12,896.3 feet above me, travelling at 23.5 mph!
View of balloon from Muddy Creek, PEI. I swear it’s there!See it?
That’s an open gondola, folks.
I knew the Linkletter Community Centre about 10 minutes away would have a clear view from their parking lot, so I continued on there and was able to watch the balloon for a few minutes as it floated on toward Malpeque Bay.
And yes, I gave a little wave, which is completely silly, but the child in me needs to emerge every so often, and young me would definitely have waved to the brave adventurers floating toward the ocean.
Update July 21, 2023 – Due to technical issues, Deborah and Mike had to land their balloon this morning near Gander, Newfoundland and Labrador. Must have been a huge disappointment for them, but I don’t doubt they will try again. And if you have seen the musical Come From Away, you know that you are guaranteed a warm welcome and safe harbour if you land in NL!
The federal government of Canada has been promising for decades to restore clean drinking water to First Nations communities. It is a basic human right Canadians expect and deserve, and it is a top priority for all municipal governments. This same concern is not extended to the First Peoples of our country.
According to the Indigenous Services Canada website, four communities had that promise fulfilled over the past year – one in Saskatchewan and three in Ontario – and 28 remain on the list.
Political leaders refer to these situations as “challenging” and “complex”, and I’m sure they are, but surely things could move faster if there was the real will to make it happen. I remember when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami occurred and Canada rightly sent the DART (Disaster Assistance Response Team) unit to Sri Lanka to assist their citizens. The DART were said at the time to be water restoration experts and produced 3.5 million litres of drinking water a day during that relief mission.
Perhaps the government could declare an emergency here and speed things up a bit? I’m sure if the water in downtown Ottawa was suddenly declared undrinkable, or if bathing babies in it gave them sores and rashes, something would be done pretty quickly. We can and must do better.
I loved the Search for Cosmic Dust episode of the BBC’s Seriously podcast. It is the tale of Jon Larsen, a jazz musician from Norway who found a piece of dust on his table one morning and followed his curiosity to become a hunter of urban micrometeorites and change the scientific record. An inspiring tale for all citizen scientists!
Noon today marks 150 years since Prince Edward Island joined Canada in 1873. After the overblown celebrations in 2014 to mark the 150th anniversary of the Charlottetown Conference, with the Island drenched in (coincidently?) Liberal red, I had expected something big for this year, but other than a couple of pieces on CBC Radio, this milestone hasn’t been mentioned at all. In today’s Guardian there are ads from politicians wishing everyone a happy Canada Day, but not one word about our wedding to Canada.
I suppose that’s as it should be, a tradition started by the lackluster response to the whole event at the time:
At it happens, the car ferry service that connects the eastern end of the Island to Nova Scotia resumes service today after having been completely shut down for a week due to a mechanical failure. The service had been expected to be out for almost a month, but a part was found and the boat expected to cross back and forth again, bringing relief to businesses and travelers alike. PEI joined Canada partly to ensure good transportation by train and boat, so having the ferry back might actually be the most apt symbol for the day.
A 1973 license plate digitally altered for the sesquicentennial!
I can’t easily identify my favourite band or book or movie. I could give you a top ten list of favourites, but would not be able to single out just one.
My favourite podcast of all time is easy, though: A History of the World in 100 Objects from BBC Radio 4 in collaboration with the British Museum. It was broadcast in 2010 and I downloaded every podcast episode over our 1.5 Mbps internet connection and listened while I worked outside that fall.
The idea of looking at the span of human history through 100 objects captivated me, and I started my own 100 Objects project on an earlier version of this blog, planning to write about a different object once a week. I wrote about a couple of things from my unorganized collection of stuff, but didn’t continue both because of time constraints and not being certain of what I wanted to say or even why I thought something needed to be said!
I’m going to start again, this time documenting things that will tell the story of my family, my community and me, but only when and as the spirit moves me.
Lobster tray from the Ernest Hardy cannery. Difficult to date, but the cannery operated seasonally from 1901-46
Item One is a lobster tray and it came to mind when I saw this advertisement in the April 25, 1923 Guardian.
April 26, 1923 Guardian, p.6
My great grandparents, Eva and Ernest Hardy, ran a lobster canning factory on the Conway Sandhills at Hardy’s Channel off Milligan’s Wharf, PEI from 1901 until Ernest’s death in 1946. My mother spent her childhood summers at the factory, so I have her stories and even a few photos of the place, but not much of the physical elements of that bustling enterprise remain.
Some of the buildings now at Milligan’s Wharf made up part of the factory and were hauled over to the mainland of PEI in the early 1960s to be used by my mother’s uncles. Some were later repurposed for cottages, one into a snack bar, and one sadly sits abandoned by next-generation owners who have little regard for its history.
My mother, Vivian Phillips, visiting the old cookhouse from her grandparent’s lobster cannery, Milligan’s Wharf, November 2021. She and her brother would sleep upstairs in the colder months to take advantage of the warmth from the cook stove below.
Ella Oatway and Eva Hardy on cookhouse steps, Conway Sandhills, 1940s. There is a small roof behind them that connected the cookhouse to the separate dining building.
The factory equipment – boilers, tools, tables, canners, utensils – are probably all long gone, no doubt sold to others in the same business or repurposed by the family, which is why I was surprised to come across the tray in our shop building some years ago.
I’m not sure why we have the tray, though I expect it came from one of the buildings on the home property once owned by Ernest and Eva and later occupied by their son, Elmer. My mother helped Elmer in his market garden and he would often give her old things that were hanging around the place and probably in his way. She had a collectors spirit, for which I am thankful.
Until I saw Fred H. Trainor’s advertisement, I had assumed the tray had been made by someone working for Ernest, and that could still be true. Fishermen built their own lobster traps and boats, so making some rough trays wouldn’t be a big deal. My mother’s father, Wilbur Hardy, was not a fisherman but did have a small box mill that he used to make lathes and boards for crates, so he would have been well positioned to fashion the wood for a tray for his father’s business.
Tray holes spaced 1.5 inches apart
The tray is base is galvanized metal. The wooden frame is 13.5 inches wides, 26.25 inches long and 2.25 inches deep. There are small pieces of wood, tapered by rough carving on either end, on the bottom on the two shorter sides that would allow the tray to sit slightly off of a table for drainage. The drainage holes are evenly spaced 1.5 inches apart, faint grid lines directing the precise location for punching. Considering the amount of salt that would have been around the factory, it’s miraculous the nails holding the frame together are still able (barely) to do their work of holding the pieces together.
The factory was probably a difficult place to work in a challenging location: a sandbar on the north shore of PEI. There was never electricity there, though they did get a gasoline-powered stationary engine in the late 1920s, which was later rescued from a barn by my cousin. He thinks it was used to run a saw to cut up firewood, which was needed in large amounts to fire the boilers that produced hot water and steam for the factory.
Everything was done by hand, in conditions that would probably not be considered sanitary today. The boiler man drew water from a hand-dug well using a bucket and would fill the huge boiler that produced steam to cook the lobsters, keeping a hot wood fire roaring all day. Workers, both men and women, would open the cooked lobsters, first ripping off the claws and cracking them at the knuckle with large knives to extract the meat, pulling out the tail meat, and ripping the bodies apart.
The little legs were fed through the wringer that came off a washing machine, squeezing the sweet meat out of them. My mother says this was the only job she ever did in the factory. The leg meat was added to the tomalley (“the green stuff” inside a lobster body) and roe to make lobster paste, also canned and sold. They also canned mackerel.
Wringer for squeezing out lobster meat, Basin Head Fisheries Museum, PEI, 2014
Leftover lobster bodies quickly become smelly, and piles of them would attract flies and wild creatures, so my mother says they were dumped back into the ocean by the fishermen or hauled to farms to be used as fertilizer. One of her uncles would fill his dory with bodies, take them back to the mainland, throw them into a wagon, and spread them on his farm fields to be disced under. They would certainly be scavenged by animals and birds when fresh, but eventually they would break down and act as a good fertilizer, or as good as a fertilizer could be before chemicals fertilizers were created. Even with all that effort of spreading lobster bodies, that uncle called his place Wild Rose Farm because that’s all the land was good for growing!
Can sealers, Basin Head Fisheries Museum, PEI, 2014. The one used by Elmer Hardy was similar to the one on the right, but smaller and attached to a work bench in his shop.
One of the canning machines, a greasy looking hand-cranked device, was in Elmer’s shop building. He raised chickens for eggs and meat, and canned chicken, beef and some fish well into the 1980s. Some people in our area still can beef, chicken and bar clams, though use glass canning jars and not the more tricky metal cans.
Unused cans and lids from two cases my mother had, which she would have purchased to give to her Uncle Elmer to have him can chicken for her. He probably stopped canning by the 1990s.
My mother says her grandmother, Eva, packed every can as she had “the knack”, and probably also wanted to make sure the weight was exact. A piece of white parchment paper was placed in the bottom of the flat, wide cans, and she would carefully fit tails, claws and bits of meat to bring it up to the correct weight. Once the cans dried and cooled after processing, a label would be affixed with glue or paste. My mother says her grandparents’ product was sold to wholesalers, so there was not an E.A. Hardy brand, but more likely they were canned for DeBlois Brothers wholesalers in Charlottetown, or maybe the large PEI retailer, Holmans.
Lobster and other fish cans at Basin Head Fisheries Museum, PEI, 2014
My great grandmother likely handled the tray thousands of times over the 45 years they worked each summers to make the money that would carry them over the rest of the year. “Factory owner” makes it sound like they were rich, and they definitely were not. They had a telephone, but no electricity and never had a car or truck. The furthest from PEI either of them ever got, that I know of, was when when my great grandfather went to Montreal for an operation, but I don’t think my great grandmother ever left PEI, or even went to Charlottetown! I gather they were well-respected in the community as being industrious and honest, but they had little more than anyone else.
Income statement for Ernest Hardy, 1931. His lighthouse keeper’s income from the Canadian government was incredibly important to the family, making up half of their net income that year.
I think of the countless people who held that tray, working long hours to make a product they probably couldn’t afford to buy. That’s still the story for millions today who produce our clothing, electronics and food in hidden corners of the world. They make little, the corporations make a lot, and we get cheap things.
There are still lobster processing factories on PEI, some of it being canned but most of it frozen. Local workers became more difficult to find over time, so a large percentage of factory workers now come from places like the Philippines. Those temporary foreign workers have supported the lobster fishing industry in a way that is perhaps not acknowledged often enough, as the market for fresh lobster is limited and processing the only way to ensure there is a bigger market.
Lobster fishing and processing is still difficult, even dangerous, work. Thank the lobster, thank the fisher, thank the factory worker who holds the tray.
