Arrows, Xs and masks will certainly be the most memorable symbols of the COVID-19 pandemic for me, but so will these little official-looking squares found in many disposable mask packages. 65%, 35%, 85%…better wear two.
Stamp of approval, I guess
Category Archives: PEI History
Eelgrass
My mother and I took a short detour on our way home after a recent appointment. I wanted to pick eelgrass from the shore to place around my tiny asparagus bed, a trick I learned from local master organic gardener Paul Offer, who generously taught an organic gardening course at our community school for many years. He said asparagus likes a little salt – it’s probably one of the few cultivated plants that does, I imagine – so some eelgrass scattered around suppresses weeds both by blocking light and from the trace of salt from the seawater in which it grows.
We drove down one of the many dirt roads that lead to the Conway Narrows, the body of water separating the mainland of PEI from the Conway Sandhills. I have written many times about the Sandhills, and my mother’s connection to them as possibly one of the last people to have lived there when, as a child in the 1920s and 30s, she spent every summer with her grandparents at their lobster cannery at Hardy’s Channel.
There are not many remote, wild places on PEI, but this is one of them. It is rare to see another human, except maybe an oyster fisher in a boat. During spring and fall migration it is common to see large flocks of geese and ducks as they move north or south.
I had forgotten to bring buckets with me, so I grabbed two grocery bins from my trunk and quickly filled them with the dried grass that a high tide had helpfully deposited on some wild rose bushes, so it had been well rinsed in the rain and then dried well in the sun and wind.
The quiet and calm of this place, the undulating dunes on the horizon, the absence of motorized anything, is a portal to another time. I was there at high tide, which prevents a walk as the beach is completely submerged, but at low tide you can walk a long way and see cranberry bogs and peatmoss hanging off the low bank, seabirds and shells and all sorts of treasures.
It is possible, in a couple of places, to walk through the water over to the Sandhills at low tide, but you really need to be aware of the weather and tides to do so, and it isn’t recommended unless you know what your doing. I’ve actually only done it once – we always boated over when I was a child – and it was a bit too wild, even for me!
There was no time for wading or strolling anyway as my mother wanted to go see “Jimmy Mick’s place” while we were out that way. Jimmy MacDonald was a customer of my parent’s, a veteran of the First World War, long gone now. The electricity lines end at the intersection of the Luke and Murray Roads, and you keep following the later road, which is only really one lane at that point, to a turn the bend and there is Jimmy’s old house. It is in remarkably good shape for something that hasn’t been lived full-time in for decades, the roof line still straight, windows and doors intact. Someone has kept the grass cut around it. With the over-inflated PEI real estate market, even this ancient abode could now likely fetch more money than Jimmy ever made in his entire life.
We used to go out to Jimmy’s place to pick blueberries in the shrubby fields. The fields are all woodland now, and I doubt you could pick a cup of blueberries where once people could fill buckets. One of my mother’s great loves was picking wild berries, spending hours each summer gathering strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. I did not inherit the love of berry picking, and would dutifully accompany her and various great aunts when I was a child, but would only pick for a few minutes before wandering off to explore or head back to the car to read.
Our visit to the land of Jimmy Mick complete, we headed back home. The roads out there in the Black Banks (the blackness because of deposits of dark peat moss) are narrow and muddy in a few spots, and in a couple of swales I closed my eyes and gunned the car to get through, my mother and I laughing each time, well aware we could get stuck and relieved when we didn’t. We turned onto the Luke Road, a much better-kept route, but still narrow and muddy in places. We soon reached the pavement and drove in modern comfort the kilometer or so to our house.
You can still see a few older houses in our area ”banked” with dried eelgrass each fall. People collect truckloads of it and put it around the outside of the bottom of their house to keep out cold drafts in the winter, using stakes to keep it in place. Eelgrass was also used as insulation inside house walls a long time ago, which wasn’t really that effective, but better than nothing. My mother used to sleep on a straw tick mattress at the lobster cannery, and I bet you could throw some dry eelgrass in there, too, if it your mattress flattened and needed some bulk.
I remember learning to operate a dory with an outboard motor when I was about 8 and the feeling of the motor bogging down when I would steer into a shallow area and eelgrass wrapped around the propeller. I’d have to stop the boat, tip the motor up slightly, and then run it in reverse to clear the blades to continue on my way.
And yes, eelgrass is long and slithery like an eel, but there are also eels in eelgrass. When you learn to swim in a muddy-bottomed river, as I did, you get used to the silky feel of eelgrass brushing your legs as you move through it, and you sometimes feel an eel rush by, too, if you set your feet down in the wrong place. People who learned to swim in concrete pools or oceans usually find the river swimming experience unpleasant because of these encounters, and it probably is.
Lobsters live in eelgrass, too, and I would sometimes come face to face with them when I played Jacques Cousteau in the river as a child, each of us surprised to see the other, and both retreating in opposite directions. I never caught a lobster, as that’s both illegal without a license and pretty tricky with bare hands, but it was always fun to see them.
Eelgrass is under threat in some areas of the world, which is astonishing to me as it is such a ubiquitous part of my seascape, lots of it in the water just steps from our house. I will gather it as long as I can.
The View From Here
The land where I live in Foxley River remains the unceded territory of the Miꞌkmaq people, who have occupied this island for over 12,000 years. Since European settlers arrived, the piece of land where my house is has been claimed by six people, as far as I can figure, including me.
It was once owned by Creelman MacArthur from Summerside, a businessman and politician. As far as I know, he never lived in Foxley River, and I suspect he bought the place solely as an investment. He had hoped the property would be designated as Prince Edward Island’s national park, as he mentioned when he spoke to a National Parks Amendment Bill in the Senate on June 17, 1938:
Hon. CREELMAN MacARTHUR: … Five years ago I acquired the old Warburton estate of 655 acres, only to realize that it was a white elephant. I built a lodge and a concrete and steel dam and put in some 50,000 trout. In a word, I did everything that I thought might appeal to the Commission when selecting in the province an area for a national park which would be attractive to tourists. But it seems the outstanding requirement was surf bathing, and my property had only sheltered stretches of river. It is a very beautiful area and its waters are well stocked with trout, lobster and oysters.
Right Hon. Mr. GRAHAM: What a place!
Hon. Mr. MacARTHUR: The property cost me some $15,000. I offered it to the Government as a gift, free of restrictions of any kind. I thought in that way a greater service would be rendered to this country, and to visitors in this country, than could be rendered by me as an individual.
However, it was deemed the part of wisdom to select an area in Queen’s county, of which the honourable senator from Queen’s (Hon. Mr. Sinclair) can speak in more detail than I can. Mr. Cromarty and another gentleman from the Parks Branch went down and after looking at four or five sites selected the one referred to in the Bill. Unfortunately, there was some difficulty with three or four landowners with regard to the expropriation, and for a year or more there has been some contention. This difficulty has now been removed, and the purpose of this Bill is to describe the area. We are now looking forward to having a park which will be the equal of anything in any other province in Canada.
And so the PEI National Park did not end up in Foxley River, but in Cavendish, in the heart of the area made popular by author Lucy Maud Montgomery and her Anne of Green Gables books. Just as well, but I’m sure Senator MacArthur had hoped to recoup part of his $15,000 investment, even if he did say (after the fact) that he had intended to give the property to the government as a gift. I don’t say that to be mean, and I never met the man, or his family, but I’m sure there would have been some way for him to make a little money on the deal. Business is business.
Mr. MacArthur died in 1943, and his Foxley River estate eventually broken up into smaller parcels, 23 acres of which we now inhabit. Part of the lodge he had built in 1933 is still here, as well as the dam and the descendants of those 50,000 trout!
I found a postcard online years ago that was probably taken in the 1930s or 40s of the view from the shore in front of our house looking northward up Foxley River. I wondered when I found it if MacArthur had the photo taken to advertise the beauty of his property, perhaps as something he could hand out to sway the opinion of the decision makers at the Ottawa Parks Branch. There really isn’t any other reason why this photo was taken, being so far from the beaten track as we were and still are.
I have many times tried to recreate this postcard photos, capture some mountainous clouds, but never have I caught a similar sky. It is startlingly the same vista, though, despite the massive forest fire that ravaged this area in 1960 and the many decades that have passed. The building in the centre is long gone, but the trees on the far shore look almost the same, with the same breaks in the treeline.
Yesterday a neighbour was making hay on that far field, as has been done for nearly two centuries on that piece of land. This area dodged becoming a tourist mecca 90 years ago, but how long before that field becomes cottage lots is anyone’s guess, so I am thankful for its timeless beauty every day. A miracle, really.
Popular Milkman
Great Uncle George Harris gets a mention in the June 14, 1922 The Charlottetown Guardian. Nice to know he was well-liked, and not, as you might try to decode, a salesman for the Popular milk company, or from Popular. Pretty sure he worked for himself, milking the cows and bottling the milk.
His improved home still stands on the outskirts of Summerside, the barns that held his milk cows more or less intact. That end of town is still farmland, but not for long, as businesses continue to move to the north end.
My mother stayed at George and Carrie’s house on her way to enlist in the RCAF 79 years ago (Carrie was the youngest sister of my great-grandmother, Eva Hardy). George drove my mother from his house to the Summerside train station in his horse and milk delivery wagon, where she caught the train to Moncton and then on to do her basic training in Ottawa.
Also in today’s 100-year-old paper was the obituary of my friend’s great grandmother. I knew more people in the antique edition that in the one published today!
Barbara Ann
Reunion, the software I use to keep track of my family tree, has a handy feature that allows me to see dates of family events in Apple Calendar. I’ve added one for birthdays and one for death anniversaries, and I appreciate being reminded of those still alive, and those long gone but still part of my story.
Today I was reminded that my maternal great-grandmother, Barbara Ann Williams, died on this date in 1908. She married Patterson Hutchinson in January 1900, in what is said to have been the first wedding at St. John’s Anglican in Ellerslie, a beautiful little country church built by Barbara’s brother, the renowned “Fox House” and church builder “Little” Harry Williams.
They had three children: my grandmother, Thelma, born in 1901, her brother Stanley, born in 1903, and a second boy, George, who died at birth in 1904. In 1905, Patterson died, aged 37.
Barbara remarried eight months later to John Newcombe from Northam, just outside Tyne Valley. As far as I know, it was his first and only marriage. Barbara and John had three children: Lillian, John and George. John died at birth in 1906, and George died in August 1908, three months after his mother, who quite possibly died giving birth to him. Lillian seems to have married a Roderick MacLean from Lot 16 in 1926 and died in 1957. Lillian may also have really been Patterson’s daughter and adopted by John Newcombe, but I can’t yet confirm that.
According to 1911 census records, John Newcombe and daughter Lillian had moved back with his parents. His step-children, Thelma and Stanley, were listed in that census as living with their uncle Little Harry and his family in Poplar Grove. I have no idea if my grandmother, Thelma, kept in touch with the Newcombe family, but she died in 1927 aged 25 and, in a sad echo of her mother’s life, left behind two children under the age of 4: my mother, Vivian, and her brother, Edgar.
Genealogy is generally pretty straightforward: I had parents, who had parents, who had parents, back and back to the cave or the savannah (or the Garden of Eden, if you are so inclined). But drop down in the middle of some of these stories, and witness the happenstance that kept people alive just long enough to give birth to a child that is key to your existence, and life seems even more miraculous. All of our ancestors successfully bobbed and weaved just long enough, and here we are.
Richard Hinton
A lovely home care nurse just visited, on what is generally a holiday for most people, to give my mother her second COVID-19 vaccine booster. While she waited to make sure my mother didn’t have an adverse reaction to the injection, we had a great chat about health care and the changes to home care over the years.
The PEI Home Care Program is one of those health care services that most people don’t know much about until they are thrust into a situation where they need it. They provide a wide range of services, from nursing and personal care to physiotherapy and adult day programs. My mother only started to receive visits from them last year, and it has been a wonderful help to our family.
The Summerside office has had a health equipment loan program for many years, so if you need something like a walker or commode chair on a short-term basis, you can get one free of charge from their collection. The equipment must be kept in excellent shape, so requires fairly frequent replacement, and some things are quite pricey.
Being part of a couple of groups who raise funds for health care needs, I asked how easy it was to get the funding from government to keep that equipment updated. She said they actually get a lot of the funding from something called the Hinton Fund. I asked if that was connected to former Summerside lawyer Richard Hinton, and she said it was.
After the nurse left, I explained to my mother about the Hinton Fund, and the connection to Richard Hinton. Then I thought about today’s date, and realised it was 66 years ago today that my father, Harold, bought the property where we now live. The lawyer who did up the paperwork was Richard Hinton.
Hinton’s law office was on Summer Street in Summerside, a lovely old house I have been in a few times as our current lawyer once had his office there. Only recently did I learn that the house was built by my GGG uncle, Robert W. Sharp, brother of my GG grandfather, the fabulously-named George Washington Sharp. More PEI connect-the-dots!
Public Transit Returns
Last week saw the start of public transit bus routes for the western end of PEI but, like so many things that seem new, this is actually something we once had that we just forgot about. There was passenger train service from the 1870s until 1969, bus service from Tignish to Summerside in the 1930s and 40s, and a short-lived bus service in the 1980s. I took the 80s-era bus with some friends exactly once to do back-to-school shopping around 1980, when I was in that sweet spot between being old enough to travel on my own and getting my driver’s licence and, soon after, a car.
I just returned from taking Steven to meet the bus at a carpool parking lot in West Devon. Steven lived in cities with public transit his entire life until we moved to PEI in 2001. He’s never learned to drive, so he relies on me or someone else to take him places. Before this, the closest thing to public transit would be calling a taxi from Summerside, which is $75 one way and so not really viable for anything but an absolute emergency.
The little bus arrived almost exactly on time, he hopped on as the lone passenger, paid his $2 (heavily subsidised by government) fare, and off they went in the direction of Summerside. He’ll do some errands, have lunch, and hop back on the bus to be back in West Devon at 5. He’s promised to pen a guest post to share his experience.
April 25, 1922
On Tuesday April 25, 1922, five people made their way to Thomas Cahill’s store in Freeland, PEI. A two-story structure that included living quarters, it was the typical general store of its day: a central aisle with two long counters on either side, the goods for sale stacked high on floor-to-ceiling shelves behind. A customer would hand their order to a clerk, who would gather the items from boxes and tins and barrels, write out a receipt, and accept payment or make note of credit. The customer would place the items in a wooden box they brought in from their wagon, or a basket they carried on their arm if they were walking.
While poking around in our basement earlier this month, I found two receipt books from Cahill’s store mixed in with 50-year-old receipt books from the general store operated by my parents, Harold and Vivian Phillips. They bought Cahill’s store in 1946, but from Laughlin “Lin” Murphy, who I believe bought the store from Cahill in late 1922. My parents operated and lived in the old store until 1952, when they built what they believed was the first self-serve general store in rural PEI. That new store had little shopping trollies that customers could put their items in as they made their way along the three aisles of the store. Though my parents were proud of this modern facility, some old timers refused to pick out their own groceries, so the old fashioned service always existed in some form in our store up until they sold it in 1971.
I was familiar with the receipt books my parents used, but Cahill’s books are slightly different in that the receipt lists both the person who was buying the goods and the person who was picking them up at the store. This is double joy for a history buff, more names to make more connections!
It’s a miracle these books made it through three owners and the dismantling of the original store. Little else survives from that store except a couple of photographs, a few drawers from the counters repurposed as wonky workshop shelves by my father, and a gripper device used to quickly reach items on high shelves.
Being spring on PEI, April 25 could have been cold and snowing or hot and sunny, or both over the course of the day! A horse and wagon might have kicked up a bit of dust on sunnier parts of the red dirt roads as they travelled, but could have also bogged down a bit in the swales. If the roads were too muddy, people would have walked or rode a horse to the store.
First to arrive was Joe Kelly, picking up an enormous amount of salt and what was probably a five pound can of baking powder for Clara Gavin. Not sure who she was, but a woman named Sis Gavin was often mentioned by one of my mother’s uncles, and she kept house for William Bryan after his wife died in 1914. Joe Kelly lived not far away from Bryan’s farm, so Clara could possibly be Sis. If I look to the north from our house, I can see the dark outline of the spruce trees that surround Joe Kelly’s house, perhaps the oldest building in Foxley River.
Next was John McArthur, though I’d bet it was really MacArthur, picking up a $4.50 bag of flour, which would have been a 100-pound bag! There was a Malcolm “Mac” MacNeill operating a lobster cannery on the Sandhills at that time, so John could have worked for Mac and the flour was destined to feed the cannery staff.
Next were neighbours and cousins Nicholas and Raymond Bulger, both born in 1902. Perhaps they travelled to the store together. In later years, both of these men followed the well-worn path to the New England states, only returning to PEI for vacations.
Looks like Nick picked up 5 pounds of sugar, some sort of pills, soap, 10 cents worth of candy and some tobacco. The soap was probably something like Sunlight soap, which was used to clean everything. Most country women usually made their own lye soap, but perhaps Mrs. Bulger had run out. Nick had 12 dozen eggs to sell, and got 26 cents a dozen. That sounds like a ridiculously low price to us, but would have been good money then, and possibly the only money the family received that week. Cahill probably took most of the eggs he bought from his customers into Conway Station and sent them on the train to be sold in Summerside.
I think Raymond bought 10 pounds of wire nails at 6-and-a-half cents a pound, 1 pound of twist chewing tobacco, and three large boxes of wooden matches. With matches, tobacco, twist and candy, the boys would have a jolly ride back to Foxley River!
The last customer recorded on that Tuesday was Ferdinand “Ferdie” Kilbride, a neighbour of the Bulger boys and one year their junior. Try as I might, I can’t for the life of me make out the two items that Ferdie bought. The first was a bottle of something or other, and the second is a big mystery. Let me know if you can read this scrawl. [Update: an eagle-eyed reader suggests that the first item is “1 bottle witch hazel”, and I agree!]
If these folks, most of them close neighbours related by birth or marriage, had bumped into each other on their trip, there would have taken plenty of time for a chat to catch up. The weather would be finely dissected, preparations for crop planting compared, updates given on family here on PEI and in far-flung Boston or Toronto. In the distance they might have heard the surf breaking on the Sandhills like I could this morning, heard the robins and chickadees calling. The young men might have been planning what fun they would be getting up to on the weekend!
Peter Bulger’s descendants still farm his land, and Bulgers and Kellys are well represented in our community. I worked for Thomas Bulger’s grandson on the same farm Thomas owned. Sadly, the last Kilbride to live in Foxley River died a few years back. The Bulger, Kelly and Kilbride families came here from Ireland in the 1830s, so the disappearance of an original settler family name is especially poignant.
I had no idea these books existed, so was pleased and excited to find them. All these people came back to life in an instant, their movements through the landscape I know so well, the challenging lives they lived in the backwoods of PEI. An enviable time, in some ways, simple and straightforward, but still before the miracles of antibiotics and electricity, and with one terrible war behind them and one lurking in the future. There is certainly no ideal time to have lived, and I’m content with the here and now, but oh how I would love to have spent five minutes in Thomas Cahill’s store catching up with my long-gone neighbours.
Hook ’em up
My father always carried a notebook and pen in his shirt pocket, even after he retired. At the same time my parents were running their general store, he was also a partner (with his brother) in a garage and car dealership, and he delivered propane gas. There was a lot to keep track of.
I came across a tiny notebook of his the other day that I had never seen before. He had used it to record the sale and delivery of electrical appliances he made in 1958-59, when electricity first came to our area. Inside, in my father’s case-ignoring scrawl, are notes that seem to be for warranty purposes. My mother says he was busy for weeks as house by house was connected to the grid. He would hook up the televisions, install the aerial (I have a box of vintage cable hooks, if you need some!), and help everyone find the probably only one station available! He would explain how to set the dial on the washing machine and how to use the ice-less ice box.
My parents built both a new store and a house next to it in the early 1950s, both optimistically wired for the electricity that they expected to arrive some day. As the volts and watts inched closer through the neighbouring communities, my father was dreaming of the benefits for their store. They could get a new gas pump, so no more pumping by hand.They would be able to install better lighting, coolers and freezers. They had a gas generator to charge a bank of batteries in the store basement for a bit of lighting and to run a tiny freezer, but the generator was noisy and temperamental, so would not be missed.
They could also sell all the things a modern home owner would need: refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, radios, lamps, clocks, toasters, coffee makers, irons and kettles. Knowing my father, he was adding up the sales in his head all the time.
Unfortunately one of the local worthies wasn’t in favour of electricity. “It’s too expensive for people, they can’t afford it. We’ve always gotten along without it, we don’t need it,” he would say, and as this fellow was a Big Deal, Freeland was not going to get electricity. Ever. Or as long as he was alive.
Not one to be kept back from either progress or commerce, my father got up a petition and collected enough signatures to convince the electric company to put the lines through. My mother told me today that Mr. Big Deal was one of the first to sign up, of course! Pretty much everyone eventually hooked up to the electricity, though my parents continued to sell oil lamps, lamp wicks, and kerosene alongside the electrical items even into the 1970s, when they sold the store.
While the whole family would enjoy the televisions and radios and electric lights, and certainly there would also be improvements for both farmers and fishers, women probably derived the most benefit from rural electrification. No more cleaning and filling kerosene lamps or beating rugs. Refrigerators and freezers meant replacing the blood-pressure raising staples of salt meat and fish with healthier fresh and frozen options year round. The back-breaking labour of washing clothes would be eased with an automatic machine, and ironing became a breeze.
It was fun to look at all the familiar names in the notebook, see what they bought, and imagine the excitement when those televisions and washing machines first sprang to life. All of the people in the notebook have passed on, so I hope they’ll forgive me for publishing the serial numbers of their also long-gone Philco TVs and Firestone refrigerators for all to see.
Norman Falkner, Fancy Skater
Thanks to the Skate Guard blog for filling in the blanks about Norman Falker, who entertained the good people of Summerside 100 years ago this week. He lost his leg fighting at Vimy in the First World War, survived a harrowing trip back to Canada, and went on to have a career as a professional skater and skating judge, living into his nineties.