A smooth-talkin’ fella named Ernest Shipman spent a few days on PEI 100 years ago trying to convince the great and the good to back his Prince Edward Island Films, Inc. scheme. “Ten Percent Ernie” went across Canada setting up similar production companies, and I’m not certain if his PEI venture ever took off.
One worthy who wasn’t enticed was Creelman MacArthur, a former owner of the land where our house is situated. He had a letter printed in the Guardian on September 1, 1922 requesting they correct an earlier story:
The welcome mat certainly seemed to have been rolled out across PEI for Shipman and company, as it probably was in every little place they landed and sprinkled their tinsel-town stardust. We can still be a trusting and welcoming bunch here on PEI, and that means being taken in by big promises on occasion (Michael Jackson tribute concert in Summerside starring Beyonce, anyone?), but we still manage to mostly give people a chance to prove they are who they say they are, an admirable quality to retain in an often-cynical world.
Had a stubborn stain on a white shirt today, so did what I have always done: grabbed a piece of homemade soap and a washboard and gave it a good scrub. The soap was made by my mother’s uncle, Elmer Hardy, mostly likely with chicken fat as he raised hens for meat and eggs. Not sure what else went in the soap, but it certainly contains lots of lye and is hard on your hands if you do a lot of washing with it. Red knuckles will result if you are out of the habit, as I am, and you scrub too vigorously for too long.
Add soap to board, not to the piece of clothing.
In case you’ve never done it but find yourself in a rustic backwoods cabin with dirty clothes, you place the washboard in a laundry tub with some hot water, rub the soap over the washboard, leaving some behind in the grooves, and then scrub the piece of clothing over it. I use our modern plastic laundry tub, run a couple of inches of water in the bottom and a bucket for rinsing, and wash and rinse and wash and rinse until clean. Hang your cleaned item out on the line and the sun will do the rest of the bleaching!
Uncle Elmer died in 2002 at age 92, and I can’t remember when he last kept hens or made soap, but it was many years before that, so that soap could be over 30 years old and is still hard and perfect. He didn’t use individual moulds but instead poured the mixture into a big pan and cut it before it set too hard, so some of the pieces have rounded bottoms. I laugh when I see bougie soap makers now going for a similar raw look to their hand and body soaps, rough and misshapen bars wrapped up in brown paper and twine.
Who taught me how to wash clothes this way? My mother, I suppose, though I don’t remember her showing me, I just picked it up from watching her, as she watched her grandmother, and on and on back in time. My hands hold old knowledge.
On the front page of this morning’s newspaper was a story about a new ferry arriving to fill in for theMV Holiday Island, which will be out of service for an indefinite period of time following an engine room fire a couple of weeks ago.
And here’s the front page of the same publication 75 years ago to the day, what looks to be a special section celebrating the arrival of the new MV Abegweit ferry, a vessel so mythologized and beloved by Islanders that a set of doors from the ship currently feature in an exhibition about the PEI tourism trade at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown.
When I was a child, the Holiday Island and sister ship, MVVacationland, were sometimes referred to as the “hot dog boats” because the Abegweit (almost always just called The Abby) had a lovely dining room, while the two smaller summer-only ships only had snack bars and were not as luxuriously equipped. Everyone wanted to catch The Abby!
I started to read this piece from the August 3, 1922 Charlottetown Guardian thinking it would be one of many that tut-tut about young fellows racing automobiles through city streets and being a general menace, but this tale of two gals from Boston is about a different procession entirely. The tut-tutting from the city’s great and good about these two racy ladies would have been more deafening than any automobile.
I know basically nothing about fashion, current or historical, but I think the ”dutch clip” could be describing their short hair style, as in the illustration below, but let me know if I’m wrong. Flappers gonna flap, but not in Charlottetown.
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.
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.
Reenactment of propeller-stopping eel grass.
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 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 byme 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.
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!
Mrs. McKenna died just a few weeks after her son, Philip, was killed working on the railway near his home in Conway, PEI.
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.
Barbara Ann Williams Hutchinson Newcombe, Saint James Anglican Church Cemetery, Port Hill, PEITwo little boys gone too soon.
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!
