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.
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.
Thomas Cahill’s Store circa 1915
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.
Thomas Cahill had telephone number R5-15 on the Conway line out of the Tyne Valley Exchange, but didn’t include that information on his receipts – not many of his customers had a telephone anyway.
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.
The old Cahill store before it was dismantled in 1952.The house section of the store being moved to Conway, 1952.Inside the old Cahill store when it was being dismantled in 1952. If you look closely, you can just make out the floor-to-ceiling shelves on the far wall. I think this part of the store became part of my grandfathers box mill, and burned in the 1960 West Prince forest fire.
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.
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.
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.
I bought a notebook not long after I moved back to PEI in 2001 and started recording the family stories and historical information my mother and others would tell me. I’ve finally had time to type up these notes and am realizing how much of it I had already forgotten.
December 17, 2014 – Mom offered to darn my socks, burgundy ones she knit for me many years ago. They were very thin. She said her grandmother would cut the feet off wool socks that were too difficult to darn and knit new ones on, ravelling back the yarn and picking up the stitches. Knitting new feet on socks was hard, but money for yarn was harder to come by.
Eva also had a manual knitting machine that, if I remember correctly, would quickly knit the leg part of a sock and she would then knit the foot onto it. That took much less time, and as she had seven sons and a husband to keep well supplied, sock manufacturing and maintenance would be an endless job. The men all worked outside, either fishing or farming, and in the winter they would spend days in the woods cutting lumber and firewood, so having warm socks were vital tools for good health and productivity.
January 6, 2015 – We were talking about someone who was just recovering from an illness. She said a family with the last name Best had once lived in Freeland. Their daughter, Lillian, got tuberculosis. They built a little house for her in the field next to the main house. Lillian lived in it, didn’t go anywhere, and when her mother went out to visit, she wore a mask. Lillian eventually recovered, married and had children. No one thought she’d ever be able to have children, but she did, and lived a long time.
Masks are nothing new, nor are pandemics. I would imagine Lillian’s story was from the 1920s when PEI was without a provincial sanatorium. When someone contracted TB, people did the best they could on their own, especially in rural areas lacking even the most basic health care. My grandmother, Thelma, died of TB in 1927, and was nursed at the end by a local woman who also was a midwife. Dr. John Stewart had an office in Tyne Valley at this time, but there really wasn’t much he could have offered beyond advice to rest – you lived or you died.
My grandmother was probably given country remedies like mustard plasters (a mixture of dry mustard, flour and water applied to the chest, still being used by some to relieve congestion when I was a child), inhaling the vapours of turpentine or kerosene, or doses of cod liver oil.
An unoccupied old house was torn down a couple of years ago not far from where we live, and my mother had been warned as a child not to go near it as it was “full of TB,” the family who lived there having lost a daughter in 1924.
This poem was printed in the Summerside Journal and Western Pioneer on December 5, 1867, top and centre on the front page. Author unknown, from the year when the Dominion of Canada was born on land stolen from the original inhabitants of Turtle Island.
For had he not dominon where now his steps intrude?
From the Summerside Journal and Western Pioneer, December 5, 1867, front page.
Vivian Phillips, Eptek Centre, Summerside, with her blue RCAF (WD) uniform and kit bag in the background, November 14, 2021
My mother had recovered enough from a recent illness to attend the third and final launch of a book, We’ll Meet Again, that features stories about PEI women who served in the Second World War. The author, Katherine Dewar, has been so lovely to my mother and the other women veterans, and she made a point of featuring my mother’s story today as she had been unable to go to the first launch with the other surviving veterans.
Although seating was very limited due to pandemic restrictions, we were still able to say hello to friends and family who attended, and my mother had the unusual experience of hearing someone reading her words out loud and seeing her uniform and other pieces of memorabilia on display. On the way home I asked her how she had found the whole thing, and she said she didn’t think she had really done much more than outlive everyone else, that her story wasn’t that special! Like most things in her life, she has just taken it all in her stride, which I’m sure is part of how you live to be 99.
Katherine has dedicated much of her historical research and writing to preserving the stories of PEI women, accomplished women who had exciting and important careers, and even had military honours, but who often lived quiet lives after the fact, who blended back into society because that was what society demanded women do. My mother’s exit interview from the RCAF, for instance, an organization that had given her opportunities for training, adventure and independence she would never had at home, suggested that she would be best suited to being a housewife. She went on to do that, and so much more. Tomorrow she plans to bake cookies to thank the hospital staff who recently cared for her, still defying expectations, looking and acting beyond herself, an inspiration to all who know and love her.
My mother was asked if her RCAF uniform could be used in a display in connection with the upcoming publication of a book by PEI historian Katherine Dewar about PEI women who served in the Second World War. Katherine and Lois Brown, who was with the Canadian Women’s Army Corps in the Second World War and is a lively 97-year-old, came up last week to take the bits and pieces my mother has.
My mother’s air force blue uniform is nearly complete, except for stockings and shoes, which she used after the war and wore completely out. Her khaki uniform has always been a bit of a mystery to me. She always called it her summer uniform, but I believe it was what she was wearing when she ended her service on January 9, 1945, as her last meal card and clearance certificate (incorrectly dated as 1944) are still in the inside jacket pocket. As she ended her military career in Halifax, in January, it would have been far from summer weather! I hope to get more information from PEI Regiment Museum curator Greg Gallant about that uniform.
I also gathered up various pins that were scattered around the house in different little boxes. She would have received or bought most of them during the war, the General Service Badge would have been worn after the war (probably by my father, but not sure), and another is one of many pins she’s been sent periodically by this or that group honouring different battles and anniversaries.
RCAF (WD) poster
I imagine Katherine’s book will touch on the fact that women who had served weren’t regarded as real veterans immediately after the war. Women had been recruited to supporting roles to free up men to assume combat roles, so their service wasn’t considered to be the same.
While both of my parents were in the RCAF during the Second World War, neither of them served in Europe, spending their time in Canada or Newfoundland, which was considered an overseas posting as a British colony. My father was always viewed as being the “real” veteran in our family, even though his role as an RCAF mechanic put him in no greater danger than my mother. They were both involved in the background of the Battle of the Atlantic during their time in Newfoundland, he at Gander and she at Torbay, and I’m sure both of those stations were on the German hit list for a possible invasion of North America, which thankfully never happened.
My father mistakenly wore my mother’s medals all his life, and it was only after his death, when I was asked to help with an award nomination for my mother, that I found out she had been given an extra medal (The Defence Medal) because of the length of time she had spent in Newfoundland, and my father’s time there hadn’t qualified.
I don’t believe for a second that my father even knew what he had done. I suppose when the medals arrived in the mail (ex-service members applied to get them after the war and they were mailed in a little box, no dramatic presentation by a senior officer as portrayed in movies), he just assumed the three were for him as he served for nearly 5 years and my mother for less than 2.
So my mother had worn my father’s two medals, never knowing the difference. When I brought this error to her attention, I didn’t think she would bother to start wearing her real ones, but she did, and still proudly wears them to Remembrance Day services and other official events. And now, because she is one of the few veterans left, people sometimes thank her for her service.
It didn’t say what they did at the Georgetown PO to keep the mail-seeking crowds away, but a polio outbreak meant strict public heath measures were in place across PEI 75 years ago. Vaccination has nearly eradicated polio worldwide, but there are still a few cases every year in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I had a great-uncle who had polio, which left him with with he called a “crooked foot” and unable to do many things. He would have an interesting perspective on COVID-19 anti-vaccination protests.
The Charlottetown Guardian from August 7, 1946 contained this little item:
To my generation, Fanny Brice was just the character played by Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, but she had been a Big Deal in American entertainment in the first half of the 1900s. According to Wikipedia, Fanny was married three times, all ending in divorce. Her third marriage was to Billy Rose, and that divorce came in 1938.
So, the gal in this news item was either Fanny Brice pretending to be “Sadie, Sadie married lady,” or some Boston lady pretending to be Fanny Brice. Hilarious either way.
