Article from the Almonte Gazette, Thursday, July, 29, 1971

The Pioneers’ Progress

The Phenomenon will occur again this year in the first days of August. It is the pilgrimage to Middleville, the Mecca of Lanark Township. Again the roads will be full of the fervent and the curious, trekking to the geographic and cultural centre of the township, burning to pierce the curtain of time separating them from the hundred and fifty years since the pioneers arrived and began to axe the forest, spade the ground, and scatter the seed.

“New Lanark” the pioneers called it, because from the auld they came with a background of war and misery to settle in the bush with hunger and hope in the future. Such is the foundation from which springs the heritage of today whose magnetic attraction is Middleville’s Pioneer Days.

Perhaps Napoleon deserves some long overdue credit for this settlement also. The crisis of the Hundred Days’ sickness of 1815 started at the village of Waterloo at ten o’clock in the morning of June 18th. By six in the evening it was all over. Immediately after, Napoleon wrote the Prince regent of Britain: “Royal Highness, I come, like Themistocles, to sit at the hearth of the British people. I put myself under the protection of its laws, a protection I beseech of your Royal Highness, as being that of the most powerful, the most constant, and the most generous of my enemies.”

For twenty years, war had been a constant companion of life in Britain. But the misery of war years was as nothing to the misery of the peace years which followed. Population rose from 9,000,000 in 1880 to 12,000,000 in 1811, even after many years of war siphoned off the surplus manpower of the Highlands and of Ireland in regular draughts. The enclosure system drove thousands of cottagers off their lands, and in their misery, they sought the company of their own kind in the cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast and Dublin, seeking work as weavers.

Weaving was a work which was easily learned but, after 1815’s peace with Napoleon, the influx of cottagers and hordes of discharged soldiers to Glasgow drove the price of labour down from an average of 25 shillings a week in 1804 to 8s 9d a week in 1820. During the same years the price of food rose steadily to three times its cost in 1804. By 1811 Lord Archibald Hamilton had to report in Parliament that 12,000 out of 30,000 families in Lanark and Paisley were on relief. John Galt vividly described the conditions in Ayrshire in 1821: “When the local mill owner returned from Glasgow and told his employees he was forced to close his doors, the bread in a moment was snatched from more than a thousand mouths. It was a scene not to be described, to see the spinners and weavers with their wives and children standing in bands along the roads, all looking and speaking as if they had lost a dear friend or parent.”

Trapped by their conditions, their homeland a state of hopelessness and hunger, escape at any cost, became the common goal of people in Lanark and Renfrew.

The magic of emigration had all the more allure because for many it was forbidden fruit: until 1824 it was against the law for “any artisan” to emigrate from Britain. However, in those days, even as in our own, military necessity sometimes overrides political policy. Lord Bathurst, Secretary for war and colonies, received hundreds of requests for assistance to emigrate, and Henry Goulbourn, under-secretary in the Colonial Office had to admit in Parliament in 1815 “.... the danger in which Canada was during the last war (1812-14) had arisen from its scanty population, and the object of the Government was merely to direct those determined to emigrate and change their destination from the United States to His majesty’s possessions.”

The breakthrough came in 1815 when a grudging approval for emigration of destitute agricultural workers was granted, and an advertisement appeared in the Edinburgh papers on February 25th, 1815 , entitled “Liberal Encouragement to Settlers”. The terms were generous:

1) Transportation free to the destination in the colony;

2) free grants of 100 acres of land to each head of family and to each son on coming of age of 21 years;

3) rations for eight months, or until established;

4) axes, plows, and implements at less than prime cost;

5) in due course, a minister and a schoolmaster on government salary of 100 pounds and 50 pounds respectively.

And in the new land of the Canada's, preparations for settlers were being made also. John Ferguson, acting on behalf of His majesty, signed an agreement with “The Principal Men of the Mississauga Nation”, each of whom made an “X” by which the two hundred and fifty-seven Indians living in the present area of the counties of Leeds, Grenville , Lanark, Carleton and Renfrew surrendered their 2, 748,000 acres principally enclosing the valleys of the Rideau, Mississippi, Madawaska, Bonnechere and Petawawa rivers. The dates of signing was 31 may 1819.

Meanwhile the weavers of Glasgow, realizing the value of the union motto “In Unity is strength”, banded themselves into Emigration Societies, polling their resources, in order to aid some of their members to emigrate as settlers. Early in 1821, some 1800 persons left Glasgow, and out of these 400 were destined for “New Lanark”.

Emigration! Leaving one’s homeland, perhaps never to return. It can be a wrenching or a joyful experience depending on the age and the condition of the individual. Mrs. Magrath, emigrating in 1832 with her husband and small child and a servant girl named Bridget Lacy, expressed her feelings and thoughts this way: “As we still traced the dim outline of the coast from which we were gradually receding, how many associations crowded on my mind. The tender recollections of early youth, the ties and friendships of mature years, rose on the memory with fonder and more vivid impressions as the distance increased that bore me from the scene of their enjoyment. Yet, the prospect of happiness, and independence in the country of our adoption qualified every sentiment of regret, and reconciled me to the painful alternative we had chosen.”

Bridget Lacy, however, wrote to her friend Mary Thompson in a different vein entirely: “.... there are some gay lads, and great fun, and a little courting, but all in a civil way; and between you and I, Mary, but don’t say a word at all, I think there’s a servant boy of a Mr. Jackson's, one Benson, that’s throwing a sheep’s eye at me - but nothing certain, barring a sly pinch here and there and other tinder tokens that may end in smoke after all.”

An average passage from Greenock to Quebec was fifty days. One extreme was eighty-four and the record for swiftness was twenty-eight. One can imagine the joy of the wayfarers when they found themselves on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, for the fresh cod and halibut provided a most welcome change of diet. One record says: “Our fishing goes in with great success. Amongst the captures of this day is an immense Hollybut, 70 lbs. weight; we are to have it for dinner.”

The “New Lanark” contingent of 400 landed at Quebec, and proceeded up-river to Montreal by steam boat. They huddled on an open deck for the twenty-four hour voyage in a heavy downpour of rain which only added to the miseries of some who had drunk too much of the river water which they found was fresh from a point forty miles below Quebec. At Montreal all the baggage was loaded on to wagons, and the the women and children and “all who were unable to walk.” Thus they endured three days of spine-twisting jolts from Montreal to Lachine. Here, flat-bottomed boats replaced wagons, and the men replaced the horses to drag the boats up the rapids of the St. Lawrence. After six days and nights of this constant toil, the contingent finally reached Prescott, a staging point, 120 miles up river from Lachine. Prescott to Brockville to Perth to Lanark was the usual route for the last lap. Perth was a thriving place, four years old in 1821, with two churches, two bakers, three smiths, several stores and a post office. But the 14 miles from there to Lanark was a grinding task through dense bush, and there the settlers dispersed to their grants in the townships of Lanark and Dalhousie.

So the new life began. But, for life to go on for any person, pioneer or pilgrim of a latter-day, three things remain absolutely necessary: food, clothing and shelter. With the few rude tools issued to them from the military stores, the pioneers quickly had to learn to adapt the native resources of the bush to their needs for permanent dwelling rather than the movable teepee of the native Indians. Chopping, clearing, burning occurred in turn.

Once the ground had been cleared around the dwelling site, it usually took three weeks for the settler to get up his log house, 24 feet by 16. The roof was a special problem: “Black ash and basswood are considered best adapted to this purpose - the stem should be about fourteen inches in diameter, straight, clean and easily split. Having cut them into lengths corresponding with the pitch of the roof, they are then to be cleft asunder and hollowed out by axe like rude troughs.” The log troughs were then ranged alternately hollow side up, with the adjoining edges of two upper logs meeting in the hollow of the one below. Rain was carried off easily, as long as the timber remained un-decayed.

The chimney was built at one end of the dwelling. It was of stones held together with mud. Stubbing then took place, which meant filling up the vacancies between the logs with chips of wood, mud and moss mixed together. The floor was of planks pinned to logs sunk in the ground and then smoothed off with an adze.

A rude beginning it was, but a strong contrast indeed with the conditions which had forced emigration upon them. The land was there for the making, and the spectra of hunger could be dispelled by gentle care of the land. The manner of it was simple indeed: “Our first agricultural proceedings are as rude and as simple as well be imagined. A triangular harrow, the teeth of which weigh several pounds each, is dragged over the newly-prepared ground: its irregular and jumping passage over the rots and loose vegetable earth scatters the ashes of the burned timber over the entire surface; the wheat is then sown, about one bushel to the acre, and another scrape of the harrow completes the process.”

The lady of the house would set out her garden, merely laying the seed on the ground. Her choice showed a nice discrimination between plants of auld world and new: they were potatoes, turnips, pumpkins and Indian corn. Only enough of the loose earth and ashes to cover them did she hoe, and a luxuriant crop generally followed.

Pumpkins and Indian corn were not only delights of the new world. Bridget Lacy was so impressed with the natural sugar obtained from the maple tree that her credibility almost outran belief. She described it to Mary Thompson with difficulty: “But what flogged all that I had ever seen was making sugar out of a tree, Mary - not a word of a lie do I tell you: you take a big gimlet and make a hole in a tree (the maypole I thinks they calls it) and out comes the sugar, like sweet water thick-like, and you boil it ....”

As the neighbours found new settlers coming in to take up land, and as the need for specialists grew more and more acute, the villages sprang up with carpenters, blacksmiths, lumbermen, harness-makers, builders. The use of the community’s manpower resources was particularly evident in the “Bee”. It was like this: “A framer, on receiving the dimensions and plan, cuts out the mortises and prepares the frame. A BEE, which means an assemblance of the neighbours, is then called; and a person well-skilled in the business, and termed a Boss, takes the leadership of the active party, who, with the mere mechanical aid of the “following” or “raising” pole, gradually elevates the mighty bents (perpendicular parts of the frame) until the tenants (connected with each other by beams) drop into their mortises in the sill, to which as well as to each other, they are immediately after secured by pins, and in a few hours, the skeleton of the house with its rafters, etc., is ready for shingles and clap boards.”

As many as 70 neighbours might assist on such a Bee, without any recompense whatever, except for a plentiful dinner. Mr. T. W. Magrath writing of a barn-raising at his farm, said: “We raised a barn, sixty feet by thirty-six, and eighteen feet in height, with the ice house, root house, and summer dairy beneath it, which cost us, in cash for hired labour., only twelve dollars to a framer, and the price of some nails worth about 2s 6d. On this occasion we were able to supply our obliging neighbours with an abundant dinner and supper in the dwelling house, and to gratify them in a little music.”

Ah, the barn dance! How many indeed has paused to wonder how any wooden structure, made by man, would ever withstand the stresses and strains put on it by the stomping feet of the dancers! Mr. Magrath lets us in on the secrets: “The floor of this barn would surprise you: it is supported by twenty-three beams of wood, eighteen inches square, with two courses of three-inch plank over them”.

The early harvests showed the settlers still adjusting to the changed circumstances they found in the new world’s Lanark. They learned to use the cradle scythe to harvest the wheat instead of the sickle. It did not make as clean work as the sickle, but a good cradler could take down from two to three acres of wheat in a day. The joy of plenty was evident in the gleanings: these were left to that strange phenomenon of North America , the flocks of wild pigeons, which the settlers noticed were sometimes miles in length.

The pumpkin from the first settlement was the true symbol of the harvest time’s joy and plenty. And its secret joy was easily learned: Bridget Lacy explained it to Mary Thompson: “And then, there’s the bumpkin pie which they give to the workmen; but that’s aisy made enough. The master doesn’t like it, but it does very well in the kitchen on a Sunday. You takes and slices it like apples, and gives it plenty of the maypole, and a pinch or two of cloves, and a glass of whiskey, which is like ditch-water here, and it’s mighty good eating.

One of the early superintendents of emigration remarked once on the variety of occupations which made demands on the time and energy of the pioneers: he said: “When I am not superintending the emigrant settlements my time at home is occupied in shoeing horses, making gates, fences, chimney pieces, and furniture. Indeed my mechanical labours are so multifarious - you may form some idea of their versatility when I tell you that I made an ivory tooth for a very nice girl, and an iron one for the harrow within the same day.”

The agricultural base continued as the foundation of the pioneer economy, and ample proof of the value of emigration was found in the happiness of the people. Just how fortunate their conditions in “New Lanark” was told by one settler: “Upon the whole I cannot see any risk the prudent and industrious farmer can be subject to who pays no rent and, scarcely any taxes, has plenty to subsist him, and has a ready market and a good price for the over plus.”

Thus it started, and thus it grew. So, up, up and away to Middleville on the Pilgrim’s Trail, to run the clock backwards for a century and a half, to listen to the swish of the swinging axe, to hear its crunching bite into the log, to see the chips fly upward before falling to rest. Perhaps to test the maypole, and to taste bumpkin, for in Lanark all are pioneers, by birth, or by the inclination.

                                                                             John Dunn July, 1971