Chapter 17: Personal Reflections

First grandchildren enjoy many benefits as a result of their position in the family. One of these is that they get to spend the most time with their grandparents. I was fortunate to be born the first grandchild of Harry Ross and Annie Shannon, and I spent periods of time with them in Park Head every summer from 1945 until 1954.

When I was 14 it was time to have a summer job. Harry Ross knew all the farmers around Park Head, and some of them needed an extra hand during the summer season. Harry arranged for me to work for Bob Walker, who owned a farm about 1 mile east of Park Head, on Lot 4 Concession 6 in Keppel Township. I worked on the Walker farm for 3 summers, in 1952, 1953, and 1954.

As a result, I got to sample some of the ‘pioneer’ experiences just before this way of life disappeared. My experiences were a slightly later version than those of my aunt Eila Ross or my father Bruce Ross a generation earlier, but many of the original elements still remained. Within a few years after 1954 they were gone. These reflections record some of my personal thoughts and observations about an earlier way of life.

Rural Plumbing:
A simple illustration would be the lack of indoor plumbing. Harry Ross and Annie Shannon never had running water in the house beside the Sauble River. Jim Longmire and Annie Lewis didn’t either, even though their house was in the village of Park Head. Neither did the Walker’s farm. An outhouse was standard, and it really did come equipped with an Eaton’s catalogue. Within a few years all of the houses around Park Head had installed indoor plumbing.

The Grist Mill:
One of my earliest recollections of Park Head is visiting my grandparents for a week or two in the summer of 1945, when I was age 7. Harry Ross was still operating the grist mill, and I spent hours watching the farmers arriving on their wagons pulled by teams of horses. As long as I stayed out of the way, I was allowed to watch the entire milling process.

Although some of the farmers would have owned tractors by 1945, many did not. Most still arrived at the mill with horses. Seven years later, when I started working on the farm, almost every farm had a small tractor. By 1952 tractors were being used to pull wagons on short trips on the roads. Literally, the horses had been put out to pasture.

One of the results was that the farmers started taking their grain to Hepworth to be ground into chop. There was a more efficient mill in Hepworth, driven by electricity rather than water power. Driving 3 miles along the highway was feasible with a tractor. In about 1955 the grist mill on the Sauble River was closed for good. Ben Kocher told me that the maximum revenue it could generate was only 45 cents per hour, and it wasn’t worth continuing to operate.

Rural Engineering:
Harry Ross quit school after Grade 4, at the age of nine. We don’t know exactly why he quit so young. Perhaps he was needed to help on the Lewis farm, or perhaps he didn’t like school. We know he never went back.

About 20 years later he built a dam across the Sauble River, which is still standing. Today, this would require a Civil Engineer, at least to sign-off on the plans. Then he built a Grist Mill, driven by a hydraulic turbine and an intricate system of belts and pulleys. This was Mechanical Engineering. A few years later he added a second, smaller turbine to generate electricity for the mill and his house – Electrical Engineering.

Somewhere, Harry must have learned a great deal about what we now call Engineering. The only place he could have learned was on-the-job, in the lumber mills in Ontario and Michigan and in the ore processing mills in South Africa. Perhaps Engineers are born, not made.

Pike Fishing:
When he was not working, Harry Ross sometimes took me fishing in the millpond, which was a wide part of the river above the dam, about a mile long. We took turns rowing and trolling, but we didn’t use a fishing pole. The fishing line was more like heavy white string wound around a larger version of the type of card used for weaving. The lure was fairly large and hand made, but the pike didn’t seem to mind. Within a few years the millpond had been fished out. By 1954 it was a rare event to catch even a small pike.

Muskrat Trapping:
In 1945 Harry Ross sold the mill property to Ben Kocher. Ben built himself a small house on the mill property and continued to operate the mill for about 10 years. Fortunately for me, Ben was both friendly and generous, and I continued to use the mill property for swimming, fishing, and hunting, just as if it was still owned by my grandfather. I was able to do most of the things my father had done a generation earlier.

One spring Ben Kocher was trapping muskrats to make a few extra dollars and I asked if I could help. A deal was made, and I got to run the trapline for a week. My job was to paddle around the millpond in a primitive ‘kayak’, collect the muskrats, and reset the traps. Ben skinned the muskrats, dried the pelts, and sold them to the dealer. We shared the proceeds – 50 cents each per pelt. That was my first, and last, experience running a trapline. Later in my working life when I heard the expression ‘you skin this one and I’ll go out and get another’, I knew what it meant.

Groundhog Hunting:
From my earliest recollection Harry Ross owned a .22 caliber Browning pump action repeating rifle. It was used for target practice and to hunt groundhogs, which were very plentiful around Park Head. I remember learning to hunt when I was very young – perhaps 7 years old. Unlike my father, I was not offered 10 cents each for groundhog tails, but the local farmers were still pleased to be rid of them.

This era has passed for me because I no longer believe in killing animals for sport. However, groundhogs are still very plentiful around Park Head. One of them, Wiarton Willie, has become a major tourist attraction. Each year on February 2 Wiarton Willie looks for his shadow, and forecasts the end of winter. There is a statue of Wiarton Willie in the park at Wiarton harbour, near the J.H. JONES memorial plaque.

Rural Trains:
In about 1948, when I was about age 10, I took the train from Toronto to Park Head on 2 or 3 occasions. My parents would take me to Union Station in Toronto and buy me a ticket. Then my mother would find the conductor, and ask him to make sure her son changed trains at Palmerston. Somehow it worked, and I arrived at Park Head on the rail line my great grandfather (William2 Ross – the Black Sheep) had helped build. Of course I didn’t know anything about the family secret at the time. For me, the train was just the way to get to Park Head.

Passenger service to Park Head was discontinued in 1958. The last run was made on June 21, 1958 by the ‘Wiarton Flyer’ (also known as the ‘Peanut’). The steam engine had been retired the day before, and a diesel pulled the train on its last run. A local resident who had seen the first train arrive in 1882 presented the crew with a box of cigars.

To quote from GMGS, ‘Passenger trains are sadly missed in many parts of Southern Ontario, but nowhere more than in Park Head. For over 75 years they provided employment, goods, a means of travel, and the special excitement that all trains carry with them.’

Freight service continued for some years after 1958, but then it too was discontinued and the tracks have been torn up. Like other rural railroads in Ontario, the old rail bed is now a snowmobile trail in winter and a recreational path in summer.

Family Farms:
Bob Walker, and his wife Ethel, operated a traditional family farm. They were fine people to work for by any measure. They didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, never swore, etc. However, like the younger Harry Ross and Annie Shannon, they were probably also the hardest working family in Park Head. This was a mixed blessing for a boy from the city who didn’t know anything about hard work.

The farm was a mixed farm, which meant we produced most of our own food. Today it would also be called an organic farm, because no chemicals were used. It didn’t produce very much cash income, but not much was needed. There was a large wood lot at the back of the farm that produced fuel for the winter. Ethel Walker baked her own bread in the wood stove. It was the ‘ideal life’ described in Chapter 16.

Family farms have all but disappeared around Park Head now. Farm consolidation took place starting in about 1960. New equipment had made it possible for one farmer to work more than 100 acres, and economic forces made it necessary. As farmers retired or moved to the city, neighbours bought their land. Specialized beef cattle farms have replaced mixed farms, and some are now called ranches. Today, an average farmer operates about 400 acres. The surplus houses are rented to people who drive to work somewhere else. The surplus barns have been abandoned, and some are falling down. The original Lewis homestead on Lot 5 Concession 5 is an example.

Making Hay:
In 1952 Bob Walker still made hay in much the same way as Henry Shannon had 50 years earlier. A small tractor had replaced the team of horses, but the horses were still around and used for part of the process. Most of the implements were little changed. The hay was cut with a mower attached to the tractor, but it was then raked into loose rows with an ancient hay rake pulled by the horses.

After it cured the hay was brought into the barn loose, using a buckrake attached to the front of the tractor to scoop up a load from the rows. The load was deposited on 2 slings, which had been carefully placed on the barn floor. The slings were then attached to a rope and the whole load was hoisted up to the top of the barn by a horse, using a complicated set of ropes and pulleys. Tracks in the top of the barn had been preset to guide the load to the space above the mow that was being filled. When the load arrived, it snapped into a clip at the end of the track.

My first job was to pull on a rope that hung down from the load. This opened a clip and allowed the load to drop into the mow. The important part about this job was getting out of the way before the load fell. Then the work began. The load had to be spread evenly around the area of the mow, using a pitchfork. And, it had to be done before the next load arrived. Bob Walker drove the tractor and brought in the loads using the buckrake. Ethel Walker handled the slings and the horse, to lift the loads into the mow for me to spread. If the hay field was close to the barn, the hay arrived faster than I could handle it. If the field was at the back of the farm, the longer drive made the pace about right, but it was still a hard day’s work.

The era of putting loose hay into barns was ending just as I was learning how to do it. By the summer of 1954 Bob Walker had acquired a hay baler, and the hay was compressed into square bales in the field before it was brought into the barn on a wagon. Two people could now do the job instead of 3 people and one horse.

Harvesting Grain:
Making hay was done in July. In August it was time to harvest the grain. A few farmers around Park Head grew cash crops, but most did not. Bob Walker grew about 25 acres of oats and barley each year - enough to feed his cattle and pigs. Most of the other farmers did the same. In early August each farmer cut and stooked his own grain, and later in August they shared a threshing machine that travelled from farm to farm on a circuit.

This was the best part of working on the farm each summer, because each farmer contributed a man to the threshing gang that visited each farm when the machine arrived. Compared to solitary work like mowing hay or hoeing a field of corn, these were social occasions. The women competed to see who could prepare the best meals for the gang of men, and the men told tall tales - most not repeatable in a family history book - as they walked around the fields pitching the sheaves of grain onto the wagons.

The era of threshing machines was also ending in 1954. Combine harvesters were already being used on larger farms, and they were much more efficient. It was only the small farms, with even smaller acreages of grain, that had kept them out of Park Head this long. This era ended when the consolidation of the family farms took place.

The One-room School:
The first school in Park Head was a log building on the Henry Lewis farm. In 1893 a new brick school opened in Park Head, known as U.S.S. No. 16. At that time the School Sections were laid out so that the children could all walk to school, as was described in Chapter 15. The result was a large number of small schools, each teaching all eight primary grades in one room.

Since I grew up in Toronto, I had never attended a one-room school. But, all of the young people I knew in Park Head had. This system lasted until 1968, when U.S.S. No. 16 closed its doors for the last time. A district school was opened in Hepworth, and the children are now transported to school by buses. The school has been converted into a private home.

The Rural Telephone:
GMGS tells us that twenty-one residents of Park Head agreed to become shareholders of the Park Head Telephone Company in 1910. The company bought poles from the Hepworth Manufacturing Company, and the phones were installed and working by 1911.

The system had not changed much by 1954. Wooden telephones, with handles to produce the rings, were mounted on kitchen walls. They were all connected on the ultimate party line. Each customer had a distinctive ring - for example long-long-short-long. Every call rang on every phone, but you were only supposed to pick up if you heard your ring. However, anyone who picked up was able to listen in, or talk, on any call, so the calls were not very private. It was a bit disconcerting for a shy boy who wanted to call a local girl and ask her out.

The Park Head Telephone Company was sold to Bell Telephone in the fall of 1964.

Rural Communities:
Like other rural communities, Park Head went through a major transition over a period of about 15 years, starting in the mid 1950s. Many factors were involved, but the widespread use of cars, trucks, and buses was the most important. The old way of life was based on services being provided locally. When this was no longer necessary or economic, the old way of life disappeared.

The Grist Mill shut down in 1955. Rail passenger service ended in 1958. The General Store closed in 1960. The Train Station was torn down in 1964. The School closed in 1968. The Post Office closed in 1970. During this same interval the consolidation of family farms took place. The nature of the community changed forever.

Amabel Clearances:
Donald Ross was a Highland Scot who served in the British Army and ultimately retired on a small piece of land near Glasgow. In Chapter 2 we speculated that this probably resulted from one form of the Highland Clearances. Most popular accounts of the Highland Clearances describe only the most brutal form – tenant farmers driven off the land by force, to be replaced by more profitable sheep. In fact, the clearances were much more complex than the popular accounts, and took many forms. The overall result was that large numbers of highland farmers vacated the land, and migrated to the towns and cities, and to new countries. The Ross family came to Canada.

It is only a bit of a stretch to invent the term ‘Amabel Clearances’. Most farmers in Amabel Township owned their own land, so they were not evicted by brutal landlords. But, economic forces had the same result. In 1890 Thomas and Hannah Ruth Blenkin left for Saskatchewan, and they were joined by 8 of their 10 children. At about the same time, Henry2 Lewis and John Lewis, and their families, left Amabel for the Rainy River District.

Over that next 50 years many other residents also left Amabel, mostly to move to the towns and cities. Eila Ross and Bruce Ross were examples of this form of ‘clearance’. A few years later the consolidation of family farms resulted in even fewer families remaining on the land. One old friend of mine from Park Head mused, a bit sadly, that Park Head’s greatest export was people.

The End of an Era:
These reflections have been about a way of life that is gone. It disappeared in Amabel over a period about 15 years, starting in 1955. Of course, it ended much more abruptly than that for the Ross and Lawson families. The River house burned down in 1955, and Annie Shannon died later that year. These two sad events marked the end of the Park Head experience for the children of Eila Ross Lawson and Bruce Ross.