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Note: HI66
Note: (Research):HAMILTON'S ISLAND
The times we spent at the island when we were kids were probably as good as any before or since. Friends made then are still friends and no amount of time passing seems to change anything. There weren't many cars, in fact only two families on the island had them, and no phones, no TV, and no electricity! We all went to bed by oil lamps and all the cooking was done on the old kerosene three-burner stove in the kitchen, where we also ate and had our baths when the weather was bad.
Sleeping arrangements were pretty basic; everyone, young and old, all in the back bedroom, which had an old green curtain down the centre of theroom dividing the two bunks. These were upper and lower with the lower one a double. Rob and I slept in the top ones and the old folks shared the lowers. Sounds funny but worked all right as we were only little kids, and nobody snored.
Basically we lived outdoors from dawn to dark, eating on the veranda. I don't remember many mosquitoes but there were always a couple of long sticky flycatchers hanging from the rafters. Rob and I lived most of the summer in a pair of shorts, no shoes, and at least half the time in our bathing suits. Practically living in the water along with all the other kids, but never allowed to go in until the prescribed one hour after any meal. In those days there was a small beach down in front of the Marshall's cottage with a nice wooden wharf which Mr.M put in every year for all to use. He also put out a large wooden float we could swim out to and dive off.
Apart from all this every cottage owned a skiff made locally by one of the Laplante family in the village. These were wonderfully constructed lap-strake boats made from cedar strips in the classic skiff shape, ie.pointed at both ends, rowed like a dream and were extremely stable. We roamed the river endlessly and strangely I never remember my mother ever worrying about our safety. Apparently once she knew we were good swimmers we were on our own. I think that we all developed a good set of shoulders from all the years of rowing - there weren't any motor boats, although the game warden by the name of Baker was rumoured to have one but nobody had ever seen him.
The fishing in those days was good nearly anywhere and naturally we all were experts. Mother would haul me away from swimming to get some perch for lunch. This would usually take no more than twenty minutes from the time I got the skiff in the water until the fish were in the kitchen.
The Island season for us began a few days after school finished in June and officially ended Labour Day weekend, as school always begins the following Monday. In the early days we, that is the women in the family and us kids, would taxi down to the old Bonaventure station to catch the train for the hour and a half trip to Cornwall. There we would be met by one of the Bentleys who owned the store in Summerstown,and transported to the cottage, either in their Model T Ford or more usually by horse and buggy. A couple of the local boys were always available to help with the heavy work needed to get the place open for business. No charge. Of course we were always expected and as the families from Cornwall had already been there for some time the local butcher, grocer and so on would soon arrive for the first orders of the new year. Having no car we had no other way of getting supplies, except by rowing a mile up to the village. Everything around the house was usually pretty good; the farmer, Tom Jack, would have had the horses into the cottage area for a month or so to get he weeds down which was good although they always left a lot of horse manure for us to walk in.
Of course in the good old days everybody worked Saturday morning. So as a result all the men belonging to the Montreal families had to get the afternoon train and didn't arrive, via Bentley's buggy, at the cottage until long after dark and the kids nearly ready for bed. The old man and my grandfather came up every weekend, although Grandpa didn't like it much, especially after the summer we got hit by lightening and all the kitchen pots, pans etc. flew all over the place. This really pissed him off and after that he spent as much of the season as he could with his great friend Bill MacCartney, from Fort Covington, across the river in New York state, travelling the Gulf of St. Laurence in a small old tramp vessel and having the time of their life away from family and cares. The two of them had been friends from about the age of ten when, because the international border then wasn't nearly so restrictive, my great-grandfather was the postmaster in "the Fort", and the two boys were at school together. MacCartney became a medical general practicioner, receiving his postgraduate training in the Bellvue Hospital in New York.
From their modest beginnings in the small border village on the St. Lawrence both of these friends achieved enviable success in later life, My grandfather as a senior partner in the prestigious firm of Montreal chartered accountants, P.S.Ross & Sons and a leading expert in municipal administration in eastern Canada, and MacCartney, after more than 50 years caring for northern New Yorkers - whites and Indians alike, gained nationwide fame with a series of books covering his long career in country medicine. His last, which was called "Fifty Years a Country Doctor" held the number one spot on the NY Times best seller list for three months. I still hold a copy, inscribed by the doctor," To John A. Grant. Whom I have held in high esteem for much more than Fifty Years"
.. William N. Macartney. July 10,1938.
As already mentioned the island at this time was farmed by Tom Jack, with the help of another man of similar age with the unlikely name of Danny Spink, Tom was unmarried as was Danny and they lived in the big white farmhouse occupying the prime position on a slight rise overlooking the river. Although Tom was a batchelor he had a niece who came up from the States for several weeks every year to give him some company and I suppose clean the place out. She became a good friend over the years and mother and Queenie always looked forward to her arrival in July.
Tom was an irascible old guy who got on reasonably well with the cottagers, who all relied on the farm for their daily milk. However for some unknown reason he hated our great-aunt Bertha, grandmother's sister, who had the cottage next to ours, and whenever she would make the mistake of going up for the milk in the evening instead of sending one of the kids, Tom would appear out of the barn and break into a string of all the foul language he could manage in one breath. Whereupon he would retire, satisfied he had done his thing for the day. Aunt Bertha scuttle back down to her cottage, purple in the face and muttering about God fixing him in the end. As might be expected we were always on hand to enjoy the fireworks and were seldom disappointed.
Every year Aunt B. took on her three grandchildren for the summer months. Neil, Carol and Keith Whiting, our cousins, lived in Connecticut where their father Harry was in charge of the State Mental Hospital. Their mother Marjorie was Aunt B's daughter.We got along well and looked forward to seeing each other every year, although in later years news of their activities came via the family. As always happens, although Kieth, like his father, graduated in medicine from McGill and he has been up to visit at the cottage a couple of times more recently.
One of the events of the season used to be the random visits, always at night, of their uncle, known in the family as Cousin Reg, and famous far and wide as the black sheep of the family. He even at that time enjoyed an enviable record with the Cornwall Police for a series of run-ins with the law, although as I grew older I often though this had been brought about by the kind of early childhood he must have had under our religious maniac Aunt Bertha. Every time he showed up we were hastily taken inside with threats that "Cousin Reg is there"; doors locked, blinds pulled down, lights off. Such was the reaction of our good old Victorian WASP family. By golly, when my brother and I were small,"Beer" if ever referred to was always in Italics, as were all things alcoholic.
There was one instance we remember in particular. A couple of the island cottagers, Neil Moore and Bill Macartney - Dr.William M.'s son - were painting Moore's living room floor one Saturday afternoon and each had a quart of Molsons beside him to alleviate the thirst as it was pretty hot. All of a sudden who should arrive but good old Aunt Bertha "Just visiting". But they were more than equal to the occasion. Bill looked up, gave her a big smile and casually reached over, grabbed his beer and poured a little into his paint, gave it a bit of a stir and went on painting. No flies on them. They weren't family but she carried a lot of clout.
Don't get me wrong; the old aunt was kindness itself, spending over fifty years from the time of her husband's death teaching the first grade in the Cornwall Public School. At the time of her retirement practically every person under the age of sixty, living in Cornwall, had been a former pupil of hers and were proud of it.
Aunt Bertha was responsible for two regular island events. One was the weekly Sunday School attended without fail by every kid on the island, and held on Aunt B's front deck. The hymn singing could be easily heard as far away as the farm, due largely to Aunt's formidable voice. We did our best but were not in the same league, and at best were pretty embarrassed by it all. This weekly torture was dreaded by all and sundry and there was no afternoon snoozing by the oldies as long as we were in session. Each of us had to bring ten cents collection and this was sent off to some unknown struggling missionary somewhere out in the Pacific. We never heard from him.
The other regular event, and one which was eagerly awaited by everyone, was Aunt Bertha's annual "Taffy Pull". This was held in the area just outside her kitchen door where trestles were set up and we could all get nice and close to the action. Aunt B. would spend the morning hard at work boiling up big aluminium pots of the beautiful honey - coloured toffy. You could smell it a mile away. When it was ready, in the early afternoon, the fun began.
I suppose most times there would have been ten or twelve of us, ranging in age from five up to twelve or thirteen. These included Kilgours, Smardons, Bigelows, Hunters and Archibalds from the States, our Whiting cousins and of course Rob and I. Maybe a couple of friends from town as well.
We all were issued with plates. On these Aunt put a large dollop of red hot toffee. The idea was to put butter all over your fingers, grab the toffee and pull it into long strings mash it together again and continue this until it got too stiff to work. Of course the toffee was so hot the fingers more often than not ended up with a lot of blisters long before the afternoon was over, and tubes of burn soother were always on hand for those too impatient to wait for the toffee to cool off a bit.
At any rate the stuff was mighty good and we all went home with our share and made it last for days. Unfortunately none of the survivors I have since talked to can remember how it was made, or we might well have a fiftieth anniversary "taffee pull" reunion.
Apart from these outings there was the odd impromptu marshmallow roast and towards the end of the season when he corn was ripe the Hermistons put on a corn roast for all the island, with a huge bonfire on the Marshall's beach and as much corn as you could eat. As a matter of fact my memories of this particular event are that the roasted corn - you stuck it on the end of a sharp stick - after you had almost roasted yourself, was gritty and all you got out of it was a mouthful of ashes.
We spent the days roaming the island, which as already mentioned was open farm grazing land. All the islands in this part of the river are composed of glacial drift - mainly large angular boulders of granitic rock from the pre-Cambrian shield quarried by the last ice sheet. There is a lot of clay in the overlying soil such as it is and we often found the odd arrowhead and pieces of pottery in this clay along the riverbanks. We also used the clay along with a bit of old iron to make stoves for roasting potatoes.
As part of the river navigation system the Government maintained a large lighthouse on the island. This was situated about the centre of the line of cottages, was painted white with a red top and was lit by means of an acetylene flame. The gas was contained in two huge steel cylinders, forty feet long and about eight feet in diameter. They were wonderful to dry off on after swimming.
Some two or three times a season the service boat would anchor off the island and the crew would come ashore to refill the tanks and renew the paintwork. The captain was a very understanding man and would allow us kids to row out and go on board, although I'm sure this was against all regulations. On one occasion in particular, when they needed some special equipment for the job they were doing, they took a whole bunch of us all the way up to Cornwall and back, something that would have cost him his job in later years.
And so it went. We had the usual array of summer complaints, from green apples and the like, however if we looked a little worse than that we were hustled up to great-grandma Skeith's house in Cornwall where my grandmother and her sister Aunt Jen looked after us in the nice comfortable back bedroom.
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GLEN WALTER
One of my earliest memories of the farm at Glen Walter and of my mother's family, the Craigs on her father's side and the Fergusons on her mother's, was grandfather Craig meeting my mother and I at the old Cornwall railroad station back on Ninth Street. He was waiting with the horse and cutter and once all the bags, boxes etc.were loaded we were off to the farm. This was the day after Christmas, which we had just spent with the other grandparents on Montrose Avenue an annual event, and now it was mother's turn to visit her family, taking me with her.
In those days there was no question of any lack of snow at Christmas time and the countryside was already blanketed in a couple of feet, with drifts all along the roads and against the fences. The temperature in the low teens (degrees F), almost a complete absence of any other traffic on the road, and away we went bundled up to the eyes in heavy buffalo robes. I can still remember how quiet it was. Other than the swish of the sleigh runners on the snow and the sleigh bells on the horse's collar not a sound could be heard. Had there been any wind, we would have heard the telegraph wires, fiddlestring - tight from the cold, singing like violins. I have often since thought how lucky I was to have had those early experiences. It wasn't so many years later that the motorcar put all these slow and enjoyable little trips from the station permanently into the past, and the horses permanently into the barn.
Grampa Craig would head down from the station to Water Street and then east past the huge Courtalds silk mill and along the river out of town. From there it was all open country for three or four miles with only a farmhouse now and then, smoke from the chimneys rising straight as a string into the still air, until finally we came to the Church of the Precious Blood - the rather unlikely name given to the local Roman Catholic church. The church was on the river side of the road and together with the manse and the graveyard occupied most of Flannigan's Point. From there it was only a few hundred yards to the house.
This was a far cry from the present 401 freeway speeding traffic from Montreal to Toronto and beyond. At this time the road past the farm, the King's Highway No.1, carried all the traffic there was.
When we finally came in sight of the house the very size of it made me sure we had a lot further to go. When we turned into the drive and drove up and under the large covered portico I was speechless. In a twinkling we were surrounded by a noisy family crowd of all ages. There was Grandma Craig, first with the hugs, and then a string of instructions to the happy smiling faces around us to hurry up and get us inside out of the cold. Then Aunt Jean, the first of grandma's family, a year or two older than mother and the teacher in the Summerstown school. Then mother's younger sister Aunt Helen Brown who had arrived for the holiday, down from Cornwall with Uncle Edgar and my cousins Norman and Anna Catherine. There were to be more Brown cousins as time went by but only the two then. Norman and I were born within three months of each other and Kate a year or two later and the three of us were more like brothers and sisters in those days. Sundry other uncles lurked in the background.
The house was a square three storeyed building built of red brick. It had a steeply- angled tiled roof and large white wooden pillars spaced along the wide front veranda and framing the flight of stairs rising to the front door. To a five-year-old used to a more modest home, once we were inside it seemed endless. There were rooms everywhere. A grand staircase off the entry hall led to the large second floor bedrooms at the front of the house. Another toward the rear serviced more bedrooms on the second floor and went on up to those on the third. At supper I learned that Aunty Jane McGregor, one of grandma's sisters, inhabited the third floor. Her husband had died not long before and she had come to live here. All I can remember of Aunty McGregor is that she was very old and very quiet, wore black and didn't frighten me.
I don't think I have ever seen a bigger kitchen than that in which grandma ruled. It took up a large part of the rear of the ground floor and was the main centre of household activities. It contained a huge wooden table in the centre of the room. This could and often did seat twelve or more, especially at breakfast, and was where almost all meals were eaten. The presence of a strange face or two at the table was a common sight as people were always coming and going.
The cooking was done on a giant iron stove at one end of the kitchen that never seemed to go out. Grandma saw to it that the " boys "as the uncles were collectively called kept a generous supply of wood in the wood box, and you could hear her as far as the barn if she thought they were letting it get a bit low. At the other end of the kitchen there was a large iron sink with a pump connected to a well under the house which supplied all the kitchen water. I remember that it had a terrible taste.
When I first arrived on the scene and for several more years after that, the electricity supply still had not been extended into the Glen Walter area. Once darkness fell, and this was pretty early in the middle of winter, the household was on its own.
The solution which grandfather had come up with, and one that had impressed the neighbours for miles around, was the installation of a small gasoline generator out in the barn. Wires ran from it to the main house and supplied the juice for the light bulbs hanging in the various rooms. It also provided the barn with light for the evening milking. Who could ever forget grandad at dusk heading out to the barn to start the motor? We would hear the faint rumble as it started, then watch with fascination as the bulbs start to glow and finally achieve their full brightness. Activity would then accelerate through the supper period and for a little while afterward because about eight o'clock grandad, good Scot that he was, would then head out to the barn again and turn the generator off. Of course, knowing the routine, the female family members would have had the kerosene lamps going and we would be back to the pioneer days. Needless to say this routine fascinated all of us kids from the city who were not used to going to bed by lamp light, and I for one found it scary and needed others around until I got to sleep. I think I was always a pretty nervous little kid and remember one episode in particular when a neighbour's house down below Glen Walter burned down. The disaster had been discussed in great detail by the family all the afternoon and evening; it was in the middle of winter and a very serious thing. Somehow I became convinced that our house was also going to burn down that night. Nothing anybody could do stopped me crying and howling and I finally fell asleep exhausted, to wake up in the morning wondering why we weren't lying in a pile of smoking ashes.
Apart from the main house families there was uncle Robert's young family in a small red brick house just east of Granddad's, on a part of the original farm that had been made over to him when he married. Robert was the eldest of the boys and had married Jessie Masterman from Summerstown and at this time they had Frances, the eldest, and Jack, their first boy. These cousins formed part of our group from the earliest days and we enjoyed many Christmas, Easter and summer holidays together until we were a good deal older.
Granddad had some years earlier bought Stonehouse Point, a large block of prime farmland fronting on the river about half a mile east. The name derived from the ruins of a huge stone house built by a Colonel MacDonnell during the war of 1812 and which later destroyed by fire. The Point, as it was known in the family, was given to my grandmother by Granddad in around 1921. Seeing a golden opportunity Grandma wasted no time building several small wooden summer cottages along the river. These she rented to Cornwall families. However she always saved one for Aunt Helen and her kids and mother and I, and later Rob, spent a lot of early summers with them there; Norman and I sharing a big canvas tent at the side of the house which the sun used to make terribly hot.
We all learned to swim at the Point almost as soon as we were able to walk. The current was quite swift in front of the cottage and mother and Aunt Helen lost no time making sure we weren't going to drown. We learned the hard way. No soft plastic inflated vests for us. In those days it was two pieces of cordwood joined by a short length of harness strap which went across under our arms, keeping us afloat while we thrashed about trying to make some headway in the water. The scratching as can be imagined was awful. But we learned quickly and after that the mothers were quite prepared to allow us into the water any time, as long as it was an hour after any meal. It was well known that if you went swimming right after eating you would immediately get terrible cramps and sink straight to the bottom.
So all of us had wonderful carefree days, able to roam anywhere and do anything without a care in the world, and the mothers confident all was well. Every few days Norman and I would head off down the track to the highway and back to grandma's to have a few hours around the farm. If we had any money we'd stop at Rousell's little store next to the cheese factory and buy some "honeymoons" my alltime favourite candy. Two for a cent and worth every penny. In the summer months the road got so hot that the tar would soften and if we weren't careful it stuck to our bare feet and burned like hell.
Just before the cheese factory, and also on the river side of the road, Harry Pierson had his blacksmith shed, with his house next to it. Harry had worked for Granddad in Jamaica, where Granddad was building the railroad at the time. When the contract ended and grandad returned home he brought Harry with him and set him up in Glen Walter. A good move as he then got all his blacksmithing done for no charge. And, although we didn't realise it at the time, was the reason Harry allowed Norm and I the freedom of the place when we made it our first stop en route to the farm. Harry'd sit there in the sun while Norm and I, after getting the forge roaring, heated up old horse shoes or other scraps of iron and hammered away at them on the big anvil, sparks flying everywhere. Until our arms were worn out. Harry had married one of mother's many cousins from Uncle Jimmy's on the other side of the road so it was really all in the family.
Once we got to grandma's we were always sure of a warm welcome and were given cake and milk or whatever was going at the time. We had the run of the place and would roam around the farm and the barns until we found where the current work was in progress. This of course would depend a lot on the time of year. I remember one of the favorites was the late June or early July haying, when everyone was out with the hay loader and the big hay wagons to get the hay into the barn while the weather stayed dry. Occasionally Norm or I would be allowed to drive the wagon along the line of raked hay while the loader, towed behind the wagon, carried a continuous belt of hay up into the wagon bed. One of the uncles worked away with a hay fork spreading the hay evenly around the wagon. This was mighty hard work because the hay came up fast. As the wagon filled up we were soon all about ten or fifteen feet or more above the ground. I can remember looking straight down on the horse's backs.
There was a really fascinating arrangement for getting the hay from the wagon into the barn hayloft that we loved to watch. At the peak of the roof at one end of the barn there was a large opening from which a metal rail protruded. The rail ran the length of the barn and carried, on rollers, a huge two-pronged fork. The fork was raised or lowered by a long heavy rope attached to one of the horses. The fork would be driven deep into the hay. The horse then moved slowly away causing two big teeth on the end of the fork to fold inward and the whole thing to lift a great bundle of hay up to the roof peak. Once it reached the rail there was a loud clang and the load shot along the rail into the barn to the desired location where with a yank on another rope the load dropped into the mow. The barn was very large and high and held a huge amount of hay which lasted all winter.
The hay mow was one of the favourite places to play. We would climb high onto the beams that supported the barn, then leap down into the piles of soft hay below. It had a wonderful smell. In those days cows were kept in the barn for the entire winter and were fed twice a day with the hay which was forked down chutes from the mow up above.
Norman and I sometimes went swimming there out from the boathouse just across the road below the house but there were a lot of weeds and we only did it to keep Frances company when she came over from Uncle Robert's house east of Grandma's. Frances was their eldest, and about the same age as Norman and I. Robert and Jessie also produced two brothers and a sister for Frances; Jack and Harry, and lastly Mina. We have always been closer to Frances than the others. Perhaps because they were younger. During the long years which followed we all were kept informed of each other's activities by our parents, and by the infrequent personal contact. Once our mothers died the contacts became more difficult, however by that time most of us had settled into our lives and were well established with families of our own. We also had been well enough advised of each other's whereabouts by then to be able to keep in touch. Happily this is what we have done.
In Aunt Helen's family, Norman, after serving in the Canadian Navy during the war, attended Queens University and Osgood Hall law school at the University of Toronto, went on to a distinguished career as a Queen's Council with a large practice in London, Ontario. One of his sons is now practising law in Toronto. Anna Catherine also graduated from Queens (as did both our mothers), married Gerry Rogers and they have lived almost ever since in Arnprior, a very attractive town on the Ottawa River a little way above Ottawa.
Strangely enough the three youngest of the Brown children have all died. Betty, who never married, was a teacher and was killed in a car accident while on a holiday in Germany in the winter of 1966. The last two boys, Charles and Robert were living in Waterloo, Ont. and Edmonton, Alberta respectively. Robert had no family but Charles was married and had two children who are still in Waterloo.
To round it all off, Frances graduated from Queens majoring in languages and for several years held a job with the Federal government as a translator, and with a fairly high security rating. She married Bruce Dunlop, a law professor at U of T. They have two children and still live in Toronto. Sadly Bruce has had progressive arthritis and is now confined to a hospital bed from which he continues to edit the Ontario Law Review, even though hardly able to move. Frances and I keep in touch.
The rest of us were never close to the others of her family. Jack had done extremely well in Halifax, with an Order of Canada for his efforts. Harry, a school principal, died, I think in 1997. Mina now somewhere in Montreal at last report.
Both sides of mother's family had been settled in the Cornwall area for more than a hundred years. The Fergusons, my grandmother's people, were living in the Mohawk Valley in upper New York State before the American Revolution and moved to Canada with the United Empire Loyalists at the time of the revolution. These were people of Scottish descent living in the Valley who opted to stay with the Monarchy and with great difficulty and extreme hardship made their way north to Upper Canada. Mother used to tell me stories of how the families were pursued by bands of hostile Mohawk and Iroquois most of the way. One of the babies was sick and cried continuously so that it had to be wrapped tightly under thick blankets to stiffle its cries or it would have had to be abandoned.
The Loyalists crossed the St. Lawrence into what is now Ontario at a number of points, from Lancaster west to about Prescott. Recognising their plight the Government of Upper Canada allotted each family a farm of one hundred acres, and the early maps of the area, of which I have copies, show that they were almost exclusively Scots.
The Fergusons first settled close to the village of Williamstown, which incidentally was where my grandfather Grant was born, in the late 1700's and farmed there until 1812 when they moved to the present family farm on the South Branch Road east of Cornwall. Here they built the house that we still visit today and where my cousin Ken Ferguson and his wife Beverly now live. The farm was originally called "The Oaks" however a few years ago Kenny changed it to "Oakwood".
It is a little west of Williamstown and a couple of miles north of Glen Walter. Grandma Craig was born in this house, as were all of her brothers and sisters. We now have a huge proliferation of Fergusons. At the last family reunion I attended in 1997 I counted about fifty close relatives. The reunion was held at my cousin Gordon's - Kenny's older brother. Gordon has a very large corn and soy bean farming complex just north of Lancaster which he works with his two sons. I usually see Gordon and Elizabeth at least once a summer when I'm home, and it is always a happy visit.
Grandma's brother Alexander, mother's Uncle Sandy, continued to occupy "The Oaks ". One of his grandchildren, Elizabeth , or Zibby as she has always been, married a mining engineer Bill Weganast, whom she met at Queens. They lived a few doors from us during our time in Pointe Claire and have kept in touch.
Another brother, Jack, became a lawyer. Following graduation he moved west, locating finally in Saskatoon. Uncle Jack died at his office desk one morning at the age of ninety one, ending an extremely successful career. He was always very fond of mother and was a tremendous help to her following the disastrous reversal of Grandma's will, engineered by Robert Craig, which switched the inheritance of Stone House point from mother and Aunt Helen, Grandma's original stated wish, to Robert and Ferguson. Grandma had latterly been quite senile and Robert in the end was able to inveigle her into signing the revised will.
Norman, with Uncle Jack's assistance, obtained the services of a top Ottawa QC, but in an acrimonious and heated courtroom confrontation he was unable get either of the brothers to admit anything of a damaging nature. So in the end it was impossible to show any proof of their actions.
That the money they would have had from the sale of the Point would have assured mother and Aunt Helen of a worry-free end to their lives, instead of the period of financial strain mother endured, and the extreme health problems suffered by Helen. The Point was sold about five years ago by the brother's heirs for a half a million dollars. Had it not been for the generosity of her Uncle Jack Ferguson mother would have been in a very difficult position indeed.
While the Ferguson family origins for our purposes begin with their lives in the Mohawk Valley area up to the time of the American war of independence, and subsequent migration north into Canada, the Craig's arrived in Glen Walter as settlers in the late 1700's directly from Ayrshire in the Scottish highlands. This can be verified from the inscriptions on the tombstones on the graves of James Craig and his wife which lie in the extreme southwest corner of the Salem Church cemetery, directly ahead of those of our mother and father. These are the original Craigs and are the grand parents of our grandfather and grandmother Craig. The lives and careers of the early Craig's are poorly recorded, although we know of one Member of Parliament, another James Craig, and an early Helen Craig who married George Bryson, one of the original Ottawa lumber barons with large holdings on the river in Pontiac County above Ottawa. George Bryson's great grandson, George Toller, now lives in Ottawa. Through our mutual interest in the family history and being cousins, albeit pretty well removed, we have lately established contact and have, had several meetings during my last two summers at home. These resulted in a couple of visits to Fort Coulonge, the site of the great grandfather's lumbering ventures on the Ottawa, and also to the family sponsored small museum at Chutes Coulonge a little way up the Coulonge river above the Fort.
As far as can be ascertained the Craigs always farmed in the Glen Walter area and grandfather was born there. His was a large family comprising nine brothers and three sisters. Sadly, I am not able to delve very deeply into the lives of the other of the children of which very little is known. However two of his brothers, Thornton and Murdoch, attended McGill University and became doctors. Thornton resided in California and at least some of his descendants still live in the Oakland area.
Among the many stories our aunt Dorothy, who married mother's youngest brother Charlie, told me is worth recording. Sometime in the 1960's, when she and Charlie were still living on the farm, the original Craig farm, which had housed all Grandfather's family was finally sold. The new owners, in the course of their investigations of their new property, were terrified to find in the loft of one of the outbuildings two mouldering human skeletons. They lost little time in calling in the police, who in turn informed the Federal police. Eventually they traced everything back to the remaining Craig relatives and as Dorothy relates the Mounties came banging on the door just as they were sitting down to supper. Charlie's explanation was not what they expected. He told them that years and years ago when Uncle Jimmy, Grandfather's oldest brother, had the property they had had a lot of trouble with a couple of chicken thieves. Charlie said that all of a sudden the thefts ceased and the uncle announced that there wouldn't be any more trouble. "We always wondered what happened to those thieves" he mused.
Of course this nearly resulted if Charlie being carted of to the station for intensive questioning and maybe an overnight stay. Dorothy was finally able to convince the Mounties that it was only her husband's warped sense of humour and that the skeletons had in fact belonged to Charlie's uncles at the time of their McGill medical studies.
As happened with all the families on those small one hundred acre holdings, the male offspring when they became adults had to leave the nest and immediately fend for themselves. There was no way the farm could support them all. And so it was with grandfather, and he began his career as a lowly deck hand on the freighters which plied the St. Lawrence. We haven't any idea how long he worked on the boats, but we know that after he left this job that he went to work in railroad construction and continued in this field for the rest of his working life.
Once again it wasn't too long before he had enough experience to realise that he might take on the actual construction contracting himself. This he proceeded to do. This was a time of major rail construction across Canada and there were opportunities for men willing to take them. To begin with Grandfather teamed up with two other friends from the Cornwall area, Mike Purcell and a man by the name of McMartin. They would contract for a mile of track laying. When this was completed they would take on another, and so on, keeping their operations small.
I'm not sure how long the other two continued with this type of contracting but this was certainly grandfather's future and he moved from strength to strength. His contracts became larger and more varied until we see him,,, at the time of his marriage to grandmother Craig, in charge of building the railroad in Argentina from Buenos Aires to the Andes. He is proudly described as R.J.Craig of Buenos Aires in the newspaper report of their wedding at "The Oaks" on South Branch Road, Grandmother's home. It's difficult to imagine how he ever found the time to court her, but it was by all reports a large wedding and as the report in the Freeholder went "many expensive presents were received".
One can only surmise how Annie Alberta Ferguson coped with the traumatic switch from the quiet, ordered life at "The Oaks", to that of a busy wife of an international traveller, following him here and there. No doubt sometimes without much advance notice.
What we do know is that she always managed her household and her family with care, love and great determination, and there was never any doubt as to who was in control of any situation at any time. And as already mentioned there was always time for we kids.
As the marriage progressed and the children began arriving Grandfather's subsequent contracts included building railroads in the Miami area of Florida and the railroads in Jamaica. From a photo we know that at the time of the Jamaica job Aunt Jean and my mother were on the scene. The photo shows the two with their Jamaican nanny and Jean looks to be about four or five years old. Mother often spoke of learning Spanish there almost as soon as she began to talk. I also know from talks with Norman that Grandma Craig came back to Cornwall from Jamaica for the birth of Aunt Helen, and that Grandfather had taken a house on Second Street for her during her confinement.
It was also about this time that he had a bit of luck when he found out that the Glen Walter farm, which then was being worked by an uncle, was about to be sold up by the bailiffs for back taxes. Grandfather moved quickly and was able to buy the place, avert a disaster, and later build the beautiful house we all knew so well.
Grandfather continued with his contracting for some time. It is interesting to know that at the time of his Jamaica operation one of the cross Canada railroads, under the direction of Sir William Van Horne, was reaching its final stages along the difficult upper reaches of the Fraser River in British Columbia. The construction had come to a virtual standstill. The right of way ran down along the near vertical cliffs bordering the river and so many of the indentured Chinese labourers were being lost that the remainder refused to continue. Sir William is reported to have said finally that there was only one man he knew that was capable of getting the job done and that was Rob Craig. Sir William and Grandfather were friends and had previously worked together. Because of this he was able to convince R.J. to leave the Jamaica project for a time and come up to help out in B.C. Needless to say Grandfather fulfilled expectations and indeed got the work going again, pushing the railroad the remaining distance onto the Fraser River delta plain, in spite of the almost impossible conditions.
Canadian writer Pierre Burton's book recording the history of the railroad was published a few years ago, achieving considerable acclaim. Aunt Dorothy, who married mother's youngest brother Charlie, told me a little while before she died in 1995 that she was very upset that he hadn't made any mention of Grandfather's important part in its successful completion.
It couldn't have been too many years after that that Grandfather decided he had done enough to be able to retire comfortably from the construction business, and to locate his ever-increasing family permanently in Glen Walter. However he once told Norman that at the time he made that decision he was considering an offer of the biggest contract he had ever received, but in the end turned it down.
For all that he had already accomplished, when he retired to the farm Grandfather was still a relatively young man. According to a copy of the Bulletin of the Cornwall Milk and Cheese Board, in 1917 he had then been farming for ten years, which means that he wouldn't have been more than fifty years old when he left the contracting business.
Typical of his approach to any new undertaking, he set about the business of running a farm. The first house the family lived in was a rather large wooden building that was still standing when I first was a part of the establishment. It was situated a little way behind the new mansion and I remember Norman and I playing there when we were very young, and a bit later, when it was about to be demolished, busting all the windows that still were in it.
Mother remembers that his first and most important goal was to establish a top-flight purebred herd of Holstein cattle. This was accomplished in a short time to the astonishment of all the surrounding farmers, whom I suppose considered him to be an expert builder but certainly no hell on the land. All of these small farms in this part of eastern Ontario derived the major portion of their income from the sale of the milk produced from the dairy herds. The proliferation of small, local cheese factories - there was one in every village, gave ample evidence of this.
Occasional cash crops such as barley or corn brought in some money but Grandma ran a flourishing summer business in honey. She was an expert with the bees with some eight or ten beehives in the orchard west of the house. I remember an old Mr. Branson,the local bee expert coming of and on to give advice and maybe he sold Grandma the bees as well. She sold the honey in five-pound honey pails for a dollar each. They were blue and white with her name and address along the bottom.
We were allowed to help if we happened to be around at the right time. Grandma would go off into the orchard covered from head to foot and with a big hat with a veil tucked into her collar. With the smoke can in one hand she would lift the top off one of the hives, pump a squirt or two of smoke in among the bees to move them away and then lift out one of the combs. Don't think she never got stung because that is part of the game. But she always maintained that the bee stings were very good for rheumatism and just brushed them off.
When we went back into the bee house, a small white building next to the orchard, the combs went into slots in a big round drum about four or five feet high that was able to revolve. One of us would turn the crank as hard as we could to spin the drum and thus extract the honey by centrifugal force. The smell was wonderful. Honey varies greatly depending on the source the bees are using at the time, changing quickly as the different plants or trees flower. My favorite has always been the Basswood tree honey, a very clear type with a nice flavour; Norman on the other hand preferred buckwheat honey which was produced whenever Grandad put in a field of buckwheat.
From this time until I was about fifteen or so our summers were usually divided between the Island, the Point and the farm. Later on, when Uncle Hal married Aunt Lois and they built the big house on Ivy Island just off the village of Ivy Lea in the Thousand Islands, Rob and I would spend a week or two there with Hal every year. He was the favorite uncle of all time and we couldn't think of a better place to be. Hal had a beautiful mahogany Chris Craft in which he would drive us at great speed through the islands over to Alexandria Bay on the US side, or up to Gananoque about ten miles west. A big treat was to have our lunch there at the Golden Apple.
We fished a lot but didn't ever catch much; but the best thing was that we were able to paddle the original Indian Birch bark canoe that Lois's family had had for many years. It was still in perfect condition and floated like a leaf. Today it would be priceless, and in a museum somewhere. The canoe was next to impossible to control in any kind of wind but in calm conditions nothing could beat it. As is so often the case we never found out what happened to it. Hal was a pretty easy going guy and as he got older and we were no longer around somebody may have convinced him to part with it.
Hal and Lois continued to spend every summer on the island until a couple of years before they died. Our cousin Margalo and her husband Denis Whyte, with their children had long been living in Vancouver and were unable to manage nearly enough time each year to come east and give the property the attention that it required. And by then Hal was long past it. In the end although Dennis had retired it was still a big responsibility, and after renting the main house for a few seasons and spending some time in the smaller guest cottage, Margalo sold the island and everything on it. Sad but inevitable.
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GRANT FAMILY HISTORY
It wasn't until many years later that I realised the magnitude of the impact on the entire Grant family then living in Montreal that my arrival on a cold, snowy Sunday afternoon in February 1923, at the old Catherine Booth Hospital on Sherbrooke Street must have generated. The very first grandchild. And a boy - what could be better. The continuing effect over the ensuing few years is ably demonstrated by the hoard of surviving photos depicting little Ian in every conceivable situation, and proudly held by every member of the tribe at one time or another. This rather unusual documentation was due solely to the fact that grandpa Grant happened to be an amateur photographer of no mean ability and never without his camera. We shall see later on that by the time brother Robert arrived five years later he was getting kind of tired of it all, and consequently our photographic record of Robert is somewhat lacking.
At the time of my birth my parents were living in a small flat on Northcliffe Avenue just above Sherbrooke Street in the western Montreal suburb of Notre Dame de Grace, or N.D.G. as it is commonly known. However not long after I arrived we moved further west to a new flat on Park Row Avenue, in Montreal West, which at that time was separated from N.D.G. by a large acreage of farmland held by the Jesuits and known locally as the Priests Farm. We were to remain there for the next five years until mother produced brother Robert, again on another cold, blustery Sunday in February 1928. The family then made its final move to 545 Lansdowne Avenue in Westmount. This was to be our home until Mother finally sold the house in 1968 to move in with Aunt Queenie. They were by then the only remaining members of the family in the city.
Our little family was not alone in the city. Grandfather and Grandmother Grant, aunt Queenie and uncle Hal were but a short walk away across Murray Park on Montrose Avenue. Life was pretty good all round in 1923; the war had been over for five years, everyone had a job, we all had plenty to eat and drink, and here was I to brighten this happy family scene. Grandfather was by this time a partner in the firm of P.S.Ross & Sons, a well known firm of chartered accountants. Father was working for another accounting firm, Wood, Gundy and Co. Uncle Hal was just finishing his degree in dentistry at McGill University and Queenie, who had gained distinctions in music and home economics at MacDonald College in spite of an earlier debilitating siege of polio was looking after the Westmount menage at 4332 Montrose Avenue.
My recollections of our years on Park Row are of course rather vague. However from the age of about three and a half I have distinct memories both of the neighbourhood and one or two of the kids I played with.
We lived in an upper flat in a red brick block of four, on the west side of the street. Across the way were the fields of the Priest's Farm. In those days the farm was still a going concern and included the recently built Loyola College, a Jesuit school on Sherbrooke St. Park Row is a short street running south from Sherbrooke and terminating against the C.P.R tracks leading west out of Windsor Station. In fact I can still see Pierre Ouimet, and I climbing under the fence to put crossed pins on the track to try and make scissors when the train ran over them. I don't think my mother ever knew that. Pierre was probably the first friend I remember although Bobby Kilgour, a lifelong Cornwall friend, comes close. Pierre's father was a homicide detective in the Montreal Police Department and they occupied one of the lower flats. The mothers got on well but mother was still suspicious of anybody French. I was allowed to roam around outside on nice days - the street had no traffic to speak of - and it was safe enough. However one time when I got lost in the long grass across from our house, I was finally saved when mother looked out of the window and saw my head going around in circles in the middle of the field.
We lived a long way from any decent shopping and the only source was a small green wooden shop half a mile east on Sherbrooke. Apart from the shop the only other building around was the Montreal Institute for the Blind, about the same distance again further east.
Transport to or from the city was via the streetcar operated along Sherbrooke by the Montreal Tramways Co. The end of the line was at the top of Westminster Avenue in Montreal West. The normal adult fare, taking you anywhere in the city, was seven cents, or four tickets for a quarter. However for some reason if you wanted to continue up Westminster from Sherbrooke to the end of the line, which was only a few blocks, the conductor would come down the car and collect another two cents from each of the remaining passengers. Bill Lester, one of my father's war pals, had married the daughter of an old gentleman who lived on Westminster and he had given Bill and his new wife a nice house on the street just behind his as a wedding present. I was often taken there to play with the Lester daughters while our mothers chatted away. I was never impressed. At that age who wanted to play with girls, or knew what to do with them if you did.
I think, looking back, that the only real excitement of a family nature that I remember well from that period occurred when I was five, and not long before we moved from the Park Row flat to Westmount. As had become the custom we were all assembled at the grandparents on Montrose Avenue on Christmas day. We had made the long trek on the streetcar loaded with presents and had waded through piles of snow to get to the house. After all the presents had been duly handed out, tomato juice drunk (no booze in that house!) once again auntie Queenie's wonderful Christmas dinner was on the table in the panelled dining room. Beautiful. Enter grandpa the ever ready photographer to record the event. Remember this was in the days before flash bulbs. Therefore grandpa, peering through the tripod-mounted camera, held in his left hand a unique device consisting of a grooved strip of metal about eight inches long supported by a handle. This was filled with powdered magnesium and contained a flint ignition arrangement similar to a cigarette lighter. I don't know if he had ever tried it out in the house before but what happened next remains undimmed by time. Coincident with "everybody ready!" there was a blinding flash of white light. The room and everyone and everything in it disappeared in a dense cloud of whitish smoky dust which settled everywhere. Well
I immediately had the screaming hysterics; the others all rushing about waving napkins, yelling about ruined dresses, and "Look what you've done to the dinner!" etc. etc. After a while all settled down, as things do in these situations. Grandpa was allowed back in and we all enjoyed what was saved of the turkey. As I said - my first exposure to family crisis.
As always winter was a difficult time but each summer the family repaired to the cosy cottage on Hamilton's Island that grandfather Grant had bought in 1907. Here we all enjoyed June, July and August in the company of twelve other families who had been equally fortunate in securing cottages on this delightful island farm. The island lies just east of the tiny village of Summerstown, Ontario and about eight miles east of Cornwall. We will hear more about this later.
Life went on in this uneventful manner for the next few years until I had my sixth birthday and started school. Brother Rob was one year old. I must rely on mother's account for my school debut but I was taken, in care of a neighbour, a block up to Westmount Avenue and another block west to Roslyn Avenue School where I was to spend a good part of the next six years. Lansdowne Avenue at that time was alive with kids of all ages, as was the neighbourhood in general and Rob and I had all the friends we could wish for. Murray Park was three minutes away and Westmount Park was just at the bottom of our street. Both had tennis courts which we enjoyed all summer and which were flooded at the beginning of winter to provide skating rinks for young and old. Personally I was a skater and a hockey player only up to the time I was introduced to skiing and from then on that was the sport I lived for.
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EARLY WESTMOUNT DAYS
Our house on Lansdowne Avenue was right on the steepest part of the hill, just below Cote St.Antoine road. While this put us within a five-minute walk of Westmount Park at the bottom of the street and even less to Murray Park above the Cote road, it often spelt disaster in the winter months. Our wooden flight of steps up to the front door were removed at least three times that I can remember by cars sliding down backward out of control on the icy road surface.
The city employed an army of men each winter to sand these danger spots and it was a familiar sight to see the horse and sleigh with the big box of sand coming up the hill and the men spreading the sand along the sidewalk by hand from huge shovels. The sand was often mixed with ashes collected by the city from each house weekly as we all had coal-fired furnaces. Snow removal was sporadic then and depended a lot on the available manpower as it was done by hand. It could be hard to see across the street sometimes after one of the infrequent plowings piled the snow along the sidewalks. In the spring when the snow melted these same men arrived to shovel up the heaps of sand to be recycled. These were depression years and labour was easy to come by.
The hill also took its toll of the horses pulling the delivery wagons of the milkman, breadman, garbage, iceman etc. causing skinned knees when their shoes skidded on the pavement. As I remember, the garbage man's normal reaction to this was to kick the horse until it staggered up again, accompanied by a string of foul French oaths, which we of course then added to our own vocabulary.
Westmount included a high proportion of young families and there were kids in every second house. Unlike today we enjoyed a total freedom. Outside school hours we were seldom in the house. Everyone had a bike. There was always a crowd in the park somewhere for pickup games, baseball or football in the warm months and skating and hockey and later skiing in the winter. When we got a bit older, ten or twelve, we would go up to the top of Westmount mountain which was then native woodland. This on the far side extended right down to Cote des Neiges road and was a favourite place for us skiers. In the spring we picked trilliums.
Westmount had one small shopping area running along Sherbrooke between Victoria Ave. and Claremont Ave. which we used, and there was another on Green Ave. below Sherbrooke further east.
Our meagre cash outlays were confined to Fry's Stationary. Mr Fry easily met all our modest requirements; candy, the weekly Triumph and Champion boy's magazines that Fry imported from England and the annual supply of fireworks with which to celebrate Queen Victoria's birthday; a public holiday still celebrated on the 24th of May.
It is of interest to remember that at the time we were growing up the British influence was still dominant in Westmount, even though Montreal was predominantly French. In school, at least one morning a week began with a school assembly. This usually opened with a stirring talk from some local dignitary and was followed by loud singing of two or three of those great old patriotic gems such as ""Rule Britannia', " The British Grenadiers ", or " Men of Harlech ". The latter was one of my favourites. We often finished with "The Maple Leaf " which features General Wolf and his stalwart proclamation of Canada for the British - - close to being an anglophone national anthem.
Likewise Christmas day always began at six in the morning with all the family silent around the radio listening to George V's speech to the empire, broadcast from Buckingham Palace. After this we would open our stockings and get on with the rest of the day.
They were great times. All our clothes were English, and as mentioned above our favourite magazines, eagerly awaited each week, were the Triumph and Champion, and once a year at Christmas we received our huge red Chums Annual which contained enough reading, things to do, etc.to last any kid for the rest of the year. I think half of all the fancy cakes, biscuits, cheeses and other delicacies came from the old country.
Of course, as already noted, one of the highlights of the school year was the 24th of May holiday. Mr Fry was well prepared with a wonderful selection of firecrackers of all sizes, plus all kinds of other pyrotechnics for later in the evening. Every kid in the street spent the day blowing tin cans into the air or throwing lighted crackers under the baker's horse or other kids. The Kingslands lived across the street. Jack, who was a couple of years older than the rest of us, owned a small model of an old Royal Navy cannon which he would cram with gunpowder and fire off on their front porch. It made a hell of a noise and the smoke nearly reached our front door. All other activity ceased while Jack was firing his salvos. At night, with our parents we would go up to Murray Park to shoot off our skyrockets, roman candles, pinwheels and anything else we could get our hands on.
Of course today no kid is allowed to carry on with this sort of thing; it's against the law. Selling fireworks is prohibited. But in all the years we annually blew up the neighbourhood I can't think of any kid who burnt himself on his smouldering punk stick (used to light fuses) damaged himself with firecrackers,or caused any damage to anything or anyone else.
I started school when I was six years old, but most of the kids began a year earlier, going into the kindergarten before officially starting in Grade one. It wasn't that I was too bright to waste time there but because I was considered a slow developer, small for my age, and needed sleeps in the afternoon and all that type of crap. Most of this was dreamed up by my grandmother, who spoiled me rotten and nearly ruined my normal development in the process. She had lost most of her enthusiasm for this by the time Rob arrived on the scene but for me it was hard going. And of course at that time I was too young to understand any of it.
From the beginning I was found to be a lousy student and this deficiency followed on until I got into university after the war. In fact when I was struggling through high school Wild Bill Irving, our English teacher who had married a rich widow and lived across the street, once told my mother that I was the most turned-off kid he'd ever tried to teach. Mother of course already knew this having spent endless hours pounding enough Latin into me to get me a pass. At least I was known for something.
Luckily the war fixed all that. After the war ended and I had begun my studies at McGill I discovered that all I needed was a chance to select subjects that were of interest to me, and to be involved with a bunch of like-minded veterans. It's a fact of life that had it not been for my three and a half years in the R.C.A.F. I would never have been equipped for a university education. For this I have been eternally grateful to Adolf Hitler who started it all; even if it nearly got me killed a few times in the process.
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Also, a note on dad. Did you know he was a recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross? I attached a newspaper article on his being awarded this from the Montreal Gazette. Dad's recount of it was that he and his crew were on a bombing mission with their squadron. Their plane was hit and damaged by anti-aircraft fire. Andy the pilot asked the crew what they wanted to do. They had two choices, 1. turn around and head back to the airbase 2. stay with the squadron and complete their mission. Dad said they all felt they had a better chance sticking with the squadron rather than flying back alone, so they went on to complete the mission. On their return, the plane crashed on to the runway and started veering toward a newly fueled group of planes. Dad always gave accolades to their Pilot Andy for saving them all. His skill and experience got the plane turned, narrowly missing the fueled aircrafts. Andy was a veteran Pilot of 24 years of age!!
-Keltie Grant
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