The Farm on the North Talbot Road / Edition 1

by Allan G. Bogue

Overview

As the family farm of yesterday steadily loses ground to the corporate farm of tomorrow, pundits and plain folks alike bemoan the loss of the homely, down-to-earth rural life that few actually know or remember anymore. Allan G. Bogue is a notable exception. A legendary agricultural, political, and economic historian, and one of only three historians ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences, Bogue has for the last fifty years written about the political and economic forces shaping agriculture. And he himself has roots in the family farm—roots he traces in this memoir that is both a thoughtful tribute to the tradition that nurtured him and North America and an authentic, unsentimental portrait of the hard life that most have abandoned.

Through descriptions of neighborly good will, adverse climate, charismatic family relations, and the seasonal tasks demanded by dairy farming, Bogue imparts the rhythms of growing up in rural Ontario in the early years of the twentieth century. Tracing the family's fortunes through the ups and downs of the economy in the 1920s and 1930s, he draws an absorbing picture of how they and their neighbors farmed, the crops they raised, the livestock they kept, the technology they used, and the stresses, strains, frustrations, sadness, joy, and triumphs they experienced. Firsthand history of a rare and moving sort, his book is at once an elegy for a disappearing way of life and a deftly realized, meticulously reconstructed chapter of North American history.

Allan G. Bogue is emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has served presidential terms for the Agricultural History Society, the Economic History Association, and the Organization of American Historians. His many publications include Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803261891
Publisher:	Bison Original
Publication date:	09/01/2001
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

Allan G. Bogue is emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has served presidential terms for the Agricultural History Society, the Economic History Association, and the Organization of American Historians. His many publications include Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Of Time and Place and People

During the 1920s and 1930s the stretch of the North Talbot Road thatlinked the villages of Lambeth and Byron was an "improved" gravel roadbetween the junction of Provincial Highways 2 and 4 in Lambeth and theSpringbank Drive, cutting the latter slightly to the east of Byron. Placeyourself in time on a September afternoon in 1935 in Lambeth at the two-storyred-brick continuation school located a couple hundred yards southof the highway junction. Now follow me as I mount a rattly blue bicycle,leave the school grounds, and point my machine north along the unevencement sidewalk. Soon I am at the crossroads, just past the white clapboardMasonic Hall. A branch of the Royal Bank of Canada is on my right, andacross Highway 4 is the one-story Anglican Chapel beside its graveyard.

    I cross Highway 2 to take the village sidewalk on the west side of theNorth Talbot Road, passing beside a one-story gray-brick establishmentowned by the local Farmer's Cooperative Society. Stepping beneath its frontportico and inside, customers can find candy, groceries, or dry goods. Ata side entrance is coal oil in a horizontal drum. Big bags of livestock feedare inside at the rear side door, which faces on the North Talbot Road, andlocals fill their need for yellow wooden fence posts and rolls of fence wirefrom the piles in a yard at the back of the store. Across the street on theother corner is a small gray-brick hotel, the Longwoods Inn, and a littlefarther along, the edifice of the United Church of Canada, also of graybrick.

    If youlook to the left as we cross the highway to the Farmer's Co-op, yousee the gasoline pumps and show window of the Ford Agency, and beyondthat, the open door and faded board front of the blacksmith shop. A glancein the other direction, up Highway 2 in the direction of London, reveals acouple of gasoline stations, a drug store, and the recreation hall, ice creambar, and bus stop called The Bluebird.

    Leaving Lambeth's major intersection behind, I cycle through three shortblocks of residences, some of substantial size, built mostly of gray brick.One serves as residence and office for our family doctor. The sidewalk endsat a sign that proclaims on its northern face: "Live in Lovely Lambeth," amotto often altered by paint-wielding pranksters to read "Love in LivelyLambeth."

    Now I take to the gravel road, which at this time of year is a hard-packedwashboard, bordered by a treacherous fringe of loose gravel that can throwa careless rider into a wrenching skid and abrasive fall. I shall follow theroad for a mile and a quarter until I reach Dale's Side Road. This stretch isone of gentle undulation, dipping to cross a small bridge and a number ofculverts and rising in between these points, sometimes sufficiently to makeme shift from the bike seat into stand-up pumping. To the immediate left,as I leave the "Lovely Lambeth" sign, is a small field of asparagus plantedin a sunken area that was once part of a gravel pit. This is owned by myfather's cousin Bill, and beyond stretch his two greenhouses. His modestwhite frame house is set close to the road, and to the north another smallfield drops down to a creek that passes under the road below a diminutivecement bridge, scarcely more than a glorified culvert. Bill's Jersey cow grazesbeside the little waterway.

    Farther along the road are several small one-story residences. One isoccupied by a mysterious retired pianist; another, so it is said, by an agedrelative of Sandy Somerville, the London hero who won the United StatesAmateur Golf Championship a few years earlier. Across the road to myright, farmsteads have sprung up. As soon as I have crossed the little bridgeI begin to work against a gentle slope that continues until I have pedaledhalf a mile from the four corners at Lambeth and reached the line fenceof the third farm on my right. Here the Third Concession-line Road ofWestminster Township intersects the North Talbot Road from the left andapparently proceeds no further.

    At this point I have reached the boundary of my family's immediateneighborhood. In the fat V formed by the Third Concession Road andthe North Talbot Road is the schoolyard and gray-brick school of SchoolSection (ss) 17. Its two substantial rooms join at right angles, a stubby belltower sitting at the junction. Behind the school a white board fence dividesthe grounds and separates the two-holer outhouses into domain of boyand girl—females to the north, males to the south. My brother, my twosisters, and I all received our public schooling at ss 17. Across from ss 17 isthe farm of Cousin Norman, known to the family as Tink because of hislove of tinkering with machinery. Next, to the north, is the holding of mygrandfather, David. He and Tink's father, John Jr., spent much of their livesin expanding the original clearings on these farms after John Sr. acquiredthe title in the early 1850s.

    Just past the school, the road begins to slope gently toward the north andcontinues to do so until past the David Bogue farm. Thus far it has angledto the west of north, but now at the north line fence of my grandfather'sold place, a quarter mile past the Third Concession Road, it bends to headmore directly to the north. The change in direction seems to increase thevelocity of the head winds that cyclists face. West of the road the frontage ofthe Sadler family's dairy farm and well-tended orchard has stretched fromthe school to the bend. Next is the farm to which my father, George Bogue,took Eleta Britton, my mother, on their marriage in 1904; it is now ownedby Sam Kilbourne, who is employed in London but works at odd times asa plasterer and farms with the aid of a grown son. An ugly two-story brickhouse that my father built dominates this farmstead.

    Most of the farms between Lambeth and Byron are fifty or one hundredacres in size, but immediately to the north of the Bogue homesteads onthe east side is a two-hundred-acre holding, its frontage stretching for aquarter of a mile. George usually refers to it as the Burley Burch farm sinceit was first owned and long occupied by the Burch family, who obtainedit from the Crown as a United Empire Loyalist entitlement. In my earliestmemories it was the Pringle farm, owned by a London businessman believedto be rich, and stocked with purebred Jersey cattle, some of them wearingthe chain and small padlock around the horns that denoted origin in theJersey Islands, or so we believed. Across the road and next to the Kilbourneplace is the Bilyea farm. In the corner made by their line fence and the roadfence is a small cemetery plot with an impressive monument marking theresting place of a family patriarch.

    Beyond the north line fence of the Bilyea farm the road dips gently forsome fifty yards and then levels to run to its junction with Dale's Side Roada quarter of a mile ahead. To the left the Vanstone farm stretches for thewhole distance, first an open field, then an orchard and a weathered two-storyframe house shrouded by large pines, with maple trees along the roadfence, and then again an open field. To my right is the fifty-acre farm ofFred Merriam, a younger farmer who recently bought the place after thedeaths of Mrs. Vanstone's aged parents. Next I reach the land that GeorgeBogue farmed during the teens and most of the 1920s. Its farmstead sits atthe corner of the North Talbot Road and the side road. Here, quite close tothe North Talbot Road, George built another two-story brick house. But Ipass by this residence because the family now lives in the farmstead on thenortheast corner of the road junction.

    On the right-hand corner of the road junction two mail boxes aremounted on posts, and I open the one closest to the corner. Back on thecycle, I pedal along the side road for some fifty yards before turning leftinto the driveway of our farm. Had I continued past our farm to the northtoward Byron, I would have found the cycling more challenging, for after aslight dip in front of our house to a small bridge spanning a little stream thatemerges from our night pasture, the road crosses hillier terrain. Beyond ourline fence on the left side of the road is an old frame house usually occupiedby renters, and across our line fence is a one-story dwelling, little better thana shack, built by a bachelor who recently inherited the twenty-five acreson which it sits. Now the road dips again before surmounting a hill steepenough to make some cyclists dismount and push their wheels up past themailboxes of the McLaughlins' place on the right and that of the Griffithsto the left. From here there are no more farm residences to the east of theroad until it reaches the Second Concession-line Road, three quarters ofa mile from our side road. To the west of the road however, Ed Brown'sfarm lies adjacent to that of his sister Mrs. Griffith, and Basil Cornell hasa small acreage in fruit beyond him. The Second Concession Road risesrather sharply as it runs west from its junction with the North TalbotRoad, and on the crest of the hill Stan Cornell manages a prosperous smallfruit operation. His gray stucco house commands a magnificent view ofthe countryside to the south, and he has named his home the Valley ViewFruit Farm.

    Beyond the second concession the road continues to loop upward.The first farmstead on the left is unoccupied, owned by a widow, Mrs.McGregor, the land rented during the mid-1930s by Tink Bogue. Oppositethat farmstead is a smallholding occupied by nonfarming retirees. Beyondthe McGregor place on the west side of the road to the north is the small farmoccupied by the Duncans, father and son. Just beyond their farmstead theroad crests, and here there is a large gravel pit. Now the rider has reached thesummit of the Thames River bluffs. From here the road descends steeplythrough wooded banks in a series of tight curves. To the school cyclist,this is the "Big Hill." Sometimes my brother Len amuses himself and hispassengers when returning from Byron by pushing the accelerator of ourModel A. Ford to the floor as the car labors out of the last upward curve ofthis big hill, gains all the speed possible over the short stretch of level roadahead, and bursts over the hill crest behind Duncan's barn with a stomach-twistingwrench. Then he turns off the ignition to see whether the car willcoast all the way home.

    For the cyclist returning home on his one-speed bike, the Big Hill istoo much; he is soon afoot, pushing his machine up the winding inclines.But going north, as I did on school mornings during my last two yearsof high school at London Central Collegiate Institute, the Big Hill waspure exhilaration. Coasting downward, the bike accelerates swiftly. Soonthe wind whistles in the ears, eyes tear, and the intoxication of speed takesfull command. In the late spring of 1938 that intoxication was almost to endin serious injury. Sweeping out of the last curve, I tried to avoid a rut andmy handlebars broke apart. In the clanging, scraping, dust-raising crashthat followed, pure luck placed me on top of the rear wheel as the machineslid along the road.

    My companion, Ron C., helped me search for broken bones. There werenone, but there was a six-inch rent in the seat of my trousers. We borrowedneedle and thread from Jeanie L., at whose place we left our bikes duringthe day, and Ron did his best to stitch up the problem. But my probinghand detected flesh as we walked from our London bus stop to the school,and I blessed the dimness of London Central's corridors when I movedfrom class to class. As I emerged into the light of a classroom, I dartedquickly to a seat, holding my notebook well to the rear.

    The two miles of road stretching from Cousin Tink's southern line fenceto the Duncan property gave lengthwise dimension to our neighborhood.Dale's Side Road, on which our driveways opened, provided latitude. If wefollowed that little road west from its junction with the North Talbot Road,the Vanstone farm ran along on our left, and on our right lay the fields ofFora Cornell, who occupied the holding on the northwest corner at ourcrossroad. Beyond its junction with the North Talbot Road the side roadinclined downward for some 150 yards to a small bridge above the samestream that exited from our night pasture. On a rise some fifty yards pastthe bridge sat Fora's two-story brick residence.

    Now the road ditches became increasingly sandy and we came to asmallholding where young Harvey Kilbourne lived in a one-story dwellingfor some years during the 1930s, supporting himself by market gardeningand by work as a plasterer. Once past his sandy field, we came to the woodsthat bordered the east bank of Dingman's Creek and a final mild downwarddip of the road took us to a small iron bridge across the "crik." Here a paththrough the trees along the stream led to a neighborhood swimming hole.Beyond the bridge on both right and left were the farms of the Pack brothers,although in these years, Bill, living south of the side road, spent much of histime trucking livestock, particularly animals being shipped to the Torontostockyards.

    If, on the other hand, we turned east from our gateway on the side road,we traveled between George's former and current farms for half a mile andthence another half mile between the Dale and the old Topping place.This distance brought us to the T junction where the side road met theBostwick Road, named for the early nineteenth-century surveyor who hadsurveyed it during the 1820s. By turning to the right and traveling along"the Bostwick" for half a mile, we reached, on the right, the edge of the backfifty of the David Bogue farm, a tract that George had inherited. The familyof George's younger brother Chester held the matching fifty, fronting onthe North Talbot Road, Chester having been killed in the woods by a fallingtree in 1911.

The presence of Bogues on the North Talbot Road during the 1930s tracedback to the decision of a lowland Scot, John Bogue Sr., to emigrate toUpper Canada when he was already in early middle age. Born in 1800 inLanarkshire, Scotland, he arrived in London, Ontario, with his wife andfour young children in 1837, the year of the Upper Canada Rebellion, andthey settled on lot 33 in the First Concession of Westminster Township.Unfortunately any records and correspondence belonging to Bogues ofthe first and second generations disappeared with their passing. John'sbiographical sketch in the History of the County of Middlesex of 1889 explainsthat he migrated as a young man to Widby in northern England, wherehe worked as a gardener for some twenty years, married Elizabeth Parrott,and fathered the children that they brought with them to Upper Canada.

    In the new land John was a farmer and brick maker, benefiting fromthe excellent brick clay that underlay some of the holdings in the FirstConcession of lots in Westminster Township. This activity of John andsome of his neighbors gave the road its early name, Brick Street. The censustaker of 1852 recorded a household that included John, Elizabeth, and theirchildren, Allan, Emma, James, David, and Richard, ranging in age fromtwenty to seven years of age. Of the younger Bogues, Allan and Emma wereborn in England, while the place of birth of the remaining three was listedas Upper Canada. The household also included a laborer, James Smart,identified as a Scot and eventually the husband of Ann Bogue, a daughterwho was not present when the enumerator called in 1851. The census revealsa thriving agricultural operation producing a wide range of crops, livestock,and dairy products.

    By this time, the Bogue family on Brick Street was already subdividing.The census taker also reported that twenty-four-year-old John, Englishborn, and eleven-year-old Thomas Bogue, Canadian by birth, were livingon a farm in the Second Concession of Westminister, where they tendedsixty-nine acres in crops in 1851. But this John's later history, along with thatof his younger brother David, was played out on the North Talbot Roadbetween Lambeth and Byron.

    North of Lambeth on both the east and west sides of the North TalbotRoad, the government surveyor marked off two-hundred-acre lots, beginningwith number 71. These continued the sequence of lot numbers runningfrom south to north along the road from Talbotville, south of Lambeth.On the north side of lot 75, the surveyor left space for the crossroad that wecalled Dale's Side Road, and beyond this street lot 76 fronted on the NorthTalbot road. Since the lot lines along the North Talbot road did not run inparallel with the concession-line roads of the township as a whole, lot 78(east), lying immediately south of the Second Concession-line road, wastriangular in shape. Reflecting the fact that the land surveys in WestminsterTownship incorporated at least two organizational principles, the lots to thenorth of the Second Concession Road fronted on that road rather than onthe North Talbot Road (see map 1).

    In 1835 the Crown vested the title to the 202 acres of lot 73 (east) in AbramSloot, and by 1853 David M. Rymals and his wife owned this property. Inthat year this couple deeded it to John Bogue Sr., accepting from him a noteand mortgage in the amount of one thousand dollars. Ten years later theRymals released the mortgage, John Bogue's obligation to satisfy the note orbond having been satisfactorily discharged. John Bogue Jr. and his youngerbrother, David, developed farms and raised families on the southern andnorthern halves of this property. The patriarch on Brick Street did not rushto place ownership of these lands in his sons' hands, deeding them to JohnJr. and David, my grandfather, in 1886. By that time John Jr. was fifty-eightand David was forty-three years of age. John and David Bogue lived outtheir lives on the North Talbot Road. John passed on his property to hisson Norman, and David divided his half of lot 73 between his son Georgeand the family of his deceased son Chester.

    Elsewhere, three other sons of John Bogue Sr. also became land-owningfarmers, presumably with the assistance of their father. Thomas and Jamessettled in Adelaide Township, close to the town of Strathroy. Allan, thesecond son, inherited the Brick Street property when his father died at theage of ninety-one in 1891. Of the six sons of John Bogue Sr., therefore, fivesucceeded in acquiring farms in Middlesex County. Only Richard left thecounty, emigrating to the prairies of the Canadian West and becoming astorekeeper in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

    Obviously the combined occupations of farmer and brick maker allowedJohn Bogue Sr. to do well by his family. He reported to the census takerof 1871 that he had produced 250,000 bricks in that year to the value ofsome twelve hundred dollars, using a labor force of six workers during fivemonths of operation—somewhat lower figures than those reported by theproprietors of seven adjacent brickyards.

    David Bogue celebrated the birth of his eldest son, George Allan, in1879. The youngster attended public school and then saved the moneythat allowed him to attend the Business College directed in London byJames Westervelt. Here he learned basic accounting procedures, mentalarithmetic, and other skills appropriate to bookkeepers and clerks. Latein his life he could still demonstrate the rigor of this training by recitingmultiplication tables up to fourteen times fourteen and saying the alphabetbackwards. His business skills gave his later life a different quality thanthat of the usual farm boy. One of his best decisions, however, led himto court and in 1904 to marry Eleta Britton, one of the three daughtersof Ellen Brannagan Britton, who lived on the Third Concession Roadbetween the school grounds of ss 17 and Dingman's Creek. When he startedfarming, George's possessions consisted of two horses and probably a buggyor wagon. But Eleta had inherited five hundred dollars from the estate ofher father, and George used it as down payment on a farm in lot 74 (west)on the North Talbot Road. It was apparently a sensible decision, but Eletalater believed that the importance of her stake in the union was not alwaysacknowledged.

    Solidly built and a scant five feet, nine inches in height, George had hazeleyes, a small wave in his black hair, and a ginger mustache. He was articulate,although no orator. Nor was he a wit or a great raconteur, although notwithout some sense of humor. In later years I recall him repeating with greatrelish the story about Mitchell F. Hepburn, the provincial Liberal Partyleader, who mounted the box of a manure spreader at a barnyard politicalrally and announced that for once he had the opportunity to stand uponthe party platform of his opponents. A female relative in George and Eleta'sgeneration told me that as a young man, George had been thought to be agreat catch by the young women of the neighborhood.

    Eleta Britton, eldest of Ellen Britton's three daughters, was a slim girlalmost as tall as George, with brown hair, gray eyes, and regular features.Her stepfather called her a tomboy, and one of her shins was deeply pittedwhere a doctor had chiseled out an infection that had developed in a bruisesuffered in a fall from a horse. She did not smile for photographers becauseher teeth were unevenly placed. In the years that I knew her she was aserious and prim woman. "That wasn't very nice," she remarked to meas the audience laughed during a grandstand performance at London Fairwhen a clown lost his outer trousers to reveal red flannel long johns. Shedid enjoy the occasional joke and drew upon a fund of proverbs. "If wisheswere horses, all beggars would ride," she told me when I learned that I wasexpected to walk to a young people's function in Lambeth, adding "Shanksmare for you."

    We know little about George and Eleta's first farm operation. Theirfirst daughter, Myrtle, arrived in 1905 and three years later came a son,Leonard Wilfred. The household at this time was Grit—that is, Liberal—insentiment and my brother's hated middle name attested to George'sadmiration for the great party leader Wilfred Laurier. Eleta and Georgeapparently prospered in other respects as well, if the substantial brick housethat they built on this holding is any indication. During George's earlyyears in agriculture, the farmers of the Lambeth area became converts tothe gospel of cooperation, he among them. In later years Eleta told ofearly cooperative activity when the local society ordered railroad carloadsof fertilizer and other farm supplies for distribution to members. Georgekept the books for such enterprise. Later the society maintained two generalstores and a cheese factory. Hired employees managed the stores and a cheesemaker contracted with the society to run the dairy enterprise. Throughoutmy memory of the co-op activity, George was the secretary, holding the sealof the society, preparing and sending out the annual reports, and going tothe store in Lambeth on Saturday nights to write checks for the manager.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Farm on the North Talbot Road by Allan G. Bogue. Copyright © 2001 by University of Nebraska Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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