Colonial farmers were often considered slovenly by English visitors. Accustomed to the careful, increasingly “scientific” agriculture of their homeland, the English were dismayed to see stock browsing in the woods, manure lying uncollected, and wheat planted amid stumps. Many lamented the apparently widespread practice of alternating wheat and fallow ground in the same fields year after year, because it was bound to exhaust the soil. In fact, such rough and ready practices were far better fitted to the conditions that prevailed in much of British North America—where land was relatively cheap, capital was in short supply, and labour was scarce and expensive—than most visitors allowed.
Creating a colonial farm was no easy task. The land was a prisoner of the forest and could be liberated only by back-breaking toil. At best, an energetic settler could roughly clear four acres a year; as his little farm expanded, other tasks would occupy him and reduce the rate of his progress. And the aggressive growth of weeds and young trees on bare ground was a constant reminder that hard-won gains could quickly vanish. A tent, a primitive shelter of branches, or a rough windowless cabin was often the first home men and women had on their new land. When it was replaced by something better—most often a log cabin—that was likely to be small and simple. Many log cabins lacked foundations, had a dirt floor, and measured about 5 by 7 metres (16 by 25 feet). Heated by a fireplace on which meals were cooked, these single-storey dwellings were generally smoky, drafty, and dark. They were roughly furnished and offered no escape from the blackflies and mosquitoes
Some immigrants did maintain a genteel, civilized life in the New World. Anne Langton—seen here by the fire—came over in 1837 to join her brother at Sturgeon Lake, Upper Canada, where two-thirds of the male settlers were university graduates. Her journal and correspondence were published by her nephew in 1950, and titled A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada.
That abounded. Frame houses were more commodious, but they were five to ten times as expensive as well-made log cabins and were relatively rare in recently occupied areas of the colony.
The axe and the ox (favoured over the horse for the heavy work it could do) were the pioneer family’s main instruments of improvement. Ploughs were of little use until fields were clear of stumps. Crops were sown by hand and harvested in the same way, using a scythe. Threshing was done with a flail, for there was no machine to do the job in Upper Canada until 1832; it was tiring, dusty work, carried out on the floor of the barn, with the doors open to admit the breeze that separated wheat from chaff. And there were countless challenges to the family’s patience and ingenuity as they were forced to make do and repair broken equipment. One immigrant, an Irishman
View of Halifax Harbour. While carefully placed figures and objects decorate the foreground, the town itself is all but lost in a romantic haze. Oil (c. 1820) attributed to John Poad Drake.
Micmac Indians. The finely crafted canoes, the single-family wigwam, and the quillwork containers within it were made largely of birchbark sewn with spruce roots. Note the women’s peaked and beaded head-dresses. Oil (c. 1850) by unknown artist.
The HB Company Ships Prince of Wales and Eddystone Bartering with the Eskimos of the Upper Savage Islands, Hudson Strait, Northwest Territories-, a watercolour (1819) by artist-explorer Robert Hood. Two years later, Hood was murdered by a voyageur turned cannibal.
A View of the Chateau Richer. A line of houses, eel traps, salt marshes, kitchen gardens; fields of wheat and peas; livestock and game; these were basic elements of the Lower Canadian landscape. Watercolour (1787) by Thomas Davies.
The Woolsey Family. A prosperous English merchant and his family carefully posed in their Quebec drawing-room. Elegantly dressed and comfortable in their fashionable neoclassical surroundings, they are a proper and selfconfident group. Oil (1809) by William Berczy, Sr.
Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton (65.43.18), gift of Mrs. R. N. Steiner in memory of her mother, Mrs. L. C. Dillion, 1965
The Good Friends: a charming example of folk “animal portraiture,” no doubt commissioned by a proud and prosperous farmer. Oil (after 1834) by Ebenezer Birrell.
La Procession de la Fete-Dieu a Quebec. Corpus Christ! was a major religious festival in Lower Canada. Here, the cure of Notre Dame leads his congregation along a route marked by young fir trees, symbols of death. Oil (1824) by Louis-Hubert Triaud.
Collection Monastlque des Ursulines de Quebec (70)
The North West Part of the City of Quebec, taken from the St. Charles River. “What a scene!—Can the world produce such another?” exclaimed Susanna Moodie. “Rejoice and be worthy of her—for few, very few of the sons of men can point to such a spot as Quebec—and exclaim, ‘She is ours!’” Oil (c. 1804-10) by George Heriot.
A Shot in the Dawn, Lake Scugog. Two men hope to bag a few ducks from the cover of a partly harvested wheatfield north-east of Toronto. Oil (1873) by John. A. Fraser.
More affluent, educated, and established than most, caught well the adaptability needed when he wrote to Dublin in 1832:
My time at home is occupied in shoeing horses, making gates, fences, chimney pieces, and furniture. Indeed my mechanical labours are so multifarious that I can hardly enumerate them, but you may form some idea of their versatility when I tell you that I made an ivory tooth for a very nice girl and an iron one for the harrow within the same day.
It was, concluded the remarkable pioneer gentlewoman Catharine Parr Traill in 1836 in her magnificent account of settlement. The Backwoods of Canada, a “Robinson Crusoe sort of existence.”
Thousands of Upper Canadian farms began in touch this way, and the young lives of countless men and women were absorbed by the labour they required. But with time small clearings devoted to oats, corn, pumpkins, potatoes, and turnips were expanded to include larger fields of wheat and rye. Buck and Bright (“the names of three-fourths of all the working oxen in Canada,” claimed Mrs. Traill) were joined by the usual assembly of cows, calves, pigs, hens, and ducks. And a complex rural economy developed. Nine of every ten farms in Upper Canada grew some wheat, but unlike timber, before 1840 wheat was not a major export crop. Transportation costs, the restrictive British Corn Laws, and Canadian prices generally kept it from British ovens. Even in good export years, shipments from the colony averaged less than a modest four bushels a person. Significant quantities of flour went to supply the colony’s growing urban population, and wheat generally yielded at least a fifth of farmers’ incomes. But production fluctuated widely from year to year. It was also more important in some parts of the colony than in others. In eastern Ontario, pot and pearl ashes (from which came the lye to manufacture soap), and lumber, were often more important than wheat, while substantial quantities of pork were regularly taken in payment in the Lake Ontario region and, to the west, sales of rye, tobacco, and barley generally exceeded those of wheat. Although 40 to 50 per cent of the cleared land on the fringes of settlement was devoted to wheat. Upper Canadian farming as a whole rested on a broad mixed base.
Few colonial settlers were able or willing to divorce themselves from the market. If they had nothing to sell, the debts they incurred obtaining necessary supplies from country storekeepers bound them into the commercial system. Absolute selfsufficiency was not possible nor desirable. As they struggled to clear the land and make homes amid the forest, many of them saw their farms less as instruments of profit than as the means and focus of life in the new land. If the labour was available, and a market for their produce accessible, settlers anticipating good prices in the year ahead might plant a few acres more than necessary to supply the family, in hope that the surplus would yield a cash return or defray debts—in much the same way that others worked awhile in the woods to supplement their incomes. But surplus produce to take to market was as often the result of better-than-expected yields, or of a large and healthy litter, as of deliberate design. The essential purpose of many an early colonial farm was to provide for its inhabitants, whatever the vicissitudes of the market, and in general the farmer sold only what he and his family would not consume.
Of course, not all farms were like this. Especially in the lakeshore districts of Upper Canada which had been settled earlier, where markets were accessible, and where large farms existed by the first decades of the nineteenth century, farmers imbued with the spirit and the doctrines of improved English agriculture ran thoroughly commercial operations. Their fields were drained and manured; their crops were rotated according to approved ideas; and their mares and heifers were bred with imported stallions and bulls to improve bloodlines. But through much of Upper Canada before 1840, the connection between farm and market remained tenuous. Acerbic visitors complained at the “improper and wasteful profusion” of farmers who ate only the best (“roast beef almost every day”), and local enthusiasts of scientific farming, who formed poorly attended agricultural societies to spread their convictions, lamented the ignorance and apathy of those who refused to improve the quality of their stock and grain. But they would not see reform until the struggle to establish home and family was well won and improvements in transportation made reliable markets readily available.
There was much in the agricultural economy of early Upper Canada that was characteristic of rural life in the rest of British North America. In many parts of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, credit, indebtedness, and exchange linked small farmers to a wider commercial world, but on the poorer soils and in the more difficult climate of these provinces surpluses were, if anything, smaller and more sporadic, and market connections less significant than in Upper Canada. “Enlightened” leaders of local agricultural societies tried in vain through the first half of the century to overcome the traditional “prejudices” of Scots and others notorious for their willingness to make do. The wants of the Highlanders, wrote Thomas Chandler Haliburton—distinguished but inveterate Nova Scotian Tory and creator of the fictional character Samuel Slick, in the late 1820s—“are comparatively few and Their ambition is chiefly limited to the acquirement of the mere necessaries of life.” Neither premiums to encourage higher yields and better stock nor the enormous effort spent in the 1820s “coying science to dignify the labours of the plough” realized the commercialization and improvement of agriculture that their proponents sought. “I never seed or heerd tell of a country that had so many natural priviliges as this,” announced Slick the Yankee pedlar, while lamenting that its inhabitants, for whom he coined the name “Bluenoses,” were “either asleep, or stone blind to them.” Wanting three things—“Industry, Enterprise, Economy”—Nova Scotians, he continued, should have “An Owl... [for] their emblem” and “He sleeps all the days of his life” for a motto.
In Lower Canada too, early nineteenth-century commentators lamented the sluggishness of farming conducted according to old routines. But in this long-settled region, where farms had spread across the good agricultural land of the St. Lawrence lowland and run up against the thin soils of the Shield, the character and problems of rural life were different. In the last forty years of the eighteenth century, a growing population had cleared new land in the seigneurial lowlands at a striking rate. Access to West Indian markets and rising English prices in the 1790s stimulated agriculture, and Quebec traders sent out agents “to buy up all the grain which is not necessary for the farmer’s subsistence.” There was prosperity in the countryside, and many Canadiens, claimed deputy postmaster-general George Heriot, began “to lay aside their ancient costume and to acquire a relish for the manufactures of Europe.” Although farming—which relied on a simple two - or three-course rotation in which wheat and pasture predominated—was as bad as it could be in the eyes of European visitors, by 1802 wheat exports rivalled those of furs in value. But then they declined precipitously. Soaring domestic consumption reduced the amount of wheat available for export, and to accommodate new families, old seigneurial lands were subdivided and subdivided again. Falling yields from fields so thick with thistles and weeds that the wheat from them made poor flour, and the growing pressure of people on the land, encouraged farmers to diversify. More and more potatoes were grown until, by the late 1820s, they made up almost half of the harvest. Pork assumed a new prominence in habitant diets, and by 1840, low-quality mixed farming was the norm in Lower Canada. Habitants of overpopulated seigneuries—from which a steady trickle of emigrants was already running to the United States in search of a better life— sought to provide for as many of their own needs as they could. Rural living standards were as low as at any time in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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