By John Cairns

Editor's Note: This story is as told by the writer's father.

LOWER FREETOWN, P.E.I., Canada – Not many people experience the achievement, luck and longevity that leads to a hall-of-fame induction ceremony. When the Atlantic Agricultural Hall of Fame in Truro, Nova Scotia, inducted Prince Edward Island farmer William Cairns on October 27, the 83-year-old couldn't help but reflect on a lifetime career devoted to helping to feed the world.

Each year, the Atlantic Agricultural Hall of Fame inducts one person from each of Canada's four eastern-most provinces. This year's other inductees were Alexander Thomson of Nova Scotia, William Frank Pryor of New Brunswick and Melvin Rideout of Newfoundland and Labrador.

By happy coincidence, I've interviewed William about his experiences in agriculture and how the business has evolved. He has seen huge changes in rural lifestyles, everything from the arrival of tractors, telephones, electricity and paved roads to stable-cleaners, milk-tanks, silage carts and even computers.

“In the 1940s, nearly all the farm work involved horses pulling equipment”, the likes of plows, harrows, seeders, harvesters, binders and sleighs, William said. “Now farming isn't as demanding physically. A lot gets done by mechanization.”

Fewer farms exist, and they're bigger, but farming still “isn't an easy way to earn a living”. The work-days remain long, and the profits uncertain.

For decades, William and his father Scott ran a diversified family farm in Lower Freetown. Now William remains involved as his son James and daughter-in-law Janet keep the 400-acre enterprise busy and viable. The business has a history of potatoes, turnips, corn, hay, grain, dairy cattle, pigs, hens, horses, sheep and more. Eventually, like agriculture overall, it turned more specialized. James and Janet focus on a large herd of Holstein milk-cows and crops to nourish them. The only other animals remaining are a mob of mouse-chasing cats and a dog named Curly.

“Going away back, I remember that when my father sold a cow, he had to deliver it to Kensington” (a nearby town), William said. “His only way to get the cow there would be to put a rope on her and lead her.

“If people had cows to move, they herded them along the road. Farmers used to have cattle drives into Charlottetown.”

As for working the soil, “I remember when our two-furrow plow was considered a big improvement on single-furrow ones. People with two-furrow plows thought they were getting pretty modern.

“By 1950, quite a few tractors had appeared. Then people could work more land and maybe longer hours. Earlier, horses only could work for so long before they got done out. Most people stayed very aware of their horses' limitations. They didn't want to hurt or abuse them in any way. When I was young, we had six horses on the farm. It was a lot of work to look after them – feeding, brushing and hitching. They had to be well looked after.” Maintenance on machinery is easier.

Then, as now, P.E.I. grew some of the world's best potatoes. “We'd plant potatoes in early June and harvest them in early October,” William said. “Now lots of potatoes get planted in May.” The remaining potato farmers have big acreages and want more time to work.

At harvest time, a horse-drawn beater-digger “had a shear that went underneath the row deep enough not to cut the potatoes. Then a kind of a whirligig with rubber pads on the arms kicked the row apart. Hopefully, a lot of the potatoes landed on top. It was only a fair rig.

“Beater-diggers spread the potatoes over an area wider than one row so the pickers followed two abreast. They used wooden baskets and bags at intervals in the field, dumping baskets into the bags.”

Milk-cows spent summer days in the nearby pastures, returning on schedule to the barn. The twice-daily “barn work” (milking and feeding) started at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., lasting for about two hours each time.

Before electricity, farmers carried glass-bodied kerosene-lanterns around barns with them. “You'd have a bucket of milk in one hand and a lantern in the other,” William said. “If you had a really good lantern, it could go outside and stand quite a bit of wind without going out.

“Some people used to carry two buckets of milk at a time with a lantern on the edge of a bucket with its handle turned down to hold in one hand along with a bucket handle. Some buckets were big and rugged, even made of wood, almost like little barrels.”

Lanterns in barns full of hay and straw created a constant fire hazard. “Fires happened – no doubt about that. If you ever upset a lantern, its fuel would spill out and you'd have a real blaze.”

Electricity arrived circa 1949. “A group of people in our district built the line ourselves and paid for it too,” William said. “At the time, some people didn't want electric power. They felt they couldn't afford it, or they'd never had it and didn't know why they needed it.”

The first milking machine reached William's farm in about 1942. Before that, every cow received the hands-on treatment.

“We didn't store milk to any extent,” he said. “We separated the cream and then fed the skim milk to our pigs and calves. We stored the cream for a few days in big cans. In summer, we had to keep it cold enough to avoid going sour. We pumped (cool) water for the cattle into a steel tub. In that tub, we'd put the cans of cream. A spout drained water into another tub outside where the cows drank.

“Farmers used to keep 100 or more hens,” William said. “They gathered the eggs, cleaned them and took them to a store. Most country stores bought and sold eggs. They had ‘egg-grading stations’ with people trained to grade eggs by size and quality. People might have enough eggs to pay for their groceries.”

As producers of food, farmers, who usually had their own orchards and gardens, needed fewer groceries than city-folks did. “We'd be after tea, sugar, salt, pepper and such things.”

At rainy times, the mud on rural roads and farm lanes caused concern. “Mud always was bad in the spring,” William said. “Sometimes it was terrible in the winter too if we had long periods of warm weather. With horses and wagons, we usually didn't get stuck in mud. But when cars arrived, we certainly did.”

For a time, horses and cars shared the roads. “Cars used to frighten the horses, sometimes so badly that they ran away. At first, cars attracted a lot of opposition, including from my grandfather.”

But motor vehicles gained popularity, and gas stations proliferated. “There were all kinds of places to buy gas,” William said. “Nearly every corner-store had hand-operated pumps. For every place on P.E.I. to buy gas now, I'm sure there were a dozen places in the 1940s.

“For a long time, we still kept horses as a backup to cars and for hauling manure from stables. After snowstorms, the horses also were needed to make tracks in the roads. Every rural person needed to help with ‘breaking roads’. Actually, in winter many of the sleigh tracks weren't on real roads. They went across fields.”

People saw their neighbors “a lot more than now. Anyone with nothing to do on a long winter evening would hitch a horse or walk to visit someone. People knew their neighbors then. The same families lived on farms for generations. Visitors would be invited to stay for supper. That was part of the system.

“Sometimes back-peddlers came around too, and they might stay overnight. It'd be a man with two or three big boxes strung around on his back. He'd open everything up on the kitchen floor and have nearly as much stuff for sale, like toothpaste and shoelaces, as in a convenience store.”

Amazingly, people did household chores without electric appliances. “Machines for washing clothes were hand-operated, either by turning a crank or pulling a lever back and forth,” William said. “People without washing machines used scrub-boards. Since there were no clothes driers, we hung clothes outdoors on a line, whether it was winter or summer. In winter, they froze. Another thing for washing clothes was soft water from a barrel that caught rain running off the house roof. Of course, the only way to warm water was boiling it on the kitchen stove. All this sounds primitive by today's standards.”

Before electric refrigerators, “we used a lot of salted meat. Things like butter were kept in a cellar which was cooler. Milk came from the barn at the same temperature at which it came from the cows so we couldn't keep milk for too long.”

Usually the farm crew included a faithful dog responsible to keep watch and to help herd cows. “We had a dog named Tippy who used to come into the house at mealtimes and rest near the kitchen stove,” William said. “If anyone came into the yard, Tippy would get up, push open the screen-door, go out and investigate. That was a great dog that stayed with us for years.”

Returning from a trip once, William learned bad news. “My sister Winnifred (one of his five siblings, all sisters) met me at a railway station and said, ‘Did you hear about Tippy?’ ” Having suffered a stroke, the dog soon died.

On the subject of death, the early 1940s coincided with a global crisis as the Second World War raged. “People followed the war news by newspaper and radio,” William said. “We had our first radio by about 1942. Some neighbors had one earlier.

“I remember visiting friends and listening to some early war news on a radio. That was the day when Great Britain declared war on Germany. At a certain point, my father stood up and said, ‘Well, I guess we'd better go home. The war won't end tonight anyway.’

“A lot of people went to the war. There was conscription to a point. If two young men lived on a farm, it was expected that one would go. Everyone had to register. All the men of age had medical examinations. In some cases, four or five from a single family went.”

Too young to enlist, William was 17 years old when the conflict ended. “Some people might have gone earlier if they lied about their age,” he said. “But I reached that age just as the war ended.

“Often we stayed up late at night to listen to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill speak on radio. “The Canadian prime minister was William Lyon Mackenzie King, and he had various meetings with Churchill and American president Franklin Roosevelt. For several years, the war went very badly for the British side.”

Even in Atlantic Canada, “people sounded air-raid sirens and declared blackouts. All windows were supposed to be covered with blackout blinds so that no lights showed.” No German bombing raids materialized there, but “German submarines did sink ships in Canadian waters”.

When peace returned, William happened to be in Charlottetown, the provincial capital. “At noon time, I walked up the street. Everyone's doors were open, and radios blared. I almost could get the full newscast as I walked up the street, so much from each person's radio.”

Thinking back, William believes that not everything modern qualifies as better and more efficient. For example, “Post-office service then was better than now,” he said. “You could mail a letter for about three cents. There were many more post offices. They were all over the place. Someone picked up and delivered mail at the farm gate. If you didn't have a stamp, you could wrap a letter in a piece of paper with a few cents in it and someone at the post office would take out the money and put on a stamp. When I went to Prince of Wales College, I used to write a letter home each Sunday and mail it on my way to evening church. It always was in the farm mailbox on Monday morning. The mail traveled by train. I suppose that someone at the post office worked all night.”

Anyone who chats with William (and he loves to talk, especially about “old times”) may find the conversation punctuated with references to agricultural gear and spectacles (like loads of turnips, dump-carts, hay-forks and cream-haulers) no longer seen in the fields and farm yards. He can recite long-past train routes in a province that no longer even has trains.

History endures most strongly in the memories of people who lived through it. Helping everyone else to understand it too is a big reason why the world has museums – and halls of fame.




William's four surviving sisters join him on the day
he entered the Atlantic Agricultural Hall of Fame
(left to right: Helen, Louise, Amy and Georgina).

(Photo by Don McConaghy)




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