It is our intention at this point of our story, to devote a chapter to an attempted description of how the earliest settlers set about building their first log houses after their arrival and, when that task was completed, engaged in the more arduous one of clearing up the land. These tasks were gone about in a very crude manner when compared with our modern methods. It was, as has been observed elsewhere, the day of small things, but these things had to be before they gave way to our larger ones. Our factory system with its minute division of labor and immense production of commodities at reduced costs, has gradually developed from simple methods and small beginnings, and even farming has in the same fashion become a specialized business in which the farmer more and more attempts to raise but one crop and that with the least possible exertion of effort promising the greatest returns. From the standpoint of economy and conservation of energy this is a prudent policy, but it is to be doubted if it has had a beneficial effect upon those who do the actual manual labor, in the production of wealth in its various forms. The human mind becomes too much like a machine. Each man knows his task thoroughly, but that task becomes more and more circumscribed as new inventions and new processes displace hand labor with the machine. Factory life becomes a daily round of sameness and deadly monotony, and life on the farm will in due time inevitably follow it. There was no such monotony in the life of the pioneers when every man had to be his own mechanic, to a very considerable extent.

The basis of this description has been found in some personal recollections committed to paper by a former resident of the Lake Shore Line who came there as a boy of thirteen, in the spring of 1844, with his father and a large family. We may be sure his experience tallied pretty closely with that of his neighbors, who at that time were like the proverbial hen’s teeth, few and far between.

The first job tackled by the homesteader or the man who bought his land outright from the Crown was the building of his house. Until that was accomplished, he usually boarded with some neighbor who was kind enough to take him in. When he had felled the trees that were cut up into logs for the purpose, a bee was held among the surrounding settlers and a log house of the size wanted, went up, frequently in the most rapid manner, the walls being erected in a single day. No architect’s plans were required, nor was any attempt made at ornament. Sometimes an elm or a maple, from two to three feet in diameter was felled and the butt cut, lying just as it had fallen, was used as the foundation log for the front of the house. In the exact centre, a cut about twelve inches deep and a convenient width was made. This made a fine doorstep and marked the location of the front door. There was also one window in each of the side walls and a door in the back led into a lean-to. The walls were of various heights, but mostly of one storey of from ten to twelve feet. A pitched roof on these walls covered what in these effete days we call an attic, but was then known as either the upstairs or loft. Access to it was gained by a perpendicular ladder.

In building these houses the most experienced woodsmen were usually assigned to the corners, of which there were of course four. It was their part to mortise the log so that it lay in its place securely and with as little open space as possible between it and the log next lower. It was taken as a mild form of disgrace if one of these four failed to hold up his corner and kept the other three waiting, in fact these raising bees were a test of axemanship and speed which often developed into a race. Sometimes the logs were hewed square on the outside wall after the building was finished but this was uncommon. Had the windows not been necessary, the houses, when the chinks were properly plastered on both the out and in sides, would have been practically airtight. When carefully built, they were warm and dry but hardly sanitary. They frequently became infested by cockroaches and it was almost impossible to get rid of them.

Sometimes, too, such a habitation was directly connected with the log barns of the period, by a covered passage leading from the back door outward to the latter. Mr. Thomas Lunn, later mayor of Owen Sound, built and occupied such a house on his farm, a mile northeast of Leith. These passages must have been a comfortable convenience on a cold winter morning.

The interior arrangements were as simple as the outside. Sometimes there were no partitions at all, and one big room served for kitchen, dining room, parlor or sitting room, and bedrooms all in one. In other cases a carpet was stretched on a pole through the centre of the house, doing duty as a partition. Every inch of space was utilized and if the family was sometimes cramped for it, they could always look forward to the building of the new house as soon as funds were available. The beds were often constructed so that one could be stowed away under another in the day time. Everything was primitive in the extreme. In one case a settler on the Lake Shore felled a tree, levelled the top surface of the stump carefully and then built his shanty around it. The stump served as a table.

The fire place was usually built into the back wall. The back of it was built up for three or four feet with stones. Logs three and four feet long and from one to one-and-one-half feet in diameter were used as back logs, and smaller ones placed on top when the family retired for the night.

Such a fire lasted all night. In the morning the remains of the back log were drawn forward and more fuel piled on top. Seldom was a really well built house ever cold. Two chains were hung above the fireplace for holding pots and kettles.

A Dutch oven was often used for baking bread and roasting meat. Cookstoves were still in the hazy future. Another utensil used was a bake kettle, about fourteen inches in diameter and six inches deep, with an ordinary pot handle and standing on four short feet. After a good bed of coals had been pulled to the front of the fire and dough placed in this pot it was put on the fire, the lid was applied, and also covered with coals and the whole left standing until the bread was baked. The Dutch oven was a heavy sheet iron affair, about two feet long, fourteen inches wide and sixteen inches high, with open sides. It was placed on the open fire and the heat circulated through the open sides, cooking all kinds of pastry and meat. These are now relics of an almost-forgotten age, but in their time some splendid meals were cooked in them.

We had almost forgotten a highly important part of the house, the roof. It was in most cases made of small basswood logs, split exactly through the centre. Each half was hollowed out from end to end, leaving a thickness on the circumference of about six inches. This was done with the axe, the log being scored down its whole length on the flat side and then chipped out, much as an Indian hollows a canoe. A row of them was placed on the roof, hollowed side up and running lengthwise from the eaves to the gable. Another row was placed on these with the hollowed sides down, the hollows of the second fitting over the joints in the first row. Such a roof shed the elements splendidly for a few years, but the basswood logs were apt to crack and warp in time.

Such a house met the first requisition of the settler—it was cheap. An axe, a saw and a hammer were about all the tools used in erecting it. About the only sawn timber required was that used in the doors and window sash, the floor generally being of cedar poles hewed down to one half their diameter and laid down with the hewn side uppermost. The close of a raising bee was almost always signalized by a jollification in the new house if the weather permitted, and at a neighbor’s house if it did not. Some lone survivors of these earthly habitations whose walls once echoed to the mirth or sorrow of their inmates of long ago, are still to be seen standing in delapidation and forlorn loneliness in the more remote districts, but their number is steadily decreasing and soon the last of them will be swept away. It would be well if these survivors could be removed bodily and one of them placed in each of our cities where all could see, as an example to the rising generation of jazz of the houses their grandfathers were satisfied to live in. It might give some of them a thoughtful hour.

His house finished, the settler turned his attention to cutting, logging and burning the solid bush that surrounded the tiny clearing made by the building of his home. The ordinary layman may consider this as a task requiring a maximum of muscle and a minimum of brains only. He is profoundly mistaken. It was the Scottish economist, Adam Smith, who first reminded his readers, about one hundred and fifty years ago, that a certain amount of brain exercise is required at the most menial tasks of manual labor and that a college professor may make the sorriest kind of a ditch digger, until he has mastered the know-how of such work. A mechanic starting with nothing but a blue print and the materials to construct a piece of machinery he never saw before, is surely not only a brain worker but a manual worker as well. White collared office men too often forget this fact. Be that as it may, it still remains that a great deal of headwork and handskill were called into play in the clearing of bushland, at the time we speak of. In time it developed a fine type of wood craftsmen on the Lake Shore. The labor was some times excitingly dangerous as well. The chopper had to cultivate the art of concentration and have his wits constantly about him.

Where the land was level and unbroken by any natural obstacle, it was cleared in strips about forty rods long and sixteen or more feet wide. An acre a day was a good day’s work for a yoke of oxen and five or six men, but it was seldom even a man with a family could muster such a force. Hilly land had one advantage, the log heaps were obviously easier to collect and pile. The larger logs were laid at the bottom and smaller ones skidded on top of them. About six or eight months afterwards, when they were dry enough the whole was burned. Would that we had some of that precious fuel now, when roots, rotten logs and limbs are carefully piled and dried for the stove or furnace! There was considerable knack in hitching the chain to a log to be pulled by the oxen to the heap. If the chain were hitched directly on top it meant a dead straight away pull, but if it was made at the ground and to one side, and the oxen started in a crosswise direction and away from the hitch, the log rolled and of course this slight momentum gave it a good start. Logs that could not be budged on a straight pull were easily started this way. Some logs were hard to burn regardless of how dry they were. The butternut was the worst. The remains of a butternut log, partially burned, were frequently dragged around to three and four subsequent fires before it was entirely consumed.

In chopping standing timber, the choppers after calculating the proximity and relative distances between a number of trees, sometimes started what they called a windrow. First one tree was cut about half through ; then another standing at the right distance from it was cut through in about the same manner, and so on back to the number of six, eight or even ten trees. The trees were so chopped that in falling all would press to the same centre. Then, as last tree, a big maple or elm was selected and chopped entirely through. It fell upon the one nearest it, breaking it at the stump ; this in turn fell upon the one next to it and so on down the line, until the whole row of trees came down in a promiscuous heap. When the operation was carried out successfully a great deal of labor was saved. First, the work of chopping the first six or eight trees was cut in half, then the weight and momentum of the fall broke up the branches and made the brushing up arid piling of them easier. It was a moment of glorious excitement for the choppers too, when eight or ten trees came to earth with a crash like thunder.

In felling large trees singly it was a common practise to have them fall over a stump, distant about half the height of the tree chopped down from the same. Sometimes this was so successful that the tree broke in three places—where it struck the stump, once beyond that point and the top and once again between the same point and where the chopper had cut it through. Again this saved labor in cutting into log lengths for piling and burning. It required nice judgement and there was always the pleasurable anticipation of the results of the fall, not always realized however. Deep snow was a constant source of danger to the choppers in the winter time. They had to arrange matters so that they could make a quick getaway from a falling tree and when the snow was unusually deep, paths away from the stump had to be tramped in several directions, for it was not always a certainty which way it would fall. Sometimes a falling tree would lodge among its neighbors, hang there a few minutes and then suddenly fall to the ground. Where the timber was thick, in starting to fall it would break the branches of those around it or its own and these branches falling from a great height were another menace to the fellers. At other times the tree, lodging in one close by, jumped back from its own stump and the chopper had to jump, too, if it came in his direction and he valued his life. Again, the butt would fly up and fall to either right or left of its own stump, and again the chopper had to get in the clear. When a gang of men were chopping together, constant watch had to be kept for trees that swerved in falling, and sometimes caught the unwary in the sweep of their branches. Old settlers tell of running along tree trunks to escape such traps or, if driven to it by immediate danger, jumping far out into the deep snow. Sometimes when they had just escaped being caught, they were buried in the snow throw up by the falling trunk.

The reader will have gathered from the foregoing, some of the perils of the first clearing of the land. It will also strike him, if he is of a thoughtful nature, what an indispensable tool the lowly axe was. In a land where there was nothing but raw timber its uses were manifold; it was seldom for any length of time out of the hands of the pioneer. In time this developed a fine race of axe men. The middle aged settlers who came direct from the old land, never became unusually expert in its use. The}7' were two accustomed to the stiff blow from the shoulder they had acquired in many cases from using the pick, back in the land of their nativity. But they brought young sons with them or raised others after getting here, who reduced the use of the axe until it was almost a science. It is a pleasure to watch any man at work, when he is thorough master of the tool he uses, and this was so of the early axe men at Leith and on the Lake Shore Line.

There was an old saying, current in these localities at the time, that if you heaved a rock out of a window in Leith it would strike a Day--if not a Day a Cameron. The saying was probably refurbished to do local duty from one that originated in Washington during the Civil War, that if you heaved a rock out of a window it would strike a brigadier general.

From this humorous exaggeration it will naturally be inferred that the progeny of these two old and honorable families, who played such an active and useful part in the early upbuilding of the community, were numerous in the land. While this is undoubtedly true, the chief claim to distinction won by the first comers bearing the names, from the heavily timbered country of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and all the sons they raised, was that almost without one exception they were known far and wide as mighty men of valor with the axe. In their hands it became a thing of beauty—a beauty of accuracy and speed in chopping and hewing. They knew just where to place the stroke and every stroke told. This was a gift in the days when cross-cut saws were scarce, or crude V toothed affairs when one had them. The lance toothed cross-cut still belonged to the future. But give one of these men his favorite axe and he would cut his way through anything.

There were many tricks with the axe. Sometimes two choppers would start felling a tree, one upon each side of it. When they had chopped as wide a scarf as the diameter of the tree demanded, instead of continuing on around the stump and starting another cut, they would simply turn in their tracks and the new cut was begun. This necessitated right-and-left-hand chopping, a gift far harder to acquire than one would naturally suppose. A right-and-left-hand boilermaker who, before the days of organized labor and uniform wage scales, used to draw more money than his less fortunate mates, would appreciate the destinction.

There was another family on the Lake Shore which acquired considerable celebrity in its use. Four of the sons, all natives of Scotland who had left it at an early age, would surround a huge maple with their axes, forming a square. The first blows were struck and as all had a good sense of rythm, in the course of a minute or two a regular tempo was caught, about one hundred and twenty to the minute, the strokes synchronizing as regularly as the drumbeats in a march played by a concert band. No tree stood up long under such an assault, sometimes continued regularly for a quarter of an hour when the choppers had gained their stride. Soon there came the first ominous crack, then a few more strokes and then some more clear sunlight was let into the forest. The scarves on such a stump after the tree had fallen, would be as smooth as though jack planed. One day in early times one of these choppers drove his axe into the gash in a log one hundred times, striking the same spot every time without the variation of one sixty-fourth of an inch. Such men naturally prized a good axe. In the severe frosts of winter it was apt to break when the wood was frozen hard and the axe itself was chilled through. A hemlock knot was also destruction to the keen edge under such circumstances. So the axe was ground sharper in the summer and with a blunter edge in the winter.

The land was generally prepared for seed the first season after it was cleared. The surface was a rich vegetable mould which the falling leaves of centuries had steadily rotted upon and fertilized. It was not an inexhaustible fertility however, altho some great crops were raised in the early years. On the farm of Mr. Lunn, mentioned above, about 1858 when the farm was leased by the Henry family, then well known in the district, ten acres were cleared in one season and this was sowed to wheat. This threshed forty bushel to the acre which is a remarkable yield when one considers the area of the clearing that must have been covered by stumps. The hardwood stumps rotted slowly, the basswood and elm stumps disintegrating in a few years. Frequently the labor involved in clearing the land stirred up the surface so that it needed no cultivation for the first crop. At any rate turnips and wheat were frequently sown upon such a surface and flourished “like a green bay tree”. The soil along the Lake Shore, however, never had the depth or such a favorable subsoil as that lying along the shore on Concession A northeast of Leith and in latter times has I needed more fertilizing. After about thirty-five years of cropping the first signs of exhaustion appeared and large yields of wheat became a thing of the past. Will the same be true of our Western Provinces? The writer read an account last winter of land at Brandon, Manitoba, which had been under crop continuously since 1881 and was still going strong and raising as large crops as it did in that year. In many parts of the west as we learned from personal observation the farmers let the barnyard manure go to waste. They assign two reasons for this: First, they dread the seeding of the land in weeds; second, where manure is used in many cases the rank growth of straw breaks down and the grain lodges. But surely such a pace of cropping cannot be maintained indefinitely.

The first crops raised in Sydenham were bountiful and there was plenty for man and beast in all her borders. There was only one period when there was a scarcity of provisions in the new settlement. This was in July, 1844, when, owing to the non arrival of a schooner at Owen Sound, a pinch was felt for about three or four weeks. Several Lake Shore Line people returned to Galt whence they had come and worked at the harvest until it was over. Flour was so scarce that more fortunate neighbors had to divide up with their fellows. It was made into a mixture called pap, a word which later gained an unenviable notority when used in the sense of political patronage. Pap was made by stirring flour with water in a cup ; this in turn was poured into scalding milk and when thickened to the proper consistency and cooled, was eaten with milk. What was used at one meal was always prepared about one meal-time before. In time the overdue schooner arrived with provisions, the use of pap was discontinued and borrowed flour was returned. It had been so scarce people had not dared to make bread.

The first crops were harvested with the sickle, as in the days of Ruth and Boaz. They were so small in acreage and stumps in the new clearings were so thick that in all probability it was the most economical way of cutting the grain. In a few years the grain cradle came into use. It was followed by the reaper and along about 1884 or 1885 the first self binder was started in Sydenham. People gathered from all over the township to see that binder start, ourselves among them. What if an aeroplane had sailed overhead that day ! The ensuing scene can hardly be imagined.

The grain was drawn to the rude log barns and threshed, mostly in the winter. Before the advent of the first threshing machine the common method was to lay the sheaves in two rows along the floor of the barn and drive a team of horses or oxen over them and thus tramp out the grain. During this process the sheaves were turned over repeatedly so as to thoroughly separate the wheat from the chaff. In 1848 a threshing machine came into the Owen Sound district. It was a small affair about six feet long and five feet wide, little bigger than the ordinary fanning mill. It was as simple as it was small, the principal parts being a cylinder and feeding board. The straw was taken away from the cylinder by a man using a rake for the purpose, and by him passed to another who threw it out of the barn or into a mow. Two hundred sheaves were threshed at a time. Then the machine was stopped so that the grain accumulating behind the machine might be pulled back. Two hundred bushels were considered good threshing for ten hours. There were usually two men and as many teams with the machine and the price paid the whole outfit for its use was four dollars a day. From such a type the present large threshers of the Western Provinces that have threshed as high as three thousand bushel a day have evolved. However, only oats, peas and barley could be threshed in the manner first described. Wheat was always threshed with the flail.

All the farm implements were primitive in the extreme. As far as possible they were made on the farm itself. Harrows were made from crotches cut from a hardwood tree. These were trimmed down to the required size, the top side flattened off and long spikes driven through the A shaped frame to act as teeth. The first seeding after clearing was as often as not harrowed in by cedar brush drawn over the seeded soil by hand. Nature did the rest. Oxen were the only beasts of draught and burden at first. Horses were unknown on some farms on Concession A as late as 1875. There is an item in the recollections referred to at the beginning of this chapter of a horse bought from Mr. Robert Crichton, who lived on the 10th Line. The purchaser, who bought it about 1848, agreed to cut and clear ten acres of land, two acres to be done in the first ten months after the sale was made, four acres the next year and the remaining four the following year as payment, the seller to furnish board for the choppers while they were on the job. The price paid for the horse in labor performed was afterwards estimated at fifty two dollars. This gives one some idea of the scarcity of horses and the high estimation in which they were held.

The contract for the first flour mill in the vicinity, built at Leith, was let in 1846; before this the settlers had taken their wheat to be ground at Inglis Mill near Owen Sound, built some years earlier. When built, this mill was the only ,one of its kind north of Fergus. Its patronage was good; the settlers from within a radius of forty and fifty miles came to it to have their grists ground. Sometimes they waited four and five days before this could be done; their oxen meanwhile being tied to trees in the bush about the mill. This mill had one pair of stones and a large bolt, but there was no screening, or fanning mill, and there was considerable pollution of the flour from various causes, especially hens. The miller’s toll was six pounds in the bushel. In the winter it was customary for the Lake Shore Line settlers to take their grists there one week, return home and go back for the flour the next. The bottoms of two bags were sewed together and a bushel of wheat was put in each bag. The load was then slung across the back of an ox and taken to the mill. A great deal of thieving went on among those who gathered and waited for their grists. Axes, ropes and other articles disappeared mysteriously; it maybe the mill’s patrons considered the miller’s toll excessive and squared the account in this manner. The Leith mill, the machinery for which, while there is no positive record to that effect, there are strong grounds for believing was shipped from England, was a great convenience to the settlers of the district and was a success from the first.

By 1852 practically every farm on the Lake Shore had been cleared to some extent. John Telfer had used a nice discrimination in allotting the lands to the three races (if I that be the proper word) represented in the pioneers. The Lowland Scottish were given the land along the Lake Shore Line nearest town, and for about five miles below Annan. The Scottish Highlanders were settled farther down the line and around the future village of Balaklava, which was given that name during the Crimean War. The Irish were sent to the Irish Block where they secured some splendid farms.