A couple versions of the stone boat. What a rock in the first!
Stone boats were used (and still are) for a multitude of purposes from clearing fields of stones, to training animals.
The top image is from an interesting site called Ox Hill Devon.
The second from Appalachian Album
As I pull a package of meat out of the freezer for dinner I wonder at the efforts that must have gone into feeding a family (sometimes upward of 15 people) for 6 winter months. Imagine the time and effort that must have taken! I can’t imagine having the skills, planning, and energy it must have taken.
As the end of the year approaches, the shadows and nights grow longer. Hours of sunlight are a blessing. The barn has faded and stained during the last few months and is now becoming a more integrated part of the landscape. It’s colours mirror nature’s surrounding it. I added a few more fragments of history yesterday. Here are some photos.
I love how the walls of the barn are evolving. As layers of new ‘history’ fragments are added, the older pieces fade away like memory - peeling away slowly from the boards, becoming obscured, stained and faded by the weathering of time and new the addition of information. Nonetheless, the layers build up slowly, one on top of another, like a visceral cumulative experience.
A point for reflection as the snow season begins:
Some modern tractors boast 400 Horsepower engines. To put this in perspective, that means it would take approximately 400 horses (and countless handlers) to do the work that one of these modern tractors does in a period of time. This is a picture (courtesy of Bud Van Alstein) of a team pulling a snow plough in Lanark County (c.1940’s).
Steev Morgan shot time lapse video and Benjamin Hesse created the soundscape for the documentation of our very fun day of raising the timbers of this wee barn frame back in May. As you can see, many hands made the task a piece of cake (not to diminish the precision work of Cam Gray and, to a much lesser extent, Susie Osler (aka me) who measured and cut the timbers, mortises and tenons that ended up fitting so nicely! We started about 10 am and had it all up and were drinking beer by 2:30pm. Thanks to everyone who helped out for their braun, enthusiasm, and support.
I love these photos showing how hay was harvested (c. 1890-1910) on farms similar to this one where Part Lot 18 is standing. It always amazes me how accustomed to labour-saving devices we have become (and perhaps what a blessing they are) yet we still complain at haying time about the heat, the dust and the work it takes to bring in bales of hay. Imagine the efforts back in the day when it was forked onto the wagon, loose or in small sheaves! Many hands, and hooves, were necessary.
I particularly enjoy the photo showing the horse on a treadmill powering I’m not sure what - an elevator, or hay fork?
Photos are from the Ontario Archives website. Reuben Sallows was the photographer of the image on the left, William Hampden Tenner for the one on the right.
This document shows the transfer of the west part of the northeast part of Lot 18, Concession 6, from Nicholas Hall to Thomas McEwen in 1867. This portion of land, where fieldwork is today (where this art installation entitled Part Lot 18, Concession 6 is located), had numerous severances - to the Ontario & Quebec Railway (1882), to the Hydro-Electric Power Corp. (1946), and to various landowners between 1858 and today. It is somewhat confusing to keep straight!
As for the familial or personal histories of the individuals that I am finding early associated with this land, very little seems to be available. Hall seems to have moved on - possibly to greener pastures - to Concession 7 (S. Sherbrooke) in July, 1867 - selling his portion of Lot 18 (the north half) to Thomas McEwen who was already deeded the southwest 1/2 of the Lot by the Crown in 1860. Basically, the two men (and families?) must have lived across the road from each other for a few years before McEwen bought Hall’s piece of Lot 18.
Neither Nicholas Hall nor Thomas McEwen, it seems, have much in the way of decendants still in the area. Neither are they figured prominently or often in the documents I have been able to access so far about this area close to the town of Maberly.
However, each lived lives that one imagines involved work, procuring food, loving, quarelling, passions of some sort, families, personal triumph and tragedies. Yet their stories are invisible, the threads forgotten, and only the occasional archival record acts as a reminder of a life lived.
This document was found in the Algonquin College library archives in Perth, ON
Some of the archival material I have been collecting in the last few months. This document is (I think) from a registry of Ontario land patents issued from the Crown. The detail shows the name of the first owner, Nicholas Hall, of Part Lot 18, Concession 6 (where this installation is located). The information given is as follows - his name, 100 acres, Date of Patent Request (26 March, 1858), the Lot and Concession, the Township name (South Sherbrooke), the County (Lanark), the date of issue of the Land Patent (3 April, 1858), the type of transfer (Crown Sale), and the book and folio numbers where the records are located.
My friend Sammy took these great photos with her phone last week. Love the vintage look!
This blog is a companion piece to the installation 'Part Lot 18, Concession 6' created at fieldwork by Susie Osler in May 2012.
The installation explores the partial story of this place – this farm, this road, this township, and other places similarly settled in Ontario. The small timber frame barn is incomplete but acts as a skeleton on which fragments of history and figments of imagination hang. As the past is continually being recreated through stories and historical accounts, so too the life of this barn and the land it is sited on is continually unfolding.
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Susie Osler is a ceramic artist who also engages in writing, investigating local history, and (most recently) timber framing. She is part of the fieldwork Collective. Susie has a special appreciation for this place – the land and the community - which has been her home for the last decade.
