| Title: | From Thomas W. Magrath, Esq., Upper Canada, |
|---|---|
| ID | 4546 |
| Collection | Authentic Letters from Upper Canada [Rev. Thomas Radcliff] |
| File | radcliff/4 |
| Year | 1832 |
| Sender | Magrath, Thomas Wm |
| Sender Gender | male |
| Sender Occupation | superintendent for settlers |
| Sender Religion | unknown |
| Origin | Erindale, Toronto, Upper Canada |
| Destination | Dublin, Ireland |
| Recipient | Rev. Thomas Radcliff |
| Recipient Gender | male |
| Relationship | friends |
| Source | |
| Archive | |
| Doc. No. | |
| Date | |
| Partial Date | |
| Doc. Type | |
| Log | unknown |
| Word Count | 1668 |
| Genre | settling, farming |
| Note | |
| Transcript | to the Rev. Thomas Radcliff, Dublin. Erindale, Toronto, Jan. 1832. My dear Sir, It may be interesting to you, and useful to your friends, to have some information relative to our first agricultural attempts, and subsequent operations on our new land. My last letter, being confined to one object, omitted some details on these subjects, which I now hasten to furnish. After having purchased our lot of seven hundred acres* from Government, for fifteen hundred and seventy dollars, (about £325 British,) my father, during the period of his residence in York, sent my brothers and myself to erect a log-house on our farm, of which we all took possession immediately after its completion; and when fairly lodged in that, we undertook the building of our present residence, which is a frame-house. This dwelling is 44 feet by 33, containing three stories; that under ground is 12 feet high, and built with stone and lime. The mode of forming such a house is as follows:— A framer, on receiving the dimensions and plan, cuts out the mortices and prepares the frame. A Bee, which means an assemblage of the neighbours, is then called; and a person well skilled in the business, and termed a Boss, takes the leadership of the active party, who, with the mere mechanical aid of a fallowing, or raising, pole, gradually elevates the mighty bents, until the tenants (connected with each other by tie beams,) drop into their mortices in the sill, to which, as well as to each other, they are immediately afterwards secured by pins, and in a few hours the skeleton of the house, with its rafters, &c. is ready for shingles and clap boards. It will appear strange to you that a house could be covered in before the sides are finished; and still more so, that the cellar, or basement story, should not be excavated, nor the foundation-walls built up to the sill until the upper works were completed; but such was our course of proceeding. At the raising of my father's house, seventy kind neighbours assisted, and worked extremely hard for an entire day, without any recompense whatever, except a plentiful dinner al fresco. In a few months my brothers and I, who are tolerably handy, with the aid of two carpenters, had the inside finished; and we have now been nearly three years inhabiting a truly comfortable house, quite in the home fashion, except that it has the advantage of a verandah, (not very common in Ireland,) on three sides, (supported by pillars and secured by railing,) into which we can walk from our bed-rooms, and enjoy the delightful air of the summer and autumn mornings. This verandah is 12 feet in breadth. We pass our leisure hours in it during the fine weather, choosing the shady, and sheltered side, according to the sun, or wind; and frequently sitting there with candles until bed time; with the occasional annoyance, however, of the troublesome moskitoes;—but where can we expect to find perfect enjoyment? When we had completed the house, we raised a barn, sixty feet by thirty-six, and eighteen feet in height, with an ice-house, root house, and summer dairy beneath it, which cost us, in cash for hired labour, only twelve dollars to a framer, and the price of some nails, worth about 2s. 10d. We had a second Bee for the raising of this, which was effected in five hours, and on this occasion were able to supply our obliging neighbours, who again volunteered their valuable services, with an abundant dinner and supper in the dwelling house; and to gratify them with a little music. The floor of this barn would surprize you, it is supported by twenty-three beams of wood, eighteen inches square— with two courses of three-inch plank over them. There is in fact as much timber in the floor alone, as would cost you more than a hundred pounds. With us it is a cheap commodity, and it is less expensive to draw and use it in great bulk, than to send it to the saw mill to be reduced to smaller scantlings. The cause of the double flooring of thick plank is that (the timber being fresh) the grain, which would be lost through the opening joints of a single floor, may be saved, by having those joints covered by a second tier of boards. My two brothers, James and Charles, unassisted, cut eighteen thousand shingles for the roof and laid them on, besides siding and flooring the barn—no idle hours here! Before the house was ready for our reception, we had cleared twenty acres of the land for wheat, and during the successive operations of brushing, chopping, logging, burning and fencing—my father was obliged to hire workmen. The land has a miserable appearance when first cleared, the surface and stumps being as black as fire can render them, and these latter standing three feet high, to facilitate their being drawn out by two yoke of oxen when their roots decay, which does not take effect for seven or eight years, (according to the kind of timber) and is more tedious if the land be laid down for grass. Our first agricultural proceedings are as rude and simple as can well be imagined. A triangular harrow, the teeth of which weigh 7 lbs. each, is dragged over the newly prepared ground; its irregular and jumping passage over the roots and loose vegetable earth, scatters the ashes of the burned timber over the entire surface; the wheat is then sown, about one bushel to the acre, and another scrape of the harrow completes the process. On some portion of his land thus cleared, the new settler plants potatoes, turnips, pumpkins and Indian com, merely laying the seed upon the ground, and, with a hoe, scratching a sufficient portion of earth and ashes to cover it— a luxuriant crop generally succeeds; in this district from twenty to thirty bushels of wheat per acre—the land is sown with Timothy grass and clover in the following spring, while the snow is on the ground, that it may be easily ascertained whether the seed is sown correctly. After wheat, no other crop is taken (generally speaking) except hay, until after the removal of the roots, when the ploughs can work. The weight of hay seldom exceeds two tons per acre, because mowing on such land is a work of difficulty; with all our care we leave much of it uncut, and frequently break our scythes. To reduce the expense in harvest time, we use cradle scythes to cut all the grain, although they do not make quite as clean work as the sickles. A good cradler will take down from two to three acres of wheat in a day. Gleaning is not worth the attention of even a child; the scattered grains go to the sustenance of the wild pigeons of which the flocks are sometimes miles in length. By the way, I must ask you to account for a curious circumstance which results from sowing wheat on a swamp, or wherever wet lodges. The purest seed wheat that can be procured, in such soil, becomes a kind of grain called chesse. Some dry land of ours produces fine wheat; but where there is a tendency to swamp the chesse grows, and in one spot, with us there was last year half an acre of it with very little wheat among it. Some farmers maintain that it does not proceed from wheat, but from a dormant seed; others, of whom my father is one, are of opinion that the wheat degenerates from the constant moisture and becomes what we term chesse, and, what tends to confirm this very natural hypothesis Is that chesse did not grow in any part of the field where wheat is not sown, and the adjoining patches which were purposely left unsown produced only rank grass and This chesse looks exactly like wheat, whilst growing, but when beginning to shoot or spindle—the head opens. I will send you a specimen of it cut in harvest time. It is an advantageous circumstance for the clearing of this country, that the settler finds it his advantage to bring in fresh land every year. Some emigrants, who are without capital or assistance, exhaust their first clearance; and others prepare their land by girdling the trees, which though it kills them, and allows vegetation under and around them, is an injudicious mode, as they frequently fall either on the fences or on the crops, or, what is worse, on the cattle, and occasion annual and often very inconvenient labour to remove them. We had a very spirited manager for the Canada company in this neighbourhood—Mr. Galt—whose various publications bear strong evidence of his literary powers, and whose foresight and perseverance, acting upon a great scale, would eventually have produced a wonderful improvement in advancing the most important interests of this country. The London merchants, however, composing the Canada company, did not approve of the expenditure of too much of their cash on general improvements, without an immediate return, and recalled him, placing in his room the Hon. William Allen and Messrs. Thomas Mercer Jones, ånd Dunlop, better known by the name of Tiger Dunlop —the last, though not least, of whom, is Warden of the woods and forests—all excellent and honourable men, who will conscientiously do their duty, and may, perhaps, eventually reap the advantage of Mr. Galt's wisdom and exertions. An individual emigrant must expend capital and toil before he can have an overplus for market; why then should immediate profit be expected by the company from a number of colonists, within a shorter period? I believe you will not be sorry that I close my letter here. My next shall treat of various unconnected matters that may be interesting and useful to settlers. Your's, my dear Sir, Faithfully, T. W. MAGRATH. |
