Every neighbourhood has its own stories of farmers who had to be hard as nails to survive, but who turned out to also be fired by a vital spark that could not be extinguished even by the heaviest, most wearying toil.
It’s this combination — the toughness and the humanity — that makes them such heroes. On their own, neither trait was enough.
In my own case, Alexander Sinclair was born on a Scottish farm but was brought to Canada with his parents in 1831 when he was 13. The family got rights to 200 acres of primeval forest just down the road from me, and Alexander farmed in the area the rest of his life.
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Despite the primeval forest with trunks of four- and even six-foot thickness, Alex wrote in a memoir when he was 76 that the only tools a pioneer needed were an axe, two iron wedges, a spade, a hoe, a handsaw and a couple of augers. With them, he could build a dynasty.
Of course, the tools changed during Alex’s career. He cut his first 20 grain crops completely by hand, raked and tied them by hand, and then mostly threshed them by hand with a flail.
Later in his time they got a reaper, although it still needed a man to rake sheaves off the table. Then the self-binder automated even that, and the farm soon enough had a mowing machine, a horse-rake and much more.
In fact, you get a sense from Alex that they might almost have got them too soon. “Farming is only child’s play when compared with what it used to be,” he wrote in 1894.
Where I am now, the Ruddell family arrived from Ireland in 1820. They put themselves to it and dammed up the creek and built a mill that Alex would have known very, very well, carrying his wheat here in sacks on his back in the early years.
At its optimistic best, according to letters the Ruddells left behind, their mill could grind six to eight bushels an hour.
Today, I’m quick to look out the window at each new machine I hear on the road working up the hillside where the Ruddells bedded their dam. The horsepower today of course is of a different order of magnitude altogether.
But what of the farmers? It turns out that it is still true. It not only takes all those hard-as-nails traits, like dedication, perseverence and single-mindedness to farm. In my neighbours and in the farmers I interact with every day, what I also see is that same vital spark, that extraordinary humanity that carries the belief that living isn’t only meant to be about being, it is also meant to be about doing.
2016 will bring its share of change, but as we stand at its brink, I hope you’ll raise a glass to the old ones from your own area and from your own family. There are lessons they can teach us for generations yet.
Are we getting it right? Let me know at [email protected].
