|
PROVISIONS
AND PUBLIC HIGHWAYS The staple articles of food
among the pioneers were much the same as in our day. Pork formed the chief
item of meat. the hams and shoulders were smoked and the rest of the carcass
preserved in a strong brine. The flour was coarser than the article we get
from the modern roller mills, but none the less, rather the more, wholesome.
Corn meal was used much more extensively than now; it was boiled and used as
porridge for breakfast, a thick covering of brown sugar being sprinkled over
it; what was left over became quite firm as it cooled, and was eaten for
supper with milk, or cut into thin slices and fried. Corn meal griddle-cakes
were also in great demand. Johnny-cake was not popular, as it was regarded as
a Yankee dish; and it took a good many years for the Loyalists to reconcile
themselves to anything in any way associated with their former persecutors. Wild strawberries, raspberries,
plums and gooseberries were to be had for the picking, and the thrifty
housewife always laid in a good supply. The raspberries and plums were dried
in the sun and put away for future use, or made into a jam, like the
gooseberries and strawberries. The maple furnished the most of
the sugar, but cane sugar was afterwards imported - not the white lump or
granulated sugar of to-day, but a moist, dark-brown, unrefined product known
as "Muscovado". Tomatoes were not considered fit
for human food until after the middle of the nineteenth century. If grown at
all, the fruit was used merely for purposes of ornamentation, suspended from
strings in the windows under the name of "love-apples". Many
believed that they would cause cancer in those eating them - a notion that is
not even yet wholly dead in some places. Although our fresh waters
abounded in fish of a superior quality, the Loyalists were not what we would
call a fish-eating people - perhaps no people ever were or are as a matter of
choice. Most of us enjoy a fish dinner once in a while; but few, if any, of us
would care to accept it as a steady diet, or as a substitute for meat. The
rigors of our climate and the outdoor life of hard work seemed to call for
something more sustaining. The bays and rivers teemed with maskalunge, bass
salmon, pickerel and pike, and in the late autumn months the whitefish and
herring were very plentiful. The "mascos" were speared at night by
the aid of a jack-light; they were even shot from the shore as they were
lazily swaggering along in the shallow water. In the early spring, a mess of
pike could be secured at any time with very little effort; every inlet and
creek seemed to be alive with them. The whitefish always has held first place
among our merchantable fish. In the summer season they were caught in nets
upon the shoals of the Great Lakes, and in October and November the seines
were thrown across their path as they were running up the lesser bodies of
water. I have heard an octogenarian, whose truthfulness even in a fish story
I had no reason to doubt, declare that he had frequently, when a boy, speared
fifty or sixty whitefish in one night. If we examine the map of any of
the first townships, we find that the road allowances are in straight lines,
intersected at right angles by cross-roads, also in straight lines. About the
only exceptions are the roads along the waterfront, which of necessity must
conform to the irregularities in the shores. How few, however, of the roads
in actual use are straight! We find them twisting and turning in every
direction and intersecting each other at various angles. During the first few years of
the settlements a path through the forest was all that was required. A low
piece of ground, a steep precipice, or even a fallen tree, which would
present no difficulty to the modern road-builder, might at the time have been
deemed a sufficient cause for departing from the blazed trail. Once such a
path was laid out and improved from time to time, it became a very easy
matter for it to be recognized and adopted as a regular highway. In time, the
cause for the deviation may have passed away, but the crooked road remained.
The writer knows of several "jogs" in public thoroughfares which
were so constructed in order to pass around buildings carelessly erected upon
the road allowance. Many of the most important highways in Ontario appear to
be the shortest practical lines between certain towns or villages, and were
unquestionably laid out as a matter of convenience, with an utter disregard
for the road allowances reserved by the government surveyors. During the second session of the
first Parliament of Upper Canada the Legislature passed an Act to regulate
the laying-out, amending, and keeping in repair the public highways and roads
of the province. Under its provisions the whole matter was left in the hands
of the Justices of the Peace, who were declared to be commissioners of
highways to lay out and regulate the roads within their respective divisions.
They were also given power, upon the sworn certificate of a majority of
twelve of the principal freeholders of the district, summoned for the purpose
by them, to alter any road already laid out or to construct new ones. We can
readily imagine how many of the crooks and turns in our roads were thus
introduced in the first instance to serve the temporary purpose of some
friend of the commissioners, or to satisfy the whim of some influential land
owner. By the same Act was introduced a
form of statute labour, which has deservedly met with little favour and much
condemnation; but has undergone little change for the better from 1793 to the
present time. Men possessing little or no qualifications for the position are
appointed pathmasters to act as foremen over their friends and neighbours.
Annually they turn out in full force, do a good deal of visiting and some
work, and frequently leave the road they were supposed to repair in a worse
condition than they found it. Chapter
1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter
4 Chapter 5 Chapter 7
|
