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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.

   To overcome the accumulation of snow in the roads a very simple remedy was provided as follows: "In case any highways are obstructed by snow at any time the overseers are hereby ordered to direct as many of the householders on the road as may be necessary to drive through the highway." So long as the present system of statute labour remains in force and gangs of unskilled workmen persist in annoying the travelling public by rendering the highways practically impassable, this section might, with appropriate modifications, be re-enacted to-day.


Chapter 1  Chapter 2  Chapter 3  Chapter 4  Chapter 5  Chapter 7

 

 

 

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