| Vol. 2 No. 1 January 1998 |
| The Coubrough Times |
| The Canadian Years |
| 1881 | Politics | Economy | Home | Travel | The Family |
| Other Branches | Question Corner | Editor's Corner | Subscriptions | 1998 |
Upper Canada life: 1871 - 1881
Happy New Year, everyone. We have moved into the future and so have Annie and Jim Coubrough of Dawn Township in the county of Lambton, province of Ontario. Let us see what they are up to.
Between 1871 and 1881 the country around the Coubroughs changed a lot. More and more trees had been cut down to clear land for cultivation (though Jim was still farming the same 10 acres he always had), and roads ran in all directions. Some of the concession roads were now clear for nearly their whole length. Many oak and elm trees were burned to create potash which could be turned into cash when packed in barrels and shipped to Europe where it was used to manufacture both soap and gunpowder. The brush from one acre of land would give about 30 barrels of potash, which sold for about $1.85 per hundredweight. Small logs obtained from clearing the land were often used for building, while the larger ones were sold to shipyards for masts and other ships timbers or to sawmills to be cut into boards. Milled lumber was still quite expensive--it sold for $1 per board-foot in 1871--and was generally reserved for folks with plenty of money.
There were also some things that hadn't changed by 1881. There was still no Post Office closer than Petrolia or Dresden. It still cost 6 cents to send a half-ounce letter home to Scotland, while you could send one pretty much anywhere in Canada or "The Northwest Territory" for 3 cents. The maximum allowable weight for parcels was now up to 5 pounds, but enclosing anything which resembled a letter was still a misdemeanour. (From tales I have heard, this postal regulation was cheerfully ignored by most people. In fact, it seems to have been a source of some satisfaction to be able to gyp the government of the price of a letter stamp.) The closest store and the closest church were in the village of Florence, about five miles east in Euphemia Township. It would seem that the family went there at least occasionally as this is where Flora Jane was married to Billy Atwell.
Many of the area farmers shipped produce and did their shopping in the villages of Dresden and Chatham. These would have been major expeditions for a family in the area where Jim and Annie lived: Dresden is only about 15 kilometres away, while Chatham is about 35 kilometres.
There were changes in the political climate as well. In 1871, Britain decided that keeping troops in Canada was too expensive and sent all British troops-- except a few at Halifax--home, taking with them the $6 million a year they had contributed to the Canadian economy. This withdrawal of British regulars resulted in all men between the ages of 18 and 60 being obliged to join the local militia in one of four classes. First class was men 18-30, unmarried or widowed without children; second class was men 30-45, unmarried or widowed without children; third class was men 18-45, married or widowed with children and fourth class was all men aged 45-60.
As a final step in the British retreat from Canadian politics, a delegation, including a reluctant Sir John A., went to Washington, DC to settle Anglo-American political differences. The list of grievances included everything from British support of the Confederacy in the US Civil War to American government negligence in the recent (1870) Fenian raids. As had been expected, all negotiations were directed at settling differences between Britain and the US, with scant regard for Canada's best interests. The Prime Minister had to be content with the British contention that lasting peace with the Americans was an "inestimable benefit." For Mr. MacDonald, the trouble was that the voters didn't agree.
1872 was an election year and a struggle it was to convince the various factions that they did indeed still want Sir John A. MacDonald at the head of their young country. Everybody, it seemed, was angry about something. The Maritimes were assuaged with huge government contracts and staggering amounts of patronage funnelled in by means of the Intercolonial Railway. In Ontario, workers were sopped with a law legalizing unions, while another law against most strike activities was designed to appease the owners of those unionized industries. Even farmers were unhappy that MacDonald had not managed to revive the "Reciprocity Agreement" during his trip to Washington. (Reciprocity was a 10-year "free trade" agreement on natural products that had been negotiated with Washington in 1854 .)
Sir John A. MacDonald won the 1872 election, but his government collapsed on November 5, 1872 after a scandal in which it was found that his election campaign had accepted either $132,000 or $165,000 from American railroad barons in return for a million acres of crown land. In a time when the Prime Minister's annual salary was only $8000, it was indeed a scandalous amount of money.
Another election was held over a period of weeks (secret ballots were not yet in use) and at the end, the Liberals had carried the day. An immigrant Scottish stonemason who had previously been the member for Sarnia had been elected: The honest and grim Alexander MacKenzie was Canada's second Prime Minister. Mr. MacKenzie was responsible for many government reforms, including the use of the secret ballot for general elections and the reduction of much of the corruption and waste of public funds that were rife at the time. He also created the Royal Military College at Kingston in an effort to train the engineers of all sorts that the country needed to continue growing. (RMC is still the premiere engineering school in Canada.)
Unfortunately for Mr. MacKenzie, his gloomy, stubborn personality left Canadians cold and on September 17, 1878, Canadians voted the happy drunk back into office and Sir John A. MacDonald was the country's third Prime Minister, a job he would hold until his death in 1891.
By 1871, the Canadian economy was flourishing. The Canada Almanac for 1872 says "Parliament opened on the 15th February [1871].... The revenue for the past year was stated to be in a flourishing condition, with a prospect of diminution of taxation; the Estimates [budget] are promised." By 1874, things were somewhat different. Banks in faraway Vienna had failed the previous fall and international trade and credit had suddenly shrunk. The national revenues, which came mainly from import duties, fell sharply. Alexander MacKenzie and his cabinet having never heard of cyclical financing (saving money in good times so as to have something to spend in hard times), instituted many government cost-cutting measures, a policy which did little to assist failing businesses. While the depression was widespread in the country, there were of course, many communities who suffered nothing. In fact, many later historians would deny that the depression of the mid-1870s had ever happened. The families who made their livings from the timber and ship-building industries knew better. New ships were now being made of steel plates instead of timbers and both industries were in trouble. The coal-mining and iron industries in Nova Scotia were no match for the much-better-established competition in England and shipyard- and dock-workers were unemployed everywhere. In Montréal, French-Canadian shipbuilders fought violently for the jobs of the Irish-Catholic longshoremen. In St. John, New Brunswick, long strikes paralysed the city, and when, in 1877, a catastrophic fire destroyed 13,000 homes, it nearly destroyed the city, too.
By 1878, Canadians were disillusioned by the MacKenzie government's apparent unwillingness or inability to do anything to help them survive the depression. They did what Canadians still do: They elected a "new" Prime Minister who knew how to spend money. Sir John A.'s protectionist tariffs and new railroad spending ushered in a new economic era. Incidentally, it was this new policy of luring settlers to the "Great Northwest" with promises of huge tracts of cheap land that would eventually send many of Jim and Annie's offspring west.
Change was rampant in the home, too. Most of the house- and farm-work was still done by hand, but there had been improvements in some of the comforts of home. By 1881, coal-oil (or petroleum, as it was often called) had largely replaced animal fat as a lamp fuel. Kerosene was now affordable for most people, as were the lamps to burn it in, and the old tallow candles and rushlights were mostly a thing of the past in all but the poorest homes. Stoves of various patterns had mostly replaced the fireplace for both heating and cooking. Some fashionable homes, mainly in towns, were even being built with a separate, special room for the bath. In most cases, though, the bathroom was exactly that and the "outhouse" was likely either still outdoors, or in yet another small room if the house had indoor plumbing. The china "night jar" (chamber pot) was still in common use and many housewives made little crocheted hats for the lids to keep them from clinking when they were used. Washstands in bedrooms were a common sight. Both the stand and the size of the ewer (pitcher) and basin standing on top had increased in size over the years. By 1881, the water jug had grown from about a quart (in the 1820's) to about a gallon, and washstands had been enclosed to create a storage space for the chamber pot.
Probably most of the furniture in Annie's house would have been either home-made or bought "locally" from a furniture maker in Dresden, or Chatham, or possibly even by mail from Toronto, Montréal, Kingston or Detroit. Bedsteads were somewhat shorter (between headboard and footboard) than nowadays for two reasons: They took up less space and some folks believed that sleeping in a semi-sitting position helped prevent consumption (tuberculosis). They were often so high off the floor that little sets of steps were needed to literally climb into the bed. The term bedstead referred to the (usually wooden) structure that held the mattress or tick (called the bed) off the floor. Pillows, sheets, blankets and bolsters were known as bedding, and if there were curtains, valances and testers (the cloth "ceiling" of a canopy bed), they were known as the bed furniture.
Closets were not built into the walls, as we know today. Rather, they were large, vertical boxes (similar to what we now call an "armoire") with shelves, drawers, hooks, etc., for storing extra clothes, blankets, and other linens. Since most homes were neither large nor staffed with servants, most did not have a separate laundry area, the floors of the closets also served as place to store dirty clothes and bedding. Laundry was a heavy labour task that was not performed any more often than necessary--especially in winter--often not more than every four or five weeks.
By now, full-body bathing had become more fashionable as scientists continued to prove the relationship between cleanliness and disease prevention. Many homes had acquired a tin bathtub of one sort or another, but they required the hauling and heating of a lot of water and when they were put to use on a Saturday night, all members of the family often used the same water.
Many farms, probably including Annie and Jim's, had been established long enough to have flower gardens around the front doors and perhaps to have added some exotica to the vegetable garden. Tomatoes had been considered poisonous for many years, but by the mid-1870s cookbooks had begun to carry recipes for tomato "catsup," stewed tomatoes and even chow-chow to use up all those green tomatoes at the end of the short Canadian summer. There were also recipes for using cucumbers and making them into pickles. In line with the still-current idea that raw vegetables were bad for the digestion, one recipe I found in an 1877 cookbook recommended splitting the cucumbers in half and boiling them in a solution of water, vinegar and salt. If they were "done properly," they would be a beautiful green colour. I haven't tried this recipe (boiled cucumbers don't sound particularly appetising), but the "beautiful green colour" quite possibly came from boiling the vinegar solution in a copper kettle and the colour was a result of the pretty but rather poisonous compound created by the reaction of the vinegar on the copper. Many unscrupulous merchants of the time made their pickles more attractive this way. Most of the old recipes made huge quantities, as befitted the size of most families and the length of time between one harvest and the next. Many of the recipes I saw for Tomato Catsup call for a bushel of tomatoes!
There was also a huge variety of flowers available. Besides simply digging up wildflowers, there were a number of plant nurseries in business, many with mail-order facilities, but most people saved their own seeds from year to year. This would have been cheaper than buying seeds, and a lot more convenient when the nearest post office was most of a day's travel away. (Dawn Centre did not get its first postmaster until 1876/7 when the village became known as Rutherford, after that same man.) Among the flowers in Annie's garden we might have found Bachelors Buttons in white, pink and blue; Sweet Basil with white and purple flowers; Bouncing Bet (soapwort); camomile; carnations; crocus; daffodils; daisies; feverfew; tiny blue Forget-me-nots; plain and scented geraniums (pelargonium), hopvines (for beer and to put in your pillow in case you couldn't sleep); Sword Lily (iris); Johnny-jump-ups; lilacs; mint (including apple mint, spearmint, catnip and peppermint); pennyroyal (to prevent bugs in clothes and fleas on people); petunias, roses; sage; Sweet Savoury; sunflowers; snapdragons; Sweet William; white, red and yellow tulips; and violets. Most of these are hardy enough to stand the rigours of poor soil and too-little water and will grow happily for years with little or no cultivation, making them ideal for housewives with little or no time to tend flowers.
Travel within Dawn Township was still something less than easy, but if you could get yourself to one of the major points of departure, such as Quebec [City], Montréal, Kingston, Toronto or Halifax, travel outside the country was pretty easy. There were several steamship lines with regularly schedules runs from Quebec to Glasgow, Scotland and Halifax to Liverpool, England. These were quite costly. For example, a one-way ticket could be had on the Allen Line for only $60 each, if you wanted a cabin with bedding and food provided. If you wanted to spend most of the trip below decks and provide your own bedding and eating utensils, an adult one-way passage could be had for only $25. Rail travel was not yet available in many areas and most ordinary people still travelled the way they always had: on horseback or on their own two feet. With these options, it is no wonder that, once settled many people never went more than a few miles from their new homes, and only the wealthy could afford trips back to "the old country."
The 1881 census records do not have much information about the way the Coubroughs lived at that time, but on May 11, 1881, the census-taker counted the Coubroughs as the 163rd family in the district, living in the 158th house. Jim was 50 years old, and Annie, at 55, had reverted to being only five years older than her husband. Mathew was 27 and still living at home, as were Mary Anne, aka Minnie, (22) and Barbara (20). Jenny (Flora Jane) had left in 1878 when she was married on November 21 of that year to William (Billy) Atwell, son of John and Mary Atwell. Her brother Matthew and sister Barbara were the witnesses. The family religion is now marked as Presbyterian, and Mathew is now a 'Farm Assistant.' Poor Mary, being of 'unsound mind,' is 'Infirm.'
The only discovery of note on the other branches this time is that William Couburgh, son of John Couburgh of Ellrig, was christened in September 1684. This William seems to be the eldest son. He had a brother, John, christened in 1687, and a sister, Margaret, christened in 1689. This discovery pushes the estimated date of his father's birth back to somewhere around 1650-1660. [Historical note: this is about the time that Sir Oliver Cromwell had moved his troops North to try to beat the Scots into submission. He was not successful.] We still have no evidence of John of Ellrig's origins.
Here are some of the things I am currently working on:
1. Still looking for Annie's family. We know she had at least one brother, Ronald, who was living with Matt and Liz in 1901. The Coll MacDonald who sold her the land they lived on may have been another brother. She also seems to have had a relative who was a doctor--possibly the Hugh MacDonald who signed her death certificate? Hugh was listed as being the son of Ronald MacDonald. This Hugh was about 3 years old in the 1861 census.
2. Annie was also possibly somewhat older than was previously thought. The way census records record her age, her birth date was 1824 or 1826. However, she is recorded in the parish record as being aged 82 at her death in August of 1902. This would make her born in 1820. Of course, unless we can find a record of her birth, we will likely never know the truth. Any ideas?
3. Still looking for the origins of John Couburgh of Ellrig. There were reportedly others of the name in the Campsie area where John came from, but we haven't yet found them.
4. Jim and Annie arrived in Upper Canada early in 1858. Coll MacDonald bought the land where Jim and Annie lived in January, 1858; and Mary Anne was born in March 1858, in Canada West. In the 1901 census, where Ronald MacDonald, uncle to the head of the house, said that he came to Canada in 1824, could this have been an error that should really have read 1854? (We know that Ronald's sister, Annie, came here in 1854 and it seems reasonable that they would have come here together.) Also still looking for why they packed up and moved to Canada in the first place. Any ideas?
If you can answer any of the questions in this issue, or if you have some of your own, be sure to write or give me a call. I would be happy to hear from you. I am also still looking for family stories (funny or sad or whatever) that you might like to share with the rest of the family.
Just a reminder: Subscriptions may be had for $5 (Canadian) per year for paper copies or free on the Internet. I need your name and mailing address for paper copies. This is a non-profit endeavour, so I have no objection to anyone sharing their copies and this electronic version may be freely downloaded.
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