The View from Castle Rock

The Wilds of Morris Township

William’s children grew up in Esquesing, among their cousins. They were treated well. But money would not stretch to sending them off to grammar school or to college, if any of them had wanted or been judged to have the ability to go there. And there was no land coming to them. So as soon as they were old enough they set off for another wilderness. One of their cousins went with them, one of Andrew’s boys. He was named Big Rob because he had the same name as the third son of Will and Mary, who was now called Little Rob. Big Rob took up the family custom or duty of writing his memories down when he was an old man, so that the people left would know what things had been like.

On the third day of November, 1851, myself and my two cousins, Thomas Laidlaw now of Blyth, and his brother John, who went to B.C. several years ago, got a box of bed-clothes and a few cooking utensils into a wagon and started from the county of Halton to try our fortunes in the wilds of Morris Township.

We only got as far as Preston on the first day as the roads were very rough and bad across Nassagaweya and Puslinch. The next day we got to Shakespeare and the third afternoon arrived at Stratford. The roads were always getting worse as we went west, so we thought it best to get our bags and small things sent to Clinton by stage. But the stage had quit running, until the roads froze up, so we let the horses and the wagon turn back, as another cousin had come with us to take them back. John Laidlaw, Thomas and I, got our axes on our shoulders and walked to Morris. We got a place to board, though we had to sleep on the floor, with a quilt over us. It was a little cold as the winter was coming on, but we expected to have some hardships to endure and we made the best of them we could.

We began to underbrush a road to John’s place, as it was the nearest to where we boarded and then we cut logs for a shanty and big scoops to roof it. The man we boarded with had a yoke of oxen and he let us have them to draw the logs and the scoops. Then we got a few men to help raise the shanty, but they were very few, as there were only five settlers in the township. However, we got the shanty up alright and the scoops on it. The next day we began to fill up the cracks between the logs, where they did not lie very close together, with mud, and stuff moss in the cracks between the scoops. We got the shanty made pretty comfortable and, as we were getting tired of walking through the snow every night and morning and the bed being hard and cold, we went to Goderich to try to get work for a few days and see if our boxes and cooking utensils had come.

We did not meet with anyone who wanted help, though we were three good looking fellows. We met in with one man who wanted some cordwood cut but he would not board us, so we came to the conclusion that we would go back to Morris, as there was plenty of chopping to do there. We decided to batch it some way.

We bought a barrel of fish in Goderich and got part of it on our backs. As we came along through Coul-borne Township we got some flour from a man and as he was going to Goderich he said he would bring the rest of the fish and a barrel of flour for us as far as Manchester (now Auburn). We met him there and old Mr. Elkins ferried the fish and flour across the river and we had to carry them from there. I did not like carrying our provisions.

We went to our own shanty and got some hemlock branches for a bed and a big slab of elm for a door. A Frenchman from Quebec had once told John that in the lumber shanties the fire was in the middle of the shanty. So John said that he would have his fire in the middle of our shanty. We got four posts and were building the chimney on them. We built slats, house fashion, on top of the posts, intending to plaster them with mud, inside and outside. When we went to our hemlock bed, we put on a big fire and when some of us awoke through the night our lumber was all ablaze and some of the scoops were burning very briskly also. So we tore down the chimney and the scoops were not hard to put out as they were green basswood. That was the last we heard of building the fire in the middle of the house. And soon as daylight came we began to build the chimney in the end of the house, but Thomas often laughed at John and twitted him about the fire in the middle of the shanty. However we got the chimney up and it served its purpose well. We got along much better with the chopping, after the small trees and branches were cut out of the way.

Thus we plodded along for a while, Thomas doing the baking and cooking because he was the best of the three at it. We never washed any dishes and had a new plate every meal.

A man, by the name of Valentine Harrison, who was on the south end of Lot three, Concession 8, sent us a very large buffalo robe to spread over us in bed. We made a rough bedstead and got it woven together with withes instead of rope but the withes sagged down badly in the middle of the bed, and so we got two poles and put them lengthwise under the hemlock branches so that each of us had our own share of the bed, and did not roll in on the one in the middle. This made an improvement in the bachelor bed.

We plodded along in this way, until our chests and cooking utensils were brought to Clinton, and we got a man with his oxen and sleigh to bring them on from there. When we got our bedclothes we thought we were in clover, for we had slept on the hemlock branches for five or six weeks.

We cut down a large ash tree and split it into slabs and then hewed these for a floor to our shanty, and thus we were getting things into better shape.

It was about the beginning of February when my father brought John’s and Thomas’ mother and sister to stay with us. They had a pretty tough time coming in through Hullet, as there were no bridges over the many streams and they were not frozen over. They got to Kenneth Baines’, where Blyth now is, and my father left the horses and Aunt and Cousin there and came on, to get us three to pilot them the rest of the way. We got through with only one upsetting, but the horses were very tired, for the snow was so deep that they would stop every few rods of the way. At last we got to the shanty and got the horses into shelter, and as father had brought provisions with him we were fairly comfortable.

Father wanted to take a load of fish home with him, so we went to Goderich the next day and got the fish. The following day he started for his home.

I got back to Morris, where Aunt and Cousin had things fixed up in fine style. Thomas got his discharge from baking and cooking and we all felt the change to be for the better.

We worked on, getting some of the huge trees down, but we were not much accustomed to the work and snow being very deep again, the going was very slow. About the beginning of April, 1852, there was a very hard crust on the snow, so that a person could run on it, anywhere.

As I was to take up a lot for an old neighbour, we started on April 5th, to look at some vacant lots that were for sale. We were five or six miles from our shanty, when a heavy fall of snow came on, and the east wind caused the snow to cover up the blaze marks on the trees, and we had great difficulty finding our way home. Aunt and Cousin were very pleased to see us, when we arrived, for they thought we would surely become lost.

I did nothing on my place that winter, neither did Thomas. He and John worked together for some years. I went back to Halton in the spring and came back to Morris in the fall of 1852 and got my own shanty up, and a piece chopped down that winter. My cousins and I worked together with one another, wherever our work was most needed.

They helped me to log some, in the fall of 1853, and I was not in Morris again until the spring of 1857, when I got a wife to share my hardships, joys and sorrows.

I have been here (1907) for sixty years and have had some hardships and have seen many changes both in the inhabitants and the country. For the first few months we carried our provisions seven miles-now there is a railroad less than a quarter of a mile from us.

On the 5th of November, 1852, I cut down the first tree on my lot, and if I had the trees on it now, which were on it then, I would be the richest man in Morris Township.

James Laidlaw, oldest brother of John and Thomas, moved to Morris in the fall of 1852. John took on the job of building a shanty for James Waldie, who later became his father-in-law. James and I went to help John with the building, and as we were falling a tree, one of its branches was broken in the falling, and thrown backwards, hitting James on the head and killing him instantly.

We had to carry his body a mile and a quarter to the nearest house, and I had to convey the sad news to his wife, mother, brother and sister. It was the saddest errand of my life. I had to get help to carry the body home, as there was only a footpath through the bush, and the snow was very deep and soft. This was on April 5th, 1853.

I have seen many ups and downs since I came to Morris. There are only three on this Concession, who were first settlers on the land here, and the descendants of five others, who were first settlers. In other words, there are only eight families living on the lots that their fathers took up between Walton and Blyth, a distance of 7 and a half miles.

Cousin John, one of the three who came here in 1851, departed this life on April nth, 1907. The old Laidlaws are nearly all gone. Cousin Thomas and I are the only ones now (1907) living of those who first came in to Morris.

And the place that now knows us, will soon know us no more, for we are all old frail creatures.

James, once Jamie, Laidlaw died like his father in a place where no reliable burial records yet existed. It is believed that he was put into a corner of the land that he and his brothers and cousin had cleared, then sometime around 1900 his body was moved to the Blyth Cemetery.

Big Rob, who wrote this account of the settlement in Morris, was the father of many sons and daughters. Simon, John, Duncan, Forrest, Sandy, Susan, Maggie, Annie, Lizzie. Duncan left home early. (That name is correct, but I am not absolutely certain of all of the others.) He went to Guelph, and they seldom saw him. The others stayed at home. The house was big enough for them. At first their mother and father were with them, then for several years just their father, and finally they were on their own. People did not remember that they had ever been young.

They turned their backs on the world. The women wore their hair parted in the middle and slicked tight to their heads, though the style of the day ran to bangs and rolls. They wore dark homemade dresses with skinny skirts. And their hands were red because they scrubbed the pine floor of their kitchen with lye every day. It shone like velvet.

They were capable of going to church-which they did every Sunday-and returning home without having spoken to a soul.

Their religious observances were dutiful but not in any way emotional.

The men had to talk more than the women did, doing their business at the mill or the cheese factory. But they wasted no words or time. They were honest but firm in all their dealings. If they made money it was never with the aim of buying new machinery, of lessening their labor or adding comforts to their way of living. They were not cruel to their animals but they had no sentimental feelings for them.

The diet of the household was very plain, and water was what they drank at meals, instead of tea.

So without any pressure from the community, or their religion (the Presbyterian faith was still contentious and cranky but did not lay siege to the soul as fiercely as it had done in Boston’s day), they had constructed a life for themselves that was monastic without any visitations of grace or moments of transcendence.

On a Sunday afternoon in the fall Susan looked out a window and saw Forrest walking back and forth in the big front field, where there was now only wheat stubble. He tramped hard. He stopped and judged what he was doing.

But what was that? She would not give him the satisfaction of asking.

It turned out that before the frost came he was set to dig a large hole. He worked by day and by lantern light. He went six feet down but the hole was much too large for a grave. It was in fact to be the cellar of a house. He brought the dirt up in a wheelbarrow, making use of a ramp he had built.

He hauled large stones from the stone pile into the barn, and there, after the winter closed in, he trimmed them with a stone chisel, for his cellar walls. He did not stop doing his share of the farm chores, but worked on this solitary project late into the night.

Next spring as soon as the hole was dry he mortared the stones in place to make the cellar walls. He put in the pipe for his drain and got the cistern built, then fashioned in plain view the stone foundation for his house. It could be seen that this was no two-room shanty he planned. It was a real and commodious house. It would require an entry road and a drainage ditch and would take up arable land.

His brothers spoke to him, finally. He said he would not dig the ditch till the fall when the crop was off and, as for the road, he had not thought of one and supposed he could walk over from the main house on a narrow path, not depriving them of any more grain than necessary.

They said there was still the house to be reckoned with, the land the house had taken from them, and he said yes, that was true. He would pay a reasonable sum, he said.

Where would he get it?

It could be worked out in terms of the labor he had done on the farm already, deducting living expenses. Also he was giving up his share in the inheritance and that all together should make up for a hole in the field.

He proposed not to work on the farm anymore but to get a job at the planing mill.

They could not believe their ears, just as-until he fitted those massive and permanent stones in-they had not been able to believe their eyes. Well then, they said. If you want to set yourself up to be a laughingstock. Well then you must do it.

He went to work at the planing mill, and in the long evenings he put up the frame of his house. It was to be two stories high, with four bedrooms and a back and front kitchen and pantry and double parlor. The walls were to be planked, with a brick veneer. He would have to buy the bricks, of course, but the planks he planned to use for the walls underneath were those stacked in the barn, left over from the old drive shed he and his brothers had pulled down when they built the new banked barn. Were such planks his to use? Strictly speaking, they were not. But no other use for them had been planned and there was some uneasiness in the family about how people would judge them if they quarrelled and quibbled about things. Already Forrest was eating his supper at a hotel in Blyth because of remarks that Sandy had made about his eating at the family table, eating what the labor of the others provided. They had let him have the land for the house when he claimed it as his due because they did not want him passing around stories of their meanness, and in the same spirit now they let him have the planks.

That fall he got the roof on though he didn’t get it shingled, and he had a stove installed. He got help in both these undertakings from a man he worked with at the mill. It was the first time anyone from outside the family had done any work on the premises, except for the barn raising in their father’s time. Their father had been annoyed at his daughters that day because they had set all the food out on trestle tables in the yard, then disappeared, rather than face waiting on strangers.

Time had not made them easier. While the helper was there-and he was not a real stranger, just a town man who did not go to their church-Lizzie and Maggie would not go out to the barn, though it was their turn to milk. Susan had to go. She was the one who always spoke up when they had to enter a store and buy something. And she was the boss of the brothers when they were in the house. She was the one who had made it a rule that nobody should question Forrest during the early stages of his undertaking. She appeared to think he would give it up if there was no interest or prohibition. He is only doing it to get noticed, she said.

And certainly he was. Not so much by his brothers and sisters-who avoided looking out the windows on that side of their house-as by the neighbors, and even by town people who would make a special drive past, on Sundays. The fact that he had got a job away from home, that he ate at the hotel though he never took a drink there, that he had practically moved out on his family, was a widespread subject of conversation. It was such a break with all that was known about the rest of the family as to be almost a scandal. (Duncan’s departure was by now more or less forgotten.) People wondered about what had happened, at first behind Forrest’s back and eventually to his face.

Had there been a fight? No.

Ah then. Ah. Was he planning to get married?

If this was a joke, he did not take it so. He did not say yes or no or maybe.

There was not a looking glass in the family home, except for the little wavy one the men shaved by-the sisters could tell each other when they looked decent. But in the hotel there was a mammoth glass behind the counter, and Forrest could have seen in it that he was a good-enough-looking man in his late thirties, black-haired and broad and tall. (Actually the sisters were even better looking than the brothers but nobody ever looked at them closely enough to figure that out. Such is the effect of style and manner.)

So why should he not think that marriage was possible, if he hadn’t thought about it already?

That winter he lived with only the board walls between himself and the weather and with temporary boards shuttering the window spaces. He put up the inside partitions and built the stairs and closets and laid the final floorboards of oak and pine.

Next summer he built the brick chimney to replace the stovepipe sticking out of the roof. And he covered the whole structure with fresh red bricks, set together as well as any bricklayer might have done them. Windows were put into place, plank doors removed and ready-made doors hung, back and front. An up-to-date stove installed, with baking oven and warming oven and the reservoir for heating water. The pipes fitted into the new chimney. The big job left was the plastering of the inside walls, and he was ready for that when the weather grew chilly. A coat of rough plaster first, then the painstakingly smoothed plaster on top. He understood that wallpaper should go over that but could not think how to choose it. Meanwhile all the rooms looked wonderfully bright, with the plaster shining indoors and the snow without.

The need for furnishings took him by surprise. In the house where he had lived with his brothers and sisters, Spartan preferences ruled. No curtains, only dark-green blinds, bare floors, hard chairs, no sofas, shelves instead of cupboards. Clothing hanging from hooks on the back of doors instead of in wardrobes-more clothes than could be managed that way being seen as excessive. He did not necessarily wish to copy this style, but he had such small experience of other houses that he did not know what other way to manage. He could hardly afford-or wish-to make the place look like the hotel. He made do, for the present, with the discards placed in the barn. A chair with two rungs missing, some rough shelving, a table that chickens had been plucked on, a cot with horse blankets laid on it for a mattress. All this was set up in the same room as the stove, the other rooms being left entirely bare.

Susan had decreed, when they all lived together, that Maggie should take care of Sandy’s clothing, Lizzie of Forrest’s, Annie of Simon’s, she herself of John’s. This meant ironing and mending and darning socks, and knitting scarves and vests and making new shirts as might be needed. Lizzie was not supposed to continue looking after Forrest-or to have anything at all to do with him-after he moved out. But a time came-five or six years after his house had been finished-when she took it upon herself to see how he was getting on. Susan was ill by this time, greatly weakened by pernicious anemia, so that her rules were not always enforced.

Forrest had quit his job at the planing mill. The reason being, so people said, that he could not bear the razzing he got all the time about marrying. Stories circulated, about his going to Toronto on the train, and sitting in Union Station all day long, looking for a woman who would fill the bill but not finding her. Also a story of his writing to an agency in the United States, then hiding in his cellar when some hefty female came knocking on his door. The younger fellows at the mill were particularly hard on him, with their preposterous advice.

He got a job as a janitor at the Presbyterian church, where he did not have to see anybody except the minister or an occasional officious Member of the Session-neither of these being the sort to make crude or personal remarks.

Lizzie crossed the field on a spring afternoon and knocked on his door. No answer. It was not locked, however, and she went in.

Forrest was not asleep. He was lying fully dressed on the cot, with his arms behind his head.

“Are you sick?” said Lizzie. None of them ever lay down in the daytime unless they were sick.

Forrest said no. He did not reproach her for coming in without being asked, but he did not welcome her either.

The place smelled bad. No wallpaper had ever been put up and there was still some whiff of raw plaster. Also the smell of horse blankets and of other clothing not washed for a long time, if ever. And of ancient grease in the frying pan and bitter tea leaves in the pot (Forrest had taken up the fancy habit of drinking tea instead of just hot water). The windows were bleary in the spring sunlight and dead flies lay on their sills.

“Did Susan send you?” Forrest said.

“No,” said Lizzie. “She’s not herself.”

He didn’t have anything to say to that. “Did Simon?”

“I came on my own.” Lizzie put down the parcel she was carrying and looked about for a broom. “We are all well at the house,” she said, just as if he had asked. “Except for Susan.”

In the parcel was a new shirt of blue cotton, and half a loaf of bread and a fresh chunk of butter. All bread that the sisters made was excellent, and the butter tasty, being made from the milk of Jersey cows. Lizzie had taken these things without permission.

This was the beginning of a new disposition of the family. Susan did rouse herself when Lizzie got home, enough to tell her she must go or stay. Lizzie said she would go, but to Susan’s surprise, and everybody’s, she asked for her share of household goods. Simon separated out what she should have, with severe justice, and in that way Forrest’s house was, eventually, sparsely furnished. No wallpaper was put up or curtains hung, but everything was scrubbed and gleaming. Lizzie had asked for a cow and a half dozen hens and a pig to raise, and Forrest set to work as a carpenter again, to build a barn with two stalls and a haymow. When Susan died it was discovered that she had put by a surprising nest egg, and a share of that was meted out as well. A horse was bought, and a buggy, around the first time that cars were becoming a usual thing on these roads. Forrest gave up walking to his job, and on Saturday nights he and Lizzie rode to town to shop. Lizzie reigned in her own house, like any married woman.

On one Halloween night-Halloween in those days being more of a time for serious tricks than an occasion for handouts-a bundle was left at Forrest and Lizzie’s door. Lizzie was the first to open the door in the morning. She had forgotten about Halloween, which none of the family ever paid any attention to, and when she saw the shape of the bundle she cried out, more in amazement than vexation. In its ragged wool wrappings she saw the shape of a baby, and she would have heard somehow about babies being abandoned, left on the doorstep of people who might care for them. For one whole moment she must have thought that that had happened to her, that she had actually been singled out for such a gift and duty. Then Forrest came from the back of the house to see her stoop and pick it up, and he knew at once what it was. So did she, once she felt it. A parcel of straw in sacking, tied with cords, to resemble a baby, the face marked with crayon at the appropriate place on the sacking, to crudely show a baby’s face.

Less innocent than Lizzie, Forrest caught the implication, and he grabbed the bundle from her, tore it in pieces, stuffed the pieces into the stove.

She saw that this was a thing she had better not ask about, or even mention in the future, and she never did. Neither did he mention it, and the story survived only as rumor, always to be questioned and deplored by those who passed it on.

“They were devoted to each other,” said my mother, who had never actually met them, but was generally in favor of brotherly-sisterly relationships, unsullied by sex.

My father had seen them at church, when he was a child, and might have visited them a couple of times, with his mother. They were only second cousins of his father’s and he did not think they had ever come to his parents’ house.

He did not admire them, or blame them. He wondered at them.

“To think what their ancestors did,” he said. “The nerve it took, to pick up and cross the ocean. What was it squashed their spirits? So soon.”