My great, great-grandfather came over to the United States at the time of the Revolution in the United States. He was from England, of course, and he was down there with the British army. When that war ended, he came up with the Loyalists and they sent him up here to the Island as a customs officer and a naval officer. He was only a young man. It was 1780. He married a Stewart girl, Chief Justice Stewart's daughter in Charlottetown, and I he had a family and they were scattered around.

William Townshend, the first one out, he owned this whole lot. He bought it, 20,000 acres. His son then came up because they owned the lot and picked the spot here and that was the start of it up here. This is lot 43. He owned that and then the next lot was owned by another Townshend; General Townshend, who was with Wolfe at Quebec. He was given a grant and between the two of them they had 40,000 acres right here in this area. A lot of the owners never showed up or didn't bring anyone out either. Lord Townshend was over in that next lot and he sent settlers.

My great-grandfather came here in 1825. My father's place is next to where Peter lives, right down below here. My great-grand-father's was down further again, but the house is gone now. That place that Peter is in, my grandfather's place, is still part logs. He split the farm, his father was down there and then he come up and he built this house here. So there were the three houses.

I was born in this house on my mother's fortieth birthday in 1917. There were 12 in the family. There were seven boys and five girls all born here. I was the second youngest. I guess there were midwives. The doctor got here for most all of the births. One of my sisters was born in February in a terrific storm and they couldn't get a doctor. Dr. Gus was the doctor when I was born and I guess for mostly all who were born.

My oldest brother, Charlie, lived over across the bay; I never remember him being home. He was married and gone. Oh it wasn't much fun at the time. We walked a mile to school up to the top of the hill there. We had to work on the farm. You had to know certain things. A doctor wasn't around very often. My mother made her own soap and butter and that sort of thing. Very little was bought in the way of groceries other than tea and sugar. And sometimes, even for flour, we'd grow our own grain. There would be a mill where they'd grind it. Island flour they called it and it was good, you know. Wasn't much added to it like today. Pretty good stuff. It was white but it wasn't as white as you get today.

I went to school up here until I was in grade 5, I guess, and then we moved to Charlottetown. My father worked on the railroad. He was bridge and building master when they shifted. The first railroad on PEl was narrow gauge -the rails were close together, then they shifted. They were shifting to wider gauge and he had the experience in bridge building in the United States and on the Island. So they hired him to rebuild all those bridges. They had to be all rebuilt to be made wider. He worked there but then he took a notion. He took the youngest, my brother and sister and I and my mother, and we moved to town for seven or eight years. So I finished off school in there then I came back to the farm. I took over the farm, when my father died in 1945. Now Peter has taken over for me.

Adele lived in Souris and I lived out here, though we never had much to do with one another up until just before we were married. There were social functions. There would be dancing in Souris and we started that way.

My father started in the potato business growing seed potatoes in the early 1920s. In fact, I was almost born right in the potato field. It started then and we've been growing potatoes ever since. We never picked bugs but you had to get rid of them so we used a little hand sprayer. It was quite a job. We grew a lot of potatoes over the years. One year in particular, we grew 75 acres of potatoes with horse power. That was quite a thing. That was a lot of following after horses, you know. We had 13 horses one winter. They were mostly work horses and some were driving horses. It was a lot of work. As a young fellow, you had to know how to plow with a single plow. You had to know how to make a wooden fence, a rail fence or a snake fence they called it. Things like that, you know, it was a little bit tricky, especially a single plow, you had to know how. Not like today. I started in with a single plow and came right up with an eight saw plow. It's quite a difference behind a tractor. Early, when my father started, he'd probably be growing 12 acres.

We grew all seed potatoes that went to Cuba. There was no market really for table potatoes. We grew Irish Cobbler for years. They were round but they had deep eyes. After the cobblers there were Green Mountain, then Katadin and the Russets came later .The early equipment was pretty quaint. My father brought the first tractor. He bought it second hand somewhere out on the west end of the Island. It came up by train on a boxcar into the station up north here. It came in the evening and they unloaded it out there and started through the road here with it. It had a lantern hanging on the front of her - there were no lights. It was the first motorized vehicle that went through that road. The people didn't know what was coming. They couldn't imagme.

It was quite a place around here at one time. There was a tavern down at the end of the road and a store just below here. There was a blacksmith shop right below here too. My grandfather Townshend lived over here where Peter is, and my grandfather Francis right at the end of this road. My mother and my father were neighbors, you know. Lome Francis and I are first cousins. J.S. Francis, my grandfather, wasn't in the carriage business then. He moved over to Fortune and that's when they started the business. Lome has some over there yet; he's picked them up and has a collection of them. He has both sleighs and wagons.

Today we farm a mixture of seed and table potatoes. It was seed for a long, long time, up 'til about 25, or 30 years ago. Right now we are growing about 200 acres. That's the most we have ever grown. The amount varies depending on the variety but we grow probably 500 bushels. Back in the early days when we were growing cobblers, we probably got a 150 bushels which was pretty good. That's just the difference. Growing potatoes early, it was just mud and manure, you know. Then it gradually came to fertilizer. My father was one of the first to use fertilizer. The older farmers through the district would come over and they thought he was crazy. Ruining the land putting stuff on. They may have been right to a degree but we couldn't grow them the way we are today. It would be in the early 1920s.

This is the original house and the kitchen was added and another room out back. All the children lived, and none died young, real young, I mean. The last baby did die at two years. My father's telephone was here. It was put in in 1926 and it was seventy years in that one place. It was used there were no other phones. Out here there wasn't even a line so people would come here, you know, to use the phone. Kind of handy.

We had dairy cattle like everyone else for our own use. We sold cream and then we shifted from dairy to beef. We had quite a lot of beef cattle for a while and then we got clear of them. We raised sheep too. The meat was good and then you had the wool. You had to shear them every spring. The wool was bundled up and sold. My mother used to get it into rolls and she'd spin them with the spinning wheel. She done an awful lot of knitting for all those kids. I often wondered how my mother ever did it. She raised twelve kids and she was home most of the time for my father was away. She done an awful lot of outside work.

There's one thing she got, I remember. We had sheep at that particular time and this sheep died, I don't know whether it was an old ewe or what, but it died anyway. Someone had taken it up back to the woods. She found out about it and she got a knife and she went back to the woods and she skinned that sheep and she brought the hide home and she cured it. She had it up by her bed for a mat. Imagine? She wouldn't let it go.

She'd do a lot of the barn work - cleaning the stables like. I can remember one day in particular, I remembered she was up cleaning the stables with an old rig on with, I suppose, an old pair of rubber boots, and relatives from Saint John - and they were pretty well off people - drove in the yard with a big car and she spotted them. I was up there with her and she said, "You'll have to go and tell them I'm not at home", and she headed for the loft. She couldn't face it.

I remember their saying my uncle came over and he had a big car. One Sunday, he and my father and a bunch got in this car and went to the North Side. I suppose they were going out looking for rum. The rum-running would be in the 1920's and early 1930's. There was lots of rum around in those days. But you weren't supposed to be on the road with a car on a Sunday, especially. The horses were frightened. Someone spotted them and chased them. I remember them coming and hiding the car in the barn.

Copyright
Waldron H. Leard