556 10 13565 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/0da2e9fd3734190128eb517a2d5d30a7.jpg 0019c129fd12235493c4fb646f5a99d5 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ken Armson fonds Subject The topic of the resource Forestry Description An account of the resource A collection of thousands of photographic slides depicting Ken Armson's work in the field of forestry, 1952-1995. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ken Armson Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1952-1995 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource These images have been digitized and shared on this site with permission. Most are still under copyright. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Hercules have developed a system of injecting trees to be commercially thinned with paraquat, making the root collar much more. Subject The topic of the resource Forest Products Industry Description An account of the resource Hercules have developed a system of injecting trees to be commercially thinned with paraquat, making the root collar much more. This modified saw is used. Brunswick, Hercules Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ken Armson Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1981-03 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource JPEG Type The nature or genre of the resource Photograph Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Armson-Silviculture-1733 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant USA-Georgia https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/48224b2c3e82d2e583e081f5aa0a4f4a.jpg 313fbdbcae4e3c2fc80e6da0e1a0ec29 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource General Archives Description An account of the resource Archival records that don't belong to another listed collection. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Here and there around Port Arthur Subject The topic of the resource Communities in Northwestern Ontario Architecture Description An account of the resource A black and white collection of photographs of various buildings, sights and ships around Port Arthur. Photos display the following from top left to bottom right (along with any descriptions provided): Note: Any references to events occurred at the time the notes were made (est. early-mid 1900s) not present day. 1. S. S. Algonquin - first freighter owned by Thomas Marks, a very prominent figure in the growth of Port Arthur 2. Yacht Clubs - the C. P. R. freight office now 3. Ferry S. S. Kakabeka plying between Fort William and Port Arthur 4. Town Hall - The Masonic Hall was upstairs and the public meeting hall was downstairs. There were many social gatherings here, including the theatre and the opera, the first being El Capitaine, 1905 5. Around the docks - Mary-Ann of Dunnil, number one in the Canadian register, 1867 6. The Dawson residence, Corner Park and Cumberland Sts. "The S. J. Dawson home the present site of the metropolitan store. His old property extended from the old Algoma Hotel to Park Street. Dawson was one of the first property owners in Port Arthur and can be acclaimed as the father of our city." Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource JPG Type The nature or genre of the resource Still image Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context General Archives - 87k Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Ontario - Port Arthur Canada - Ontario - Thunder Bay https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/9b8c0fae513522586f6e078793657757.tif 4fde4ffa2b784ccdc0bd508ff1018d43 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ken Armson fonds Subject The topic of the resource Forestry Description An account of the resource A collection of thousands of photographic slides depicting Ken Armson's work in the field of forestry, 1952-1995. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ken Armson Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1952-1995 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource These images have been digitized and shared on this site with permission. Most are still under copyright. Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photo Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Hereford range near Drumheller, Alberta Subject The topic of the resource Forest Products Industry Agriculture Description An account of the resource Pasture/grasslands field and cattle Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ken Armson Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Lakehead University Library Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource TIF Type The nature or genre of the resource Photograph Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Ken Armson-LandUse-018 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Alberta https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/e5d407cafdbc7f34fedb77f5bd7564e9.jpg bbbdccff2c9d23b93bece224dcc0833d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource General Archives Description An account of the resource Archival records that don't belong to another listed collection. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Herman Finger Subject The topic of the resource People Description An account of the resource Black and white photograph of Herman Finger, an American lumberman who immigrated to Canada and founded multiple lumber companies including the Pigeon River Lumber Company in Ontario and the Finger Lumber Company in Manitoba. He served as the first mayor of The Pas before dying in 1929 in his home in Manitoba. The text below the photograph contains a few interesting facts about his life. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Public domain Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource JPG Type The nature or genre of the resource Still image Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context General Archives - 95a https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/b172ea6a3ae5cacb42ea5a0070842a55.mp3 c786e3c0165fc869593069ac3cdc6eb9 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/f84c307a1c4f2c2da0a123ee92b03356.mp3 b0d0865d924973847cbb6c5eafc5a1c9 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/1f94236a97b6b7885f8e446acd190a8b.pdf cda42e7e7bc45aef30eb2e32a3a1eee3 PDF Text Text Mrs. Jacobson Born in Scotland Came to Canada in 1902 or 3 Lived in Dorion - came to work - knew a family - all bush No roads - CPR wheat freight - once a week Bishops Trail - went to a mine - train delivered groceries Small cabin - little bit of timber 13 children - she was the oldest Mother - Mrs. Whatie? - was a midwife. Men were not allowed to ~ring their wi~es up - her father was the Justice of the Peace and convinced the authorities to let the women come up. Mother went to deliver a bab,. - would celebrate for about 48 hours after. Mother was not trained - read a doctor's book - used ca~bolic acid to sterilize - imx~XENX«s - unpaid ~or task All we ever got was colds. Who delivered your mother's children? My dad. Doctor for the last one. She did not like it. Many miles for a doctor to travel - came from Port Arthur. Tasks as children - clear the bush, got to school for about 3 months. Log school about a mile and three quarters away. Had to walk Consolidated school came for her children. Didn't h~ve any tea chers. 1920 or so worked for the YMCA, cooked, cleaned- mar~ied .round 1938. Went to Schreiber. Was working during the depression - remembers the reight trains being loaded with men. Aroi, nd Hurkett, nm money paid to men - reporter from T. o. Star did story - refer to William Holder. Hurkett and Dorion - active politically. Women attended meetings. Pass on the railroad once a year for working in the Y. Went somewhere each year. - Winnipeg, , Victoria, Seatle, Travellea by herself. Everything went well while travelling. Tra velled alone. Went to Windsor. Relates an incident once when she lost her suitcase on a train. Started at $30. per month and board. Demanded higlier wages. Went to $45. per month. No problem in holding dovvn her job. 0.K. for single women to work. 7 days a week. 8:00 to 5:00 Second World War - not affected by it. Very little communication. Mail regµ.l ~rly delivered. Had to be. Different from today. Mrs. Miller - did not know her. Got quite a chuckle out of her. I cut pu~pwood. 4 foot wood. Used cross-cut saw, axe and chisel. Hauled it to Lake Superior.. 80 chords, in one winter. Summer - vegetable garden, gathered fruit (wild). Went hungry one summer but managed to get a deer. Discuss a friend of the family, - Harry Bxxim,Bryan\, organizer of some labour unions. Entertainment - dances once a week. Dances usuaJjy at someone's house - fiddler - eventually got a tovvn hall. �Mrs. Jacobson - page 2 ~ ■ II House in Do~ion - 1-room log shack - shovel off snow on roof Relates story of Lynx coming to visit house. Used to snare rabbits, fish for trout Kept house warm by cook stove. More and more children came - house did not expand - just the family. Eventually built a bigger house. She did not live in-.the biggeF house. Small ravine with root nose - well wit~ surface waten - dug well. Summer - water turned broyvnJ - mosquito larvae in summer - would touch the water and the laryae would dive under - then they would draw the water. Baths - once a week - barrel cut in half would be bathtub. Friendly community No alcohol - too busy - trying to get a farm going Ha d no cattle - chickens and pi~ they had Hitched pigs up to a sleigh - made a bell for the pig but it did not like it. Pig would follow the kids like a dog. Used to f ollow her to the trapline. Eventually had to slaughter the pig. Indian f a milies - on across the tracks in Hurkett w man had an Indian housekeeper with a wooden leg. Indians were "down the line". Little contact with the whites. Not many ethnic groups in Dorion - mostly from down east Hurkett - Bulgarian population Knew little about other people's backgrounds. 1933 CCF was organized - 1934 she joined Railroaders against the CCF Wm1x~xEaxxxkx~xN~mxsx She was attending the meetings so when she went to vote her name was alrea,dy struck off the list Nothing much you could do about it. Active in the CCF - worked in Gommittee rooms - went to conventions. (Tape is blank here) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Herstory Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Herstory: Caroline Jacobson Subject The topic of the resource People Women's History Description An account of the resource Oral history interview with Caroline (Watty) Jacobson of Dorion, Ontario. The interview was recorded October 30, 1975, as part of the Women's Decade Council Herstory project. Caroline Jacobson (1900-2007) lived along the North Shore for much of her life, working for the CPR's YMCA in Schreiber for a time, and raising a family. She was also very involved with the CCF/NDP. The interview speaks to her childhood in Dorion, time working, and involvement with the CCF. The recording consists of two sides of one cassette tape, available here as two MP3 files. (Click on the speaker logo to play each file.) The transcript is available by clicking on the image thumbnail. Please note that this tape includes discussion of settler-Indigenous relations, using language that would not be seen as sensitive or appropriate today. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Ontario - Dorion Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975-10-30 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Release form was obtained by the Herstory project, allowing the recording to be shared and used. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 PDF Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Audio Text https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/c8485c0002c9706ed7a6facc42b09cfd.mp3 25f8905b2490c120d946c03575ea96f7 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/a254e34517aef8ba27de9aca11c998f7.pdf cf06c968ba5a3cbf39a65225bb84e344 PDF Text Text Interview of Mrs. D. Murray by Georgina Garrett ---@__MQmen.Ls A: In-s-tlttttes- ... my father and Mr. Cooper were friends, and I knew she was an Institute lady, and that was, I felt, part of their project. There was an Institute in Pearson, but they weren't getting, I mean, they were going along befriending everybody, but again there was no money for the, you know, with them, or for them. raising money, because nobody had any. No way of So I told, wrote to Mrs. Cooper and I told her that I had a family , or two, with children in it and so on and they were lacking this and that and the other. kids outgrow things. Could they help, because often You know how it is still today. So, by golly, they had a shower shall we call it and boxes of stuff I had my present, my husband now, he is at present but at that time he wasn't, pick up the stuff and brought it out, and so we were able to help a number of the families that way. Well then another time, a couple of families were really hard up for food. Really, you'd think living on a farm there was food, but the crops were poor and so they had potatoes and that was about all. So I wrote to her again. some help, can you help us?" I said "We need So, they did. Then jars of fruit, cans of beans, cans--anything and everything, boxes of stuff. into town. - - - - - -I married my husband and we came So east Fort William by that time--and then I was a, had joined the Institute out there. Their Secretary-Treasurer, well, just quit in the middle of a year, so who was going to take iit? And I used to go to �-2the meetings when I could, after school. So, I said, "Well I can't meet with you people at two or two-thirty, 'cause school's on. But what we could do, I saw the Inspector, and he said 'well, if the senior girls want to go to the meetings, where they could have them in the school, teach through the noon hour or give them fifteen minutes for lunch'". So that's what we did, and then the senior girls came, we had it in the school from then on. So that, and then so I took the Secretary-Treasurer for them, and finished out that year, and then as I say, jwe were married, and I catne into town. Eastfort, Westfort were both pulling me. Westfort was easier, I could walk down Brown Street to the homes; the other was way was a longer walk. The younger group in Westfort, my own age. But I felt, well, Eastfort has done so much for me, I just said ''Can you help", and help came. So that's how I got into Eastfort. Q: What year was that? A: Nineteen fourty-one. A: .... practically the same, I would say. Oh sure, each community's going to have something different, or something, but as a whole 2: But you want to get an overall picture, too. It's actually their likeness that comes across, but then that's a good thing too, because it's women united. A: That's right. 2: ... Which is really ..... . �-3A: Which is right, yeah ... Q: It's the similarities that stand out more than the differences. A: Yeah, yeah. Q: I know, yesterday in Dorion, where I was talking to Mrs. Atkinson. She was mentioning that the Women's Institute, the women were very close despite racial differences, ethnic background, whatever. So, I would sort of like to find out, is that true of the Thunder Bay rural woman? I don't really know. How close were, lets say, Finnish women farmers to people from the British Isles, or were they, did the women have to be self-sufficient. A: Well, there again, I'd say, I taught in a, first taught in a Finnish community. There were no English people in that cormnunity. Q: In Pearson? A: No, no. Q: Oh yeah. A: You see, there again, I would say, now at Chabaqua, they In Chabaquao. • didn't have an Institute. They stayed more or less to themselves .......... . Q: Well A: No. we're not just doing Institutes, you know. And there in that area the Finnish people stayed more or less to themselves. Oh there were, down at the station, the section people were Ukrainian descent, talked Ukrainian at home, Finnish ___ there, there was only one And when I was out lady, really, that talked �-4- Englishe, and she had gone to school there, and taught, and not taught but, she married, and they had a store, and so I, that was my companion. with her mother. You see, I boarded The children spoke Finnish, as soon as they--Finn or Finnish,whatever you want-- as soon as they left the school and home. And some of the parents realized that wasn't good and they said to me "Make them talk English all the time. You see, the parents couldn't, a good many of the parents, some of the men could and the odd woman, but they were afraid of putting their subject or their verb, you know, mixing it up. They were afraid of that, and so they were very hesitant about talking English to anyone, not just to me, but to anybody. We And ahm,--that could talk English. Well, you can't follow every child home. yard, I did insist after I them in In the school- Finnish, but even in the schoolyard, see, they would talk Finn. Well, naturally, that's their language. 2: Sure, it would come easiest. A: So I insisted after that, in the schoolyard, that they did. I said, ''You might, as well. you might as well learn." I loved them. You're here to learn, You know we got along well; I was out there three years, and it was just one big happy family. those people, very good. They were very good to me, Well, then when I went into Pearson, well then you had a mixture, well mostly English ... Q: Some were ScandinavianQ �A: ... --Anglo-Saxono Uhm? Q: Some were Scandinavian, the Olsen's? A: Yes, the Olsen's were Scandinavian, but, but, what will I say, as much or more Anglo-Saxon as the Anglo-Saxon. You know what I mean. There was no distinction there. There was one or two Finnish families, but they were, they were accepted, and they carried on with all the right rest of us. Maybe a little bit different ~there, I don't know what it was. But as a whole, they all got along together and worked together, and when there was something on, well they all worked, you know, they all carried on. Like I know, through the school end of it, you know, the concerts and things like that. So the families naturally were more eager to help or something. Q: Do you think the women co-operated a great deal, and helped each other out alot? A: Oh, I think so. Oh, yes. Q: In what ways? Q: Well, when there was sickness, they would help out, ayh, go and help people. Now, in Chabaqua, the lady I stayed with, as I say, it was all, mostly Finnish settlement, she had no nursing training, but whenever there was somebody sick or a baby on the way, there was an English-an Anglo-Saxon lady, young couple, what, three or four miles down the road going to have a baby, so they came ou know with the hand car rail, they borrowed one of those somehow and got her to go there. So it was the same thing in Pearson, although they went into town to have �-6babies, but at the same time, when there was illness or something, they co-operated. When somebody got burned or-- burnt out or something, they all co-operated. a happy situation. yes. It was Oh, yes, they would co-operate. Ah, Well, I don't know, maybe half a mile, a mile away from somebody, that's your neighbour. You don't care what they are, as long as ______________ ou go and talk or you have a cup of tea or something like that, ayh. 2: You know what !mean, . 1.t, . ' 1.t s . . . . . . . . . . . . Yeah. y~t probably people would integrate an awful lot better, simply because of circumstances. A: That's right, yeah, yeah. Q: Do you think farm women were treated, on the whole, as equals to the men, or were they treated sort of somewhat subserviant, next to the animals or something? A: I can only talk for two areas. Chabaqua, I would even think the women were the boss, the head of the household. to do. They sort of told, tell them what they were going No, they weren't treated as aminals or, or ... Q: Not as animals, but what I mean is .... A: No, no, I know, but I mean No, no. So far as I know, they're, and in many cases, I'm just thinking back to, oh, four or five definite families in the area, you know, where the woman was sort of the boss of the house, sort of thing. were equals. And in _?earson, I think they They would talk, any house I was in, they would talk about what they were goinna do or something, you know, and a crop had to be done, or this had to be �-7done. Women helped; they had to. You know, out in the fields and that, because there wasn't always enough help. Not all women, but some of them. this ah, no. But there was none of Not like you used to think. 'Course, I think these ahm, the father and then the mother down in the house were years and years ago. in the rural areas. Before _ ____out And certain types of people, too. Certain races. Q: So do you think the work of women was always valued as highly as that of men. Of course, I suppose the work was somewhat the same. A: Well, I think,like they knew that the--! think it was valued, because the woman did her work in the house, which was necessary to keep the man going, ayh 9 And if the haying time, and she was needed, I think the father or the husband appreciated the fact that the mother went out and helped to - - - - , or whatever had to be done. In any of the communities I were in, yes. Now in the, in the Pearson section where I was, the man would get the potatoes and so on. go out and help. The women would I often used to go after four. Out in Chabaqua, another rural area, Finnish area, the women did that sort of work. That was women's work rather than men's work, and yet the man didn't look down on woman because she did that sort of thing, you know. Q: What did the women do with the children when they did farm work? A: Took them with them if they could, or there'd be �-8- somebody else to look after them, like in the older children. I don't ever remember any child being left alone in the house. And then again, as I say, and some of those times I was there when the children were not tiny little ones. There was a few families that had little ones, but then there always bigger ones to look after the little ones if mother was out in the field or so. Q: Did you ever get the impression that maybe the women were a little disappointed with the circumstances, some of them coming from cities in Britian, or Scandinavia, and then being plunked in the middle of Northwestern Ontario bush? A: Well, there weren't too many--there were some that had come from, whose husbands had good jobs in town, and went out to the farm, because the farm was the thing to do, make a living, get the kids out on the farm, you know, out of trouble, and they'd had lovely homes and so on in town 9 But I never heard any complaints. of accepted it. They sort It was the kids they were coming out for, and they accepted it. It was harder work than in town, because you had a well to get water from and so on, and especially Anita(?) , I don't remember. Pearson it's different now. turn them on. Now again in They have taps and they But when I was out there it was well water or you hauled your water from the___ But there was always a youngster to do that, you know, mother didn't have to do that. But most of them accepted their lot. �-9One lady, of Norwegian descent I think it was, her husband was a housepainter in town. He got the idea the country was the only place, so he went out to Pardee, which is further on than Pearson. And not knowing anything about building a house, he built a house down at the bottom of the hill. Well, in the spring, the water used to leak right through the house. Now, I did hear her complain, but who wouldn't. Not complain, but say "Why did we ever leave?" They came down, they had to come down the river, in the spring when they came there, in a canoe, so they paddled their way down. in a boat, And then, she didn't know anymore about where to build a house than he did, and so as I say. But never again did I hear her ~say, "Oh, I'm going to leave", like today you hear, "Gee, I'm not puttin' up with it, I'm gettin' out, oand if you don't come, I'll go on my own". 'Course, the women didn't do that then, what thirty years ago, thirty-five, fourty years ago. Thirty-seven years, anyway. But yet, every year the same thing happened, until finally they did build another place. years and years. But this went on for No, I can't really ever say that I, maybe because the people that I came into contact with hadn't had moeny or an affluent life in the country they'd come from. I know a lady that came out, her husband went out to Scobol, and she had been well-to-do. she accepted it. Well They didn't stay there long, because I don't, I, well, a few years. She was, when my baby �-10was born, she was the nurse in the hospital. She was a nurse, and she'd had, they'd had a good living ~in ~ England, and came out, and then he got this crazy, you know, I shouldn't say crazy, but the idea your going to live on a farm. He got this piece of land in Scobol where nobody could raise anything. few years they went back to town. But after a Again, I never heard her say, "What the dickens did we do that"--she did say, "Coming from London to here", you know, but never did I hear her grumble about it. grumbling today. Q: I don't know. Were the daughters of the families treated as valuably as the boys? A: I think there's more I know that sometimes that's· ------- Well, agian I say, from what I gathered, yes. I think when you think of that idea, you're going back before my day in the country. Maybe eighteen ninety's or something, or nineteen hundred's, where they wanted boys so they could work on the farm, ayh? But in many cases, where there were no boys, the girls helped the father. So, I mean, they were, they perhaps couldn't work as hard as the boys ·, but still they did the job, too. In fact, one family out in Pearson, there were four or five boys and three girls, and the ,~i:,_: one girl, she didn't like to work in, so she worked as hard as the boys did outside. She loved that, and so she was treated as an equal by her brothers as well as by the father. The mother often used to say she shouldn't be working like that, she should be in the house doing things. But she �-11- she wanted to stay outside. Any that I have contact with, yeah. Q: How did you feel as a woman teacher out in the bush? A: In the bush. And Chabaqua was bush then, because they were just building the highway out through there. Actually, I liked it very--at first, it was a, sort of a frightening experience, because I went in where no one was talked to. You see, where I boarded, the ~l lady could say "Eat, now" or Finnish word for teacher. 0 ).- , f pe,\a.) Ct II , that's the But after the first month, I was very homesick the first month, I didn't want to eat or anything. But after that, I just loved the place. Q: How old were you when you went out? A: Twenty. Through normal school, I didn't go to University, I took University sometime after. came home once a month. And I Department of Highways was working out there, or Ministry of Highways, it's not a Department. They had a true~, and I'd get a ride with them Friday nights and go back Sunday night with one of the men that were going back to the camp. The road was passable. Q: I read that, especially among the Finns, the A women teachers were really highly respected. A: Oh, yes. I was. I didn't want to say that, but oh, yes. And through this girl whose husband had the store, through Laura, she told me that the people, oh, the Inspector told me tooo He said that they didn't know anything �-12about the system of education or any--you know, things like that. So they left it up to me, and they knew it would be all right. And I was very highly respected. And very, very well treated. Gifts at Christmas--now, again, they were hard up, too, and so it wasn't gifts of stockings, or things like that, but jars of fruit to bring home to my mother. me, but through my mother. You see, not only through Chickens and beef, and stuff like that, where in those days we didn't have a fridge, and so it was just the same, that stuff. Oh, no. And yet when I left--and they left the system of education up to me, and I did, I honestly did my best. Because of their trust, too. But then I was, I'm not meaning to boast, but I wanted to do the best I could. When I went out to Pearson, it was different. We had one family in there--it was the system, writing. first the children printed. At Well then the new system, Mr. Mustard the new Minister of Education said they must learn to write. Well it's harder for a child to write than it is to print, so I used to teach so much printing at the start and then write. And I got ever so many letters from pare--from this one particular family, about them writing. You know, (garbled). I guess they'd read the paper, and knew there was going to be writing instead of printing, and so on, in letters. Well, I didn't get any, never got a--'course they couldn't write in English at Chabaqua, but at the same time, they left it to you. For the best results. �-13- Q: Yeah. Ahm. Oh. When did you leave teaching? Did you retire in town? A: No. I taught three years at Chabaqua, five years at Pearson, and then I got married, and that was it. Q: Were you not allowed to teach as a married woman? I know that that was the case earlier. A: Well, it was to a certain extent. Well, I didn't want to, my husband was, it was war time, and my husband was wanting to get in the Air Force. him down. Well they turned So he tried to get in the army, and they turned him down, because his heart. And I had, they had wanted me to come to town, like when I got married, to teach, but at that time, if he'd gone away, I was gonna go too. And that was my, you know, my , what we were going to do. away. So I didn't get into town right And then I felt, well, I had enough to do. I was interested in making his home, and I belonged to the Institute, and you get into other things through the Women's Institute. Well then we had a daughter and then when,--! would never go to work, I said, while she was young, so when she went to kindergarten. And it wasn't 'til she was grade five that I went back to to supply teaching. But only~ two or three schools. I'd be home when she was home. Now I know today, the system was different, altogether. to do. That isn't the thing You go and you get a babysitter . . But I didn't believe in that. And then I supplied at _____ three or four years ago. I could have gone on �-14- teaching, but I didn't want to. Q: Do you think work outside the home is important for women? A: You were a teacher. That's hard to answer. individual, ahy? I think that's up to the You know, like myself,--well, I have these other interests outside the home. no money with it. There's Depends too, on what, whether the woman's working for money to get something, or what. It's up to the individual. Q: Why did you want to be a teacher? A: Uhm? Q: Why did you want to be a teacher? A: Oh, because when I was going to highschool, the depression was on, and there were three places you worked, in a store, or a nurse, or a teacher. You couldn't be--and there was no air hostesses or anything like that, you know. No. And so, I just happened, I went into teaching. I liked children, I liked teaching. We also, every sunnner used to play school when we were kids, and I was always the teacher. So the kids knew their multiplication tables when they went back to school. it. have. Oh no, I enjoyed Maybe if there'd been, if it was today I wouldn't There's so many opportunities, I might have flitted from job to job, because there's so many things that I would loved to have been ino journalist and so on. Public relations, My daughter has the life, had the life until she got married what I would have enjoyed. She went through journalism, then she worked for the �-15government, was up on the hill, you know, - - -oh, boy, and travelled the country. But . . . . Q: ? A: ? Q: So you think things are better for women now? A: Well again, !--yeah, !---they have more opportunities, don't they? Q: Uhm uhm. A: Because of more opportunities, though, do they take life--well, maybe we took it too seriously. I think anybody that was raised during the depression, they used to--ah, you people weren't? 2: ? A: No. 2: ? A: No, I know you don't. But I mean, those who went through Depression find, we took life too seriously, and I think we still have that tendency to compare today all this money back to when you had nothing, or when you had maybe had one pair of shoes; the sole wore out. As I heard the other night on the radio, ----·just stick cardboard in your shoe. Now I'm not meaning that that happened with everybody and so today on, but ahm, oh, opportunities are greater I\ And again, if a woman feels that she wants to be outside the home, I think that's between the--if she's married, between her and her husband, jor something. It's hard to make a yes or no out of that, because j �-16there are different circumstances, different ..... You hear women saying, "Well, I have the brains, why shouldn't I do this if I can still have children and get the babysitter, in?" Well, when they get married, if they both think that way, well .... Q: It's hard to make a (end of tape) This has been Georgina Garrett talking to Mrs. Doreen Murray, June 21st, 1978, in Thunder Bay South. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Herstory Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Herstory: Doreen Murray Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Release form was obtained by the Herstory project, allowing the recording to be shared and used. Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Mrs Doreen Murray in Thunder Bay, June 21 1978, by Georgina Garrett. The interview is a part of the Women's Decade Council Herstory project. The recording consists of one side of a cassette tape, available here as an MP3 file. (Click on the speaker logo to play the file.) The transcript is available by clicking on the image thumbnail. The interview talks about what farming life was like, the need for assistance, rural Women’s Institutes, and family life in the areas of Shabaqua, Pearson and Scoble. Discussions centre around women’s work, care for children, immigration, language, learning, and the resilience of families who settled into farm life. Mrs Murray, as a teacher in Northwestern Ontario in the bush, travelled out for the week to teach. She taught for eight years before getting married, moving to town, and starting her family. Returning to supply teaching while caring for a family, Mrs Murray shares about what it means for an individual to choose a job outside the home, through the Depression and the war. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1978-06-21 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 PDF Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Audio Text Subject The topic of the resource People Women's History Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Ontario - Fort William Canada - Ontario - Thunder Bay https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/79630ad785398a7e59b9e383198bf04a.mp3 cdd2e0ebe12d13522e5d5261409b8682 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/7b179231a7fefa86caffcf00447fd13b.mp3 0455cc167b52cfe671307d8395e7a5c4 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/576834165824b3246194eaefd851dd83.pdf 202dd21a22ed240f6233e34f99926306 PDF Text Text / ! / (-~ This is , Kanen Graves(?) talking with Mrs. Almos in Port Arthuro G: At G: A: G: A: Could we start by telling me what year you were born? 1913 And where were you born? I was born in a little CPR siding, called Melgand. Where is that? Now this would be, Oh, I don't know, past, well half way between here and White River, I think, on the CPR Mainline. My dad was a CPR pumpero This was when they had the steam etiginjs, and they had to take water, you know,every so manyo And¼::here we moved to Cauldwell; he was a pumper there, and then from there, when I was about four, we moved to Jackfish, and he was a stationary fireman there. They took coal in for the docks, the CPR dock there,for the trains, and he worked there till the deasel came in, and then they' did away with the coal, natµrally,then he was.o. No I'm wrong. They did away w~+h bringing it in from the States ~ by _boat, and brought it from, from the eh, provinces, somewhere, by CPR boxcar, and it had to be unloaded by boxcar, so they didn't need anymore fireman or anything li like this, see, to keep things going,to unload the coal, so he was transfered to a place called Britto G: That sounds familiar. A~ - That's down, oh, around Perry Sound, and there he stayed until he retired. G: Did you move with him? A: No, I married, and stayed in Jackfish. G: Had your parents been born in Canada, or were they immigrants? A: No. My grandparents came from Scotland as Hudson's Bay factors, up to Moosonee, and my Dad's family was all born there. And they came down to, by canoe, to, where is it now, the CPR anywayo And then just scattered around. My grandfather on my mother's s.ide had a store in Heron Bay. And the rest of the family fished; on~ uncle had a fishing and tourist business in McDermod. And the others were mostly railroaderso G: What do you remember as a child growing up in a small town? A: Well, I don't know. We weren~t very rich, we were a big family; eleven of us, twelve of us. G: Twelve kids? A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: Uhm uhm. Really! Eleven, and adopted my mother's, be more like a nephew to me, but he was adopted, because his mother and dad had passed away. And I don't know, we just seemed to have enough of what we needed. We never had to go without anything~but we didn't have any frills, that's for sure. But I think we were much happier then, than the children these dayso You appreciated things I guess. Everything just handed to them, ayh? ' What we got we really appreciated. An~ we had to work, you knowp I worked from the time I was~urteen, for, ten dollars a month, I thinko Doing what? Well, I went to help this, he was, Mr. ~ Nichol was the station agent, the gas station agent, there. And she needed 6: \. ~~ somebody in the sunnner, because she had so much company an~1/~0 ~VV that. So I just went and, as a cl-, like a girlc;-~ a y h o ~ . And, that's about all. Went to school until graoeeight, J and How big a school was it? Pardon me? How big a school was it? It was •:up to grade eight. It was from one, there was no kindergarten, ~ rom one to eight ayho And there was just the one teach~r~~ ;.._b,.we had very many happy memories there, because there wasl concerts, and field days, that kids have never heard of, these dayso Arbor d~y, I asked the kids if they had Arbor day. "What's that Nanny?" And, I don't know ._~ This was the centre of activity, the school and the church, ayh. The c~urch, once a month, there was two churcheso So everybody ~fo the, and the Salvation Army cam~ probably once every two months. And strange, I do quite a bit of volunteer �-2- ""~ work, and I do a lot for Home League, or~with them alot. And they knew all these Captains, and that, that came to Jackfish, like 60 years ago. G: What would they have come for? A: The Salvation Army? G: Yes, this is the first I've heard of this. A; Oh, well, just for a service. G: Counselling type? A: No, just a church -- o., meeting at night, you know. And, everybody would bring a lunch, and we'd have a little gathering after. This one chap, especially. He came from the Yukon, and I just heard recently, through a ~ Home League here, that he died in Californiao OThese are just the little things that we'd look forward to. We were fortunate enough that we had a pass, and relatives, that we could travel. Where a lot of the other children didn't ayh, we could go free, we had relatives in Saskatchewan and Manitoba and that. So we were able to goo•• My dad took us pretty often for a trip to Toronto and Montreal if we could afford it. But then I married, and we lived there, it was ,,, I was just saying, some girl came here the other day, said she was tired because she washed the clothes. I said oh, what kind of machine do you have? Well, an automatic, ahy. I said''what if you do like me when Don was, we had one boy, and one still-born child. When ~,Don was small, my husband was a railroader too, so he had to go out and relieve on the different jobso And in the winter I had to snowshoe down a hill like about Hillcrest Park, and snowshoe back up with the water to wash clothes. And I said, "And you push a button, and you're tired? And when my brother-in-law wasn't home, I had to chop the ice, to make a hole in the water,ayho Sometimes it was pretty thick in that bay. And then I'd come up and wash clothes on a board. So, when I look back now, I think, 0 dear, I woT\der how you ... My neighbour across here, she was raised on -Me. farm too. She said I wonder how weJ<l.id it ayh. We sit back~ nd wonder and really, you know, Jhat .. o But like I say, I think we were much happier then than now that you could ... I know when I go down town now and, we were married during the depression, and when I go down town now and think "Gee I wonder if I should, maybe I'll buy this. Do I need it?" That's a throw back from the depression. So it seems strange that life goes on s·o • G: What kind of social things did you do, say in your m_a_r_r~i_e_d_ years? Community dances, and things like this? A: Oh yes. We used to have pie socials,to raise money for the Christmas fund. And bingos, later on we had bingos. But mostly it was, oh, teas, church teas, and pie socials, and cake socials. And what else now, ohJ then we used to have snowshoe parties. We'd all get together to snowshoe out to a certain, everybody had a little, tracking camps, like, you know, and you'd make beans out there, have beans and that. Like I say, I was one of the more fortunate ones, Art always had a job, and we had a free pass, so every year of our life we've always had a holiday. Even if it was, I know !'! come back often, with just enough to tip t~e porter ayh. Or maybe not even that, but we had our pass, and we knew we could get home without any money ayh. But every month, I'd put away maybe even sometimes 50 cents to a travelling fundo And when our holiday came, well that was our money, and when that was spent, we came home. G: That's an interesting way to travel. A: But other than that, like, and ... I think the teacher was the head of the social, like you know, she put on the Halloween dances and ... G: Would these all be held in the school? A: Yes. At one time we had no ibasement in the school, so it was quite a chore to, our seats were on two by fours, and we had to pull them all out, you know. So the, I can't remember, they must have got a grant or something, and they ... I was married then, when they put the basement in the school, and this was were we held all our socials, such as our ... G: How large a community? A: Pardon me? G: How large a community? A: I would say about 35 families. And of course, during the summer the Patterso, you know, these freighter folks, they �-3would come in with coal for th~ ... It was the only industry there, was the coal industry, for the CPR, for the engine'S. And it seems every time a boat came in, they'd put on a dance of some kind,and they'd let us know, and we'd put a sig~ up, and the ladies would bring a lunch, or the boat would bring Q 'lunch. So, pretty nearly every week we' d have a danc·e. G: Then this would be with the people who worked on the boat. A: This was with the, yes, with the Captain and the mates would put it on, like, you see, and everybody that was free~.Rn the boat would come. I guess they'd been out on th~i ~~e~a week, ten, twelve days, and they were happy to get some~recreation. At one time we had a pool room there, and that was part of the, you know, they played pool. But that closed down, too. wheA we built our own skating rink and looked after it. We played hockey between Rossport,and Schreiber, and Jackfish. G: Did you seem to have been a lot more sports minded, a little more active1 A: Yes. There didn't seem to be any cliques. Everybody seemed to get together. Then we bou•ght, there was a general store and the Post Office, and Immigration Department thereo And we had that, we looked after that, til the placed closed up. G: So that would be an office to receive benefits? A: Well, no. The officer had to come here to clear the American ships. You see, the American ships came in, and they had a clearance before they go out. So that office was in the store too, the general store, and the Post Office. So then when that closed down, when Jackfish closed down, my husband got a job as a, went out on the road as, he was 7 of course he's an engineer, this was what he did in Jackfisho But it was more like a~_ ~mergency; he was sent anywhere from Fort William to, oh~~~crwthe Sioux, to Ottawa, to Mattawa, and anyplace that they needed him, ayh. So we lived, we had our own car on the railroad, and we lived there for seventeen years.before we retired. So that was an interesting way to live. I know one weekend,one middle of the week, we were in Rossport, or just out of Rossport, and (interrupted by phone) So whatf was I saying? G: You were talking about living on the rail A: Oh yeah. We were up near Rossport, about Tuesday, and they said to Bart, "Get ready, there's a train picking you up, and they're going to stop at White River, and get your groceries, and you've got to keep going til you get to Mattawa, for the weekend." Because they were building an overhead bridge, and you can only do it on a weekend. It was things like this that made it so interesting ... G: So you just took up your car and,.o A: Well, the train picks us up, ayh. We were on the railroad, like a, like a trailor ayh. And a train would pick us up and the machine that Bart worked with, ayh, and take us all the way down along. And wherever we were, like if we came into a divisional point, where there's a train waiting for us to take us out, so we'd get there in time~ So you never knew what the next job was going to be. G: I guess, you said you just had the one son? A: Yes, and when Bart took this job out on the railroad, he had just started high school here, so he was up here like,you see. And when we were close to home, close around here, he'd come there for the weekend, and if we weren't home, he'd go to Jackfish to his grandmother'so So we were there for eighteen years. G·: You said you were married during the depression. How did the depression affect you? ~ ------- r , I think we were very fortunate because on the job that tiart was, a hoisting engineer's job. In the winter they just had , maybe eight or ten staff, or twelve. And they had .\o ~<.,'-le. time keeper. And none of them could do office work. None of thot+older men, even if they had more seniority than Bart, they couldn't do the office work, with the result that he was never out of a job. As small wages as he had,we were fortunate; we never lost our insurance, or our house or anything like that. So many of our friends did ayh. Other than having to be very careful,you know, make sure that you didn't go off on a buying spree, or somethingo ~d (}.. �-4- G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: - G: A: Did it affect Jackfish, particularly bad? Not too much. Most of the people there were, I would say have permanent positions, they would be, like section men, and in the wint~er, like section men, and then th~v had to keep this plant going, because they had to keep a. coal shute going to keep the coal eh, ready to coal all these trains, all these ... So it was more of a steady thing, except in the stnnmer they brought in these extra men to help with the unloading of the coal for the winter. But we were very fortuna..te. • -~ There was nobody, I ~~bink, out ot work in Jacktisn ouxing the depression, because of this CPR coaling station, see. Maybe the junior fellas on the way, like on the track were laid off, but pretty well it didn't affect them at all. But all around us, terrible. I know friends of ours that had lost their homes and their insurances, and things like this. Did you get a lot of people travelling through on the railway? Oh yes. men in the box ... Boxcars, yes, yeah. In fact there was some of that still when we went on the roado Cause they warned me, I was often alone, you k~ow, out on the siding,and they said not to let anybody in. ~~ t ~is was not like the depression,! think it was just those who were travelling more just to see the, the, cause it was during the war when we were out there, so there was lots of work. How did the war affect you? Pardon me? How did the war years affect you? Ahh, not ... I guess things became a little more prosperous? Yes, yes. Well I know when uhm, when Bart went out on the railroad, when we were in Jackfish, there was no union. So he would have to go, he went to work at seven every morning. And if that company, boat company, wanted that boat unloaded for a certain hour, he would have to work, all those hours, maybe sometimes up for 5 o'clock the next morning. And he never got paid for more than eight hours, ayh. So as soon as he went out on the railroad, on the, on the mainline, he was able to join a union, and he did, and I could never get over him being paid, in fact, this was how we bought this house. All the overtime that he made, I put it aside, because I said "If we, you know, this is just money found, because you'd never have it, if you didn't have this job." So this is how we put money away to buy this house. Because if you travelled, at night, with the crane, then he had to look after it, and he was paid for it. And if there was a mainlinefl and the mainline was busy, then they would have to wait maybe til after 5 o'clock, or 6 o'clock, til the trains were all gone, then go out, and he was still paid. And I can remember my son was, it was during the war, they couldn't get a helper, so the boss asked Bart if he didn't know anybody. So Don said he'd go out. And I can remember the first day Don worked, he had to go out an hour ahead, at six, to get the crane ready, and they couldn't go out til 8 o'clock that night to work, cause the passengers were late (?), it was a mainline job. He made 42.50 that one day. I can remember his dad saying, "This was what I made in a month when I started to work". So it was quite a, it was quite a thing to be able to get paid for what you did. But, and that job in Jackfish, we were paid for eight hours only, no matter how, and you couldn't refuse, ayh. Especially Bart. He was the only who could do this certain job. He had a helper, but he couldn't work when there was men, they emptied these boats of coal, well when they got near the bottom, there had to go men in there to scrape it up and -•~~ put it irlZ0 the bucket so they could get it upo Well the (ljfa"'. _ ~ helper couldn't do that, because they were scared th~-'-=d-- ~ ✓0 swing the bucket maybe, and kill someone o So Owhei:l there was a cleaning job, Bart had to do it all. There was two of them, like two cranes, but they had to do all that worko Was there any talk there of organizing a union? They tried. But, this was the way they got around it. There wasn't enough, uhm, steady members, like. I think �-5there had to be ten or~welve. And the CPR made sure that _ they, (joke and laughter), but the company made sure that they got, you know, that they were kept below that. The steady ones, like, you know. They could have in the SUllllller, but then these were just men that came in for, maybe three or four rr. Jnths, so that didn't count. This is how I think I, I have never voted anything else but social, NDP or, please be careful whatever you ~all it. Because this was when you heard all about it during the depression, ayho And I can remember, uhm, Jack MacEvett, he was organizing, ayh, in Schreiber. He said"I've gone out in the country and preached", and he said "I had to be in a truck, because they'd throw tomatoes at me", ayh, or eggs or anything, if they didn't like him. And I can remember the first, uh, convention I went to in Regina I said to Mrs. Jacobson, " I never thought I'd ever see the day when I'd be coming to Regina, in a hotel for an NDP convention, ayh, the way it started out, because I know many a time I did without things to, to help <-·calm down there, like, you know, the people that came in _e,v~ ) they always came to our place to sleep, or eat or anythi11g. Mr. uhm, what's his name (\t,~Tate, he's an old timer, Jim Caullie, I was just reading about him the other day, and Jack MacEvett, of course, he was from Schreiber, and uhm, there sure was a lot of talk of; you know, political talk during the depression, and I think this was for, because, uhm, when yo,, looked around and saw what was going on, these guys working for five dollars a month, I think,on the highway. So, uh ... Oh yes, I think the whole of Jackfish was, was CCF then. G: I've been studying Dorion and Hurkett a lot, and that was a really progressive ....... town during the depression too. A: Yeso I think all these little towns, you know, that really uh, it hit them quite hard. G: I guess soo Uhm, I wanted to ask you about the early days of CCF. Did you ever think that it would become sort of a credible third party at the time? 11 A: G: A: G: A: G: A: A: A: N .• Did it start off really really small? I Uh ... See I don't ... Oh yes, like I say, I can remember, especially down our way, because uh, oh there was so many other factions against it, ayh. Strong factions, that people were afraid to, to even talk about it, in lots of places, ayh. Uh, and I really can't remember how it, that was overcome, because, like in Jackfish, nearly everybody w~s a CCF, ayho There was the odd one, but uh, they didn't do to much about it, so uh,.o• But they had no problem there. I think Jackfish was CCF ever since I can remember. And uh, everybody worked, helped, and eh, you know, ... Were the women just as active as the men, would you say? Uh, Yes, I think so, uh, 'cause I know I waso And uh, and any of my friends, there was, oh yes. Did you feel that you were, I don't know, taken seriously, that's not quite what I want to say, but you know what I mean ... You were as respected, in the Party1 Oh yes. Uhm Uhm. Oh y~s. ' · Yes, because, uh, what I found, we had so many gooa arguements, that these, the was arguing against us, You know, they couldn't find anything uh,'- come back wi ·:th, really. When we say, "Well, look-et, what's this government doing; five dollars a month, ayho And all, well Canada was, it's a rich country, and, you know, these are the arguements~LJe used to get literature~ t, and study it, you know, and have study session, and that, and uhm, and we really ... No I don't, we never had any problems down there. It was always, uh, it was always, as far as I can remember ... Of course, now, the earlier years I don't know ... 'cause I wasn't old enough to vote, ando•• But uh, ... it was alwasys strong, the CCF, ever since I can remember. 0 �-6G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: Do you, I doo., I think you're probably to young for, to remember women getting the vote. No, not really, no. twenties. Yeah, no, no. It's ahh ... You know, I can remember something about i t , all right, because I remember aguements,,, I can remember ministers come and arguing, and you knowj about ... My dad was very religiouso Uh; I don't know whether really religious, but he, uh,'cause people were very religious, and apparently always had to study the Bible very .. And they used to argue these things forth and back, and uh, and uh .. o This was what he used to, uh, argue mostly with, was because he was figuring that this Bible wasn't quite right., from the things that was said, and then some of the things that was preached, ayh. But like I say, when there's a large family, we all had to get up and do our own chores, and that; there wasn't much to, to, uhm, like ehh, there was chor~s, .and, and then schoolwork, and different things ~that. We never got much into political, uh, arguements at home. But I really took interest in it when Jack MacEvett started to come down. Of course I was married then. I was nineteen when I was married, and of course you couldn't vote until you were twenty-one, theno But I was really into--My husband has always been, 'cause he said that, uh, his dad was from Norwayo And he used to tell them how the big shots took everything there, from the fishermean, no matter how hard you'd worked, you had to ... And uh, And so, he was always socialist, if you'd like to call him that. And I haven ... I've never voted anywhere else ... anything else. So, .. o How about transportation in these days1 How did you get around? ~ Oh you know, this is uh, the strange thin oo ... We have never had a car. We have never had a car. Really? And uh, for the simple reason, that in Jackfish there was no highwe y, when we lived there. Now, uh, the highway came through after we went out o~ ~he road, oh maybe a year or so before. And we had totuhm, I don't understand too much about it, but everybody had to pay so much, then and do . .. If you didn't pay, you had to work so many days on the road that they had cut in, like. I guess the town id it, ayh. Well then, the car was no good to us then, because we were away all the timeo My son had a car right away, of course. But we always travelled by rail, or ship. How about within the community, though. I guess if.tbings.o. Oh. It was all railway, all rail. But the community was, uh, You've never down past Jackfish? No, I don't think I have. Well there's, there's just the railwasy, in the middle, then the lake on one side, and the mountains on the other. So with the result that the, that the cut-in from the main highway was very hard to put in,because it had to come down through this plane, and then over a mountain, and then (cut back to?) And there was no place you cou--There was no place in the town where you could drive a caro You had to drive just to the railway, and leave it there. So it was all railroad travel, when we were thereo And you'd just walk ............. . And just walk,~ yeaho It was av ery small village, somethin' likeo•• Oh, it wouldn't have as much walking space as Rossport, if you've been there. Uhm uhm. Rossport's really small. Yeah. But, see Rossport is, is kind of flat, ayh, and at least you can drive into there. In Jackfish you could just come in behind this mountain, there was just a valley in between this mountain, behind the church, and then right down to the railroado And that's where you had to stop. Oh some people, uh, p~t planks across there, and went across. But you couldn't go anywhere, so there was no point, ayho So, ah, everything was by car, by railroad, and it was so small that you didn't need a car,anyway, to get around. I've been thinking of Thunder Bay standards. �-7A: G: A: Yeal.. Oh, no. I know my aunt, she came from the west, she used to say "I can't breatrehere, like, 'cause she lived in the prairie, ayh. And she said she just seemed like she was closed in because there was just this little place to walk, ayh. Mountains on one side, and the lake on the other, and the railway in the middleo It sounds like it would be really beautiful. Yes, it was, it was a lovely spot. Uh, a very busy spot bsecause, uhm, in the summer they had, uhm,uhm-a, a pulpwood, the pulp boats used to, uhm, how. can I say this? The boats used to come into Slate Island, l that was out quite a way) and load the pulp there, so we had th~, uh, men come in then to, they stayed out there all summer and worked on this pulp business. So it was always a very busy spot, in the summer, very quiet in the winter. But and a good, we had quite a good tourist business when we had the store too--we had a lot of Americans come in there, because beautiful lakes lac~ in there, very, uh, untouched, ayh .. good fishing, and so we haa "')"->.ri. £k C?) quite a good tourist business.there, too. The Americans used to like to come in. But, uh, there certainly wasn't any cars around there was no place to drive them, Everything was done by wheelbarrow, if you had to, uh, .. Move things . Move anything; wheelbarrow in, in the summer, or toboggan or, or sleigh in the wint er,ayh. I know we used to have to, we burnt coal, naturally,-we were on a coal depot, and they used to bring it in bags home, on the toboggan. So, everything had to be moved by hand, wheelbarrow or, that old wheelbarrow outside, that was what we used in Jackfish. An antique wheelbarrow. Yeah. What was life like for your mother, with so many children? Well, you know, we all had our own job, ayh. The older had to look after the younger, and ah, as many as us, there was of us, she has b~ ders beside. Men that used to come and work in the summer, ayh, would come board with us, which she always used to say it doesn't make much difference putting a few more potatoes in the pot, ayh. But we all had our own jobs, and we all had to look after our own clothes, and things seemed very well organized. I don't know, I can't remember tha t;here was, uh, we all had to look after our own rooms, ana beds, and, and uh, we all had our turn to do dishes, and uh, .. o You had to be a lot more responsible. Oh yes, oh my gosh, yes. You know, if we ever got up and we I think there was only two of us that was born in Schreiber. The rest were all born at home with a midwife. Was there a local woman, who acted as one? Yes, uhm uhm. Bart's mom--my mother and I used to do most of it. And before that there was an Italian lady that used to do it. And uh, it was just, one other thing, just another ..... I can remember my last two brothers, they were born in Schreiber, because these women were getting older then, ayh. And uhm, so they, my aunt, she was kind of a midwife in Schreiber, too. So she went there, and had it there. But uh, but uh, I can't remember any, uh, I think today they'd, when I see children, the way they, I think it's just uh, oh, I think it's partly parents fault, today. Because they take the line of~ east resistance, they say you can't do that, and they do it anyway, and they don't do anything about it. I can't understand that. I know with my grandchildren here, I say \\ you do it; and they look at me, and I say "and fast ;; Don't sit and look at me o'r And 63, ayh. You've got a lot of nerve. I said "You justo .. o" Of course I do a lot of kidding, but uh, I, I just couldn't take that. When I said somethin to Don, I said "I want that done", and he went 0ndJ done it, ayh. And if he didn't do it, he just had his privileges taken away from him. And I think this is half the battle. Because they just, just don't seem to 0. G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: �-8bother, I don't know. I can never forget one woman said "I'll be so lad when they're married, when they're out of my way." Oh.9 I couldn't understand that. I said "don't you enjoy them?" And then when I saw the way they acted, I thought, "no wonder", but I thought "lady, it's eour fault" . . I think television has a lot to do with ito A: Oh yes, terribleo Just want and sit and look at that uhm, My little chtm1 was sittin' there yesterday and put the, and put it on for some x sports, and I thought, "I bet you ten years for G: Is this why you workEi_d? A: since we move'l_1ere. We moved, Bart took an early retirement~ e've been here about seventeen years. And he still worked two years, like we bought this house, oh maybe, ten or twelve years before we moved up, ayho We knew that we couldn't go back to Jackfish, we had a house there, but there was nothing there, ayho So l ike I say, we had to buy somewhere, so we , everything_J--;t~~"' got overtime, I put away to put a payment do~house, . Well then we bought it, and we rented it for about twelve years. Well then, the people who rented i~were going to move away, so I said to Bart, "Well whf} t -.f taki n' an early, he, this was how we started~fto Mex. i~ o, in '57, He had an arthritic hip, and they said that, like the winter's a slack time, ayh, 'cause there's no building or anything like that. So, uh, I started looking into going to Mexicoo So we went down there, and then, uh, the . nP.xt winter they'd, the people said they were going to move, so we moved down then, and we didn't go anywhere that winter. Just So we've been here eighteen years, and ah, Like I say, we never stary in the winter, except the, the two years since I've been sick. But ah, we've never had a car either, so we've just ... Like I say, then, but he came up, he worked, he still worked two years, at, summers, while we were here. So I, I just couldn't sit here and do nothing, so I started to babysit first. Babysat for all the doctors, and that, thereo And ~ then ah, this little, this little store down by ah, the clinic, McKay's, they looked, they were looking for a clerk, so I worked there, for ah, five years. Then we were, every winter we ~ .~ away, she'd have to get someone else, so ... This year we're goin'to, summer we're goin up to Alaska, so I said "I'm oing to quit", I said "You911 have to get someone else", 9cause it's not fair to her either, ayh. So we came back in October, and then I knew the woman that was working in, in the uh, what do you call the office down there, employment office, and she phones, and "Would you like to go and work at Burk's ~ itts. I said "What?" So she said "They're looking for someone for Christmas rush',' so I said "Okay, I' 11 go down and try it". So I went down and then I worked every summer then, for ten years. I really enjoyed ito • G: Did you work, uhm, in your early_..y,ears of marriage? A: No, except for our own . bus flies s, when we had, had our own store, like, you·-know; in, in the country. But when we were on the road, we were never anywhere maybe sometimes .two weeks, and then maybe sometimes two days, ayh. So !~ just ah, G: Are this, I that there are3/many opportunities for women to work, in small towns, small ~industry towns. A: Small--No, no,no. Uhm, what there was an :~ an hotel in Jackfish, during uhm, now let's see, that started during the war. But, there had been previously, a hotel before, and it, people died, and they just closed it down. Well then, this family, Spidoni brothers, you've heard of them in Schreiber, I guesso They bought the hotel, and they opened it up, so this was the,really the only place to work, ayh. Cook, or or, ah, upstairs girl, and bartenders. But I never did, I never worked there, 'cause we had our own store, then. G: You had the general store? A: Yes, l the post offic~ and this, uh, other office, that the �--9- G: A: Immigration guys So I worked there., most of the time. But uh, other than that there wasn't, there was nothing in, in smaller places. Do you remember any people, I'm thinking particularly of women, being really lonely, really sort of cabin-crazy? No. No, I don't think so. Not that I can remember. Everybody was too busy. You knowo Like the men worked steady, ayh, and the women just had to do, take over for the men laid off when they had to work,ayh. And like uh, you just didn't come in and turn a button on, and a stove go, you had to keep your stove up and carry your water in. Heat your water on the stove to wash clothes, and it, and iron ) the iron's on the stove, and this all, you know, it took so much more time than it does these days. So I say laugh. · when that girl said she was tired, pushing a button on an automatic washing machine. Ahh, no I can't ... Oh there was lot's around eh, you know, in the 1 . .m re the farming district, I thinko Yeah, I guess women really isolated, in the country. Yes, but we were never really isolated, because we had mail twice a day,ayh, which is something, because the mainline went right through it, and the railroad carried the mail then. And ah, so we had mail twice a day, and we had, uh, we got fresh fruit and vegetables twice a week. From town her~,they'd come down, on the train. And fresh milk every morning, 'cause it came on the train, too. At one time there was seven trains going by there, ayh, passengers. And uh, So we really weren't~ where we were, we weren't isolated at all because we, ~ other than that we didn't get out too much,. Like I say we made our own fun, and, and we uh, oh we were never without anything. And like, there was a doctor in Schreiber, which is, was nineteen miles awayo And if we needed him, we just phoned through the CPR phone, to the station in Schreiber, and he came down on the first freight. So we really were better off than a lot of places that didn't even, when they didn't have a highway~ ayh. We at least had the mainline going right ~ through. And anything happened, well, they were always kind enough to stop a train and pick anybody up that was hurt, and bring them in to whereever was, to Schreiber, or anywhere. I know all the uh, sick people that had to come to town, they just stopped them, put them on a stretcher, put them in the baggage car. And then we came up with them on the baggage car. So uh, and we'd phone the doctor in Schreiber, and say so and so was on the baggage car, and he'd come in and see if they needed a needle or something. He was a CPR doctor then--and a town doctor too. And if they needed help before we got to town, well he'd give them a needle of some kind, like, you know. And we just stopped in time to expect a train here, and took us to the hospital.The, uh, only thing that we found, the younger ones wouldn't stay there to have their babies,ayh. Like, before the babies were born they came up to town here, or to Schreiber and waited. But the old timers used to have them right in town at home. But no, we were, we were very fortunate there, because, like I say, we were just like on the mainline of ah, uhm, lots of places that's all they, the only thing that was, you know, there was no highways in a lot of those places. So uh, we were, we were, I guess, we never thought of it then, but now I realize that we were lucky, much luckier than most people, where they were isolated away back in the bush. What did~ ~u say, that there was a school in Jackfish? Uhm uhmJ_~ rade one to grade eight. And how ~ Mdid many people go on to high school? Yes, quite a few. And they'd have to go to Schreiber? They'd have to come to town hereo Oh, to here? Uhm uhm, Really? Uhm uhm. There was no high schools i ny of the ~~ 0 G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: 0 ± There was high schools in Sc reiber, but, now, I don't �-10- G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: G: A: understand what the ruling was there, I guess you could have gone there, but it, uh, no, I don't think so. 'Cause nobody ever went into Schreiber too. My son took music lessons, and he had to leave, Like he'd leave ot night at seven o'clock to go to Schreiber, which is nineteen miles away,stay overnight, have his lesson, music lesson in the morning, and come back at noon the next day. But he didn't mind that at all. And first he, the first time he went to White River. He started in White River, but then the music teacher died, there, and eh, I thought "well gees it's much easier to go to Schreiber, because I, that was two days to go to White River, ayh. You went down in the morning, and then you couldn't go back until the next nighto So that was the whole weekend, and he, he used to love to fish, ayh, so uhm, this way he went in at night and he was back in the morning. But eh, no, everybody there, I don't know what the reasono You know, I never thought about thato I think that most of them that came up to high school, wanted uhm, to go to technical school, they didn't just want high school. They did their first year, and then they chose their, what they wanted to do, ayh. I think th¾_s was why they mostly all came up here. 'Cause I know Doqhad to come up here. And anybody that came, eh, it was out p, unless they wanted to go to, eh, to be a teacher, then they had to go to North Bay. There was no teacher's college here then eithero And-a, nursing, they mostly all came here,because at that time there was a residence~fhat they could stay in, ayh,o Now it's all, isn't it alJJJniversity and just ... The college, stays there, yeah. Yeah, uhm uhm. And, 'cause quite a few nurses, quite a few pupils come out, ayh, quite a few pupils came up. Do you recall the, uhm, it would be mostly boys who continued on to high school? Or was it sort of half and half? ~~) No,no, no. Half and half--a lot of~girls, nursing, teaching. Like I say, I know they had to go to North Bay to teach, because when we wer on the road, we were in North Bay,working, and this young girl was in college there, and she used to come down to visit us, ayh. And this is how I know they had to go to school,into North Bay to go to school, Oh no, the, the, girls had uh, came out, there was ai many go , as boys. having more, uh, they were, should go first, were the, uh, foreigners . You know, they thought the boys were, should go, and the girls should stay home. But in among our, we, that was never, .uh, prevalent were we, you know, girls, if they wanted to gOf'\iad the same chance as boys, whereas with some of the foreigners,the boys had to go first. Even if they're dumber. You know. They were the, they were the misters. You mean there were. ~~-_·,:~a:.,~~,.. a lot of foreign families? Yes, there waso Uhm Uhm. What nationality would be ,,.,, ----7. (~) Uhh, uho Mostly Italians, there was ah, a couple of Ukrainian families, but they were mostly *alians down thereo And ah, then all, men that came i o work in the st.mnner, brought their families, in Sudbury ?)o But ah, Did the connnunity, uh, did they reach together? Oh yeso Uhm , uhm, uhm uhm. Like I say, there were so few, ayh, that it took everybody to, to get anything going. But as I can remember, we had some good times. We used to ha ve big picnics, you know, in the summer. And ah, pie socials, kids didn't even know what a pie social was. What's a pie social? It's a box social, where you make this fanc, oh no, fancy, and there was at this, uh, most of the time there was such a competition on who would make the best, the nicest box, ayh. And uh, then you'd have to have it auctioned off, and ... You know, you never hear of those things any moreo That was just something you do for ... I must, I must suggest that to Home League sometime, just for fun. 'Cause their always looking for something different to do, you know. We have teas and, and~things, but that\/ was J1~fent:_ ~-~t\\~ ~\) 5~ �' -11- G: A: And they always said they could tell the teachers ' box, 'cause it was always so much fancier, she had so much to work with, ayh. And I can remember this one guy had quite a crush on this teacher, and ah, this, she just put it in a, in a plain brown box with a bow on it, ayho And this great big fancy box came up, and he thought it was hers, and he bid, bid so way up high. And here it was ~ married woman, she had about six kids. And here comes this box, and he didn't bother, and here it was the teacher'so It went for about a dollar, ayh. But, like I say, everybody had to, to chip in, ayh,because it was, but we had, we made our own mi , we had to go and build our own mi shack, put a stove in, to, to change our shoeso We used to do it in the station, and then the officials got mad and kicked us out of there, so ... But everything seemed to, I don't know, everybody seemed to pitch in and, •o• I guess smaller cotm:Ilunities are like that. I don't know, they always like the ... Like I was telling the kids, I think we had just as much fun then--there wasn't G!.any money, but, but we were fortunate enough that nobody was hard up. And, like I say, if anybody had a problem, everybody was there to help them. .c~1:r --\. Yeah, I've also found that places that women~didn't have so many social service agencies as we do now, there was a whole sort of, policing force within the, in the region. If someone was mistreating his wife, or those kind of prob 1 ems . ~ ere.'s· Yes, yes. Oh yeaho I think A far too much hand-outs these days. I know I did volunteer work and I do meals on wheels, too,ayh. But boy, oh boy, there's some funny things going on there too. I know I used to go � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Herstory Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Herstory: Elizabeth Almos Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Mrs. Elizabeth Almos in Port Arthur, Ontario. The interview was performed by Karen Graves as part of the Women's Decade Council Herstory project. During the interview, Mrs. Almos recalls the social and working conditions of Northern Ontario, primarily focussing on Jackfish, Ontario, in the early 20th century, with topics including housing, mining, railways, unions, the Canadian Pacific Railway, community and personal relationships, and the activity of women. Mrs. Almos also highlights the presence of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and its eventual successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP), in small towns in Northwestern Ontario, specifically Jackfish, Schreiber, Dorion, and Hurkett . The recording consists of two sides of a cassette tape, available here as two MP3 files. (Click on the speaker logo to play each file.) The transcript is available by clicking on the image thumbnail. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Release form was obtained by the Herstory project, allowing the recording to be shared and used. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 PDF Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Audio Text Subject The topic of the resource People Women's History Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Ontario - Port Arthur Canada - Ontario - Thunder Bay https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/60ab5289d6c85aeae7f5d40fad9280c3.mp3 d339c5bc24d7376d30eddd797d792bd5 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/bb5ef2167f96110968675a2d7fbfe8c9.mp3 0627bce914fc4b5ac96ef66943154349 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/163960670b5f385b86195a386ccfe50d.pdf ad8b62432e0209da781bf4e9bc7c40ca PDF Text Text HERSTORY PROJECT T'Irs. Lru-nb interviewed by Helen Lovekin +-AAe.SI'\ J)..\5i1~$i,/ Q, You lived on a farm in Saskatchewan? A. Yes. Q. r7 ere your parents homesteading? A. Yes, my father took the property for homesteading back in Q. Do you have a large family? A. Yes I • and 8 children and Mother and Dad. Q,. T!hen did you move to this area? A. 1924. Q. After you were married? A. After I was married , yes. 18'jQ, Q.. , · ) What made you come here? A, r The dry weather out there, so we decided to come here. And because of the timber - out there ue had no wood , we had to buy coal for fuel. Q, So did you farm here as well? A. TI ell, I guess you could call it farming - hay and we had cattle and horses and pigs and chickens. Q. Jhat did you think of this ·~rea? 'e fell in love with it right a11ay. A. After being on the Prairie, we were about JO miles from the lake and here we got probably right on the edge of the lake, Q. How do you feel about having this papermill here? A. I clon 't know 1-rhat we would do without it. Q, You married in_ Saskatchewan? A, Yes. Q. And your husband was also a farmer? A. Yes. Q. 1 A. At Rscham, north of here - we don ' t pronounce it correctly so they tell us it !here was your farm here? should be pronounced Rikam. Q. 1·!hen you carne here did you have children at that time? A, Yes, I had four of them, two boys and hro f;irls. ~- So your whole family moved here. �A. Q, Yes. A.i A~ ~t [. Q. How did you come down, by train? Yes, we came by train. My husband came in the car with the stock and ·implements and I came with the children in the train. :ere your children very young when you had to be moved up here? 32 and my husband was 36. A. I was Q, So that would be a rather lone jour.aey with children on a train. A. Oh it was, they got very tired ancl the youngest ono, he was 2;~· • he would say everytime the train stopped, "Now come on Hommie, c;et off this rickety old train. " He didn ' t like it at all , he had never been on a train before. Q, What was the home like that you came to here? A. We just stayed with a neighbour we had known before we came doun here. He generously gave us his kitchen to live in until we got a loe; house up on the homestead. Q. How long did that talrn? A. Pive months. Q. So what you had to start off uith in building your home here was pretty rough. A. It was built with rough logs, yes. And there was a small sawmill here and we could get lumber for the floor and the roof. Q. How did you keep it warm? A. By woodstove. Q. ::--,s that very good for heat? A. Oh , yes, wonderful. We had wood stoves out in the Prairies too but He didn ' t have timber so we had to use coal. But here , after being in the country where there was no wood , every chip· and stick was used carefully. f ere you pretty isolated on the farm or did you have neighbors close by? Q. 1 A. Here we had neighbors very close and at the time we came there ·Fere a lot of people coming in here. Q. So here you had neighbors and in Saskatchewan your neighbors 1-wuld be further away. A. They wanted to get away from the dry reL.,ions. You Hould be more isolated? No, about -¼ a mile was the nearest _1eighbor there. That was about the same here. Q. How did the climate here affect you? A, Ue didn ' t find a _:rea.t deal of difference. We had cold winters in the Prairies but He had a lot more rain mre in the summertime. Q. Could I ask. you hou old you are? A. 88 ?Oin~ on 89, �Q. You .:;rew up in Saskatchewan. Your mother also came from England? A. No, my mother was raised in the east . Her parents had come from Scot land ju;:t before she was born. Q. How did she cope with the homestead? A. They f01.md it rather rugged after the east, with all their fruits and nice e;ardens and all that and_ come out to the Prairies where they had to break up the land and gradually work into fruits and vegetables. Of course they started out 1-1ith oxen for p01rer. Q. You would have had a lot to endure, alot of hard Nork and ver-J different from •._,.hat your father ana ::iother uere usGd to. Did she teach you anything about how to cope with life? A. Yes it teaches you patience for one thine;. You just have to be patient and take thini;;S in their stride and as they come. Q. Can you think of any particular incident which demonstrated to you what you would need to have in your later life as a girl? A. i-Je had to make everything. We had to k..l1.it the socks things and make the other clothing from materials. alld mitts and caps and One cliff erence I noticed a great deal now - I remember one time my mother called me in, Eaton ' s in those days used to send out samples of materials for dry goods and my mother got samples and she called me in to pick out a piece that I would like to have for a dress. yard. I chose a nice pink one with little dots in it and it was 5¢ a One year I made the dress - that is something that I have often thought of since the price we had to pay for material now. I wish I had kept a piece of that material. Q. ~an you think of any stories she taught you by her example as a mother? A. She taught the girls all through that we had to take a hand at cooking or dishwashine or getting vegetables prepared. Q. iJhat about education? Was she anxious that you got your schooling? A. By this time, the time I was old enough to go to school, they had e;ot a sort of grant to pay someone to teach in a private home. By the time I was at the school age they had a school building and homemade desks and seats - so they weren't very comfortable to sit on. Q. You had brothers as well? A. Yes, five brothers and two sisters. Q. Were you all encouraged equally to go on with your education? A. Oh yes - I wanted to go on. There was ei€;ht of us all together. But if they i·:rould rather choose some other life - two of my brothers chose railroading engineers. �Q. Did you work before you married? A. Just at home, that ' s all. Q. You are the oldest of the daughters? A. Q. I was the oldest of the family. A. Yes, and I thought that wasn ' t fair. There was the children. You had some additional responsibilities? Too many things I think - she wanted me to supervise and it didn ' t turn out quite right and I got chastized for it. Q,. What kinds of thines were you able to do to brie;hten up your house and make it more into a home? Oh, embroi.elery work and we gathered theso :lowers and bullrushes in the fall and tied them up with - well we would crochet a straie;ht tie and make a little bow on that. Sometimes we put them in a fruit sealer and put them on an organ or something like that. Q. Do you do those paintings? A. I did the center one, the other two are done by. friends. Q. Did you find you had a talent for painting when you were youne;? A. No, this was aft er - my f arnily were pretty near all away when I st a1."t ed to paint. The lady here.was the President of our Women ' s Institute and she was just a natural paintei - she had no schooling on it at all. We were all so keen on her work and she said, ":Jell if you ladies would like to learn, we could arrange for some painting lessons. " So she did. Q. Did you do quilting'? A. Yes, lots of quilts. Q. Did you have one of your children at home? A. Yes, they were all born at home. Q. Who helped you when your time came? A. Just a neighbor lady and then I had the doctor here. Pieces now that we wouldn ' t bother with. There was no hospital like 1101-1. There was a doctor and he had a large community and it was difficult to get him. I just remember my mother telling that when I was born my Dad had to go 20 miles with an ox hitched in a hay. ,,de., to get a doctor. He had a pony of course and could come much quicker. Q. When you were having your children did any of those old stories occur to you about your childhood. Oh, yes, sure. Especially the first one. had gone through. Q. Did it give you more strengh ? It made me think of what my mother �A. ·Jell, I guess it did in a way. Q. you. You would have been brin;;ing your children up in the depression? A. Yes, that was hard because w!?. The things that they needed. You think that if your mother can do it so can couldn ' t get the things that we really wanted. We couldn ' t 6 et the things for their lunch, in fact, that He would like to get. Jhat Hould you be able to get them for their lunch? Q. 1 A. Mostly just a sandwich made of homemade bread and homemade butter and the meat was home cured also. And jam, we picked a lot of fruit and made jam out of that. Q. Being on a farm, I guess you never have to go without food at all? A. No, we were never short of food - we grew our vegetables and I think back now and I see wagon.loads of potatoes and carrots and beets and turnips and things that were cooling in our basement. them all in the winter. Q. We just wondered \how we could get through We irere all ready for next spring and to start again. Would you have to go without or economize on things like clothing or household. utensils? A. Yes, you get one good dress made and that would be handed down from one to another. With my mother, I remember she had her wedding dress, a brown silk, and she had that one for 2.5 years, that was her good dress. Wherever she went she had to wear that. Q. You mentioned the Women ' s Institute. What yeat-: did you join? A. My mother and I had joined to a Homemakers Club in Saskatchewan which is practically the same thing. Q,:. Did you join the Women ' s Institute here shortly after you moved here? A. Yes, in ' 26 we organized our Institute here. Q. Did that help you meet new people in the area? A. Oh, yes. Many of the things we did helped the school and teachers and furniture, The Institute supplied the furniture for the first school. Q. What kind of fund~ raising things did you do? A. We put on concerts and we had a wonderful lot of people here for entertaining. So we put a great deal of thG.t on. Then we made quilts and sold them and we knit caps and mitts and sold them. Q. Did you see the Institute as a club that helped people? A. Oh yes, it Has wonderful. Q. But it was something for yourself too. A. Especially for the Homen. It really raised their lot a good deal. �Q. A. How? By e;etting them all together. ::Xchanging recipes and methods of housework. I don ' t know, perhaps you ' ve heard this story of the lady that first started the Institute. She was just a yotmg girl and I think she was raised near Toronto and she wanted to be a teacher and she became one and in those days they had to teach two or three years in a rural district before they were elegible for a town. So she did this and while she Has putting in her three years out in the country she fell in love uith a youn_:; fellow at the house where she was boarding and finally cot married. She ··rent out ~iving lectures on organizations of the women so after a time - Erlin Lee 1 ·as thon the Minister of Agriculture and he told Mrs. Hoodles'"" that if she 11anted to he would cto all he could to help her. Department. 0 et an organization for women He was the President of the Farmers He did help ui th that a lot because he went ar01md demonstrating and lecturing what the thincs would be like for the women. That is how the or_:anization started and it is still ::;oing. Q. It seems to have cau0 ht on really quickly. A. Our membership now is Q. Did your institute do the T reedsmere histor-J? A. Yes, we ' re doing that. Q. You mentioned that the women organized and you said that 11as a very ___;ood thing, 8½ million. Al~ of course, over the ·world. 1 was there a definite lack of Homen .:;etting together in this community, not sharing things? i. There was lrntil we started organizing the Women ' s Institute. Then they caught into that very readily. Q. How did JOU arrance things so you could have your afternoons or evenings free? Did you leave your children ~ri th your husba..n.d or ... ? A. \e took the children with us. Nothing like a day care centre nouadays, we had to· take our children with us. Caxry them on our backs and go wherever we could. Q. Very often, one hears the idea that women can ' t work together. A. '-le haven't had anything like that - very little. Over 50 years nothing like that has happened that is worth mentioning. Q. It made enough of a difference apparently to the lives of the wom:en to make it ~rnrthwhile. A. It certainly did_. A wonderful difference to women ' s life. Q. 'That did you, what kind of a woman's life did you ~Lead? �A. We had so much work doing, ne couldn ' t get into mis ctt.ef. Q. What kind of work did you do in the farm in Northern Ontario? A. Almost anything - on the Prairies I used to drive the horses and harrow or whatever it waE",,depending on what you had to do. I milked cows, I milked as many as 20 cows at one time. Q. So, in your circumstances, people just did what they could ;md it wasn ' t a matte.I of a man doing this or a woman doing that. A. Oh , . no, doing. If a man iras busy at something else, you took over what he hadn ' t bee:e If you didn't know how you had to learn how,· Q. And the kids would all :~.help too? A. Oh , yes , they were right there to help out. The young people in those days :-rere more willing to do these sort of things. them that 1-fant Today there are very:· few of to do any work. Q. Did you have any time just to sit down ax1d think by yourself? A. Very seldom, sometimes in the evening, especially in the Hinter time. But then you irould be knitting or sewing or something. Q. Did you find that frustratin 0 ? A. No ·rn just enjoyed it. Took each day as it carne along. We had games, we would get together and sometimes in the winter in the afternoon. We all had home- made sleighs for sliding down the hills and we would gather, about 10 or 12 of us, and sleigh r~de for the afternoon ru1d then we would go in and make doughnuts and coffee. timo we played 01. 'rhat was our amusements in the afternoons. tside games all the time. In the swnmer- We would play with the children, "Ring around the Rosy" etc. Q. 1.'ere there dances and things? A. Yes, ue had dances once a month, the difficulty Has to get music for it. Q. TJould it be just local people? A. Just local people. Q. Would the dances be held in the homes? A. Yes. Q. ~That kincl of music - •rould you get accordion, violin? A. Yes , accordion, Violin, ~uitar. Q. Did you use the organ? A. Yes, that was used at many a dance. ~. Did you bring it from Saskatchewan? A. \To , we bought it here - it was the first organ that was sent up to Dryden ... There was no piano. �There Has a teacher here, Mrs.Ryto who came up from the east to teach and in the summer time instead of her ~oing back home, she had her brothers and sisters come out. Also some friends came too. When they. ·went to church here, the Presbyterian Church, and they thought it nas awful because there was no music. You had to have a person Hho 1rould.llead the singing. When they w:int back home they got their auxiliary busy and bought this organ and sent it up here. When they got better off and decided to get a better organ, we bought it from them. It cost $35. I 've been offering *500 now but no one would take it. Q. $500 is not enough. Can you recall when women got the vote? A. Yes, that was a very interestinc; time. every woman to vote. We were very excit·ed and tried to get We had a number of Ukrainian families here and it was hard to get them interested in voting, they joined the Inr;;titute and were _::;reat workers but when it came to voting, they had a different idea. Q. ~Ihat was your iclea about voting? A. I thought the women should have the same opportunities as men. Get the right to vote and excersice your wishes. Q. Do you remember any of the d_emonstrations or speeches on the part of the suffra.a-ettes? A. I don't thinI<; _.we had few of them. Q. How alJout in Saskatchewan? A. Yes, I think there :Tere more than down here. They -rnre more excited about the vote up there. Q. Do you remember the attitude of some of the men a.rouncl here? When women were first allowed_ to vote. A. Oh, yes, the :1en thouc;ht He should stay home and mind the babies - that ' s what they told us. Q. But you didn ' t listen to them. A. No. There was one man who before he got married had_ given h7s lady love a ring with ten little diamonds in it and a pearl in the center. Well, she was look- ing at it and admiring it and he says, "That is ten boys and one girl" and she said, "You ' d better Get an incubator. 11 Q. What did it feel liI:e when JOU ca.st your first ballot - did it feel like you had gotten somewhere? Yes, I had the feeling that Tm were rising a little bit anyway. �Q. ··J ere you :involved in any suffragette activities or the Women ' s Christian Temperance Party? A. Yes, v-re 1-?-Sed to help 1-1ith that too. That was more on the Prairies. Q. Tiow do you feel about the women ' s movement· today? Do you feel that we are still 1--rorking for the same thing? Yes, it seBms that it is the same as me, maybe I ' m old fashioned - it seems that we are going up another step. Q. Thincs toe 1: a lon[., time. A. Yes, that is right. 4-. Has your family affected by either of the wars'? A. rnl.l it goes back to my i:::;reat grandfather , he fought in the Boer War and my grandfather was in the African War and then my father was in the, I can ' t remember nhat year that was because he didn ' t go overseas, he was just training on tho P:iairie and then ny h!o sons were in the last war. Q. Hhat was it lil:e after seeing the First Vorld War and they say that this is the war to end all wars - to have to send your boys off to a Second World War? A. We didn ' t agree with it at all. setting thi1v-s. We thought there should be some other way of Rather than taking a King or a country all the time. Q. r?hat kind of work did the women do here after the rfar? A. Beside homesteadin~? Q,. ]hat about the wo~1en that stayed home? A. They 1rnre working for them and !r.nitting thin__,s to send overseas and caxming ....... . vegetables and fruits and meats to send over. Q. Did that accomplishment make the women feel that they doing something if.re for the covntry? A. Yes, I think that they felt they were really helping with the Q. The more I hear about women Imitting clothes etc., the more I think that the Har. governmeiTt didn ' t issue them. Ue also heard that there seemed to be more of a committment on the civilian women ' s part, to the First World 1lar. They seemed to work harder for it than the Second. A. I ' ve heard that too, but I couldn ' t say that it was so. or dmm here. Either in the nrairi.e Women worked equally as hard in one ·war as the other. I suppose if your children are involved, it becomes much more personal. Hhat do you think was one of the hardest parts of being a farm woman? It is much easier nowadays. The fa:cmwomen have as many household conveniences as do city people. Q. -rould there be a chore that you particularly hated to do? �A. Oh , yes , dish-rashing for one thing. Q. Hating dishHashin 6 sure hasn ' t A. No it hasn ' t, even if I do have a dishwasher. Q. Unlike a lot of women your age , you are not telling us that we should be home 0 one out of style. having babies and looking after them and you are quite interested about the affairs of women. Why do you think you picked that up? From my mother I think. She was very much that waJ. She was very much in favor of better conditions for ,;,rnmen. Q, Was there any pa-.:-ticular reason? A. All the uonen around her, especially on the Prairie, they just did as much work as the nen really. Q, You are prob2bly familiar with the Irene Murdock case out in the Prairies? '-That Hore your vie--s on that? A. I don ' t k.Y101-1 what to think of that. So far we haven ' t got too much information on it, Q. Y0 u told us that most fa...rm women worked hara_ if not harder than the men , so if something happens to their family, do you think it should be divided eq_ually between them? A. I think that Nould be a proper thin - if they worked equally hard. Q. The Homen have to work outside 0:1 the farm as Hell as inside, and often they a.re a man ' s work persay, did the men in your family ever share any of the chores inside the house? A. Oh, yes, some of them did, but f'ome of them 11ould.n ' t take to the housework at all. My crandfather and my father Pere quite willing to take a tun1 at Nash- in~ tho dishes or peeling potatoes. Q. Even noP if you . . an cret your brother or your boyfriend or your husband to wash your dishes it is a real accomplishment. Did your husband help you out with your children? Yes, he was alnays willin2: to do Hhatever he could. I was raised in such a large family that I ~ot used to doing everything in connection ·with If I asked_ him to clo things he was willing to do it. children. Sometimes he -:rould say , "I '11 do it if you shm, me how" . Q. How did you feel about other women who would do twice as much work as their husbands - workin 6 outside and then working inside} _ ,· A. n e had one case like that that used to rile me because he was a school teacher and he wn1.1.ld go out and set out so many yards of land for his wife to clear �vhile he was teaching . Q. Chopping up wood? A. Yes, cutting the :wod and clearin0 the stumps and everything. That used to a11noy me. Q. A. Did you ever speak :-Ii th her about it? No, I never , it 1-1asn ' t my business . I clidn ' t want to make trouble between them. If she was willing to do it for him, I guess it was best just to leave it as it was . .That was it like in a rural community if there was a familJ and sonebody was being mistreated but there were no e:overnment agencies? A. I don't know just how far the neighbors could have gone, but in this case, they didn't do anything. If they - sometimes, some of the ladies Hould co over a.Dd help her, clear the brush etc . Q. A. Q. A. Q. .That about in a case where sO), eone drank too much and Nould 3et violent? In that case, some of the men would interfere. So if somebody was beating their wife, a neighbor Nould come a.Dd oeat them? I don ' t know whether they would l)eat him or not but they would do somethinc;. So you had your mm policing force. How far north Fas the community youllived in? h. Fifteen miles north. Q, So did you get into town much? A. ITo, it 1·as a year and a half before I ever sa1;-: it. our home up and tho ba_rn for the stock and We were too busy :;ottins chickens. Q. .Tould it be a treat if you had to come into town? A. No because you had to ride in a wagon and there was no road. I dread to think .C' 0.L •.J.. l v now. Q. So it wasn ' t something you looked forward to doing? A. No. Q. When your chlldren were grown up did you begin feeling lonely? You ' d worked so hard to establish this home. No because I had some knitting or sewing or somethin.:; to do. time for lonliness. There was no Evelyn , the eldest one , she was only 13 and I had to send her to Winnipe.3 to go to college because she wanted to be a teache:c. Two years later, FraYJ.ces wanted to be a bookeeper so I had to send her to Winnipeg too. I had to pick be::,'.,~ies to pay for their board. Then I got working for some lady who wanted me to be there with her children when she was going out. �I worked for the board &'1.d that helped out a lot. Q. So in the early days you 11ould. pick berrie,... a.rid ··hat?, sell A. No, just sell the bo~cries. ja.1~1. I used to }ick abovt a $100 worth and that rras a lot of money in those days. It was a lot of berries too. long would it take you to' pick a $100 worth? Q. H011 A. All the berry season, as soon as the berries got frozen He couldn ' t sell them ' mymore. Fe would start about the 20th of July but there wouldn ' t be very many for pickine; and later on into Au6ru.st a day, my husband and I. Q.. He could pick maybe three baskets The children would pick maybe two baskets each. So you believe as long as you can keep active and do something useful there is no reason to be lonely. A. That is the way I feel. I've aJ.ways been that way. Q. Aside from your mother, can you think. ·of any other 1romc1.1'1 1·rho affected your life or tho Hay :,rou thouzht? . i . No, unless for my grandmother or mother ' s mother. She was a very proud Scot and I used to have to go stay with her during the winter because my uncle was up at the barn most of the day and she 1-ras getting on in years and they were all afraid she might take ill or something so I had to go and spend my winter months there. I remember one clay, their cattle weren ' t used to children, just :rown ups so one day she as:::ea_ me to take the potatoe peelings out to where the cows were milking. .Ana_ I didn't like to go. I wa.s afraid of those great big long hornecl cattle. She asked what was the matter with me a.rid I said I was afraid of their lon.; horns and she said, "Ah, la.ssie you do not trust your Lord or you Hould not be af ~aid to 6 0 out there. " lone way from me, Hhen those cattle got after me. 0 I thought , the Lord was a Q. So ·a lot of determination Has in your family. A. Yes, on both sides - my mother and father both were determined and I guess that is T;rhat pulled them throush. Q. ;rere they very strict on you as a child? A. Just about the sru.1e as all the children were. The parents were a great deal more stricter than they are today. Q, Were you as strict uith your mm children as your mothGr was? A. No, I a_on 't think Q. Hhat were the sort of thin_;s that you didn ' t want to do to them? A. I always tried to strai..;hten things out without trying to spank them. =1-ras. I didn ' t �like that idea. I think that was just taidnt: the spanking out on them for nothinc:; really. If you start when they are young and make them understand 11hat they should do and what they shou.ldn ' t'"·do, then you don ' t need to do the spankinz that some :people do. Uhat they call child···beating now. Q. How important was the Church in your life? A. Very much so until we did come doim here. Dryden was the nearest church and if you didn ' t mm a tcalfl of horses and a wagon you co1..lldn ' t '-·o in time to t;;et there. So we us Pd to have 81..ma_ay school and every Sunday it would be in a :iiff erent ho:-ne. Ue i-rould have a:.,-1 elderly man take the boys and nen and &"1 older lady for the older ones and I generally had the little one5. Q. 1 Tas the Sunday school important because it brouglt people together? A. Oh, yes, in that way. r'le used to get the missionairies that came in a.11.d they were statj_onea_ at Sioux Lookout and he vrob.ld come up once a HeeI: and l"old service in the evenings here,, at the different houses. Q. Did you ever ~et your mm church? A. r-.rot up there, no. He came out to Dryden and I think He had 7 churches here. Do you live here? A. No. A. I Tras 1-~ondering if you lived here you would I:noN "better the number of churches. Q. If you Trere our age is there aJ1ything you nould like to do? A. I 1 ron ' t say I'd like to do it over a.;ain lJecause I could make a lot of correct- ions. Q. ',Jhat nould A.. A number of thinbs I had to put up Pith a.11.d I didn ' t like. Q. 1 A. Different people coming in to settle here. JOU like to correct? Jould it be too personal to ask 1·~hat. they are? Sone of them would come in and they would be quite socialble and help out Hith everything. be Thm there would others that 1rould come in that would just seem to fight and ·o acainst ··•ha;t you were tryin 6 to do all the time. a lot. That was one thing that bothffced me Q. Here there many non-English spealdng immigrants? A. Yes, there was quite a lot of them. Q. Was there much interaction bebreen those people? And yourselves? A. They tried to mix with them and get them to see their way and try to impress upon them that they were in this country now and that they weren ' t in their ola_ country, and these were new rules that they had to abide by. �.J . .,~\. For instance, when the women __:ot the vote - espel::ially the Russians, they could not see that the women should get a.r1y vote at all. She should just do what he.r husband Hanted her to do. Q. . ould this be the views of the Russian men or the Russian women or both? A. The Russian men mostly, but the ~-~omen too. That is all they ever k..new. As things Hent on and they rr-ot older, then they couJ.d see our views. Q. How involved was the ·romen ' s Institute in wonen ' s rights? A. They ::-eally took a leading part here. Q. What kinds of things, other than the vote? A. Tho lady that or._;anized it - Mrs. Hoodless - she went around and practically cspent the rest of her life going around and lecturing and getti:h 0 women to join,. the Institute. Sometimes I ' d hear stories of women walking twenty miles through the snow dmm East to get to wherever she was lecturing. Q. Do you recall the views of some of the men in your community towards the Insi tutE A. They nere just as ea[;er to see it a success - they did ail sorts of things to help. ~- ~fas that because you did so much social work as well? A. It might be, yes. Q. 'Jhat do you think of the chru.1ge in women ' s roles? A. It is much ea,sier for them al though there is a certain, d e,_;ree of "tryinc to keep up with the Joneses " . ;Je dicii1 ' t do that, we 11ere satisfied wit h oui; :_ l og cabin and woodstove. Q. Insofar as she has changed in society - how laws have chcmged - instead of saying we are asking f o:r things we are fightin9 for then no~-1 and sometimes we set listened to. Are you glad to see this happen? A. I guess we will all be able to ha-rn somebody to carry on the work. ~. I hope so. A. . ........ there are women here who might be able to 6 i ve you more information than I can. Q. You ' ve been very interestins. A. There are 62 residents here. Q. Do you enjoy livin~ here? A. Yes, but when you ' ve been used to living in your try to keep busy. 01m home it ' s different. I . I usually spend the summer out at the farm but this sprin6 I had a call stone attack aYJ.d they wouldn ' t let me rro out there aion-e. Q. You macle dresses and things from A. No, f:~om flour bae;s. tobacco pouches? Tho~r v1eren ' t itchy, they we1."'c smooth after you Hashed them. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Herstory Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Herstory: Eva Lamb Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Release form was obtained by the Herstory project, allowing the recording to be shared and used. Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Mrs. Eva Lamb in Dryden, Ontario. The interview was performed by Helen Lovekin and Karen Dubinsky as part of the Women's Decade Council Herstory project. During the interview Mrs. Lamb discusses living on a farm in Richan. She moved from Saskatchewan to the Dryden area in 1924, after she was married. She discusses the effect of the wars, raising children during The Great Depression, and women’s suffrage. There is a focus on family life when she was growing up and when she had children of her own. She was an active member of The Women’s Institute in the area and describes the role it had in bringing women together. This recording consists of two sides of a cassette tape, available as two MP3 files. (Click on the speaker logo to play each file). The transcript is available by clicking on the image thumbnail. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 PDF Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Audio Text Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Ontario - Dryden Subject The topic of the resource People Women's History https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/80015bcb0b1896dd779115222e8a99d7.mp3 7864cb6fd1e2eeb6f52d49e2cd73dfa6 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/5b809326085f5e608a1cfb1c28892ba6.mp3 c6df8efcda58db1010370169bb508415 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/5fb275888be553dc27019b0504bf328a.pdf 0d4ef5066ba8d7025f6681928ebe73ab PDF Text Text J HERSTORY PROJECT Mrs. Kamstra interviewed by Georgina Garrett Q. A. Q. A. I'd like to talk about the relationship between women out in the country were women close to each other, was there a lot of co-operation? They were all very independant ... Yes. You had to be close enough to feed a threshing gang. What do you mean, feed a threshing gang? The threshing gang would come in and the man with the machinery - there would be a man who had a threshing machine, and he made it pay by going around to farmers and threshing for them. The usual thing was the waiting for-the thresher to come around. When the threshing gang came with the thresher, which was as many neighbors as possible, so the farmer's wife has to cook a whole bunch of pies, because no farmer's wife would thin.k of having a threshing dinner without scads of pies. So the pies had to be made and the roast had to go in and you couldn't do it alone - that is when you had to be close to somebody. I used to be jealous of the men because they had a great deal going for them, they seemed to have a lot of fun, what with the dirty jokes going around, and the only person who had a hard part was the owner of the farm. He had to do the dirty work, he had to stay in the maw? that is where all the junk and charr'··goes and that is the jo·b for the family whose grain is being threshed. So th~y would go in with kerchiefs and red handkerchiefs and they would come out of it with bloodshot eyes, and it was very hot weather and that job was the hard part, but only when it was on your place. I saw that this was fun for the men and a sweat for the women, but then what I noticed about the old-timers was that they got such a big high - the women out of producing enough and with quality, then everybody would say, whether they meant it or not, what a wonderful dinner that was. The closeness that had happened in the early days, I used to wonder about it because they lived so far apart and they had to walk to visit, so that a visit meant a whole day, and they would spend a whole day with their neighbor. Then they would have it to talk about when they got home, but they weren't in each other's hair a whole lot, they would really put all their effort into going to that place for a whole day. When I came to the country, that was all over. Those \ �people were reminiscing about the good old days and what they had had and how close they were. But in reality I used to wonder how this was because it didn't happen very often that they got together. Q. Maybe it was more of the quality than the quantity. A. I think so. Q. In what year were you born? A. '20. Q. How long have you lived in South Gilles? A. I went there first in '38, I went to Scobo\!. which is in the S. Gill es area, I think the deep issues had to be dealt with on those days. three miles away from Gilles. That was my school, down there. I was there for two years. Q. Can you talk about how you became a teacher? A. Yes, I was born in England an9- I was a baby when we came to Canada. Did you say you were British? My parents came from Surrey in 1921 and my father's family had to come here in 1913, My grandfather was brought here to be the city roads supervisor and all his life he seemed to gripe a lot because when he got over here, assuming that this job was waiting for him, they had given the job to somebody else. Q. What was it like for your grandmother coming from England to Thunder Bay? A. She was another very determined little lady. She was five feet tall and my grandfather was six feet three inche~ she was so short that she had no lap. She had quite a strong temp-er and she was uneducated, she couldn't write and she had to sign her name with an 'X' I think. by his sister so he Imew how to write. My grandfather had been taught She just fought her way. When my mother came in 1921 we were afraid of Gran Adie. Q. Did your mother come over as a child? A. My mother married Gran Adie's oldest son. She came to Canada in '13, then there was the war and my father, her son, was in the war so afterwards he and his bride .... Q. So your mother was a warbride? A. No.not exactly. They had been married. in England and had my older sister, so there was a four year old and a one year old come to Canada. My grandmother had this fight to survive, so much so, that my mother could har:aJ.y survive. Have you seen the show "Upstairs, Dmmstairs", well my mother wasaa downstairs. She was a housemaid, she would be very angry if l did.n 't get her proper position. She was a parlour maid which was a little further up the rung. She had learned from the aristocracy some of the social graces and some of the fLr1er things. She had access to music and art and she wanted her children 7- �to have some of the finer things in life. earth you know, By God. My grandmother was right down to The thing to do was to make money, and making money was what my grandmother was about doing. Q. How did she go about that? A. She pushed my grandfather, and he never measured up. She was just a woman. He did the best he could. She came to Canada thinking she was going to be the wife of the city engineer and it didn't work out that way. My grandfather got the supervisor of the incinerator job down at the end of town where nobody who was a nice person was supposed to go. That was a whole part of my life, that I used to go down and visit my grandfather at the incinerator and found such lovely, warm people dmm there. My poor mother was afraid that if we went down to that end that we would be raped. It was really such an. education and right away I cuuld see the pulls as a little one. Q. Very class conscious. A. Our street in Westf ort - Brooks St. - there were Roman Catholic and Protestant fights. We were Anglicans and most of the people down that md were United Church and Methodists and Presbyterians and they were having their little thing. Besides that there were the Italian immigrants up the road that every- body caJ.led waps and we wea.-e not aJ.lowed to call waps. Then there were the Poles and the Ukrainians and there was a reaJ.ly strange thing that you couldn't figure out. We were not allowed to go out of our gate, other kids were al- lowed to play on the Francis St. playground and there was a mix-up of the races there, but from my mother's background, she had to keep us English, but my grandmother was going to stay English but she was going to fight her wa;y out there. She was rough, very class conscious, but she was go:ing to be up because she had been down in England. As I got older I discovered that this was an ingredient of the immigrants of all of the races, and the ones who came here were the fighters and that's why we had so many fights. They had to survive and the only way they knew how was to push the other down. My maternal grandmother was the same and I didn't know her but I heard and I've gotten to know some of my cousins in England and her daughters, half of her family said that she was a "proper bitch" but my mother adored her, so the other said that mother would favor a daughter - there was a lot of sibling rivalry going on. But that old girl brought all her dau&1ters - she had a family of te:n and eight survived, four girls and four ,lx>ys and she brought the daughters through the terror of the war._ by her strange strength and by J �her ability to do midwife things. People were afraid of her but she was also in charge when there were crisis situations. She was an amazing woman that none of the cousins or second cousins Imew. She wouldn't hesitate to leave the old man - she did the terrible thing of separating from the old man. Q. Was there very m'l;ich separation? How common was that in the c·ountry? A. Mrs. Turk saw for herself a role that was more than being a mother. Q. Was that because she had been a teacher? t. I think so. She had experienced being put up on a pedestal and she liked it. She had a way of talking, she didn't talk like the rest of toem, she talked with a bit of an accent, I don't know quite what it was. little American sinoe her mother was American. to have change take place in people. -- Could have been a There was a lady who was able She was able to do it with kindness and warmth and streffi.h and she was no underdog. She was quite beautiful. She kept her Anglicanism and when I first moved out into the country I was an Anglican and she used to come, she was a·bout 80 yrs. old, to our house. Our new little house, the bride in the community and we would have the priest come to our house for Communion and there was just this quality about her. +'\thought she was a lady because her behavior met with my ideals of what a woman should be. Her husband was a very amusing man, she used to do the right and proper thing and she didn't believe in booze. But old Bill Mitchell, who was the dearest, sweetest, funniest man - going through rough days but being able to see the funny side. He used to say that he unscrewed his wife's blueberries in order to get a little bit of fermented juice down. away with that - I don't know whether she knew it or not. He got From what I know of her, she probably knew it and let him get away with it. Q. How do you think they raised their daughter so that she had the gumption to leave her husband? A. I don't know. All I ever knew of Annie was that I felt sorry for her. In getting into the education thing.·:like me, you start to feel yourself being pulled away from the people that you love. Being put on some kind of a level that you '.re not prepared for and don't want. Because you have the name schoolteacher. Q. Can you talk about that level? The women teachers ..,I have talked to didn't talk about that, I know they were respected - but what kind of respeci;? A. It was resptct for a person who could lift themselves up to such a status as a teacher - they really had a high expectation of a teacher. �You couldn't live up to that because you had a certain area of expertise and it was very, very, narrow. You went into a culture that was foreign to you and you had to learn about the culture in order to funct ion. Sometimes you had to get in there and ask questions that were embarrassing. I asked too many why questions. I know that They became threatening to people - usually the wives or mothers of the families I taught. They would be people that you knew and immediately they would start play acting in some strange way that I couldn't understand. It would be a kind of "put the teacher down" game. "Put her in her place", I felt, but I couldn't understand what place. didn't understand their jokes, because it is a cultural thing. I I didn't understand why I had to be called Peaches, why couldn't I have been called Freida? You have to have a nickname here, so I tried to understand it but it didn't fit right with me. Then there were the husbands who flirted with me and who came on fast at the dances. I had to keep that to myself - I didn't understand it - I was only 18, and I was the teacher, this almighty teacher. I needed somewhere to go to talk about these funny things that were going on between the mothers of the children and the fathers. I could see that some of the fathers were doing mean things to their wives, and the wives didn't Imow. The wives were providing - they went out to the blueberry patch - although there is a side issue here since the wives got freed.om in the blueberry patch. That was also a status thing, how many better berries you can put on the table. The women had to provide the food, and I noticed that in one or two families that I boardedwwith, that the big thing for the father to do was to e;o out and hunt. in the fall to make sure there was enough meat and yet the wife had to stay home and do all the cutting of the wood to keep them warm, and harnass her kids to that. Q. You were a teacher in the time of male supremacy,- and yet most of the teachers were women, and were highly respected. A. It's not quite respect. It was respectiin the way that they were being looked at "respicio" - the latin word. at and they were being tested. And they were really being looked Tested against the former teacher. I had a Danish woman who used to come in and she had come to Canada with her husband and she was having this male-female fight. It was a fight - he used to chase her doim the road in the night and he had some kind of a drum ... it was really weird. Eventually I got to thinking that these people were crazy. She had been the former janitress and when I came, I was a new 5 �teacher and they also had a new janitor and so she was going to see what she wanted in the building because it had been hers before". She used to come around and peer through the windows and ask me questions about my program. I was scared of her and she was an example of the way the teachers were being tested. When the mothers would get together the teacher was alQ. A. way~ the topic of conversation. Do you think it was because the teacher was so important in their childrens life, and the mothers hoped that they would rise above their station, so the teacher was responsible? Yes, I'm sure, but the teacher wouldn't dare letoon ... for example, I remember one of the fathers giving me the third degree on Shakespeare. And to teach after Grade 10 and what I knew about Shakespeare was what in high school and it was Macbeth and Hamlet, and if he got me out I was sunk. But I didn't dare tell him because he was a member of I had I got of that the school Q. board. It doesn't sound like you enjoyed being a teacher that much - some of the A. other women say it was a great part of their lives. Maybe they say so but at that time, there were many of us who had great doubts and breakdowns. When we could get into town we had a Saturday where we would just talk shop all the time and we'd exchange seat work to keep the kids busy next week. Our real community on the education line had to be the teachers getting together on Saturday - had to keep that connection in order to develop our teaching skills. If you talk to me about the Christmas concerts-never have I reached that peak of power and creativity. That was mighty powerful stuff - you used your whole being and every scrap of paper and every crayon you could get a hold of and you had nothing, not even toilet paper to work with. You had to produce a Christmas concert and by God if you didn't you were fired, because the Christmas concert came right before the annual school board meeting, when you weren't there, and many teachers, if their concert didn't measure up were fired. Q. What things made the conditions of the concert so significant? A. It was the one thing that everybody went to and brought them all together with shared purpose. It took care of all the aches and pains of the year. There were tears and there was laughter and hugging, and bottles passed around. Santa Claus was usually drunk and you hadato have a few under your belt to play the part. I don't think I'm exaggerrating, everyone was there, so the �struggle for survival was forgotten, it was a ritual which mended the hurt feelings. If the teacher had a creative bent at all, then she collected a big ;high from the Christmas Concert, and a sense of power. I got the sense that this was what I was created for. , I can do this and do it well. The sad pa.rt was that like all things it got out of balance and some teachers thought that the focal point was the concert, started practising for it in September. The academic part of it was lost therefore, the inspectors dictated that the concert had to go. There doesn't seem to be a place where the community can get together now. Q. Why didn't many women have anything to do with the Women's Institute? A. That sounds as if not many did but a lot of women did and it did serve an educational meet, and a social meet. least once a month. Oh God how they needed that meet at The Women's Institute as you '11 notice is not a big organization, numbers-wise, ... Q. The number of wanen in . the countryside are shrinking. A. That's not so, maybe it is. powering. In my communitythe young women there now is over- I am so surrounded by young wives now, more than I've ever been. It's not trueethat the population of women are shrinking in my community. Q. Women, one in particular, attributed the decline of the Women's Institute' in her community with the introduction of automobiles. You are now able to drive into the city and have much more leisure time, so that rural values and comerad.erie were no longer necessary. A. There is truth in that. I suppose it is hard for any organization to be flexible enough to meet the changing needs. That's what happened in my estO imation - they d'idn 't have either the knowledge? or the understanding? who had any understanding of what was happening in the sixties? the Women's Institute understand it? input from the people. How could There was no roomiin their format for You did the 4-H program, and I also remember when I gqt into the Indian communities how badly those people asked. They wanted to Imow recipes, they wanted to Imow how to live in the present when they had to deal with food out of cans and different food. the very program that the Institute was offering. They were asking for The 4-H clubs were mar- vellous and they taught how to sew, and cook and also a lot of creative craft and they had experts in the field brought into the community so that you weren't getting old hat information - you were getting top notch infor- 7 �mation on budgeting_ and so on. The Department of Agriculture had that pro- gram, Indians were wanting it but the Department which is behind the Women's Institute - I talked to the top people in the Department personally - they couldn't do it, they couldn't change the program. That was an example of why the Institute failed. Q. It couldn't change the program to adapt to Indians? A. Yes, for inst.ance, these people couldn't write so they had to keep notes. Q. It sounds likeyyou were rather ostracized from the S. Gilles community because of your priveledged. position in your husbands' household compared to other farm women. Were you ever able to establish a feeling of closeness with neighboring farm women? A. I found that happened now, only now. Q. Did midwives ever help you? A. No, I had my children in a hospital. The only emotional experience I had with that was when I first came to the country in '38 and one of the little boys who I was teaching in Grade One, his mother had died in childbirth. Aunt Cassie had been there and the doctor from Hymers had been called but they couldn't with their expertise, save her. anything about midwifery. After that I didn't hear 6nly the very poor people took advantage of that. I remember a Hrs. Barret - she used to deliver some of her neighbor's babies. That was in the '40's. Q. How did the climate and envioronment of N.W.O. specifically affect your life? How was it different being a woman in N.W.O. as opposed to the Praries? A. Elsie Couch's father was the pioneer of H:¥Jllers. They came in and they got into the surveying and the men in those days seemed to get access to the outside world and the women got "bushed". This was the word that was used. Q. Hhat did ''bushed' mean? A. I don't really Imow, except that the women who used it to me said that "I'm getting bushed", and she hungered to be in the town where things were going on, to talk to people. It was used by other people in a sort of way the people took for meaning that someone was going crazy. eral women who went that way. I have known of sev- I'm thinking of several whose burdens were so great and there was no place to go. If they went to any tof these strong women, their message was that "you have to be strong", and they couldn't. So they just left the world of reality, and that is how I assessed beine; "bushed". Mr. Hy.mers was a beautiful, intelligent, wise man but his wife �was said to be crazy, you could.n 't communicate with Iher. She died at 60. Mrs. George Hy.mers. With the Mi tchells and with the Couchs, with the Hy.mers - these were people from affluent parts. The Couchs came from Absley Ontario and they had already raised their kids and they brought the last half of their family up here to start freshebecause of _ _ _ __ killing the old man Moses. The Hl{Illers were adventerors, and wanted to see it all. The next generation something happened, since they d.idn 't have access to education. In comes a green little school teacher and they a.re suprised at the lack of better education. One of that man's daughters told me a story of her uncle who had been caught, stuck down by a thunderbolt and she had the thunderbolt on the fireplace to prove it. Now that is just the next generation you see. Q/ A. Q. A. She didn't' know 1·rher8 China was, their world was there and that was all. It was an urban platter of e;oodies that they resented. Partly that, but there was something else. It had to do with the male-female thing because the teacher was a threat, she was someone who could, and felt it necessary, and the measure of her was how she could stand up to a man, and to the school board. The school board boys were caught in this attraction and making a man out of her too. How did you deal with that personally? I was very naive and the only thing I knew was that I was a woman and a woman gets married. It is very good that I have my teacher's certificate and I'm glad I had that training because at least I could give m~ kids something that the others didn't have. That whole thing was in my heart but then I saw how it separated - just with b~ing with me - the mothers in the country refused to realize that they were also teachers. I could.n 't do anything really worthwhile unless I took all the kids, so I got myself involved with the children. I had to go through about ten years of undoing and unlearning and to turn myself in some direction. I could function with the children because they were honest- there was no way I ought to have discussed anything with the parents - there leave you with the impression that I hated longed in the Women's Institute and that is she couldn't tolerate the Women's Institute now there was a woman who was strong in her while was no way I could. I probably all people who believed and benot so. But Vi for instance, - Vi Woodbeck, your aunt opinions about J:Ihat is worth- �She could.n 't stand all this bloody gossip - she couldn't take it - she hadn't the time for it. There was too much to be done, she had to raise all her kids and Orbie was so beautiful and sexy and women all just loved Orbie. just had it with the women. He Attractive young wives and women, he made them feel great - but he didn't know how to earn money. She had to feed the kids so she had to work and she didn't have time to spend at a bloody meeting. Q. A. Your grandmother didn't go to the Women's Institute. They were sort of solitary, they didn't open up much. Mrs. Garrett opened up to me. I found her far from solitary. She looked after my kids when I decided to go back to teaching, because they couldn't get teachers when my kids needed teaching. Q. A. This was in the fifties, '58. Well she was quite old then. Yes, I guess so. She came and looked after my kids and did the housework while I went and taught school. She was very free. There was a closeness among the women but there was also a very destructive grapevine. When things were okay - if I need your friendship right now, I'll accept your inadequacies and I will acPept you as a friend. But if a time comes that you might beat me out in a power struggle, then I'll use that information you gave me, against you. Mrs. Kamstra told me to stay out of the organization and if you go into it, be very careful of what you let out. I think that was a truism and it's a natural human thing. Q. Is there an interesting story or anecdote about your life or another woman's life you would care to relate? A. My favorite story - I'm 18 years old and Mrs. Nielson with the brown eyes and crazy look has been coming two or three times a week and harassing me. It is about quarter to nine and I'm at the school - I walked the mile to the school - some of the kids have to come three miles and some on bare feet. What they had for lunch was lard on stale bread. They also had lice in their hair and they had to have it c.u t off because they had so many scabs. coping with this as a Westf ort girl who had never been to the country. woman is coming and telling me I don't know how to run a school. she came in again and I was frightened. I'm This This day She came, up to me again and I broke down and I was so mad at myself for crying but I didn't break down when she was there. She had left and wen to get her mail where she told all the stories of what was going on in the school. I had 33 children and up to grade nine that year. Colleen Haywood nee Lark was in that school and her brother �Bill and Art, Art was 13 years old, and he had a crush on me. We were in love with each other I think, he was a terribly attractive boy and he made my life almost impossible for me because he teased me and he wouldn't do his work and he goaded me into disciplining him. He was the first one to come into school after Mrs. Nielson left - he had just walked two miles. He caught me crying and asked me what was the matter and I told him what Mrs. Neilson had said about our school. He asked me where she went and I told him that she propably went to get the mail. I then decided I had better get the work on the board and then I went to ring the bell and there were no kids. my kids with Art Lark in the lead paraded into Mrs. Nielson's yard. that I had really done it now - there's going to be war for sure. All I thought Then the kids came back and they were angels that day and when they came in Art told me that she wouldn't bother me again. And she didn't. Somehow I guess that gave me the strength - I've always relied on the kids. I became a community with the kids rather than with the parents. That is a moment in my life that stands out. Q. Do you remember Aunt Cassie at all? A. No, I just remember her horse. People had a lot of respect for her. Those two women - Vi Woodbeck and your grandmother - . the way they went about being themselves, they wore the pants in the family. father, I think he died soon after I crune. women. I am. I don't remember your grand- They were considered strong Pinky is the next generation and Elsie is quite a bit younger than They have been going all around, visiting those country people, all around the mail route, I don't know how many years. or longer. Maybe 15 .,or 20. years They had been at the pulse of the c.ommuni ty. That is were you pick up the news of who is dy.ing, who is pregnant and who is sleeping around, this kind of gossipy stuff and it's chewed over by the regular folks. You find out the values of the community right there, and those who were deviating from it. They seemed to be doing a very subservient job to people, they are waiting on their husbands a lot of them thought. I have heard over the last 3 or 4 years from someone of some of the unpaid, loving jobs that they have done because they wanted to. The lonely women who are out there get connected by that truck coming around, and the women who can't speak English or write it, depend on them. Pinky g oes out on that truck and she is all sort of rattly sometimes, and she doesn't know the value of her work at all. Even if you told her, she wouldn't believe you. . .... My salary was$690 per year. �• They kept it under $700 because of some bookwork. get a thousand dollars. It was always like that. Men doing the same would There was something so priceless and precious about men at that time because so many had been killed. Killed in the war, so that when I went to normal school there were only 8 boys and one of them is the head of education here, in town. I was a better school teacher, I know I was, I rated much higher, marks-wise. But there was no way I would aspire to be the Director of Education. Q. What were the war years like in South Gilles? A. It didn't touch us too much. of them did not go overseas. friends which affected me. Except the people whose boys went over. Most It was my high school chums and my brother's My husband had to stay on the farm, they made him stay there. It says here about the positive change in the women's role in the community - I think there is a very strong change. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Herstory Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Herstory: Freda Kamstra Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Permission to make this interview public has been given by Freda's granddaughter. Subject The topic of the resource People Women's History Description An account of the resource Oral history interview with Mrs Freda Kamstra by Georgina Garrett. The interview is a part of the Women's Decade Council Herstory project. The recording consists of two sides of a cassette tape, available here as two MP3 files. (Click on the speaker logo to play the file.) The transcript is available by clicking on the image thumbnail. The interview uses language that is no longer used and may be offensive in nature. The interview begins with Freda speaking about companionship between country women. This is spoken about through the lens of cooking large meals to feed groups of men working the threshing machines. They go on to speak about Freda's and her families past including their immigration from England to Canada. Freda speaks about her paternal grandmother and how she was quite hotheaded and determined. Freda then speaks about early life in Thunder Bay and how the mixing pot of different religions, cultures and races led to a large amount of conflict. She speaks about Mrs. Turk and her mother, her mother being a woman she seemed to find a role model in who was a teacher and whose "behaviour met with my ideals of what a woman should be". She also touches on how she felt separated from her peers due to her families' status. Freda then goes on to speak about her experiences being a school teacher and how she was put on a pedestal of which she did not care for. She explains that women teachers at this time had a great deal of expectations put on them by society that could be very difficult to keep up with. She talks about how the pressure affected her mentally and that she was constantly in fear of being fired. Freda then speaks about some of the issues with the Women's Institute and touches and the lives of some of the Indigenous People's during that time. She expands on her thoughts on the Women's Insitute, speaking on how she used to think that women were born to get married and have children and she thus clashed with many of the opinions of other women. She also did not appreciate the gossip and the on/off nature of her relationships with many of the women. Freda then reminisces on one of the great moments of her teaching career where she found community with her students, particularly a student named Art. She also states that she liked the kids and relied on them much more than the parents. The recording ends with Freda touching on the wage gap between male and female teachers and how men were treated extra special during this time due to the war. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 PDF Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Audio Text Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Ontario - South Gilles https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/dbd9f7654e23589b1391af4c2f2355cb.mp3 d0fbea1fa429f42bd0aa3d367c6988bb https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/af859eb01913e169fa0d4d2aa1312c25.mp3 edc72996619376e70addd6a0f0d530f1 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/3eaa8a6235fe57fbc4d488e1eb849729.mp3 b0e4f06bd4050bfb2fdf6f75979cde65 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/c032fea0855f4d81c3b59d9a4ef3eef9.mp3 3707aaed138524bc0a81d915abb73875 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/58cb742b6db3bc67d1c7fe638f05929b.pdf 815399a90a0a8a7471dc9c2e3b018bb6 PDF Text Text /)Jo. ~~ ~~/4 ., /}fl~ ~~ ~ ~~v ~ - :;;~ ~~-~p 2:{) ,~()/t/3-t ,I read your bookletoon Silver Islet history and you indicate on !" 'µ\,, ,~ . VQ IM..i...... the label set but I don't want to leave XH anything in that area but what I would like to do is to go back into your own life in the early ~ part of your childhood and talk about as you remember growing up, ~hat i~ ~our personal life story. -A Well among the first things that I remember of course living in Port Arthur, there were board sidewalks all over the place. I imagine they were made of good white pine planks, all over the place, there was no cement at all, and there were cracks and if you happen to drop a nickmm or a penny why you could see them through the light of the crack but then it was to get an older brother with a not~s ~itx and get it out. p= a pick or something to hook up this plank, you see, It was quite something that all the young people did as they walked along to see if there be a glint, and if there were xexx why then finders xsssexs is keepin you see, aM ~f course there was just one public school. Now the first public school mind you there were two or more that were run by xke just Miss somebody or other that would gather a group of children but finally there was a school set up and was two rooms and it was divided, I don't know ex~~ii¥ what grades went into which rooms but anyway that's all there was. Q. What year was this? A. It was before my time because that school is now a double house or else four suites next to the Baptist Church in Port Arthur, but when it got too small then a front was put on and that's the front of the Central School over in Port Arthur up on by Gore Park. Well then when the ... and the two rooms were at the back of it joined on and when that became too small th~setwo rooms were moved over by the back of the church somebody bought it and made into two or four suites or a double house and then the �present addition I think 8 rooms was put on the back of it and that was the only school there except the Catholic school. Well then about 65 years or more ago there was a new Methodist church being built which is Trinity and the old church was moved down the hill and down Bay Street now Algoma Street to where Secord School is and it made two rooms and that was the first school, what do you call those schools not the central school (primary) anyway it was the first school other than the central school in the city and everybody,everybody had to go to Central school first and then the people that crowded in and built up the south end of Street Port Arthur had this Secord/School to go to. Then I think the next school that was built St. James Street school way down Court Street. Q. Of all first, Thunder Bay North, Port Arthur, preceded Fort William development? A. Oh no, Port Arthur was or Fort William was first, it was the fourth. xxxsx Q. What we call the East end now must have developed then was what was called Fort William then, near the old Fort? A. Yes, that's why down in the East End there are McLaughlin Street, McTavish and all those Scots names, named after the Hudson Bay men, the whole place most of it has Scots names because most of the Hudson Bay men were Scots. Port Arthur you walked to school of course. then, in what area? In Q. Where was your home A. Well the first home was at this end of Court Street before Bay, there was nothing from Bay Street on (just wilderness) Yes, just wilderness, just swamp, cranberries. Q. Even in the 40's when Jix moved up here that was still swamp Intercity was largely swamp there? A. Oh yes, well you see in prehistoric time this was a great bay than rairup as far as XR&HEekH Kakebeka Falls and then they claim that there was a Afpping and the water drained here and piled up over on the south shore of Lake Superior but however, it drained out and only wiggling Kaministiqua �River was left to drain it and x it was all swamp right from the height of land at Port Arthur to the mountain, it was all swamp and they declared they could never build a town or a city here because it was, they called it"Frog Town" it was full of frogs, it was a real swamp. lands and of Well they started in to build course the draining just kept on in some part down in the coal dock they pumped the sewage and the ... Q. All of waste that has to be A. Up and out you see EHRKHSe but of pumped because of course Port Arthur is on the hillside so they had to around as well there but Port Arthur was wooden sidewalks and mud or gravel ~ or earth t.hrowed. Q. When you were very young some of the 11e1x very well established society in the Lakehead Thunder Bay was very elegant in comparison to the outliffing areas? A. Well you see all the settlers came from the east and most-of them came from good homes down there and they E~H~ brought some very nice furniture with them and as they could they built their own homes. At first there was just the peek-through wooden houses everywhere 7well then nice homes were built on what they called the Court Street ridge that is from made by the hillside there and the Court Street and very nice homes were there. It was many, many years afterwards, I IVl. {,U-u,(~ suppose, ~ow 60 years or so, when they began to build up in Maragay and those parts they were operft-y men that would buy great space and of course up in Mar~y it was swampy~ it was a great blueberryppatch up there. Q. This area here out in McIntyre River and out towards Chippewa Park was designed to develop originally as the in? ~ area of the Twin Cities. Industry has crept A. I guess those sections outs there were finally left to the mosquitoes and roads and they had to think of the centre of the little town or village because after-all the stores were there. d �So they just kept building houses. Q. Yet there were streetcar tracks moving out to Chippewa Park and streetcar tracks right ijtx~ 0 Rosslyn? A. Well the idea was that they would take them out to Rosslyn and you know that bridge that goes xx~kx over the Kam River has an upper structure. y ou drive through in the lower part, well that was built meaning to have the streetcars go right out through there the and if the top deck is on a level with/hills on each side. There was to be a high level xa ~ and go over the bridge right through and span the immediate valley but then trucks came in and the farmers didn't need the/railway to BHiX~ bring their produce in and in fact there wasn't such a tremendous population to encourage large farms with the selling of produce in the town, ...s.Q i understand it .tfo be ~laced before very long but that bridge must be oh I suppose that's 70 years old or more. Q. There's a story that a woman designed the first bridge across the Kam River~ so far its only a myth, I haven't been able to track it down? A. No, I couldn't tell you of that. Near that bridge, the first bridge that went across and into Flint River Valley and all was there. You turned lQ~scorner and go across the bttdge and you went straight on and it was a level on a river level bridge. Q. Bigger families ~ llectio~ ~J here's ~ I ) -- ~ - - U ~ IJ..R.Arff)-4p i ct ure S of 80for 9~t.Q Oeta5ie 1golhg to Silver Islet for Sunday picnic and very elegant thing5 ~~each other packed and so on. ever a part of the excursion for Sunday afternoon? Were you A. No, we strictly went to church and Sunday school, we wouldn't go on excursions on Sunday but when we first were out there, Capt. Malloney xaxke~ would leave the Port Arthur dock at 10:00 on Saturday night and the men would scramble to be shut up their stores and get it, and XHB¥X tgen they would reach Silver Islet by midnight and the wives would meet them there, and help them carry home the basket of fresh meat and so forth. The men would stay then until 8:00 o'clock Sunday night ~ the �tugs would leave and get into town around 10:00 o'clock Sunday night. It was oh some time after that I suppose what 65 years ago anyway it became a grand spot, Silver Islet. It was theonly place where there was a dock ax decent dock and there was no highway, no #17 I either way, you couldn't get out of town except by water and so these sailing boats w~re old boats that were bought down east and brought up here one at a t i m e - /44ien it was wrecked or scrapped another one would be bought. There were daily excursions Ji Silver Islet because that was the only place you could go and the old carpenter shop was fixed up and a hardwood floor put in it and they had dances and then for picnicing why they picniced all over the place whexerever they wanted to open their basket. picnic consist of in those days? Q. What sort of food would the A. potato salad, cabbage salad, but not any of the frillies pretty baking now-a-days, sandwiches, cake and pie in the original baking dishes. you have a bottle of wine? Q. Would A. Oh, I never heard of that, I suppose some of them might have, it wasn't the outside drinking that there is now. changed Q. Has the attitude xx~a towards d~I½ in Fort William in these past fifty years? IA,M/' A. Oh ~ea~ ~~,,(~ ya, you see in the olden days t h e r e ~ they tell a saloon on every corner of Cumberland Street, four corners and four saloons and right from Arthur Street down to well Pearl Street~•- cnrd"J:t was a different type of person that drank, drank abundantly, it was the men that came and worked in the bush and then they would come in and they would spend a good part if not all axx of their winter's earnings on just getting drunk, and what they haven't spent somebody would relieve them of. Oh it was terrible, and a lot of drunkeness but not educated people, not the kind now,well then when how many years ago, Lt-'1v7 ~alcohol was entirely outlawed and then it got to be considered smart to find a .-----blind keg or be able to sneak in and then the �/. ,. educated people they should have had more sense t ~ n'- 1' -.le 1,,. ~~ and it§ continued, I hear so many well educated people that could ,. be fine citizens and therjust alcoholics and the poor people, well I guess there's a good deal of drinking of there.& beer, but you don't hear so much about that, except in the way of crime0 J tk generally drinking RH~ that brin~s on the crime. So it would look as if were headxH~ed for many years that it would be outlawed again. In catalogues see all of the paraphanalia xf~ making wine and beer. b �J Q. A. Well the important point is love, but then people their own home have inner thoughts and in and they save the dining room, the living room has an arch way between where the is wooden why because of taste and some people had quite large living uh dining room. This is you know and across the hall from MRS there large I think a comedy thing and they would send to Toronto would have a first in those days and they would send I think it was coal that was food sent up by Train and coal into the cubic form and Mrs. Mccullen showed me a big form that just looked like a big piece of wood, but that's what she said it just was sent up the other way the coal would be boned at KxxkxaHa and separatea with a fontth meatand put a jelly in XH sthis form and have H some radishes and different things imbedded in the jelly and then they cook and then the whole this was xke a coal you see this was thin~ was sort of levelled itself and that's what turned up here by train and then the night of the diner party I suppose and it was turned out onto it would be dipped into a R plack oh huge one HHa no Houbt, and then Mxss Mr. i great there was no bone in it, and he would just slice right down and leave the outside room with jelly and be ice cream and 70 years ago. This was a terrific maid or maids maae/and others borrowed Then there would before cherries that's about and we had axxxs girl and they had all this cleared away and after the ice cream, and the �cake and the cheese cake, and pie oh the cooking would be tremendous Graham and then there's a dance. Well George Rxa~ now they and the McTabish were the leading socialites in Fort William and this George Graham's first home was down on the river like the McKellar home just way down here out straight down and they had lawns and a lovely that goes home ~xase down to the river and they had beautiful and they were very nice. When the~ the railway tracks were moved from down in the East end up here, all those houses were either raised or moved and her's was moved out to the corner of Archibald and Metcalfe? ? and on the south corner of Archibald and quite a large house well there's after he built everything on this side and he built a great big park and when the other of the old house there's a garden decorated with big parlour and then Peter had an office there interested and Died off and I was no longer xx he came down just a meeting about once a year or once every two years or so, and when he and there's all the papers were brought to me one time to digest and write but I was ill and I was ill for a long time but I happened for whatever I could be any worth on my bed the box could be geared over and Mr. Langley had brought so this here to skaH when I was so he took the one day when he was home and gave it to Bill Langley in his office. They had them kept in a trunk in the basement of the library, the old library, well it got to be oh not many years ago somebody wanted to know where those papers were, so I told them in the libaary. Well they hunted in the library and then thing.insi'd e out cou ld n I t f'in d t h e turned thexaaxxH~ trunk and in the mean time Mr. Langley had just died and one of I �daughters oh was I thrilled because I did my part xax~ex he ~~x gave them right back to me because he had brought thmmx to me and I couldn't tell John go xi~kx &Hgk find whoever had the key to this trunk and whoever finds xxwa ix the key I would do my part. Oh that's what happened. Well the older people those thatw were left, when those older people had joined to form what we call ..... they would alternate the meetings but would be very well attended because there xaliieae more people wka maxe« and there were some in Port Arthur really new comers although they were elderly and then they progressed to having a building and my mind simply thought well at xeHxx these meetings were over the library and this is why the ... and then you see these new people which was all revitalize the wanted to and do the museum and have about up and coming things was in my surprise I said would become of these Port Arthur people where very impressed, they outside and I said well my goodness are you going to do it? its wonderful to have some a~iside that are going to revitalize it, they didn't even sayH anything, however, but you see the end of these between these two towns, but of course they're one now but I mean in the west xi«e end isn't died off, it takes a generation of folks to die off. Mind you in the olden days it was a «ixxiii~x thing because they MaHx« were quite isolated in the winter, cut off, entirely isolated cut off still and they had good fights just tremendous fights that brought often HH« xkex any other day and this kept them alive. Q. weren't enough. A. Oh yes, because there Q. There wasn't enough A. Yes ae~HHXe if they want they could have it, you were �/0 in Port Arthur and they were very friendly, those people ? A. Yes, you see Q. Do things like that their grandfather came to Ontario when everything a long time ago to the land if you took the land and you were told that only mining was sss xke ~~xsxKHsx~~HXkKs KHSX~~HxkKsxx~ x~ took a fold and you had to hope cariboo and also to the California gold and therefore be something a miner and you just sent by the Allie Mining Co. who their representative here and they kKs have prospectors all through the bush. I would expect there would be a thousand prospectors all through the bush, mind you it would be so many miles out where they were and I suppose they were out about xke all the substance where they win but .... Q. A. Yes, maybe forty years ago, a long time ago, ... Q. Would A. Well they, yes, that was established by a :f:xxm called a i~~, they had six xliii and the grandmother and he and my aunt they then had six sons KHs, then there was and/they had three daughters. Then grandmother and grandfather and the girls at that why the sons were all fixed with tradeaown east machinist and father was a IIXKHSX and they weren't just ordinary tradesmen time were they were really sHpex supper, I guess all of them had two trades before they were a handyman. , and of course in those days you were There was a University in Toronto father wanted to us and back home there was what we found in Toronto. So father from and my mother and brothers like a another one has a foundry now and also coal mine next to the one �II who has a foundry and something else, and the oldest brother has something call RH~ end of an old building ~ln'.HXXH not an archway, oh my goodness that was very long ago, but only he would he would be back and also with a potter maker and that's very still Well they had all these things, the brothers, and m¥ grandmother thought that this was going to be arain city • a ~xeax an d t h ere way you h a d to come h ere an d th e west wou ld come here and they coming into this they would set now but she just told the boys up and they would all go inx~ =together, so the day came when they guilt the Port Arthur Iron Ore all under one roof, and they were BR ? and it was A. The year, well 92 years ago, 1873, and father was married/before Eva lffRthe first child was born so he stayed down east and he knew the Q. What year did Indians? He bought them food and came up in July of that year and the Crothers had been here putting up buildings. there~was The CPR was coming through and it was going through RR ~x~ no foundry between Toronto and Winnipeg and there was so many being done so father would that they would be working night and day to settp the and get the He had this xi~ little engine that they had set up a boiler to give them the power to run the little engine, it would run all over in the machine shop. to put up a Now in the foundry they had and all kinds of things there and in the blacksmith's shop fordge and all this. Well iMewas the machine shop that was taking xkeixx~x~exs the longest and they were trying to get this boiler to get it started but in the meantime . as it was hard for them to get the material so they set them up XR a line and if you know anything about a steam shaft why they or electricaR~&they had a ~zezz¥ great �overhead and they had leather belts over those between downhill heal on their and they would sew the machine belt,,would be to turn the machine this rubber thing would be on. and and then he put extended So they set them up and he put a great big candle and would .... the long enough for two or three men to stand, but those men could and turn it was a the handle of this forget the word, anyway they came back then they could release the strap came on from a small wheel to a large wheel the large whe~l and then back again and they could turn, I don't know how many men, they could turn the and then before you have the boilerJ~He engine boiler they then you have the cooler working and then ¥~H would matter i~rkx~most of the night to fill th e then r-X ~-xH /boiler and that was no easy they got the little engine going and its a kooky engine but you and but it was an old man who know the staff/they were well would start as long as I could remember but it was a grave price so much noise, so much going on after shop blacksmith/ around school there were always boys who town that would need men well the blacksmith would RH ask him to help with the fordge you know this sort of A. Yes, and X Q. KR I ix was awful after school and on Saturdays this nice old boy and I found out that he was one of the men he worked I guess he kept track of everything and like the handyman � https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/d879455e6691b905a588f780a4c40db1.pdf b8d9aa7b2c6d2f103b99d16600f8879b PDF Text Text .·, 1 MRS. GER~RUDE DYKE~-Norah Street The first thing she remenbers is living in Port Arthur and that there were board sidewalks all over. She thinks they were made of white pine planks, there w s no cement at all. The boards had cracks in them and for fun they used to try and get money that was dropped between the cracks out they used pliers or a pie or anything to hook the board so the \ 0 could get the money out. There was just one public school and she doesn't know the date this was. It had just two roans and they were divided. It is now a do 1ble house next to the Baptist Ghurch in Port Arthur, this is the ori r. inal building they did build on to it and it is now the front of the Central School near Gore Park. About 65 years a g o there was~ new Metho ~ist Church being built and the dld one wa s moved down the hill and down Bay 0treet to where the Secord Schoo1 is and that was the first school besides the Central uchool, the next school was on St James Street. Port Arthur and Fort Nilliam were built fourth the first to be built up was the East End were l 1cLau ·· hlin and McTavish Streets are. The first home w·s at this end of Court Street before Bay from there on there was just wilderness. In the forties inter~ci ty was still swamp area. The} s~id they could never build anything on it, it was full of frogs and when the~ did try to build the sand just sunk and it dr2.ined. When people settled here they broucht t _e best furniture as they did come from good families ~own East. The nicehomes were built on Court Ridge and many ~, ears later they started to build in Mariday and it was swampy this was out towards Ghippewa Park this was suppose to be the residential area but industry crept in. When she was young she was never part of the e~cursion that went to Silver Islet for Sunday picnics. There was no hi 6 hway or any other way to get out of town so they had to use old boats that were sold down East and brought her~. The picnics used to consist of potato salad, cabbage salad, sandwiches, cakes and pie. In her day there was the usual drinking, there were four �saloons, and it was men that worked in the bush that used to drink all their wages up in one ni c ht of drinking. Ste said it was outlawed to drink and it wasn ' t educated people who drank then but she thinks there would be better people if they didn't all drink so much, crime wouldn't be as bad if there was no drinking. Around the year 1875 0PR was coming thro ugh. � https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/3f780398215efb8d448801dfa135afb2.pdf 4e8efdff911365f2c76e9e145e0d7dd5 PDF Text Text 7/ J..~ lI ✓ •! I ' I. \ HERSTORY PROJECT Mrs. G. Dyke interviewed by Helen Lovekin Mrs. Dyke: Q. Now what do you want to know about? First I would like to ask you some general questions and then some specific ones that we have come across in our research. How long have you been in Thunder Bay? A. All my life. Q. Uhat did your family do? A. My grandfather came 130 years ago and at that time his mail was addressed to Thunder Bay. I was born in Port Arthur. He came to Thunder Bay as representative of a mining company, he had gone to the California Gold Rush and to the Caribou (Canadian Gold Rush), so he knew quite a bit about minerals. His sons all lean1ed trades so four of therncombined and came to Port Arthur and built Woodside Iron ~1 orks. The company still exists in P.A. . It is 9.5 years ago, this July since my father and mother came because the boys stayed down east when their father and mother came he.:ie, and they learned their trades. Then there was the black- smith and the machinist and the pattern maker and one was a carriage maker an:i painter. They all seemed to have two trades and they were all master mech- anics in whatever they undertook. So their mother thought that the Lakehead would be the Chicago of the north, before there was any C.P.R. running through, So they came up - four of the six boys - to the Lakehead and with their father they built the first building and had that all ready and father was buying the machineT"J down east and making it because he made the first engine that was used in the shop, and it was 8.5 yars ago, the 19th of July. I don't remember dates but my oldest sister was 6 weeks old when they came up; they crossed the lake in a sidewheeler and one of father's oldest brothers was settled in Port Arthur and so they started up right away. inery in rie;ht away, as soon as it came up with father. ing towards P.A. 9.5 years ago bu£.\ is wasn't up to P.A.. and so they could cast iron things. I They put the mach- The C.P.R. uas buildThey hall a foundry The C.P.R. was desperately in need of foundry and ma<:!hine work sas well as blacksmiths. The blacksmith Hasn't so bad because you can move a blacksmith and a foree and an anvil, but you can't / �move a machine shop and a foundry. work at once. So they set it all up and commenced to Father was tryine; to get the boiler in place and get the engine so it would do the work and there is a shaft overhead. with the machines underneath and you pull a lever and the belt that is up top will turn the machine you are working on. This one shaft will turn all the machines, if there is two rous, then there are two rows of shafts. Well, father couldn't get it up at once and there was such a need for it that father put a great big iron thing which could fit 3 or 4 men and put it at the end of the shaft. These men turned the shaft by hand to run these different machines. Uhen one was winded he would step out and another would take his place - and they worked until all hours of the night because there was such a demand for their work. There was an old man in the shop and I remembered old Ned Hill and he was always kept on and when I knew him he was old but he had the job of just Imowing where everything was and he also turned the crank and a man that endured that, father kept him on. The other men had gone of their own free will but Ned had a family and he stayed. Woodside Iron Works. That was the beginning of There is really a great story of the beginning of the shop, when they had the place set up, men uere married and had their homes the brothers, and then there was grand.mother and there was the three girls that Here 13 yea.rs younger than the 6 boys. So there were a lot of women and they decided they would have a pink tea dmm at the shop to celebrate the opening. Q. What is a pink tea? A. It was called a pink tea in those days just for a little decoration I guess. But the women had pink teas at church - we say they had teas nowadays - wHl they added pink and gave it an air. So they had a pink tea, they brought cups and saucers and the baJdng and all arid the work stopped for a half hour and they had pink tea to celebrate. This brother who was in the other molding room or shop as was the case, had cast a horseshoe, a little horseshoe. There was a patten1 made of it in the pattern shop and then you put it in sand - you have to see a foundry to know how it's done. shoe for every woman there. And he cast a horse- As a child I remember that every kitchen had a horseshoe with a li ttl e bit of - not canvas but anyway, yuu put a piece of cloth on the back and you made this little pouch and it was a matchfolder. I don't know where our's went, I don't know if my brother keeps it or not. Anyuay, that was a souvenir of the opening of it and they had a lot of things �like that, and they a.re really a story nowadays. Q. Could you tell me a little bit about your education? A. In p. A. we had the Central School which was the only school in the whole city and then we had the high school which was the only school in the whole district. They came from Fort Frances a.rid Murillo if any of them wanted to - I don ' t remember that any of them did though - and Fort William and Westfort. They came to this four roomed high school. Q. Where i-ras it? A. It was where the gym is at the high school on the hill - P.A. C. I. Q. So they were quite close - the two schools. A. Yes and the high school was torn dmm and the big one built then, they added the gym. It was just four rooms and two teachers and finally they got a woman teacher which meant three. Q. Do you recall what yea.:r that was? A. I don 't Imow. Q. But you were at school at that time? A. Yes. Q. Did that cause any sensation? A. Of course most of the teachers were women but in the high school there had just been the two men always. That a woman was teaching? Then I think this woman was buffeted around by the two men but she stuck with it. from the east. Niss Achison was her name, she came We had a e;reat many teachers who came from around Sarnia because they could come direct by boat. Q. Has she a young woman when she came? A. She seemed young to me - she may have been JO. And I think she taught history and geography and the principal was a Scotchman who had taught boys ' school in Scotland and why he came out here, I don't know. Except that he drank once in a while. Q. Perhaps he was just another black sheep that was shipped off? A. I don ' t lmow, but he was a very superior teacher. The other man was l\'Ir. Morgan and he taught physics and chemistry but he had learned German and at the most unexpected time we would have a little lesson in German just when the principal wouldn't know anything about it. Everybody picked up a few German words. Q. So you feel you got a ue2..l rounded education? A. Yes - . and a great many Hent to Toronto University which was something. • It 1 �would take on the part of the teacher, a lot of real teaching to get them so ambitious as to go on. Q. Did you finish hieh school at all? A. In P. A . ? Q. Did they have Grade 13 at that time? A. T-J ell, Yes . they didn't have grades - in the public school it was the book - Junior and Senior 1,2,3 and 4 and then in high school, I guess it was the year, 1, 2 and Q. J. There was just the three years? Hm1 old would you be if you graduated each year you passed? A. I started school 1-1hen I was 4. My father was chairman of the Board of Educ- ation or a member of it, years and years. This time they were short one pupil to get the goverrrn1ent grant so they said, "Tom, you have lots of children, you can just spare one." Well, I Has tall and big for 4 and so I was sent to school and my aunt Ann, his sister, was the kindergarten teacher. And she taught up to the end ofthe first book I guess. So I was strorg and nell and I uas just 10 or 11 uhen I Has in high school and I got through high school and we had teachers college in P.A. Q. You became a teacher? A. Yes, for L~ yea.rs. 1h . So I went through that and when I graduated I wasn ' t quite And they couldn't Grant me a certificate, I was too young . Q. You had to lJe 21? A. You had to be 18, however they grru.1ted me a special dispensation and I went down east to mother ' s old hqme ru.1d taught there for a year. Q. ~Jhich town would this be? A, Out of l'ieai'ord, near Owen Sound. Then I came back and because they bad done this, allowing ne to teach, I was obliged to teach one year here, so I supplied in the different schools in P.A. -well, there was just the Central School. Then they built the south ward and I took the principals place, she was sick or uent on a trip and I think that was when I was 16 that principal of a south ward school. But I was 5' 10½" I .was so they didn't argue :'1ith me. a. Q. This was A. Yes. Q. A. Q. Because you went through teacher ' s college rather than normal school? secondary school? Yes - because they didn't have a normal school/ And you taught, married, raised your family - how did you become interested �in becoming an historian? ~: If you grew up here, naturally you saw it all happen so you couldn't ~elp but be interested. You might say I just stumbled onto it or grew into it. Q. It has become for you a career? A. No. Q. Do you look at it as more of a hobby? A. Hobby, yes. Goodness, I hadn ' t time. You raise a family - these women that work and raise a family are braver than I. Q. How many children did you have? A. ; I raised 3 children, but I had a lot of company. Q. Company with friends or with your children? A. Both, and relatives - we had relatives all the way from Halifax to Dawson City, and they all stayed on, on trips. Q. Hith both your career as a teacher and a historian, did you find any discrimination? You mentioned that Miss Achison had a bit of trouble with the men but you were able to hold your A. 01-m? Yes , but it was the first lady teach er and if any pupil had to stay aft er 4 she was delegated to stay too. Q. But you were the principal in the south ward - how many teachers were under you? A. Just one - of course don ' t mention that - I was principal at 16. That ' s why I was young when I was teaching, because I started at 4. Q. Was this a lady teacher as well? A. Yes. Q. You would have had no experience between wage differential? A. My goodness, I think the teacher got $32 a month or so. Q. Regardless of whether you were a man or a woman? A. No, I guess the men got more because they were the principals and sub-principals and they had families - they would have to have more - but $32 and $35, There were some of the girls that had a special permit and taught, that saved money and went on to university. Q. Was a teacher paid according to whether he was married or not? A. I think there was a set wage. Q. For a man or for a woman. A. Yes, but the man was al ways married and the woman wasn't. Q. This was before women were allowed to have a career after marriage. A. You didn ' t dream of anything after marriage, other than scrub bare floors and scrub clothes - you hadn't time for ... Q. No married ladies taught, even if they didn't have children? s �A. I don't think so. They didn't here anyways. There were widows - that was Q. different. As a historian, I have come across some of your works which are extremely competant and have you ever had any trouble with the - there is quite a few male historians about kn-ocking anything you might have to say. A. I have never had any trouble because whatever I wrote I had printed myself and they didn't consider me a full scale historian - I was just a woman that was writing down a few things. I don't know whether anybody wanted to have any trouble with me or not but I never did. Q. A. I wrote 3 booklets and I have the .. ........... . lfaat about the organizations and co-operation between women and their org- anizations? I really can't recall any dirty work, they seemed to have - well you can't say they have worked together always because they haven't always. There have been women - some girl teachers who came from down east who were stirring the teachers up to go on strike, years ago. Such things had never been heard of - teachers going on strike - too bad because teachers have a wonderful influence on their pupils and they don't have an influence through It sets them down a bit I think - for the pupils. :Bu:-:t I think that this one that was the leader in all this, wasn't hired _in the second year and things were done gently, they did.~'t have a fist fight. What was her proposition? Hhat was she upset about? Wages, and she was principally upset about it, everything that a strike would ... So you felt your wages were high enough? No, the wages were always low. And yet, you would not consider strike action as the course to take? Not ... She was upset about wages, she was upset about what else, hours? One thing they were upset about was that we weren't pr0ducing teachers of our own and these teachers had to come from down east and of course, in those days, the girls were very glad to get a position and so they came from Petrolia and Sarnia because it was close to the boat. So, one thing she was going to strike for was that the Board of Education would pay their boat fare here. There were people in the town who boarded teachers - they were well cared for and were honored citizens in the churches and all were fine strike. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. �women. Some of the finest women we ever had are teachers, ~: Can you recall, as a young girl, the suffragette movement being discussed? A. Yes, Q. Was there a suffragette organization withing Thunder Bay? A. Of sorts. It wasn ' t very strong but of sorts. The suffragettes had many cartoons in papers of the suffragettes and I think some of them were accused of wearing pants and you could be run in, you could serve a term if you appeared in pants. It is not many years ago since my husband told me that I could~..go to his tailor and order a tailored suit with pants - any material or any cut - and he would pay for it. He knew perfectly well that I would never wear pants and out here it is just the kind of thing because it's cold and keeps your ankles warm. It's not so many years and now we don't think anything of it at all. Q. Must have been auful hard washing long dresses and ... A. Yes , washed by hand. Q. After the suffragette movement of sorts, do you recall the organization that also had something to do with that movement? A. Miss Black who was one of the first librarians in Fort William wasn ' t a fighting suffragette but she was quite in favor of that. Mary J. Black, Q, Unfortunately, all her people were lost when she went out to B.C. A. Yes, she had a brother that she went to when she was sick - before she died, and I suppose like. so many people, they cleaned up everything thoroughly. Q, Too bad that she hadn't given evecy ... A. I suppose, like many people she was going to write it up herself. Q, I believe th?.,t the Homen 's Christian Temperance Union supported suffrage? A. Yes, they weren't fighting about it but ... Q. They gave support. A. Yes. Q. They sent petitions and endorsements. A. Mother believed and belong ea~ to the WCTU for years. We were a big family but mother always had help - always had a maid and hadra washwoman, that came Monday all day and Hednesday for a half a day. That was the day when our dresses and our underwear were washed but not the sheets or pillowcases. That was once a week. She was president of the Ladies Aid and a member of the Mission Circle and the Miss WCTU and the Mother's____ Anyway, mother went to that and the one thing I remember abo~t it - she came home �and mother was the kind that she never looked for an argument, she was a very wise, sw~et uoman, but this night ~he came home and we sat down .... had not experience keeping house for a man and had no family and never did but she undertook to tell the mothers how to bring up their families and Mrs. Dr. Smelly had 8 and Mrs .. Neelan had 7 and they had big families and here(wRet was this woman telling them how. Q. What sort of things was she recommending? A. How to dress your children and how you fed them an.d what you taught them and everything - ;gh'e knew how. answers. These women with no children who knew all the Mother and Mrs. Smelly talked it over and they agreed that they did the best they could at the time. Q. To get back to the WCTU - you mentioned it in your book so I wonder - you have never heard what happened to Ricobs or anything - nobody seems to know. A. Young fQlks organization - The White River Band - and we had the record books for them but Dr. John Ritchie of Regina - he was a surgeon· there for years he is an uncle of Ken Ritchie the doctor in P.A.. A very fine man - well he was secretar-J for years and years and he was a pure wit and his minutes you got there early so you wo:i.aldn 1 t miss John B's minutes, it was lovely. So we had them - it had closed dmm for years and finally my sister sent them to him and of course he wrote back - he was delighted - he said many of the words he didn't know what· they meant but he had used them. So that is were that ·went, and as for the rest I don't know but Mrs. Hamlet - Q. I found several books in the library that were minutes. One of the more notable was a report of a social survey by the Department of Temperance and Moral Reform in the Methodist Church. a great amount of detail with it. It is rather complete, they went into TJas that a woman's organization or was it just church members? A. I don't know for sure but I would say it was an organization within·__. the church not necessarily all church officers. Q. What was it called? The report was called the Preliminary and General Social Survey of Port Arthur, March 1913, Directed by the Department of Temperance and Moral Reform in the Methodist Church and the Board of Social Service and Evangelism of the Presbyterian Church. A. So, you can take your pick there. Q. Yes, it is rather - so detailed, I was wondering if it had been a notable organization. �A. Q. A. Well, I think it was like so many organizations that just are born and flourish for a while and then go. They were doing good work in getting that written down. The statistics were very good. In my letter I told you to contact Mrs. Hamlet who lives in Waverly Towers. She is still there is a little nuclei of the WCTU - she and her sister, who is now in Westmount or Grandview in Fort William. Let me see, did she die just lately? Anyway, Mrs. Hamlet will know - she•s a little birdie woman Q. a very nice woman, a widow. I have noted on my studies of the English suffragettes - they were the prime movers~ that they allied themselves with temperance movements, for the rather obvious reasons. Nellie McClung was very closely allied with the temperance movement. Although it wasn't a militant movement, literature was circulated for women's rights and this went along with temperance, which was A. because women couldn't afford to .... I don't think so, it was the same women largely in all organizations. King's Daughters and all of these - oh, mother belonged to the K.D. or the Queen's Daughters - it was the Queen's Daughters in Victoria's time and then it was Q. A. the King's Daughters. Could you explain the function of the Queen's Daughters? It was an organization that fostered patriotism and when any noteworthy person like a Govenor-General etc. came, the Q.D.looled after them and they had meetings and showed the flag, like the Imperial Daughters - but they were older women - younger than lots of the IODE. Q. It was just a patriotic formation. There was also another book I came across - a report on the Local Council of Women - The West Algoma Local Council of Women. didn't you? A. No, I didn 't . Q. There was a Mrs. Dyke. A. It might have been my mother-in-law. You convened that JO years But I attended - I don't know whether I held any office in it for q_uite some time. But I wasn't a leading light but I think my mother-in-law was and she was a member of a hospital aid before the RMG hos pitaJ. was built and during which time, mother and Mrs. Dr. ~1Smelly and Mrs. Neelson and Yi.rs. Mical. Quite a bunch of them that were very friendly and they enjoyed their friendship at these meetings and once the RMG started - once a week they went to the hospital and mended the sheets and pillowcases and towels. Mother always had a good maid, woman or girl, so that �her children were in e;ood hands and mother was up early so that in the a£ter- Q. noon she could go and bring word back of what they did. This would be the ladies social contact I suppose because they didn ' t work out of the homes. If you didn 't belong to an organization, you wouldn ' t go A. out very much. Yes, that is so. I did come across the minutes from 1894-1950 and I wrote a list of all the Q. proposals and the ammendments that the coucil had made for the wanen. They strongly pushed for women sitting on various boards, particularly the School Board and in 1917 they wished to have at least two women appointed to the Taxation and Organization of Homen Labor Boards. Although they were interested in hospitals, they seemed to have suggested - in 1930 a pre natal. clinic in Port Arlhur - all sorts of things that women are still asking for. It seems that they were thinking along feminist lines - did it strike you that A. way at the time? That ' s why they organized - to have mightier say in things than they have had before because they were supposed, just to run their homes and bring up their children. And now they bancled together and asked for some things like the RMG hospital. There was just St. Joseph ' s Hospital and women didn ' t go to the hospital. to have their babies. The RMG hospital., the women urged that until they got it and the primary idea was for it to be like a maternity hospital. They had wards .and private rooms for maternity but it was RMG that was General, The Railway, Marine and General Hospital. Well, in those early days there was a great deal of typhoid, and they had a lot of typhoid wards and men ' s and Nomen 1 8; And my oldest sister went to the RMG to have her baby and there was a night nurse on for the men's typhoid ward - she crune across the hall to ansuer the bells of the young mothers. To have a nurse who would be far more interested in gabbing all night with those men than Q. A. bothering washing and scalding her hands before coming to the mothers and Eva went home with typhoid fever. Did she survive? A. She survived but she was ill for a long time. The baby as well? Yes. Q. They were both very lucky. A. Yes and lucky too there was a Scotch nurse - a married woman . Q. You see any lO �trained nurse was scarce and this woman married and came with her husband to Port Arthur and someway, I think my brother-in-law knew them well enough to have her come and look after Eva. She was Scotch - trained and we had very few trained nurses in those days. That is what started the RMG - to be Q. a maternity hospital. Were you also a member of the Women's Institute? A. No, that was a rural organization. They made - two or three years ago - the word went through all the institutes : "Have your district written up." and Mrs. Oliver did it for Slate River. Each area had it written up and I pre- sume all those books and papers are kept at the headquarters. Q. We are having a difficult time extracting the Hymers book from a Mrs. Thatcher. She has it and she is not giving it out. A. Q. Well - and hasn't had it published yet? No. I know that the Women's Institute did some valuable things including setting up libraries and providing rural women with what they needed - a place to go and be with other women. The council is more politically orientated - was there any tension between the two or did you co-operate? A. I don't recall any tension. Q. A. Was there any co-operation between the two groups for projects? Some. Q. Can you give me the areas? A. Q. I just have the feeling. Did you hear of the Dominion Women ' s Franchisement Association? They did change their name to a much easier one which was the Canadian Suffrage Association. I talked to Mr. Russell Brown and he said he remembered but he couldn't remember anything about the suffrage movement other than they wore pins. A. They tried to be militant to stir themsel~es up and to head up a slight war but they never got that far. Each strove a little bit and all together they have got some very good things for women. Q. After looking at the minutes I am findin 6 so many things that we are still fighting for. Looking back, do you think we have changed very much? gotten anywhere? Have we A• They have really done very well. Slowly and without making big distresses. They quietly accomplished a good many things. Q. Have you got something that you had worked on then, that is still not an accomplished feat, that you would very much like to see happen? \l �A. I don't think I can pull that one out of a hat. Because there ar~ so many things that they just have quietly gotten. Nellie McClung - she used to come and speak. Q. A. Her father-in-law was Presbyterian. She came to speak here? In P.A. and F.H.. The men loved Nellie McClung, she was witty. I used to go with father, and to hear her speak in the evening, there was lots of laughs in it. Q. A. She was very diplomatic and very kindly but she made a point. lfas she an inspiration for you? Yes and she had some experience with liquor and so she was out and out for WCTU. I remember her speaking in the Presbyterian church in Port Arthur - St. Paul's - and there would be as many men as women because she was worth going to hear and you quite agreed with what she had to say because she put it quite nicely. She spoke this evening and I think there was some big ~ I don't suppose it was a war, but something was on and the Archbishop of Canterbury had said that he couldn ' t do without his wine because it helped his digestive system and stomach do it ' s work. And the way she would state it and she had a little twinkle in her eye and everybody was laughing about this. The Archbishop uasn ' t an out and out prohibitionist, he liked his wine. was a very fine woman. She She went west - her father-in-law was one of the earliest ministers in P.A. - Methodist, because Robert McClung, who she married taught a Sunday school class of boys as a minister's son was expected to do. My aunts were all teachers and my grandmother taught the Bible class and my uncle was a Suuday school superintendant, and his wife played the organ in church. These were unrilly boys that Bob Mcclung was teaching. young man, 19 or so, He was a very Hell they would sit around him with their row of chairs, heads tight together listening to him. And they discovered that he had a copy of Robinson Crusoe in a Bible cover and he was reading that to them and they just~ loved him and loved his stories. Nellie went west to teach in those early days and she fell so in love with Mrs. Mcclung and there was a young son and she was so disappointed because if she could marry a son, she would be Mrs. McClung's daughter-in-law. To her great amazement and joy, this bo:;y sh(n1red up one time - he was a druggist - and here was a ready-made son of her own age. So she said that she - well, she would say it of course - she simply said her cap and he couldn't get out of it. So they married. led a great deal and was acclaimed wherever she went. She lectured and travelShe was well-known and one time she heard that her husband was objecting to her being away so much \2 �without telling her. So she went home and she had been honored in Toronto and Ottawa and he felt she was getting beyond him so when she got there in the evening and they had tea, she said to him, "Would you please pass.the brown bread?". That was the staple food, brown bread, and she wanted him to under- stand that she was still staple. So it went on from there. She loved Mrs. McClung and Mrs. McClung loved her, more than any of her own children. Q. Was she treated well by the papers here? A. Yes, wherever she went. Q. Did they print up any of her speeches? A. Oh, yes. Q. So, if I go through the microfilm - you don't know the years she was here? A. No, I couldn't tell you .... If you just get up and give dates and times, it just bores you to death. I see you have read "Plane Down" , that story in there. It is pure fiction but this is the house they crune to. They came in that door tumbled down their goods there, and went into the livingroom and we made fires in the kitchen and the back shed still has the great woodpile. Ann Caaslet, the Dickinsons were really pioneers, her great grandfather ran - r·don ' t know whether it was the first paper published in P.A. e His granddaughter is Mrs. Ann Causelet and she lives in this cottage where old Captain Marrin lived, Ann Dryna - my mind went blank, what was I going to say about Ann Dryna? ,a/,. '· 1 e A. . .... Oh yes, that "Plane Down" and they have been here for ever and ever and were talking about Nellie McClung. Ann speaks very slowly. morning. She lives back again in F.W. and she phoned this She said, "Mother and I have racked our brains trying to think of the year that plane mishap and we can't remember it at all. pen?" When did it hap- I said, "Imagine, have I convinced you?•, "Convinced me of what?". "That's pure fiction" and she said, "You told it too well, we thought it was true," Q. You have been very active in women's organizations all your life, and so has your mother. A. How do you feel about the women's oganizations now? I'm stric~ly a temperate woman, Father called it the "accursed stuff" because he had such trouble with th.e,~:men, especially the foundry men. fines and hauled them out and got them back to work. He payed their He and mother were strictly temperate and one thing I o1;>ject to is that these organizations now there is wine and cheese - well, it doesn ''t seem to dawn on them that they don't need to have this wine and cheese business but they think they've got to do like some of the others do. There are other less outstanding things �that they are also embracing and it used to be that now the Canadian Club was a splintered organization, it was for the most part made up of cultured, educated women, and I don't say that they aren ' t educated now, but I don't like some things and I feel that the women ' s organizations should stand forth for the best in Canad.a and you can't bring up children to avoid alcohol if you belong to these organizations that serve it and take it. to be on one side or the other. didn't need it. You have got We didn ' t serve it and we didn ' t miss it and And then, after all, women have a place that is separate from men and women are dressing like men and their doing so many things that men do, Q. Do you mean working? A. No, I mean in every way. For example, car racing and boy, the women are driving the cars along with the men. They have to do with all the sports. Q. You think that 's wrong. A. I think the men like them to be women. Q. Nellie HcClung had a saying: We were t~J.king to a woman who preferred to have her coat taken off and the doors opened etc. and Nellie McClung referred to that once as "wantin 0 to eat the icing rather than the cake." And that goes right along with her brown bread saying, where yoy. have to be recognized for your ability, and whether they open the door or ill.at shouldn't stand in the way. To me, this is the goal I 'm trying to work towards, and I think a lot of other women that I work with would agree with me on that. It is the cake that I would rather eat, you get too many cavities eating icing - too many holes in it. Do you have a daughter? A. Yes, in California. Q. Do you think that it is a better life for her than it was for you? A. It was pretty rugged and we didn't know it because it was where we lived and what we were used to. They have sidewalks and roads now that you can go without going down to the axle and in my day, in Fort lilliam especially. we have coveniences now in the house and travel etc. And Yes it is much easier. I was telline; somebody of a classmate of mine who got to P.A. from the States and came to high school. I don't know how she got to P.A. and her father had died and her mother was lecturing for something. She and her brother and, I don't know how they jerked themselves up but anyway they both got to P.A .. She was poor and had no ml':biley or \~achl.ng worked her way. but she got up to Collegiate and she She got up for this English woman who had 2 girls and she �washed and dressed them and got them breakfast and eot them to school and did the beds and dishes and left the house tidy - to come to school herself. I didn't think she paid and as for clothes, she gave her her cast-off clothes and this woman was two sizes smaller than Lula and Lula I remember had no hat so she wore a bonnet every winter and it was all she had. jolly well take· h er with a bormet or leave her. And you could She went through public school and went to the teachers college which we had for a few years and then she went up the line to teach and married the first man that asked her. hadn't had a home, so just to have a home. about him. She She wasn ' t asking the man much He had a farm but it had been bun1t over and when I saw her after some years of marriage, her hands were like horns - she was still using this burnt over wood and she had 5 children and somebody said "one every Friday" .every year, anyway. Her husband wasn't interested except to feed them - that was his duty done. She wanted them to have an education so she sewed and she proclaimed herself a barber and then she got a second hand chick hatchery an incubator - and turned one of the two bed.rooms she had into an incubating • room and hatched chickens and sold them around the district. tomatoe plants and sold them and sent her children to school. Then she raised Then they had to go into town for the hi¢gh school - her oldest daughter went first and she got babysitting - had a room but I don't think her board, but did that and it was enough to bring her cash. Then she went home Friday night and her mother did the s~wing, washing and ironing, fixed her up on Saturday and then she came back Sunday night and brought a big basket of food. Her brother was ready for hig9.school and they just put a sheet up in her room with a bed on each side and she managed the food for them. He eventually became a teacher and she trained in HcKellar Hospital and she had the money that they, paid the girls - $2.50 a month or $J.OO and if she broke a thermometer, it ~as a disaster and she had clothes her mother made out of old clothes. Stockings and those button - on shoes was all she had and she learned like her mother:· that was what she had and she wore •-il and she was thankful. denims so she could go hiking with the girls. RMG and had a bad time. Had a pair of The next girl went into the The matron didn ' t approve of her - a poor girl in the class with some of the girls that had more - so she dismissed her on the first pretext she could find and she herself was dismissed for cilsmissing the girl. They all managed and were splendid children. How many are doing that nowadays? \S �If they haven't silk stockings and all the rest of it, they sit down and howl at the moon, but these youngsters didn ' t. Q. I feel sorry for the girl you went to school with who married the first man who caJ.11e along to get a home and live with a man - probably not a very happy life. A. Oh, I'm sure, but she wouldn't cheep, there would be no squabbling, she made her bargain and she kept it. Dad finally died and he had a thousand dollars life insurance in some organization - very little. Now that is five $200 ' s well the youngest girl had died so there were four and she was the fifth so they each got $200 and that was just touching the •::louds. She came to F. W. and two or three times she came representing the Women ' s Institute and they would pay her way down and then she would stay with me and she told me "I just went on a regular binge, I bought an electric iron and an electric kettle" and then she bought enough black silk or rayon and a neighbor helped her make a dress and a jacket and she had $.50 left and she put it in the bank - so she had a bank account. The others - it was spent the same Hay - had to give a good account of every nickel. She died long since and at Christmas time I write one of her daughters and this daughter - her son and another boy in the neighbqrhood were going to play PeeW ee hockey in F. W. , so they stayed with ll!e. Youngsters love to see through a house so when they had been there a little while .I suggested that the boys go on and look through the house and see everything. One youngster went home and I guess he nadn 't been in a big house before and he told his mother all the details - the furniture, what they had on the beds, how they took a bath . in the bathtub. He is now a grown man and married long::::since but she still gives me a little of his history and she and her sister were fine women and well thought of in the community and the one boy is a teach er and the other is head of the highways in Kenora and I don't knou whether he is still there or whether he is retired or not. They have always accepted any help - so nicely - no embarrassment, just thank-you very much. Q. Uas there any help for a woman uho wanted to leave her husband - perhaps if he physically beat her or the children? Has there anyone she could turn to if she had no family? A. 1 tfell, they turned to the church and the minister and his wife. went into housework - that was her refuge. Of course, she �Q. Would she be able to take all of her children? A. If there Here children that would be different. Q. She would have to put up with it. A. Q. Yes, many of them did. A. There was often a ver-J nice neigbor map. who would beat the daylights out of This is one of the things we are still trying to work on. him - which he well deserved. Q. I asked an Italian lady in Italy what a wife would do if the husband beat her and she said that generally they never moved from the original village and she had her brothers protect her. It would take on<f.'•• thump and generally he got the message. A. There was an early priest - Father Baxter in P.A. He was a great big burly man and if he heard of any man that had been beating his wife, he ' d talrn off his clerical black gown, "nightg0vm" as they called it, and he ' d just give him such a thrashing that he wouldn't forget it. Many a man stopped beating his wife when he had a beating from Father Ba,'Cter. He came out here in the early days and said mass and that white house down there is built on the old foundation of the old Catholic church - the Sellars live in it. quite a family of them. in the Lakehead. There was They were the early elevator people and grain pe ople Hr. Al Sellars bought it but it was in such disrepair and it was finally torn down and then the foundation was. remade and he built the same size on thesame foundation. It was during the years I was away from Silver Islet that it was finished so it took some arguing on Ethel Sellars ' part to convince me that it wasn ' t the old Catholic Church. Q. Do your remember WWI? A. Yes. ' Q. · I am a history teacher - do you remember after the Har, in your experience, if the attitude towards working women changed much? A. Yes, it commenced a change because the women had irnrked so hard during the uar. Q. At jobs that a lot of people didn ' t think they could do. A. 1-J ell, Q. Did it progress further after WH2? A. Yes and after WWI and especially after WW2, the people had learned to go out there were more stenographers and bookeepers and things like. that . and enjoy themselves and people had learned to leave their children and go out. They took their families lightly to what they had been before, A mother wouldn ' t \7 �leave her children and go gabbing. They think nothing of leaving them and they can pretty much bring up th ems elves, the youngsters. Q. Do you see no discrepancy between a woman hiring a girl t.o feed her children breakfast and lunch and do their clothes and send them out to school, even though she lives withinl. the house, to women who have to use daycare centres to do the same thing? ·no you see much of a difference? A. Of course daycare - Miss Michaels has now set up her evm school in the Salvation Army Eall and has the daycare. That is a real profession. She has a real degree and education. Q. The point I ' m getting at is the effect on the children, Why would it be more acceptable to have a girl living in your home to do that? A. Because they are home - that's the only differ-~nce. These daycare centres, where the girl has to Imow a lot and the child must learn a lot. Q. Yes, they are very careful with them. A. There was a couple married in Hesley Church a11d they were quite active, they were both teachers. They had a child and they didn't show up again and it was some time before one of the ladies went to call and found that· this beautiful little girl baby had an enormous head - it was terrific. There nas something wrong with the children a11d so from that, they banded together and Wesley let them have a room and they met every mon1ing uith a different mother looking after these 5 or 6 children. It meant a holiday for the mother -l~ days a week and 5 mothers, and 5 children and they did simple ~ai.11es and things and looked after them and the mother would be refreshed and rested. I went d01m for about 26 years. I was the relief officer - that is an at- tendant to the second-hand clothing and people would come to my house, I had a trunk that was never empty and never full. ....... I would then send overseas twice a year there were greatshipments. I" remember one time .we sent 850 lbs. a.nd that is a lot to pack a.nd Hr. Gerr'iJ would come and help us rope and the McKenzie dray came and took it, shipped it, a11d paid tho shipping charges and just charged us for the shippinc charge - they never charged us for their dray and went on for years and yea:cs ... I would often be at the church in the morning~ after school and these children - the little girl with the great big head, I don ' t know how she held it up - it must have taken a long time to get it O o I• Q. How long did she survive? A. I think she was 9 or 10 when she finally died. shapen and mongoloid. The others, they were mis- I always stopped and talked to them and told them a story, so that they got to know me. l3 �• Q. A. Aft er the war, when ladies had been working in factory jobs and that sort of thing, when their husbands came home, did they expect them to go back to the way they had been? What sort of conflicts Callle from the change? They expected it. Women often went out without any squabbling, they get their own way and they had more money than they had ever and they weren ' t going to give that up right away. Q. A. So there was difficulty. The majority of women stayed with their husbands. And the husbands learnt to live with liberated women? It wasn't so easy for the men to get jobs and there are a few sensible men that would see that their wives really had to bring in the bread and butter and they had to work at home themselves. You saw quite a few, but also you saw the one that wasn ' t going to have it. going to stay so. ironed out. He was king of the castle and was That was the unfortunate few but it is wonderful how many There was one English girl that came out - the men came home first - well they sent the women home first - anyway, she was-______ and she married and Indian from the mission over here and in England they are not so concerned about the color of their skin as we are. them marry from the Near East - red and brmm skin. A great many of One of our ta,-ximen was at the station and this girl came to him and wanted to be taken to the mission, and he was shocked. She was a fine looking :I!nglish girl, so he said "Are you sure that is the right address?" She had married a native Canadian and was going to stay with his people until he got here. H2 very nicely tried to persuade her not to but she was going - he took her for quite a long ciistance and then you turn up tolthe reserve and he said he noticed that her chatter ceased when he turned up because it was pretty crummy in those days, they've decent houses now. He told her that this was the house and he told her he would wait and for her togo to the door. So she did and a big, fat, very unclean looking squaw came to the door - the mother of this boy she married. She just threw up her hands and came back to the taxi and said for him to take her away from there. He told her he knew and had tried to tell her but he decided she had better see for herself. He told her he would take her to his house or to the Salvation Army, 1-1hichever she wanted and she could get help from the Red Cross to go back home. She chose to go to the Salvation Army and reported to the Red Cross and they came and helped her. went right back home. She just They would have been marrying boys from all the colonies so she ..... now they are very fine, smarl Indian men that are working on the highways and worki:pg at machines. They've had a tough time, our native people. /9 �.,· • Q. A. We have a lot to account for. They used to scalp people and shoot them down with arrows and burn them and do all kinds of things. If we had a hoard of p~ople come in and take over our country - they had it for thousands of years - of course they ' d fight. Q, As far as scalping goes, it was white men that taught the Indians - they used It was easier to bring in a scalp, they thought of ears for a while but a guy could bring in two different ears and say they were ears from one person and so, the scalps. A. More power to them - fight for their land. If somebody crune along and put me out of this house, ..... Thank-you for your help Mrs. Dyke, it for bounty. l.C � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Herstory Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Herstory: Gertrude Dyke Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Mrs. Gertrude Dyke in Port Arthur, Ontario. The interview was performed by Helen Lovekin as part of the Women's Decade Council Herstory project. The recording consists of two sides each of two cassette tapes, available here as four MP3 files. (Click on the speaker logo to play each file.) The transcript is available by clicking on the image thumbnails. During the interview, Mrs. Dyke recalls the social and working conditions of Northern Ontario in the early 20th century, focussing on the education system, her personal historical interests, regional terrain, temperance movements, local businesses, community and personal relationships, and the activity of women. Please note that this tape includes discussion of settler-Indigenous relations, using language that would not be seen as sensitive or appropriate today. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Release form was obtained by the Herstory project, allowing the recording to be shared and used. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 PDF Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Audio Text Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Ontario - Port Arthur Canada - Ontario - Thunder Bay Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [197?]-06-27 Subject The topic of the resource People Women's History