Marc Clerk
Long ago, the Spencers, Bresees, Shepards, Hawleys, and other New England folk traveled north to settle in the newly opened wild lands just across the border in Canada. In their carts and wagons they had loaded the essentials, including blankets, salt pork, pots and pans, axes, shovels, and other tools. Their main baggage, however, was an intangible thing, without weight, shape or form; it was the confidence with which they undertook the journey into the unknown. Call it the facility, if you will, to begin a new life, eyes wide open, beneath the new horizon of the Sutton Mountains.
In Vermont, New Hampshire, or New York State, they had been exposed to traditions by structures, routines, and known values. They had seen these things, lived them, been shaped by them. Their villages had streets, houses, churches, schools, general stores, smithies, and mills. Life was a habit, a planned thing; each morning was a déja-vu. Buildings were maintained, repaired, painted and improved, and new houses occasionally built. Occupations, whether farming, lumbering, milling, storekeeping, or blacksmithing, were known and familiar. Potholes were filled and old roads made over. People were moving parts, gears in an established machine. In their hometowns they lived good lives, lives of responsibility, raising families, doing chores, leading town meetings, attending choir practices...
These adventurers were not fleeing from oppression or maltreatment; rather, they were looking forward to something new, something different. They wanted to start afresh, to better their holdings, to improve their technique of living, to free themselves from whatever fetters, imagined or real, bothered them or, simply, to strike out on their own. In themselves they had the facility, the potential too, to structure a new society.
And so they made plans. Husbands talked to wives. They consulted parents, brothers, sisters, and ministers. Then they headed north, to Canada.
Across the border from Vermont, each couple went through the first and essential motions; they built a rough shack, cleared land, made and sold potash, planted crops and vegetables, tended their animals and built fences. In England and in Europe from where their ancestors came, animals had been raised by family members who, every day, led or followed grazing sheep, watched over cattle, or wallowed in pig muck. Since touching land at Plymouth Rock, that daily chore of tending roaming flocks had been dropped in favour of fencing the land and confining animals to a given space.
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Fences were an important initial step in the colonists' lives. The neighbouring lots on each side and at the front and back of their own land were located at distances established by the ever-important ‘chain'. The new arrivals made fences with the stones pulled from their rough fields, locating them along the edges of planned pastureland. Others made zigzag wooden fences of the cross and rail type or plainer stake and rail or snake fences and eventually, around the house, prettier post and rail fences. As they sectioned off their holdings, they made the practical application of the math lessons from their school days. They knew that a fence-rail had to be eleven feet long and that six rails were the equivalent of a ‘chain'. The sixty-six foot ‘chain' was used to measure the width and breadth of the two hundred acre portion of land the British government had granted each settler. The “Gunter chain” had been invented in England a little less than two hundred years earlier. In England, America, and Canada, roads and land were measured by it.
Different individuals, possessing specific talents, developed their personal specialities, hopefully different from the others. Thomas Shepard, for one, built a gristmill for grinding grain on the narrow river that ran next to his land, just North of Richford, Vermont. Shepard knew how to harness the water from the slow-moving Missisquoi River. He had seen mills in operation in his New Hampshire hometown. Most villages around there had mills and the milling trade was an honourable one. From Portsmouth probably, he brought in a dressed millstone made in France. These important tools were not yet made in America for lack of know-how and proper granite. Shepard thus became an essential man in the community. People came from the outlying farms to have their grain milled. His place became known as Shepard's Mill. Paths to his door soon became roads. Another man, Griggs by name, set up a mill for sawing lumber. Yet another enterprising individual made a hickory loom for weaving woollen blanket cloth and his wife knitted heavy stockings with the wool from their flock. Another brought in iron bolts, strap-iron, nails, hammers, and pails from a known source in his former Vermont village. He let it be known that they were available for sale or barter. Still another man offered to build stone foundations and chimneys following practices he had followed at home.
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In a short time wool stockings were exchanged for flour and sawn boards for a keg of nails. A foundation was built in return for a fine heifer. Bushels of apples were bartered for pecks of potatoes.
Children were conceived, born, grew up, and began to help. Daughters tended neighbours' children when their parents and brothers were in the field. There, fathers and mothers and sons cleared stumps, ploughed the untilled land, planted and weeded turnips and potatoes. Older daughters, taking on the role of mothers-in-training, minded the small ones and taught their siblings, using the bible as text. Soon they began teaching the neighbours' children.
After neighbours had met and acquaintances been made, barns were built by community building bees to house hay and shelter herds, flocks, and gaggles.
The traditional practices that the settling couple brought from ‘home' covered a wide range of basic fragments, which had made up and were to help make up their lives. Young women had necessarily contributed to family cooking and baking for everyday family meals as well as for the frequent community gatherings which formed part of full farming life. Women knew something of schooling and teaching, having either absorbed or given lessons in their village schoolhouses. Females had absorbed knowledge of birthing. Childbirth could be dangerous. Many women, even with a midwife's assistance, died in the process or lost the newborn infant. Angel-capped tombstones bear witness to that sad fact. Being part of farming families, women had also helped when seeds were planted or gardens weeded or crops harvested. Women were the transmitters of social graces when ‘company' called or deaths occurred. They knew too the words and melodies of hymns and of plaintive songs. Women had learned how to sew, card, knit, mend, sweep, wash, clean and were, as well, the custodians of the three Rs.
The husband and his oldest sons were soon to put to use the knowledge they had acquired. They knew how to frame, close in, and roof a dwelling. Fathers and sons built the required furniture. Animals needed to be shot or slaughtered and cleaned out for meat. Sheep had to be shorn for wool and tended at lambing time. Tree cutting, stump pulling, and scrub burning were the main occupations in the first years on the new place. Traditional, seasonal farm chores, from ploughing to harvesting, later settled into a routine. And, when called upon, the men brought out their fiddles or Jew's-harps and, eyes closed, played an old foot-tapping tune.
All these things had been learned and absorbed at home in the valleys and slopes of Vermont and in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New York State. These things were known things, traditional things, ingrained and part of the gear the settlers brought into the wilderness of the empty land. Each couple possessed a measure of knowledge sufficient to allow them to possess, occupy, clear, sow, build, defend and pass-on the virgin land they had shaped to their liking. Soon enough, their piece of cleared land was joined to their neighbours' by paths and then roads, creating the new community known as Sutton Township. A community born out of the creativity of its people, a creativity enriched and facilitated by their use of and respect for tradition.