Raw Life. J. Patrick Boyer
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the Northern Advocate, to fill the district with pioneer
Cutting white pine and “clearing the land” challenged even the most determined Muskoka homesteaders, who sometimes had to plant in patches around the stumps until they could remove them. Muskoka’s soil was often just a thin overlay on bedrock; where deeper, it could be ploughed, but the blade often caught in roots of the felled pines.
farmers. By 1877 the whole of Macaulay Township east of Bracebridge was taken up. All but five of the most marginal lots in the township were occupied. Generally, this was the pattern in most Muskoka townships accessible by colonization road or boat. Once free-grant lands were no longer available, a new settler could only get a farm by buying it from an original homesteader, or from the Crown if an original claim had not resulted in a patent of land.
Many homesteaders found Muskoka farming more than they’d bargained for. If asked what crops they had, they’d reply “growing stones.” Cramped farm fields, first cleared of the forest, then freed of their stumps, next began sprouting rocks, which were forced to the surface by frost and by ploughing. The Boyers, in common with most settlers on the Canadian Shield, found that much of their farming time was spent harvesting not vegetables but boulders, using their horse to pull, not a wagon loaded with hay to the livery stables in town, but a stoneboat loaded with rocks to the edge of their field.
Often too many large stones made the effort of hauling them to the edge of the field unbearable. Weary farm families simply formed additional mounds throughout their fields. After several years, these painstakingly piled stones resembled taunting grave markers in a burial ground of their owners’ aspirations.
In 1875, when the settlement of Bracebridge was incorporated as a village separate from lots in the surrounding townships, the newly elected council voted to appoint James Boyer first clerk of the new municipality. Being in the village, rather than near it, would benefit all concerned. After six harsh yet memorable years as Macaulay homesteaders, the Boyers looked forward to modest comfort, closer to others. They were slightly less concerned now, after the passage of time, about being unmasked. The community had come to accept them as a married couple.
In May 1876, using money from selling “the homestead farm,” Hannah purchased a small frame house at the north end of town. The Boyer house at 2 Manitoba Street was on the west side, about fifty yards from where, seventeen years earlier, the lone pioneer John Beal had built a humble squatter’s shanty as the settlement’s first dwelling. The colonization road, which subsequently passed Beal’s front door, causing the loner to relocate to more remote Rosseau, had been named Manitoba Street, just as other principal thoroughfares had been renamed Dominion, Ontario, and Quebec streets, to express Bracebridge’s soaring patriotism.
The land at the rear of the Boyers’ house, sloping gently to the west, was soon filled up with garden vegetables in summer and snow in winter. Two blocks east, a gurgling spring formed a pond, from which Hannah and the children harvested watercress in summer and fetched buckets of cold clear water year-round. They bought raw milk fresh from a farm nearby.
They would live in this house for the rest of their lives. In all, Hannah and James produced seven children. After Annie, born in New York, and Nellie, William, and Charles, who first saw the light of day in Macaulay Township, came another son, George, born on July 21, 1878. He was followed by Bertha, who arrived on October 20, 1880. The last child, a son named Frederick, was born May 5, 1883. William died when only nineteen
In this 1890s scene outside the Boyer’s modest frame house on Manitoba Street at the north end of Bracebridge, James disappears into a book while Hannah shows daughters Annie and Nellie, in white blouses, a detail about her stitching. Of the Boyers’ three sons, George stands, Fred holds “Spot,” and Charlie is absent. Sometimes a town constable or an aggrieved party would appear at this front door at night or during a holiday and “speedy justice” would be dispensed by Muskoka’s justice of the peace.
months, in November 1875. Bertha lived just eight weeks before disease carried her away on December 17, 1880.
The Boyer family attended the Bracebridge Methodist church, which James had joined on moving to Muskoka, seeing it as a reasonable alternative to the Episcopalian Methodist Church he’d belonged to in Brooklyn, and the best choice, given his views and character, among the limited options available. He soon became secretary of the Methodist’s cemetery board, and served as a church trustee. Hannah was similarly active in the Methodist church and its women’s organizations, living “a consistent Christian life,” as her son George put it, “doing her duty to her family and neighbours and to her church faithfully and well.”
Church was not all about duty, though. The real magnet of Sunday service was the music. James loved singing in the choir. His ever-expanding collection of books included many volumes of church music. James also played clarinet and flute, sang bass, and delighted in having his family sing Handel’s Messiah. The rest of the family was equally musical. Son Charles was especially gifted, and a great dancer as well. Son George, who would begin teaching barefoot pupils at a rural one-room Macaulay school by age sixteen, was leading the Methodist church choir in Bracebridge by nineteen, and singing the soprano parts, or at least the air, until his voice changed.
Bracebridge was filling up with families who, like the Boyers, were leaving their outlying bushlots. Having given it a good shot, and putting in enough time to qualify for their free land grant, they now sought something better than scratch farming. So, many now came to town, hoping to improve their fortunes there.
However, a number of those who abandoned their bushlots wanted out of Muskoka altogether, hoping never to return. Those who caught “Manitoba Fever” went west, where they hoped for better Prairie farms. A decade later, others would head deeper into northeastern Ontario to farm “the clay belt” around Cochrane, where millions of acres of fertile flat soil had been discovered: a farmer’s paradise hidden within a seemingly endless landscape of muskeg and exposed bedrock. Over the same period, many more departed for the always-beckoning United States, either returning to New England or the Midwest from which they’d come, or heading west, drawn to the coast by California’s allure.
One such man was Robert Dollar. He had been one of the Boyers’ neighbours while they lived on the farm. He had prospered in Muskoka’s lumber business, and had risen to a position of influence in the community, serving on Bracebridge council, where he worked closely with his neighbour, the village clerk. In one outing to the polls, however, Councillor Dollar suffered electoral defeat, losing by three votes. In the face of such voter ingratitude, he quit Muskoka for California, where he developed the ocean-going Dollar Steamships Line and became a millionaire.
James engaged in conveyancing work at the Land Titles Office, and in January 1871 had been appointed first clerk of Macaulay Township. But just six months after starting this municipal work, a human dynamo blew into his life — Thomas McMurray, who had started the Northern Advocate, the first
Finding six men to pose for a photo in the mid-1880s was as easy as setting up the camera outside Bracebridge’s busy Crown Lands office, hub of real estate transactions and property registrations, where James Boyer conducted his active land conveyancing practice.
newspaper in the northern districts. He wanted James to edit the publication. James accepted McMurray’s offer, and from 1871 to 1873 the Northern Advocate became James’s main focus. His job as editor was one that he was ideally suited to, because a primary mission of the weekly was to promote settlement under the free-grant lands system. He’d learned of the program in New York, was now benefiting from it, and was keen to promote it to others. He gathered reports from successful Muskoka farmers and published, at McMurray’s behest, a great deal of “practical information” to help new homesteaders. The Northern Advocate was sold in Muskoka, but also distributed widely in parts of the United States and Britain. The same information was also published in book form,