It was while sitting in the Toronto Reference Library that I really became familiar with the country where my mother was raised.While looking around the various map shelves,I discovered a map of York county,New Brunswick,complete with The Parish Of Canterbury,which showed the landowners both in town and in the country around Dead Creek and Skiff Lake,out where their family farm was.Why that map was there when a good many others were not,I cannot say.But it caused me to become familiar with the territory in a way I never had before.So I spent some hours studying it,and looking out over the urban landscape of Toronto,out past Rosedale,The Don River and beyond,to Leaside.As the city below went about it business,I read my map and thought of a place that could hardly have been more different from the green urban landscape below.
The map I'd come across was dated in the later years of the nineteenth century,but it filled in most of what I'd been told of that country by my parents and grandparents.All of those people to whom we were related were noted on the map,showing the place,and approximate shape of each of their properties.The Englishs ,the Derricks,the Hamiltons,and of course the Grahams,all shown right where I remember visiting.
My grandfather,Thomas Graham had once lived in the back country,where he cut timber.The place had been pointed out to me any number of times,but we never went there because the road in was not able to be driven,being deeply rutted and high in the middle.People often went in there to hunt though.At some point,perhaps when he married,he moved out to the place where they were living along the Upper Skiff Lake Road.It really was not far from the old camp,as the crow flies.If you were in the farmyard,standing near the house,there was a big hill out back,what some people would call a mountain.Straight out through there would bring you more or less to the old camp,according to the map.The hill leads down into the valley where the Deadwater Creek flows,but it must be very rough country with thick bush.I can recall being to the top of that hill once,but never down the other side.In looking at the map I wondered if the old camp,and the farm were in fact just one adjoining piece of land.I theory,you could still walk back there,but I'd never heard of anybody going across country to do that.It,s likely been fifty or more years since anyone's looked on that old place.
My first memory of Dead Creek is not a memory at all.I was baptized in the little church there in the summer of 1961,and it must have been during that same visit that a picture of me was taken of my grandfather holding me up on the back of a big bay horse.The house was a crude thing with red asphalt shingles,and there was a lot of hay and wildflowers.
Later on I remember being in the barn with my grandmother while she fed chickens from a pouch in her apron.There were other sorts of animals in the barn too,though only one or two of each,as far as I can remember.They kept a Holstein cow for milk,though they couldn't have needed more than one,with only the two of them living there.There was a pig too,the longest and fattest thing I'd ever seen,but it was penned in,not like the pigs where we used to live before we came to Moncton. Of course there was at least the one horse,and there may well have been a sheep or two as well,but never a goat.I can recall from an early age my grandmother saying that she did not like goats.Cows provided enough milk,so a goat was not needed.Besides,she said,they would eat anything,it was impossible to keep them away from the clothes drying on the line if they were not chained up.There were cats in the barn too,but they were not house cats.They roamed around in the barn,but never really came near people,and they were not fed.Their purpose was to kill rodents,and if you gave them food,they would not eat mice,so they were left unfed.For some reason I could never figure out,there was never a dog on my grandparents farm,though it was very much the custom to keep dogs on most farms.For that matter,neither the Englishes,my grandmothers sister,or the Derricks,her daughter kept dogs either.Those people lived nearby,on farms adjoining my grandfather's.
My uncle Clifford lived,at one time right across the road from the end of my grandfathers driveway.We did visit him there a time or two,but I don't recall much of what his place was like.In the back,it was well treed ,and so he could not have grown crops back there.There was an old tractor sitting right next to his house though,along with an old hay rake.But they were both rusty and,as far as I could tell,abandoned,and they sat there for years,long after all of those people moved into the town of Canterbury.The most likely thing that comes to my mind is that all of those people,my grandparents,my grandmothers sister and her husband,uncle Clifford,and Aunt Ruby and her husband,Ernie Derrick farmed all of those farms collectively.My grandfathers farm and Uncle Clifford's place could hardly have grown much of anything,but the other two farms,just down the road were a bit flatter and maybe a bit less rocky.The Derricks farm had an apple orchard as well,though the fruit from those trees hardly resembled store bought apples.They were enough to provide sustenance though.
I'm not certain if it's a memory or a dream,but I think there was once a huge cistern at the foot of my grandfather's driveway.Sometimes I remember it.But in some of my memories it's not there.There would have been a little wooden shack just in front of it,maybe partly enclosing it.Some people,in some places might have called it a spring house.This particular spring house may or may not have been used for storing such things as milk or butter.I don't ever recall going into it,but it must have been put there for a purpose,at one time.My grandparents had a refrigerator in the house,and a hand pump for water right by the kitchen sink,so the spring house,if that's what it was would hardly have been needed.But I do recall drinking out of a big open barrel,using a dipper that hung from the side of the hut.It was good,cool water,though all day long cars went by on the dusty road,so to get a good drink,you had to dip deeply into the barrel.The water surface was dusted over and there was green moss growing on the barrel's wood.Water emptied from a pipe into that barrel,so there must have been a large vault,perhaps even a cave within the mountain that my grandparents called home.
The map I'd come across was dated in the later years of the nineteenth century,but it filled in most of what I'd been told of that country by my parents and grandparents.All of those people to whom we were related were noted on the map,showing the place,and approximate shape of each of their properties.The Englishs ,the Derricks,the Hamiltons,and of course the Grahams,all shown right where I remember visiting.
My grandfather,Thomas Graham had once lived in the back country,where he cut timber.The place had been pointed out to me any number of times,but we never went there because the road in was not able to be driven,being deeply rutted and high in the middle.People often went in there to hunt though.At some point,perhaps when he married,he moved out to the place where they were living along the Upper Skiff Lake Road.It really was not far from the old camp,as the crow flies.If you were in the farmyard,standing near the house,there was a big hill out back,what some people would call a mountain.Straight out through there would bring you more or less to the old camp,according to the map.The hill leads down into the valley where the Deadwater Creek flows,but it must be very rough country with thick bush.I can recall being to the top of that hill once,but never down the other side.In looking at the map I wondered if the old camp,and the farm were in fact just one adjoining piece of land.I theory,you could still walk back there,but I'd never heard of anybody going across country to do that.It,s likely been fifty or more years since anyone's looked on that old place.
My first memory of Dead Creek is not a memory at all.I was baptized in the little church there in the summer of 1961,and it must have been during that same visit that a picture of me was taken of my grandfather holding me up on the back of a big bay horse.The house was a crude thing with red asphalt shingles,and there was a lot of hay and wildflowers.
Later on I remember being in the barn with my grandmother while she fed chickens from a pouch in her apron.There were other sorts of animals in the barn too,though only one or two of each,as far as I can remember.They kept a Holstein cow for milk,though they couldn't have needed more than one,with only the two of them living there.There was a pig too,the longest and fattest thing I'd ever seen,but it was penned in,not like the pigs where we used to live before we came to Moncton. Of course there was at least the one horse,and there may well have been a sheep or two as well,but never a goat.I can recall from an early age my grandmother saying that she did not like goats.Cows provided enough milk,so a goat was not needed.Besides,she said,they would eat anything,it was impossible to keep them away from the clothes drying on the line if they were not chained up.There were cats in the barn too,but they were not house cats.They roamed around in the barn,but never really came near people,and they were not fed.Their purpose was to kill rodents,and if you gave them food,they would not eat mice,so they were left unfed.For some reason I could never figure out,there was never a dog on my grandparents farm,though it was very much the custom to keep dogs on most farms.For that matter,neither the Englishes,my grandmothers sister,or the Derricks,her daughter kept dogs either.Those people lived nearby,on farms adjoining my grandfather's.
My uncle Clifford lived,at one time right across the road from the end of my grandfathers driveway.We did visit him there a time or two,but I don't recall much of what his place was like.In the back,it was well treed ,and so he could not have grown crops back there.There was an old tractor sitting right next to his house though,along with an old hay rake.But they were both rusty and,as far as I could tell,abandoned,and they sat there for years,long after all of those people moved into the town of Canterbury.The most likely thing that comes to my mind is that all of those people,my grandparents,my grandmothers sister and her husband,uncle Clifford,and Aunt Ruby and her husband,Ernie Derrick farmed all of those farms collectively.My grandfathers farm and Uncle Clifford's place could hardly have grown much of anything,but the other two farms,just down the road were a bit flatter and maybe a bit less rocky.The Derricks farm had an apple orchard as well,though the fruit from those trees hardly resembled store bought apples.They were enough to provide sustenance though.
I'm not certain if it's a memory or a dream,but I think there was once a huge cistern at the foot of my grandfather's driveway.Sometimes I remember it.But in some of my memories it's not there.There would have been a little wooden shack just in front of it,maybe partly enclosing it.Some people,in some places might have called it a spring house.This particular spring house may or may not have been used for storing such things as milk or butter.I don't ever recall going into it,but it must have been put there for a purpose,at one time.My grandparents had a refrigerator in the house,and a hand pump for water right by the kitchen sink,so the spring house,if that's what it was would hardly have been needed.But I do recall drinking out of a big open barrel,using a dipper that hung from the side of the hut.It was good,cool water,though all day long cars went by on the dusty road,so to get a good drink,you had to dip deeply into the barrel.The water surface was dusted over and there was green moss growing on the barrel's wood.Water emptied from a pipe into that barrel,so there must have been a large vault,perhaps even a cave within the mountain that my grandparents called home.
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