Pioneer families could take few home furnishings into the wilderness; a corner cupboard, chest of drawers, clock and bedstead would have been comparative luxuries. Tables, trundle beds and benches, like the one shown here, would have been fashioned on the spot. Field stones made a very solid fireplace but the first chimneys were of small laths covered with clay inside and out. They were very smoky and fires in the roof were a constant danger.
In 1894 seventy-three-year-old C.S. Lebourveau of Eaton Township could still recall when:
Every house had a fireplace in which they did their cooking, roasting potatoes in the ashes, or boiling them in a kettle hung on a crane over the fire, frying meat in what was called a spider, with three legs on the hearth over the coals. They mostly had a brick oven in connection with their fireplace, which they would heat up once or twice a week, where they could bake a dozen loaves of bread or more at a time, or as many pies, also a pot of beans. When they wanted to roast a sparerib they hung it up in front of the fire with a string fastened to the ceiling overhead, with a large pewter platter underneath to catch the dripping. Well I can remember when my mother got her first tin baker that she could set before the fire and bake bread, biscuit and meat, what a wonderful thing she thought it was.
Household articles included a butter churn, a straw broom and a spinning wheel, shown here, used to make the wool and flax fibres which went into the family's homespun clothing (known as linsey- woolsey). Flax fibres, painstakingly processed from the plant grown on the farm, were also used to weave linen sheets, towels, tablecloths, and other items later manufactured from cotton. By 1844 there were already twenty-eight woollen mills in the Eastern Townships and the British American Land Company had just opened one of Canada's first cotton factories in Sherbrooke. In 1851 the average farm family in Compton Township still manufactured 16.5 metres of fulled cloth (shortened and thickened) and flannel, but only a metre of linen. In spite of the cotton shortage created by the Civil War, the township's homemade textile production was considerably lower in 1871. In the younger township of Winslow, however, the Scots averaged close to forty-five metres of fulled cloth and flannel (presumably they had been accustomed to this industry in their native land), while the French-Canadian families each produced an average of only eight metres of the wooden cloth, but 13.5 metres of linen. In fact, this was one of the few examples where the domestic economy of the two neighbouring groups actually differed.
Courtesy: National Museum of Man, National Museums of Canada
