This Barnston Township farm was pictured in H. Belden's Illustrated Atlas of the Eastern Townships and South Western QuÄbec, published in 1881. Belden's atlas, like Channell's county history, illustrates the self-conscious sense of achievement felt by the rural population in the late nineteenth century. In selling local subscriptions to his publication, Channell had the advantage of being able to capture his clients and their properties on film, but Belden could freely embellish his engravings as well as include a much wider panorama. Belden's atlases were not designed to preserve a memory of the past but to advertise the progress his clients had made since the pioneer era. Their names were printed on maps, their property and offices were listed in a directory and as many as possible of their belongings were put on display.
In this illustration of a farm just south of Compton, there is no hint of ancestral log cabins or snake rail fences. The house is built in the latest Victorian style, with stone foundation, ample shuttered windows, ornately-carved veranda posts, a bird house and a well-kept lawn. The series of small barns reflects not only a gradual expansion in the operation of the farm but the difficulty of erecting large barns with heavy, awkward timbers. They are attached to each other to provide the livestock with greater shelter from the wind and to make it more convenient for farmers to do their chores in the winter. Also characteristic of the Eastern Townships is the larger barn built over a stable, shown here on the left. The farmer is about to drive his wagon load of hay into this barn where it will be unloaded into one of the two bays.
The cattle shown here appear to be of an indiscriminate variety, but the more prosperous farmers of this area were in the process of specializing in the three British breeds of beef cattle (Shorthorn, Hereford and Angus) which dominated the country until the mid-twentieth century. This was a reaction to competition from the prairie West where land was plentiful and cattle could be raised more cheaply. During the early 1880s Eaton Township's M.H. Cochrane (later Senator) and J.H. Pope (Dominion Minister of Agriculture) actually established two of the first cattle ranches in what was to become the province of Alberta.
