The Journal of Eliza Calkins White: A View of Mid-nineteenth Century Rural Life inQuebec's Eastern Townships

Anne F. Holloway

A Thesisin
The Department
ofHistory
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Master of Arts (History) at
Concordia University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

April 2012
© Anne F. Holloway, 2012

CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY
School of Graduate Studies
This is to certify that the thesis prepared
By:

Anne F. Holloway

Entitled:

The Journal of Eliza Calkins White: A View of Mid-nineteenth Century
Rural Life in Quebec's Eastern Townships

and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree ofMaster of Arts (History)complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards withrespect to originality and quality.
Signed by the final Examining Committee:__________________________________
Dr. N. Jaffary
Chair__________________________________
Dr. P. Gossage
Examiner__________________________________
Dr. A. Rowley
Examiner__________________________________
Dr. M. VipondSupervisor
Approved by_______________________________________________________
Chair of Department or Graduate Program Director____________2012_________________________________
Dean of Faculty

ABSTRACTThe Journal of Eliza Calkins White: A View of Mid-nineteenth Century Rural Life inQuebec's Eastern Townships
Anne F. Holloway
Eliza Calkins White and family moved from Vermont to the Townships in the late1830s. Her journal, written sporadically between 1852 and 1874, offers a rareopportunity to examine the daily details of a world that has received little attention from
historians, that of farm life in the borderland of southern Quebec. This thesis endeavours
to convey a picture of that life as voiced by Eliza through the journal, while addressing its
contents in terms of the questions debated in contemporary historical scholarship about
the farm economy.
After a brief consideration of texts focussed on the Eastern Townships, this thesis
first looks at the literatures that discuss the history, content, form and historical value of
diaries and journals. The following chapters widen out like concentric circles to examine
the content of Eliza's journal within the context of rural historiography. They evaluate
the role of the women members of the family in the strategies of the farm economy, andthe extent to which farm production in this particular time and place was geared towards
the market. This journal shows women both in the farm economy as producers and in themarketplace as negotiators. Moreover, the products that were largely the result of
women's labour that were sold or traded in the local market were an essential contribution
to the stability of the family economy. Without such journals the work of women such as
Eliza and her daughters and the intricacies of farm life would remain invisible.

iii

Acknowledgements
I wish to express my thanks to all the people who became involved in this project
one way or another. John Staton drew my attention to the journal (which he found in theattic of an old house he purchased) and supplied me with further information. Marilyn
Cameron Stairs introduced me to her aunt, Doris White Cameron, who readily shared theinformation that she has gathered on the White family. Marilyn and her husband Walter
Stairs, along with Doris White Cameron, took me on a tour of Potton Township to showme the places I wanted to photograph. Without the help, patience and good humour ofArlene Royea and Betty Cowan at the Brome County Historical Society, and of Peter
Ayles who was my help line for computer related problems, this project may well havenot been completed. I also wish to thank the staff of Concordia University's Departmentof History, particularly Dr. Mary Vipond for her advice and encouragement as my thesis
advisor, and the members of my examination committee for their suggestions.

iv

Table of Contents
List of Figures ....................................................................................................................vi

Introduction ................................................................................................................1
Chapter 1

Eliza Calkins White and her journal ....................................... 8The Migration to the Eastern Townships ......................... 8
Literature on Potton and the Eastern Townships .............. 9
The History of Diaries .....................................................11
Finding Women's History in Diaries ............................. 12
Why Did These Women Write? ..................................... 14
Form and Content ........................................................... 16
Ethics of Reading Diaries ............................................... 19
Extracting the History from the Journal ......................... 20
The Manuscript ............................................................... 22

Chapter 2

The Family Farm ................................................................... 24
Literature on the Farming Family in North America ......24
Mid-Nineteenth Century Potton Township .................... 33
The White Family 1852 .................................................. 35
The White Family 1860 .................................................. 38

Chapter 3

An Analysis of Work on the White Farm .............................. 42

Chapter 4

Women and the Local Market ............................................... 58
Women as Producers for the Local Market .................... 58
The Economy of the Local Market ................................. 58
Women as Negotiators in the Local Market ................... 61

Conclusion .................................................................................................... 64
Bibliography ................................................................................................. 71v

List of Figures

Figure 1. Map of Potton Township .................................................................................... 4
Figure 2. View of the Green Mountains from near Eliza's house ...................................... 5
Figure 3. A Page from Eliza's Journal ............................................................................. 23
Figure 4. Looking down on Mansonville from near Eliza's house .................................. 33
Figure 5. Map of Mansonville ......................................................................................... 34
Figure 6. The White Family ............................................................................................. 37
Figure 7. The road by Eliza's house, March, 2012 ........................................................... 40
Figure 8. Remains of Eliza and Kneeland's house ........................................................... 41
Figure 9. Remains of Abel and Maria's house ................................................................. 41
Figure 10. Location of Charles Garland's house............................................................... 44
Figure 11. Gravestones, Protestant Cemetery, Mansonville ........................................... 63vi

INTRODUCTION
This thesis examines a unique document, the journal of a nineteenth-century farmwoman, Eliza Calkins White, who with her husband Kneeland and five children moved
up from Vermont to Quebec's Eastern Townships at the end of the 1830s and settled in
Potton Township.1 Beginning in 1852 and ending in 1874, though there are lacunae ofmonths and sometimes years, this is a substantial document. Though the journal reveals
little of Eliza's inner self or of the emotional relationships within the family, it gives adaily report of the activities of each member of the household and notes the neighbours
and traders that came to the farm that day.2 This document is of particular interest as itrecords both the type and the extent of the labour that each person contributed towards
the economic security of the family unit. The work of the farm, particularly the work of
the women, is the main theme of the diary, and of this thesis.
To analyse such a document requires a consideration of several literatures.
Chapter 1 first gives a brief assessment of texts focussed on the Eastern Townships, few
of which are very useful for this particular study. I then consider the literatures that
discuss the history, content, form and historical value of diaries and journals, and assess
the extent to which Eliza's journal confirms, or not, the arguments of the various authors.
I argue that such diaries offer a rare glimpse into the lives of ordinary women of the pastand reveal the details of daily life, thus supplementing histories based on public
1. To refer to Eliza's document as a journal rather than a diary may seem a misnomer. However
Kathryn Carter sees the differentiation between journals and diaries as "arbitrarily introduced as a way toseparate lesser 'diaries' from the more introspective and coherent 'journals' usually produced by those whohave had access to various degrees of literary training." She adds that "in practice, both terms are applied
to such a variety of texts and styles that attempts at categorization prove fruitless." Kathryn Carter, ed., The
Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1996 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2002), 5-6.
2. For a transcription of the journal, see Eliza Calkins White, Eliza Calkins White's "Journal ofLife"1852 – 1874. Transcriber Gwen Davis Morton (Knowlton, Quebec: Brome County Historical Society,2000).

1

information, political correspondence and the lives of the elite, as well as social histories
that use cliometrics to form their conclusions. David Gagan acknowledges that "there issimply no other way to understand how life was actually lived in the past than toreconstruct, stage by stage, the lives of actual people as they went about the very ordinary
business of getting on with life itself," and his book gives a very good demonstration of
the value of cliometrics as a basis on which to examine social change. 3 However studies
based on sources such as censuses, land registrations and church records provide only astill shot taken from a distance, whereas diaries such as Eliza's show a close-up of theactors of that society in motion over a period of time as they interact with relations,neighbours and friends and thereby give a more intimate portrayal of families "getting onwith life."
The following three substantive chapters widen out like concentric circles to
examine the content of Eliza's journal within the context of rural historiography. They
address two main questions: what part did women play in the strategies of the farmeconomy, and to what extent was farm production in this particular time and place geared
towards a market economy? An additional question is to what extent local conditions
impinged on the strategies of Potton Township's farmers. The journal suggests that thesequestions are all interrelated. It shows clearly that the family all worked together as an
economic unit and that women's work was geared towards the local economy, both aspart of this unit and through the goods they produced that could be traded in the local
market. Though Eliza and her daughters customarily performed different tasks from her
husband and her sons, the farm's end-products were the result of the input of labour from

3. David Gagan, Hopeful Travellers: Families, Land, and Social Change in Mid-Victorian PeelCounty, Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 8.

2both sexes. Moreover, the products that were largely the result of women's labour that
could be sold or traded in the local market were an essential contribution to the stabilityof the farm's economy. Each person worked according to his or her ability, age andexperience, and was provided for in return. More importantly, they worked towards thesame objective, the sustenance of the family unit. The journal does not tell us how
willingly such work was undertaken, or what disputes arose, but the labour of everyone
was required to keep the family secure from one generation to the next.
Official settlement in the area that became Potton Township did not begin until
the end of the eighteenth century. Frederick Haldimand (who became the governor ofQuebec in 1777) did not want the area now known as the Eastern Townships opened up
to settlers. He wanted to leave it undeveloped as a barrier between British and American
territory.4 It was not until a proclamation in 1792 officially opened up the area fordevelopment that settlers were able to own and dispose of land as they wished. The
territory was divided into townships. These were to be squares with ten miles on eachside except for those on navigable rivers, which were to have nine miles frontage andtwelve miles depth. This proclamation was well published in newspapers in both Canada
and the United States, and the petitions started flowing in immediately.5
The settlers that came to Potton Township found forests of deciduous andconiferous trees.6 They also found mountainous terrain. The areas of the townshipdepicted by the shaded areas on the map of Potton (figure 1) show fairly accurately the

4. Jean-Pierre Kesteman, Peter Southam, and Diane Saint-Pierre, Histoire des Cantons de l’Est(Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l‟Université Laval, 1998), 84.
5. Kesteman, Southam, and Saint-Pierre, Histoire des Cantons, 88-89.
6. D. B. Cann, P. Lajoie, and P. C. Stobbe, Soil Survey of Shefford, Brome and Missisquoi
Counties in the Province of Quebec (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, 1947), 15.

3

contours found on modern maps.7 The mountains on eastern side of the township, Bear,
Owl's Head and Sugar loaf, are 678 metres, 754 metres and 663 metres high respectively.

Figure 1. Map of Potton Township. Courtesy Missisquoi Historical Society.

8

These are in the Sutton-Orford range, a continuation of Vermont's Green
Mountains; they are all part of the Appalachian upland.9 Potton Townships is almost
totally surrounded by mountains, with the result that the main thoroughfare from north tosouth follows the North Missisquoi River which is fed by tributaries from the mountains
7. See, for example "Lac Memphrémagog, Québec," 31H/01, Édition 1-JLC (Gatineau, Québec:JLC Géomatique, 2007).
8. From Map of the Counties of Shefford, Iberville, Brome, Missisquoi and Rouville, Canada East
(H.E. Wallings, 1864 DVD © Musée Missisquoi). This includes the names of the residents on the various
lots. However the notes written by David Ellis, who made the CD from the original map, suggest that "careshould be exercised when interpreting this information as the cartographer is thought to have incorporated
earlier work by others when making the map."
9. Kesteman, Southam, and Saint-Pierre, Histoire des Cantons, 38-42.

4

on either side. Though not wide enough to be navigable, this river provided power forthe mills that were built in the early decades of the nineteenth century by some of the firstsettlers in the location that later became Mansonville .10

Figure 2. View of the Green Mountains from near Eliza's house. Photograph by Anne F. Holloway"The land is good, and much of it under a good state of cultivation," wrote C.
Thomas in his Contributions to the History of the Eastern Townships which was
published in 1866. 11 A soil map published in 1947 shows more than a dozen different
soil types distributed throughout this township. About 40 percent of the terrain is

10. For further details on the first mills, see C. M. Day, History of the Eastern Townships (1869;
repr., Belleville, Ontario: Mika, 1989), 281-82; C. Thomas, Contributions to the History of the Eastern
Townships: A Work Containing an Account of the Early Settlement of St. Armand, Dunham, Sutton,
Brome, Potton, and Bolton; With a History of the Principal Events that have Transpired in Each of These
Townships up to the Present Time (Montreal, John Lovell, 1866), 314-18.
11. Thomas, Contributions, 329.

5

classified as "rough stony land" which is defined in the accompanying report as thatwhich "includes areas with steep slopes or too much stone to be fit for agricultural
purposes." Blanford loam, which is shown for approximately 16 percent of the townshipis less stony but good for crops such as oats, corn and potatoes. These were the two soil
types on the White farmland. The rest of the land in Potton Township had a variety ofsoils, some of which were suitable for cultivation and less stony.12
Lake Memphremagog, on the west side of the township, started to become apopular tourist destination in the second half of the nineteenth century but this had little
impact on the lives of families such as Eliza's. In 1850 visitors from Montreal and New
England started to cruise the lake on a steamer, the Mountain Maid, from June to October
between Newport, Vermont at the south end of the lake and Magog at the north end.13
They came to Lake Memphremagog to take in the scenery which "was described by
tourists and promoters alike as raw, unadorned and empty."14
Throughout much of the nineteenth century, due to poor roads and lack ofproximity to the railway, the farmers of Potton Township remained isolated from externalmarkets such as Montreal, where products could be sold for cash. The market for theWhite family's products such as cloth, butter, dried apples, maple sugar, potatoes, beans,oats and livestock was thus effectively limited to neighbours, pedlars and livestock
dealers who came to the farm, and traders in the nearby village of Mansonville as well as
those a few miles over the border in Vermont. The journal shows the way in which thefunctioning of the local market relied to a considerable extent on exchange of goods and12. For details see Cann, Lajoie, and . Stobbe, Soil Survey, 29-62.
13. Kesteman, Southam, and Saint-Pierre, Histoire des Cantons, 469.
14. Elizabeth Liane Jewett, "Notes on Nineteenth Century Tourism on Lake Memphremagog,
1850-1899," Journal of Eastern Townships Studies/Revue d/études des Cantons de l'Est, no. 31(Fall/Automne 2007): 33.

6

promissory notes as well as cash, and illustrates the role of women in both the farmeconomy as producers and in the marketplace as negotiators. Products that were largely
the result of women's labour that could be sold or traded in the local market were an
essential contribution to the stability of the household economy which changed little over
the twenty-two year span of the journal.
Eliza's journal offers a rare view of a world that has received little attention from
historians, that of a nineteenth-century farm family's life in the borderland of southernQuebec. This thesis endeavours to convey a picture of that life as voiced by Eliza
through the journal, while addressing the text in terms of the questions debated incontemporary historical scholarship.

7

CHAPTER 1
ELIZA CALKINS WHITE AND HER JOURNAL
The Migration to the Eastern Townships
In the fall of 1839, according to a genealogy published in the mid-nineteenth
century, Eliza, her husband, and their five children, the oldest of whom was eleven,migrated approximately forty miles north. They left their home town of Hyde Park,
Vermont, named after Eliza‟s grandfather, and a region where they had many relatives, to
go to Bolton, one of the Eastern Townships in what was then called Lower Canada. 15 By
1842, according to the census for that year, there were six children, the family was livingin the adjoining township of Potton on two hundred acres, of which twenty-eight were
"improved," and Lower Canada had become Canada East.16
At that time this township was predominantly rural, English speaking, andsomewhat isolated from industrializing centres such as Trois-Rivières, Sherbrooke andMontreal. From the inception of land grants for the Eastern Townships in the 1790s,
many of the settlers moving into Potton Township came up from the United States,
principally from New England, rather than from other areas of the Canadas or fromacross the Atlantic. The 1861 census shows that sixty-four years after the first official
settlers arrived, this township was almost entirely occupied by English-speaking people
born in either the United States or Canada. Many of the family names found on thiscensus are those of the original settlers. Of the almost two thousand residents, 68 percent

15. Reuben H. Walworth, Hyde Genealogy: Or, the Descendants, in the Female as Well as in theMale lines, From William Hyde, of Norwich, with their Places of Residence, and Dates of Birth, Marriages,&c., and Other Particulars of Them and Their Families and Ancestry, Vol. 1 (Albany: J. Munsell, 1864),
512, http://books.google.ca/books?id=rIKhN5aMelcC&dq.
16. Mss. Census, Canada East, 1842, Stanstead County, Potton Township, , 2625, line 28 reel
C732.

8

were born in Canada, and of the 27 percent born in the United States, at least 60 percent
were born in Vermont; over four hundred children had at least one parent born there.17
Living only a few miles from the United States, Eliza and her family interacted with acommunity that reached south across the border to such places as North and South Troyand Hyde Park.
Literature on Potton and the Eastern Townships
Very little has been written about this part of the Eastern Townships, especially in
relation to rural women, and much of the history of the region still lies on shelves in thearchives of local museums and historical societies. The most comprehensive book is
Histoire des Cantons de l’Est by Jean-Pierre Kesteman, Peter Southam, and Diane SaintPierre, but as it covers, in just over 700 pages, the entire history of the whole area, frompre-historic times until the end of the twentieth century, there is little room for details
about the social history of particular townships. It is, however, an extremely usefulgeneral reference.18 J. I. Little has written several books on Eastern Townships history,
but much of his work is concerned with politics. In Crofters and Habitants: Settler
Society, Economy, and Culture in a Quebec Township, 1848-1881 Little examines atownship that, although similar to Potton in terms of population size and isolation, wassettled by French-Canadian and Scottish settlers.19 In the course of his research he usedcensus and other public information, but he did not have any "descriptive personal
documents" that he could use, which perhaps explains why women are scarcely visible in

17. Mss. Census, Canada East, 1861, Brome County, Potton Township, Personal Census, 157-197,
Reel C1270. The percentage of residents born in Vermont was no doubt higher than 60 percent; ninetynine of the entries just gave "United States" as the birthplace.
18. Kesteman, Southam, and Saint-Pierre, Histoire des Cantons.
19. J. I. Little, Crofters and Habitants: Settler Society, Economy, and Culture in a Quebec
Township, 1848-1881 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991).

9this study.20 In Love Strong as Death: Lucy Peel's Journal, 1833-1836 (edited by Little),
the letters she wrote to her family back in England give a good description of rural life
but, as Little points out, "journals such as Lucy Peel's reflect the experiences and views ofa small, privileged sector of society."21 She and her husband, who had been in the British
navy and was receiving half-pay, were members of the English gentry, and although they
worked hard and were frugal, they obviously had more financial resources than the White
family as they paid in full with cash for nearly everything they bought. After less thanfour years farming near Sherbrooke the Peel family retreated back to England.
By reading the works of C. M. Day ( whose books were published in the 1860s)
and Thomas one can learn a considerable amount about the early history, geography,
wildlife and population of the townships, as well as anecdotes of encounters with wild
animals, but they lack information on the day-to-day functioning of the farm.22 Womenare hardly mentioned in Thomas's book, and only occasionally by Day. The Reverend
Ernest M. Taylor's two volume History of Brome County, the second volume of which
was published in 1937, is also a useful source of information concerning Potton, but
likewise contains little about the contributions of women. Much of the content
concerning early settlement is similar to that of Day and Thomas, though Taylor, whogrew up in Potton, includes considerably more genealogical information.23

20. Little, Crofters, 9.
21. J. I. Little, ed., Love Strong as Death: Lucy Peel’s Canadian Journal, 1833 – 1836 (Waterloo,
Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 2.
22. Day, History of Eastern Townships; Day, Pioneers of the Eastern Townships: A Work
Containing Official and Reliable Information Respecting the Formation of Settlements; With Incidents in
Their Early History; and details of Adventures, Perils and Deliverances (1863; repr., Sherbrooke: PageSangster, 1973); C. Thomas, Contributions.
23. Rev. Ernest M. Taylor, History of Brome County Quebec from the Date of Grants of Land
Therein to the Present Time With Records of Some Early Families, Vol. 1, (1908; repr. Milton, Ontario:
Global Heritage Press, 2009; Vol. 2 1937 (repr. from original published in Montreal by John Lovell, no
details of reprint given]).

10

The History of Diaries
Jackson W. Armstrong traces the roots of the structure of nineteenth century
women's diaries back to the late Middle Ages. Drawing on the work of Eamon Duffy, hewrites that "the owners of late medieval and sixteenth-century books of hours, who werelargely women, made personal entries on the fly pages and calendars of these texts,
noting family births and deaths, political events, and even domestic details like thecontents of their linen closets."24 Harriet Blodgett, studying upper and middle class
Englishwomen's diaries, sees the beginning of diaries in the sixteenth century, whencomments began to be included in record keeping documents. "Having no careers,
commands, or embassies to write of," she points out, "women noted the minutiae ofdomestic affairs, creating the sort of record that by the eighteenth century would mature
into the diary as we customarily think of it . . . the serial record of personal memorabilia
that gives us a sense of the diarist too." She notes the development later that century andin the next of "the formulaic diary of conscience (religious soul-searching in forms
prescribed by devotional manuals)" and the inclusion of entries about items of public life
in record keeping journals, so that "by the eighteenth-century the diary was flourishing as
an eclectic form" with elements of both.25 Margo Culley maintains that many diaries
written by North Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were written forother people to read, and that the women especially "wrote as family and community

24. Jackson W. Armstrong, ed., Seven Eggs Today: The Diaries of Mary Armstrong, 1859 and1869 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004), 16, 168, endnote 7.
25. Harriet Blodgett, Capacious Hold-All: An Anthology of Englishwomen's Diary Writings(Charlotteville: University of Virginia Press, 1991), 3-5.

11

historians," giving the "exquisite detail" of the events "that made up the fabric of theirlives."26
Finding Women's History in Diaries
Women's private writings frequently owe their survival not to their perceived
archival or literary value but to the failure of the writer‟s heirs to clean out the attic. Yet,as Lynn Z. Bloom states, "a great deal of valuable information; historical, economic,
political, social, medical, cultural" can be found in women‟s diaries.27 A compilation of
the details can reveal valuable information such as goods available for purchase in agiven area and their price, weather patterns and medicinal remedies. In Eliza's journal
there are frequent references to items bought, sold and traded, which often include themethod of payment, be it cash, home-produced goods or promissory notes. Eliza's
journal therefore shows how the local economy worked as well as the functioning of thefamily economy.
For a long time few historians were interested in women's diaries unless the writer
was closely associated with an important man or wrote about major events.28 As Kathryn
Carter points out, "women's diaries can be and have been used to perpetuate androcentricmodels of historiography."29 In the 1970s research into women‟s private writings was
stimulated by the interest of feminist academics from various disciplines, particularly

26. Margo Culley, ed., A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to
the Present (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1985), 4.
27. Lynn Z. Bloom, "'I write for myself and strangers': Private Diaries as Public Documents," inInscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, eds. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 27.
28. See, for example, J. Ross Robertson, ed., The Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe, Wife of theFirst Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of Upper Canada, 1792-6 (1911; repr. from Briggs edition,
Toronto: Prospero Books, 2001); Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie, ed. Isabella D. Martin andMyrta Lockett Avary (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1905, accessed at http.//docsouth.unc.edu.).
29. Kathryn Carter, Diaries in English by Women in Canada, 1753-1995: An Annotated
Bibliography (Ottawa: CRIAW/ICREF, 1997), 7.

12

history and English studies, but much of that research focussed on autobiographies andmemoirs rather than diaries, and on twentieth-century writers. The private writings ofworking class and rural women remain elusive, yet they are very important for our
understanding of all aspects of past societies. As Caroll Smith-Rosenberg asserts
To ignore women is not simply to ignore a significant subgroup within the social
structure. It is to misunderstand and distort the entire organization of that society.
Incorporating women's experiences into our social analysis involves far more thanadding another factor to our interpretation and thus correcting an admittedly
glaring oversight. It forces us to reconsider our understanding of the mostfundamental ordering of social relations, institutions and power arrangements
within the society we study.30
Finding these experiences is no easy task and little can be found in censuses andother public documents in which women are for the most part invisible. In the case ofMartha Ballard, "without the diary," writes Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "her biography would
be little more than a succession of dates."31 Ulrich found that
Outside her own diary, Martha has no history. Although she considered herself"the head of a family," a full partner in the management of a household, no
independent record of her work survives. It is her husband's name, not hers, thatappears in censuses, tax lists, and merchant accounts for her town. She is notlisted in Hallowell's poor relief records, though we know she relieved the poor,
nor in the earliest records of the Augusta First Church, though she was a member.
Nor does any extant court record acknowledge the testimony she took fromunwed mothers in delivery.32
Elizabeth Jane Errington describes a similar lack of women's history in public documents
and histories of Upper Canada.33
Culley is of the opinion that far more men than women kept diaries until late in
the nineteenth century.34 But we have no way of telling just how many women's diaries
30. Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (NewYork: A. A. Knopf, 1985), 19.
31. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary,
1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 5.
32. Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale, 343-44.
33. Elizabeth Jane Errington, Wives and Mothers, Schoolmistresses and Scullery Maids: Working
Women in Upper Canada 1790-1840 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995), xi-xii.

13were discarded. Nor do we know as yet how many are lying unread in the collections ofsmall museums and historical societies. When researching material for his book based on
diaries of emigrants to Australia, Andrew Hassam came to the conclusion that "thegender bias of the archives is probably more acute than the class bias. . . ." He found that
only 14 percent of these accounts were written by women, even though "official figuresplace the balance of male to female emigrants to Australia for the thirty years 1843 to1872 at ten males for every eight females. . . ."35 Yet during this period "women do notseem to have been markedly more illiterate than men. . . ."36
Why did These Women Write?
Reading Eliza's journal is somewhat like watching a train go by. The entries are a
stream of facts, with little or no elaboration. On March 25, 1856, for example, she wrote:"Abel worked for Frank Pebody to day Frank was taken sick last night and had the docter
Francis helped his pa and Charley scatter the buckets and then went to mill medora atOlivers Kneeland tapt part of the sugar place I went to marthas marietta done chores andembroidered Royal here to breakfast and went to the lake Lord forgive all our sins."37
Bloom's description of Martha Ballard's diary could for the most part apply to
Eliza's. Bloom writes that "her observations are elliptical and usually uninterpreted; shedoesn't identify people or places or analyze events. She doesn't need to; she is writing this34. Culley, Day at a Time, 3.
35. Hassam, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries of Nineteenth-Century British Emigrants(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 15.
36. Andrew Hassam, Sailing, 14.
37. When quoting from Eliza's journal, I have chosen to use her original punctuation, or rather thelack of it, as well as her spelling and grammar. There is the danger in amending sentence structure that theoriginal meaning may be misinterpreted. The fact that she knew how to punctuate, as evidenced by someentries, but did not take the time to do so, suggests that for her grammatically correct structure was lessimportant than getting the information down. When reading the journal, the flow of her words,
uninterrupted by commas or periods, reflects the unrelenting pace of her work-filled life.

14

aide-mémoire exclusively for herself."38 But Eliza‟s journal is more than an aidemémoire. On November 27, 1870, Eliza refers to it as her "Day book" and as her"Journal of Life" in another heading on January 14, 1872. Both are appropriate, but it is
not just the journal of her life. On a few occasions when she was absent from the housefor a few days, the record was continued by one of her children, one of whom wrote that"at Mothers request I am to keep "books" till she gets back" which suggests that thejournal is a form of record keeping. 39 Yet it is both less and more than record keeping.
Money transactions were frequently noted, but the amount involved was not always
specified. Nearly every entry includes a prayer, some of which are of considerable
length. There are also quotations from the Bible and other literature, hymns and poems,
some of which appear to be her own compositions. It was personal in that she often
asked God to forgive her for her sins, or help her to be a better person, or end her
miserable life, in a way that one would expect to find in a truly private diary. It seems
that Eliza did not mind others seeing it, even though the content and the style sometimes
indicate otherwise. She let her children have access to the journal, and on at least one
occasion she showed it to a non-family member.40 Though she rarely expressed concern
for others except to remark that they were unwell, she was very much concerned about
the state of her soul and her relationship with God. She prayed for relief from her own
health problems, but hardly any of her prayers include supplications on behalf ofmembers of her family.

38. Bloom, "I Write for Myself," 25.
39. Calkins White Journal, acc. no. 83-29, Brome County Historical Society Archives,
Knowlton, Québec, November 6, 1870.
40. On March 3, 1854 she wrote "miss Este has been examining this this [sic] book and I hope she
found it interesting." Miss Este was perhaps the school teacher.

15

Ulrich sees Martha Ballard's diary as "a selective record, shaped by her need tojustify and understand her life, yet it is also a remarkably honest one," and perhaps thesame can be said of Eliza's diary. 41 Gayle R. Davis, in an article on pioneer women's
diaries written in the western United States in the nineteenth-century, maintains that "thejournals mediated for the authors between feeling insignificant and feeling important, andultimately, between being forgotten and being somehow remembered."42 Culley takes
this further, suggesting that "keeping a diary, one could argue, always begins with a senseof self-worth, a conviction that one's individual experience is somehow remarkable[emphasis hers]. Even the most self-deprecating of women's diaries are grounded insome sense of the importance of making a record of the life."43 Diarists such as Eliza are
hardly likely to have seen their lives as "somehow remarkable," however, surrounded asthey would have been by women living very similar lives, and few of them appear tohave been writing for future generations. Moreover, in Eliza's case at least, it was not her
own life that she was writing, but the life of the entire household.
Form and Content
Bloom writes that diaries like Eliza's "march along chronologically, their day-byday progress dictated by the format and textually insulated from the rest of the work.
They exhibit no foreshadowing and scarcely a retrospective glance."44 I would argue that
although an entry may be seen as textually insulated in that it is inscribed as a separate
day's events, each is linked to those before and after, forming a larger chronological unit,
one deliberately determined by the writer. But at the same time, as Margaret Conrad
41. Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale, 343.
42. Gayle R. Davis, "Women's Frontier Diaries: Writing for Good Reason," Women's Studies 14(1987): 12.
43. Culley, Day at a Time, 8.
44. Bloom, "I Write for Myself," 26.

16

points out, "such documents, rather than offering a coherent whole, describe daily detailsof life with all its disorder, incompleteness, disharmony and disjuncture. . . ."45 It is up to
the researcher to find some coherency and order in the text by following from day to day
the storylines of the people and events that tie the unit together.
Such storylines provide alternate ones to those narrated by men, with different
perspectives, priorities and concerns as they are about private, not public lives. Margaret
Conrad, Toni Laidlaw and Donna Smyth, looking at the private writings of Maritime
women, found that "instead of forming a backdrop to 'great events,' ordinary lives here
occupy centre stage. So-called 'important events' are reduced to rumours andabstractions." In the diaries they looked at, "wars, revolutions, depressions and elections
are sometimes mentioned but are rarely described as directly related to the lives of ourchroniclers."46 Eliza only mentions the American Civil War once in her journal. Fromthe end of September 1861 until May 1869 she wrote very little, but in 1861 there are
daily entries from January 1 to September 26. During this time Eliza alluded thirty times
to some member of the family going over the border to Troy, Vermont, and on April 20,
eight days after the opening shot in the American Civil War at Fort Sumter, her son
Charles brought six newspapers back from Troy. Although the war must surely havebeen very much on their minds, and presumably the reason for the purchase of the papers,
she does not mention it. In fact, the only brief reference to the war appears in the only
entry for 1862, on June 1, where she wrote "maria got a letter from Lucus last night the

45. Margaret Conrad, "Recording Angels: The Private Chronicles of Women from the Maritime
Provinces of Canada 1750-1950," in The CRIAW reader: Papers on Literary Productions by Canadian
Women, ed. Diana M. A. Relke (Ottawa: CRIAW/ICREF, 1992), 3.
46. Margaret Conrad, Toni Laidlaw and Donna Smyth, No Place Like Home: Diaries and Lettersof Nova Scotia Women 1771-1938 (Halifax: Formac, 1988), 3-4.

17

war is nearly over I hope."47 One of the papers found with the journal is a letter she
wrote headed "Hydespark July 1862" addressed to her children, which includes one
sentence about the war.48
Eliza's narrative is set within the domestic space of her home, and depicts a lifethat differs little in many respects from the lives of most women of her time. As
Elizabeth Hampsten points out, "depending on where he lives, a man can be a cattle
raiser, a whaler, or a miner; what women do all day long is much the same from one
place to another."49 Like Eliza, women in the working-class areas of Montreal, travellingon the trail to the western states of America and on the emigrant ships to Australia were
all washing, cleaning, cooking and child-minding, in a routine that varied little from day
to day.50 It is not surprising therefore, that the form and content of many nineteenthcentury women's diaries are similar, and that "the repetitive diary, like the emigrant onboard ship, remains in the same place."51
Such diarists are writing within the context of their domestic space, which is not
merely a static back-drop for their lives. As the Personal Narratives Group maintains,diarist and context interact in "a dynamic process through which the individual
simultaneously shapes and is shaped by her environment." But historians interact withthe text through knowledge gained from other sources. Analysing such texts, therefore,

47. Maria by this time was married to Lucius McClaflin and Eliza's journal for January 1860shows that they and their two young children were living in Troy, Vermont by then. Army records indicatethat Lucius enlisted as a Vermont Volunteer on August 14, 1861. Historical Data Systems, comp., U.S.
Civil War SoldierRecords and Profiles. Accessed via Ancestry.ca.
48. Acc. no. 83-29, Brome County Historical Society Archives.
49. Elizabeth Hampsten, Read this only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern
Women, 1880-1910 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 30-31.
50. See, for example, Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender and Daily Survival in
Industrializing Montreal (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 1996); Hassam, Sailing ; Julie Roy
Jeffrey, Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-80 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979).
51. Hassam, Sailing,100.

18

"involves understanding the meaning of a life in its narrator's frame of reference, andmaking sense of that life from the different and necessarily comparative frame ofreference of the interpreter." 52
Ethics of Reading Diaries
Reading Eliza's journal lets us enter the life of a particular woman, her family andher neighbours. But first the question of the diarist's right to privacy needs to beaddressed. At what point, if at all, does it become morally right to read diaries that wereintended to be kept private? If one of Eliza‟s neighbours had read her diary without firstasking her, this could be seen as intrusive. Why does it seem less intrusive for one toread the diary l50 years later? Hassam tries to address this issue by looking at thedifferences between the published and the unpublished diary. He sees the reader as being
able to "violate the privacy of the diary without guilt" if it is published. In the case of adiary never intended for publication, he thinks that "the expectation of secrets revealed istempered by the knowledge that time has made them less dangerous. The laws of libel
ensure that no living person can be hurt." He puts the onus of ensuring that a diary will
not be published on the author, for "unless the diarist destroys the diary, there is no
guarantee it will never be published."53 The historian, in pursuit of information about aparticular society, may not stop to think of an old unpublished diary as still belonging to
its author in a moral or a legal sense before opening it or may decide that the text, andwhat it might reveal, is more important than its author‟s right to privacy. But guilt-ridden
researchers into older diaries can take heart in Carter's statement that "the alleged frisson

52. Personal Narratives Group, eds., Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal
Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 19.
53. Andrew Hassam, “Reading Other People‟s Diaries,” University of Toronto Quarterly 56 no.3
(Spring 1987): 438-39.

19

that results from reading an unpublished diary is based on the idea that the diarist does
not want her words read by other eyes, but the idea of complete privacy is peculiar to thelate nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Diary writing engages in dialogue with anaudience - a real or imagined community of one or many - who already understands agreat deal of the narrative."54 In reading the text and analysing it, the historian becomespart of the audience and engages in the dialogue.
Extracting the History from the Journal
Engaging with a diary such as Eliza's is a somewhat daunting task but Ulrich's
work provides the methodology. Ulrich found that other historians who were aware ofMartha Ballard's diary did not see how to use it and interpreted the information in it as
having no worth. Ulrich saw it differently. "It is in the very dailiness," she writes, "theexhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard's book lies. To
extract the river crossings without noting the cold days spent 'footing' stockings, toabstract the births without recording the long autumns spent winding quills, picklingmeat, and sorting cabbages, is to destroy the sinews of this earnest, steady, gentle, andcourageous record. . . . For her, living was to be measured in doing. Nothing wastrivial."55 By searching for connected pieces of information in different diary entries,
forming them into narratives, and contextualizing them, Ulrich gleans a harvest of
information from Ballard‟s brief diary entries about the economic, social and political lifeof Ballard‟s society. Ulrich's approach shows how to draw from the text coherent
patterns of the strategies used by Eliza's family to sustain the household economy and theimportant part that interaction with her community played in those strategies.

54. Carter, Small Details, 12.
55. Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale, 8-9.

20

One of the problems in working with such texts is that it is often difficult toascertain where the various people alluded to fit in the pattern of the diarist‟s society.
Eliza did not identify her relationship with the many people that came to her house, forthe most part she uses first names or last names, sometimes abbreviating them or using adiminutive for the first name. Nor is she consistent in her spelling of these names. Yet
her neighbours, should they happen to turn its pages, living a similar life within the samecommunity, knowing the same people, and using the same language, would have beenable to interpret it. It is only the outsider who fails to see its coherency. "Abel chopt
Kneeland broke roads Francis and marietta got home from the watch meeting" Eliza
wrote on January 1, 1856. "Sarah Johney and John Baley here Francis chopt in the after
noon maria done the work . . ." she continued, and "Charley got our 13 sheep from dans."
Thanks to the genealogical records of Doris White Cameron (Eliza's great-grandchild)and the 1861 census we know that Kneeland was Eliza‟s husband and Abel, Francis,
Charley and Marietta were her children, and the 1860 census shows that Jonathan Bailey
was a farmer living in the area, but who are Dan, Sarah and Johney? 56 As Ulrich puts it,"Opening a diary for the first time is like walking into a room full of strangers. The
reader is advised to enjoy the company without trying to remember every name."57
Vocabulary can also be problematic. The meaning of words can change with time andsome are no longer used. Just what did her son bring Eliza from the store on November
22, 1873 when he "got me some anarchy"? Such diaries require a considerable amount ofpatience and time to analyse, but can offer information that is not to be found elsewhere.

56. Doris White Cameron, Private Papers, Genealogy,
57. Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale, 35.

21

The Manuscript
Eliza did not use any kind of bound book for her journal. It simply consists ofbooklets made from large sheets of paper, folded in half, some of which were stitched
together. Most of the time she used up the whole page, but sometimes she left space atthe bottom to start a new month or a new year, or for no apparent reason, indicating thatbuying paper was not a problem. The manuscript was relatively easy to work with as thewriting is clear, the ink has not faded too much, and the pages have not disintegrated.
The heading on the first page is "July 18, 1852 Potton, Lower Canada," suggesting either
the beginning, or a renewal of a practice that had been abandoned for some while.
Although Eliza was assiduous in making daily entries, some years have lacunae ofmonths, others have just a handful of scattered entries and some years are missing
entirely. As she frequently started a new year on the same page as the previous one,these gaps are not necessarily because some of the manuscript has been lost or destroyed.
They are more likely the result of her circumstances at the time.
Diaries like Eliza's are about dailiness and domestic space. Carefully examined,
they can enrich our knowledge of the lives of nineteenth-century rural women. "Taken
alone," writes Ulrich, "such stories tell us too much and not enough, teasing us withglimpses of intimate life, repelling us with a reticence we cannot decode. Yet, read in the
broad context of the diary and in relation to larger themes in eighteenth-century history,
they can be extraordinarily revealing."58

58. Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale, 25.

22

Figure 3. A Page from Eliza's Journal.

23

CHAPTER 2
THE FAMILY FARM
Literature on the Farming Family in North America
As R. W. Sandwell points out, rural history was not seen as important until late in
the 1970s and Hal S. Barron, looking at nineteenth-century New England a few years
later, found a similar lack of interest.59 "The marginalization of women and the family in
our historiography," writes Sandwell, "shares a common bond with the marginalization ofrural history. The silence regarding the economic, political, and cultural behaviour ofeach of these groups can be largely attributed to their failure to appear clearly or
consistently on the screen of the market economy."60 The significance of women's labourin the rural economy was overlooked by researchers until towards the end of thetwentieth century.
For many years much of Canada's history was explained in terms of the staple
theory, in which external demands for staple products, such as furs, wood and wheat were
the agents of change in Canada's economic, political and social development. However,once historians began to pay more attention to Canada's rural history, a different picture
emerged. "Their findings," Sandwell writes, "suggest that a varied, complex, anddynamic rural society was created in the later nineteenth century that differed both fromthe rural subsistence economy associated with the traditional peasantry of Europe orfrontier America and from the wheat monoculture widely believed to typify the Canadian

59. R. W. Sandwell, "Rural Reconstruction: Towards a New Synthesis in Canadian History,"
Social History/Histoire Sociale 27, no. 53 (May 1994): 2; Hal S. Barron, Those who Stayed Behind: Rural
Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984),1.
60. Sandwell, "Rural Reconstruction," 19.

24

rural experience."61 By 1984 Marvin McInnis could write that it was generally acceptedthat early colonial farmers were not self-sufficient and that it was now a question ofdetermining "the extent of commercialization at any time and place."62 Referring to the1861 census for Upper Canada, he concluded that rather than specialising, most farmers
engaged in mixed farming and sold any surplus beyond the needs of the family to a local
market for consumption by non-farming members of the community.63
Douglas McCalla demonstrates that local merchants purchased and sent toMontreal not only wheat, but also items such as pork, potash, lumber and staves, thereby
providing their debtors with other ways of meeting financial obligations.64 He
emphasises the importance of the rural merchant's system of credit in the rural economy
of Upper Canada:
Such credit might be seen essentially as consumer credit. . . . But it can also beviewed as loans in support of investment, in that it permitted farmers, and otherproducers, to use whatever means they possessed initially for other purposes, suchas the acquisition of land or stock, or the construction of buildings, in theknowledge that they could postpone their payments for imported goods and,ideally, make them from sales of produce twelve or more months later. Because
the ordinary results of a farmer's work included not merely the production andsale of crops but also the expansion and improvement of his farm, such credit
helped to create capital in the province.
He also suggests that the merchant, operating in a society that had little cash, had little
choice but to offer credit to his customers. 65
Allan Greer refers to a similar situation in the parishes he studied in Lower
Canada.66 Moreover, the farmers on Lower Canada's seigneuries needed to produce more
61. Sandwell, "Rural Reconstruction," 2.
62. Marvin McInnis, "Marketable Surpluses in Ontario Farming, 1860," Social Science History 8,
no. 4 (Fall 1984): 395.
63. McInnis, "Marketable Surpluses," 422.
64. Douglas McCalla, "Rural Credit and Rural Development in Upper Canada, 1790 to 1850," inPatterns of the Past: Interpreting Ontario's History, ed. Roger Hall, William Westfall, and Laurel Sefton
MacDowell (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1988), 38.
65. McCalla, "Rural Credit," 39-40.

25

than they required for subsistence not only to be in a position to buy needed imported
goods, but also, more importantly, in order to meet their financial obligations to theseigneur and to the church. Greer maintains that although many researchers found thatthese "all added up to an aggregate 'feudal burden' that was paltry indeed," his study ofLower Richelieu indicated that these dues were a matter of considerable concern, "both to
exploiters and to exploited because the wealth at stake was significant."67 Fernand
Ouellet also points to the anxiety that these obligations created.68
As Greer points out earlier, studies of the rural communities of Lower Canada
mostly depicted the habitant as "the male individual, torn from his family setting."69 He
looks more closely at the communities of Lower Richelieu to give the details of thepeasant family's life, and suggests that "work . . . was primarily, though not exclusively, afamily affair. Not only was wage labour fairly unimportant, but French-Canadian
agriculture had hardly a trace of the communal practices that were so common in Western
Europe and even in early New England."70 He describes the annual work cycle of both
men and women, their crops and livestock and their consumption patterns and theirconcern with their own security and that of their children.
In the United States the role of the family unit in the changing economy of theUnited States began to receive attention in the late 1970s. Hal Barron sees the influenceof the Annalistes on American historians, referring in particular to James A. Henretta's

66. Allan Greer, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes, 17401840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 160.
67. Greer, Peasant, Lord, 133-4.
68. Fernand Ouellet, Lower Canada. 1791-1840: Social Change and Nationalism, trans. andadapt. Patricia Claxton (1980; repr. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983), 4. It seems that rents were
low in Ontario. See Catharine Anne Wilson, Tenants in Time: Family Strategies, Land, and Liberalism inUpper Canada, 1799-1871 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009),, 103.
69. Greer, Peasant, Lord, 88.
70. Greer, Peasant, Lord, 25.

26

article, "Mentalité in Pre-Industrialist America," as well as articles by Michael Merrill
and Christopher Clark.71
Henretta does not deny the importance of profit, but places the economics of the
farm firmly into its rightful place, the social context. "Economic gain was important forthese men and women," he writes, "yet it was not their dominant value. It was
subordinate to (or encompassed by) two other goals: the yearly subsistence and the longrun financial security of the family unit."72 He notes that even as the economy
developed, "the family persisted as the basic unit of agricultural production, capitalformation, and property transmission." He sees this as indicating that "alterations in themacro-structure of a society or an economic system do not inevitably or immediately
induce significant changes in its micro-units. Social or cultural change is not always
systemic in nature, and it proceeds in fits and starts."73 Merrill makes the important
observation that the trading of products between households "was controlled by needrather than price."74 In this situation, "household production . . . is regulated by neither
profit nor individual need alone, but by social need. Production is planned with one eyeon the needs of one's own household, and the other on the needs of neighbouring
households. A household produces use-values for itself, and use-values for others." Thisdifferentiates it from both the subsistence-type economy and the capitalist economy.75
Clark, looking at the Connecticut Valley at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, also sees a society where profit was not the principal motivation, and could be
71. Barron, Those who Stayed Behind, 4-6.
72. James A. Henretta, "Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America," William andMary Quarterly 35, no. 1 (Jan., 1978): 19.
73. Henretta, "Families and Farms," 25.
74. Michael Merrill, "Cash is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economyof the United States," Radical History Review 13 (Winter 1977): 53.
75. Merrill, "Cash is Good Enough," 63.

27

describing Potton Township as seen in Eliza's diary when he writes that "the outside
market was resorted to mainly to acquire necessities that were not available inside theregion . . . or in certain instances, to purchase luxury items that similarly could not be
produced locally."76 He points out that "Rather than relying on the market, rural families
supplied their wants both by producing their own goods for consumption and by entering
into complex networks of exchange relationships with their neighbours and relatives inorder to provide for the needs that they could not, or chose not to, provide for themselves.
. . . Cash played little part in these exchanges."77
Clark points out that even as late as the 1860s this way of life had notdisappeared. He argues that changes to the rural economy were not due solely to external
developments; they also came from within, not only because the modus operandi wasadaptable, but also because it "generated its own values, of co-operation, of workswapping, of household integrity and family advancement, that were to be influential
throughout the early period of capitalist development." Both external and internalpressures "helped change the circumstances in which rural families were seeking toachieve their aims and forced them to find new ways to reach old ends."78 Generally, as aregion became more populated, farmers began to produce more crops, but there was lessland available for newcomers and farmers' children, leading to more people looking foralternative ways of supporting themselves, as wage earners or by starting some kind ofenterprise. "The growing market economy," writes Clark, "expanded the possibility of

76. Christopher Clark, "The Household Economy, Market Exchange and the Rise of Capitalism in
the Connecticut Valley, 1800-1860, Journal of Social History, 13, no. 2 (Winter 1979): 172.
77. Clark, "Household Economy," 173.
78. Clark, "Household Economy," 175.

28

using a trade, some education or some other skill as an 'inheritance', and permitted thehousehold system to adapt to the crisis."79
When looking at rural economic development through the eyes of the above
historians, it is hard to see the members of the farming families as individuals. They
appear, rather, as homogenous groups with blurred faces. Rarely is a distinction made inthese theories between the contribution of men and that of women towards the farmeconomy, and then only in terms of division of labour.
Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, however, when looking at women's work in
pre-industrial France and England, recognize the importance of women's work for thehousehold economy in that period. However they see such tasks as "growing vegetables,
raising animals, preparing food, making clothing and helping with farm or craft work" ashaving "more often what economists call 'use value' than 'exchange value'." But, perhaps
because they see such activities as "immerged imperceptibly with women's household ordomestic chores," they do not analyse such work sufficiently to bring forth the extent of
women's contribution to the household economy. 80 They do, however, point out theimportance of the family as a "unit of decision making for the activities of all its
members" and suggest that "decisions are made which implicitly assign economic value
to all household tasks."81 They see the family as "the institution which mediates between
the system and individuals" but attribute changes to the family unit as being imposed by

79. Clark, "Household Economy," 176.
80. Louise A.Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family (New York: Holt, Reinhart andWinston 1978), 3.
81. Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, 6.

29

the system. The economic system of a society constrains and shapes production andreproduction," they write, "and eventually modifies family organization."82
Marjorie Griffin Cohen emphasises the importance of women in the household
economy of rural Ontario and, concentrating on the dairy industry, argues that their work
enabled the accumulation of capital for the farm. She introduces the role of patriarchyand gender division of labour within the family and shows how responsibility for dairy
production was taken over by men with the introduction of mechanization. 83 But she
fails to take into account the interaction of the family members in terms of their social
relationships both within the family and with the surrounding community. In her view,"a dual economy existed: subsistence production, which provided the most basic needs ofthe household, and the market-oriented production, which provided income."84 Thoughsuch a separation may have been the case in Ontario, Eliza's journal depicts a farmeconomy which was much closer in structure to those of the northeastern states ofAmerica, and reveals family dynamics which are missing in Cohen's study.
In his study of the Hudson valley from 1780 to 1860, Martin Bruegel describes asociety with an economy similar to that of Potton Township at the time when Eliza waswriting her journal. By using microhistorical methodology, he is able to see more closely
the dynamics of the farm economy. "Instead of thinking of market and nonmarket sectors
as mutually exclusive aggregate economic entities in a necessarily chronological time

82. Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, 8.
83. Marjorie Griffin Cohen, Women’s Work, Markets and Economic Development in NineteenthCentury Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).
84. Cohen, Women's Work, 8.

30

line," he writes, "their very coexistence characterized the social experiences of residentsof the American countryside."85
It was not until the late 1970s, then, that researchers into Canadian rural history
started to see that the staple theory gave a too simplistic picture of the rural economy.
McInnis and McCalla in Ontario, and Ouellet and Greer in Quebec point to the existenceof local markets in which merchants played a key role as suppliers of imported goods,
purchasers of farmers' surplus products, and lenders of credit. Eliza's journal shows thesame. However, although these researchers make valuable contributions to ourunderstanding of the economic aspects of agriculture, the interconnectedness of thefamily as a social entity and the economics of the farm are largely ignored. Though Scottand Tilly point to the importance of women's labour and the family unit in pre-industrial
society, they do not look for connections between family values and economic strategies.
Cohen's monograph on the development dairying in Ontario emphasises the role ofwomen as an economic force, but only discusses the family in terms of gender.
While the research into rural Canada gives valuable insight into the role of local
markets, merchants and credit in the economy, it is the work of historians looking at
farming communities in the United States that is more relevant for an analysis of Eliza's
journal, as they place the farm economy firmly within its social context. Henretta's
suggestion that though profit was a significant motivator, meeting the needs of the family
and providing for future generations were also important considerations, and Merrill's
perspective that the value of goods exchanged within a community was not simply afunction of supply and demand, but was determined rather by need for one another's

85. Martin Bruegel, Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 17801860 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 5-6.

31

goods show the need to look at an economy in terms of its functioning within a particularsociety. Clark's study of the Connecticut valley validates the views of Henretta andMerrill and shows how the farmers adapted to a changing economy, but also retained
their moral objectives as they endeavoured to provide security for both the current andthe next generation. Bruegel sees the Hudson Valley as a community in which
nonmarket and market activities co-existed, intermingled and were part of the social
fabric of that society. Eliza's journal, depicting a society at a similar stage ofdevelopment as those studied by Clark and Bruegel, shows clearly the importance ofproviding for the next generation as in the closing years we see that her sons were
established on their own farms, and the future of all her daughters except one was
ensured, hopefully, by their marriages as they become part of another family unit. The
ideas of Henretta, Merrill, Clark and Bruegel are all supported by evidence found in
Eliza's journal, which shows how the family worked as a unit to achieve a common goal
while also interacting with the local market.
These studies are more relevant also because most of the migrants coming into
Potton did not arrive from Europe, as was the case in Lower and Upper Canada, but fromthe United States. The settlers that came into the Eastern Townships brought with them
their experience, their tools, their animals, and their values. The implements theybrought, the crops they grew and their cultivation and livestock methods differed fromthose used in other parts of Lower Canada.86 Eliza's journal shows that although Potton
Township at that time was in theory part of Canada East, in practice it seemed more likean extension of the United States.

86. See Kesteman, Southam, and Saint-Pierre, Histoire des Cantons, 134-143.

32

Figure 4. Looking down on Mansonville from near Eliza's house. Photograph by Anne F. Holloway

Mid-Nineteenth Century Potton Township
Before analysing the contents of the diary, I need to set the scene and introduce
the characters. Mansonville (where the smoke is rising from the valley in Figure 4) was
the village about four miles from the farm. Eliza always referred to this place as "themills" in her journal. Most days at least one member of her family went there for one
reason or another. They could trade their produce for the things they needed, take logs,
wool and grain to the various mills, attend religious meetings and avail themselves of theother facilities in the village such as the blacksmith and the carriage shop. Members of
Eliza's family also often went over the border to North Troy in Vermont, approximately
five miles from Mansonville, trading, picking up newspapers, mailing and collecting

33

S.M. - saw mill; G.M.- grist mill; S.H. school house; Ch, church; T.H. tenant house.
87
Figure 5. Map of Mansonville. Courtesy Missisquoi Historical Society.

letters from the post office and visiting Eliza's daughter Maria who lived there after she
was married. Twice Eliza recorded having to fetch a doctor from North Troy, and thejournal also shows that in 1860 two of Eliza's children, Rosebell (whom Eliza almost
always referred to as Bell) and Charles, stayed there from Monday to Friday to attend thefall term at the academy; Charles went again the next fall. Less frequently members of

87. This map is an insert on the Wallings map referred to in the introduction and the key iselsewhere on the larger map. A rod is five and a half yards.

34

the family would go to South Troy, about seven miles further down the road.88 There
was also the occasional trip back to Hyde Park (mostly in the 1850s), thirty miles or sofurther on.89 The roads from the township towards the urban centres of the province were
not well developed, and, as Ernest Taylor's diary shows, in 1868 the trip by carriage fromthe nearest railway station, in Waterloo, to his family's house in Potton (a distance ofabout twenty-seven miles) could take six to seven hours.90 There was no railway going
through Potton until 1873 when a section of the South-Eastern Counties Junction Railway
was completed between the two American towns of Richford and Newport. Because of
the mountains, this line went back into Canada to follow the Missisquoi River valley
before re-entering the United States.91 Mansonville Station was on this line, but it was a
few miles south of the town, and developed later into the village of Highwater..92
The White Family 1852
When her journal entries begin in July, 1852 Eliza was forty-three, Kneeland wasforty-seven, and they had nine children, all of whom except one daughter were still living
at home. Their sons were Abel aged twenty-three, Francis (sometimes referred to as
Frank), fifteen, and Charles (or Charley), who was almost nine. The eldest daughter,
Martha, twenty-two, was already married to Royal Berry, an itinerant clergyman, andtheir son, born in 1850, was Eliza's first grandchild.93 The journal indicates that the
Berrys had a farm not far away, but they did not live there all the time. The next

88. North and South Troy were two separate villages, but when a post office was established inSouth Troy in 1823, it became Troy. However, when Eliza just wrote "Troy" the contexts in which she used
it imply that she was referring to North Troy on these occasions.
89. Eliza referred to this town as "Hydespark."
90. Taylor MSS Diaries 1863-1941, Acc. No. 89-24, BCHS archives, commencing 1868, 2, 24-25.
91. J. Derek Booth, Railways of Southern Quebec, Vol. 1 (Toronto: Railfare Enterprises, 1982),
60.
92.(Taylor,Brome County, Vol. 2,120).
93. White Cameron, Private Papers, Genealogy.

35

daughter, Maria (occasionally referred to as Mari) was nineteen. Next came thirteenyear-old Medora, followed by Marietta (sometimes called Tet), who was eleven, andRosebell (Bell), who was six. The youngest, Diadama (Dima), was only two.94 Eliza
was probably still nursing her last child when her first grandchild was born.95 However,with the exception of Dima, all the children were old enough to contribute to the farmeconomy through their labour. The season-driven cycle of work varies little throughout
the years of the journal, and the most comprehensive way to describe it is by examining aparticular year in conjunction with information from a census, and looking further afieldto other years covered as appropriate. As there is no extant 1852 manuscript census for
Potton the 1861 census is the first one that can be linked to the information in thejournal.96 However, as Bruce Curtis points out, the statistics of that census are not very
reliable, due to incompetent organisation, poor form design and illogical instructions, aswell as enumerators' errors, omissions and inconsistencies. 97 Eliza's journal confirmsthat for her family the entries on the personal census are correct. It is harder, however, toassess the accuracy of the agricultural census, but most farmers should have been able togive reasonably accurate information concerning crops, livestock, and other products; thecontinuing survival of their families depended on such knowledge. I have used thecensus information with caution and any calculations should be viewed as roughestimates.

94. The genealogy compiled by Doris White Cameron shows that Medora's first name was Lauraand Rosebell's was Mercy, but Eliza always called them by their second names.
95. White Cameron, Private Papers, Genealogy.
96. This census was taken at the beginning of the year, so the information concerning production
relates to 1860.
97. Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census ofCanada, 1840-1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 171-273. See also David P. Gagan,"Enumerator's Instructions for the Census of Canada 1852 and 1861," Social History/Histoire Sociale 7(1974) 355-65.

36

Dates shown are from the genealogical chart of Doris White Cameron unless otherwise indicated.
Births, marriages and deaths after the last entry in the diary in 1874 are not included.
Eliza Rosamond Calkins (b. 1809) m. Abner Kneeland White (b. 1804) 1827.
Their children:
1. Abel Calkins (b.1828) m. Maria Jersey (b. 1836, d. 1874) 1856.
Their children: Ellen Adelia (b. 1858, d. 1871); Ruth Elizabeth (b. 1859);
Malcolm Herman (b. 1860); Ida May (b. 1869); Cora Edith (b. 1873).
2. Martha Cornelia (b. 1830) m. Royal E. Berry (b. c. 1821) 1849.
Their children: Royal Eugene (b. 1850); Edward S. (b. c. 1856); *Martha (b. c. 1864);† Abram (b. c. 1866);† John Grant (b. 1871)††
3. Maria Hannah [diminutive Mari] (b.1833, d. 1866) m. Lucius McClaflin (b. unknown)
1856.
Their children: Willie (b. 1857); Eliza (b. 1859).
4. Francis Kneeland [diminutive Frank] (b.1836) m. Louisa Maria Gilman (b. 1829) 1865.
Their children: Guy Elwin (b. 1866); Olea Ulysses (b.1869); Burton (b.,d.
1870); Bert Mead (b. 1871).
5. (Laura) Medora [diminutive Dora] (b. 1838), m. Enoch Davis (b. 1833) 1855.
Their children: Emily (b. 1856); Aylmer (b. c. 1858); ‡ Eldon James (b. c.
1865); § Belle (b. c. 1867); § Nora Eva (b. 1870); Archie (b. c. 1873).* *6. Marietta Eliza [diminutive Tet] (b. 1840), m. Charles Garland (b. c. 1830) 1860.
Their children: Preston Archie (b. 1861); Frank Washington (b. 1863); MaudPatience (b. 1864); Claud Dana (b. 1867); Minnie Cora (b. 1870).
7. Charles Carroll [diminutive Charley] (b. 1843) m. Mianda Bourne (b.unknown) 1872.
8. (Mercy) Rosebell (b. 1846).
9. Diadama Lillian [diminutive Dima] (b. 1849), m. Marcus Miles Geer (b. 1845) 1868.
Their child: Clair Elmer (born 1871).
*

Calculated from age on Mss. Census, Mississquoi County, Dunham Township, Personal
Census 1861, f. 39, line 34, Reel C-1296.
†
Calculated from age on Mss. Census New Hampshire, Carroll, Coos County, 1870, Reel
M593_839, 10A, lines 33-34. Accessed via www.Ancestry.ca.
‡
Calculated from age on Mss. Census, Brome County, Potton Township, Personal Census
1861, f. 177, line 28,reel C-1296. (The Davis family lived in Vermont at this time but Medora
and her children were visiting her parents on the census date.)§
Calculated from age on Mss. Census, Brome County, Bolton Township, 1871, f. 50, lines
11,12. Reel C-10073.
**
Calculated from age on MSS. Census, Bolton East, 1881, f. 11, line 30, Reel C-13201.
Accessed via www.Ancestry.ca.
††
New Hampshire, Births and Christening Index, 1714-1904. Accessed via www.Ancestry.ca

Figure 6. The White Family.

37

The White Family 1860
By 1860 Abel was married and had a farm adjoining that of his parents.98 Mariaand Medora were also married and living a few miles over the border in Vermont, Mariain Troy and Medora in Derby.99 Marietta also appears to have been living in Troy,perhaps with Maria, until June. But the youngest daughters were now twelve andfourteen, so old enough to do the work previously performed by their elder sisters, andthere were no longer small children to look after. Charles, seventeen, was still at home,as was his elder brother Francis, now twenty-four. The information given on the 1861
agricultural census for Potton Township suggests that the farmers there were not focussed
on growing staples for export, and that the farm economy of the White family was similar
to that of most farms in the township. 100
Eliza's husband and their son Francis are shown in this census as each holding
fifty acres of land on adjacent lots, but those figures are bracketed together and theremaining columns have one entry for the two pieces of land, indicating that they worked
the hundred acres as one unit. Seventy-five percent of the land is shown as being undercultivation, with fifty-four acres for crops, twenty for pasture and one for orchard andgarden produce. The most obvious strategy in the farm economy that can be seen in the
1861 census for all the farms is the practice of mixed farming which offered some
protection should a particular crop fail. There is little indication of specialization for a98. Mss. Census, Canada East, 1861, Brome County, Potton Township, Agricultural Census, 307,lines 7-9, Reel C-1271.
99. The journal shows that Maria was living in Troy. Medora and her family were staying withher parents at the time of the census, where they are shown as non-residents (Mss. Census, Canada East,
1861, Potton Township, Personal Census, 177, lines 28-30, Reel C-1270).
100. Mss. Census, Canada East, 1861, Brome County, Potton Township, Agricultural Census,
304-311, Reel C-1271. This census shows the largest farm as over seven hundred acres, but only four
farmers with more than four hundred acres. Less than 10 percent had under fifty acres, and just over 65
percent had between fifty and a hundred and fifty acres.

38

particular market for any of the field crops on Kneeland and Francis' land at this time.
The field crops shown for the White farm are spring wheat, oats, buckwheat, "Indiancorn"(maize), potatoes, turnips, beans and hay. The census also records four "bulls or
oxen over three years of age" which the journal shows to be all oxen, six milch cows,
nine "steers or heifers under three years of age," two horses, and eleven sheep. Their son
Abel is shown on the census as having a hundred and fifty acres, ninety of which were
cultivated and planted with similar crops to those of Kneeland and Francis, and similar
numbers of livestock. The census also shows the quantities of wool, maple sugar andbutter produced and the dollar value of the yield from the orchard and garden.
Census statistics yield a considerable amount of useful information regarding
population and production, but they cannot show the inner workings of the farmeconomy. Close analysis of the daily details in journals as Eliza's, however, can reveal
the strategies used by the members of the household as they work as a unit to maintainthe farm economy.

39

Figure 7. The road by Eliza's house, March, 2012. Photograph by Anne F. Holloway

40

Figure 8. Remains of Eliza and Kneeland's house. Photograph by Anne F. Holloway

Figure 9. Remains of Abel and Maria's house. Photograph by Walter Stairs.

41

CHAPTER 3
AN ANALYSIS OF WORK ON THE WHITE FARM
There is a general consensus among North American historians that for the mostpart the men and boys did the field work on the farm and took care of the livestock. The
women and girls looked after the household chores, the children, the garden, the dairy
and the poultry. Much of the literature tends to look at the family in terms of thisdivision, rather than as a single unit in which both males and females are working
towards the same goals, the survival of the farm and the future of the family.101 The
following analysis of Eliza's journal shows that although in general the men did theoutdoor work while the women looked after the indoor chores, there were often occasions
when the men helped with indoor work and vice versa.
Until the beginning of June only two daughters, Bell and Dima, were living athome, and together with Eliza they did the routine chores which changed little for muchof the year. Washing was done on Mondays, and Saturday entries nearly always include"Saturdays work," but just what this covers is never specified. It must surely haveincluded preparation for Sunday, a day of rest when most of the family went to some kindof prayer meeting, and sometimes two. Nearly every Sunday Eliza's journal entry would
begin with "this is the sabath" but she rarely went to a prayer meeting herself. Perhaps
this was due to her poor health rather than a lack of religious conviction as her journal
entries frequently ended with a somewhat formulized and sometimes lengthy prayer. The
rest of the week Eliza and "the girls" would be carding and spinning, knitting and sewing,
101. See, for example, Errington, Wives and Mothers 8; Greer, Peasant, Lord, 29, 32; Kesteman,Southam, and Saint-Pierre, Histoire des Cantons, 132; Nancy Grey Osterud, Bonds of Community: The
Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 147, 150;
Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, 32, 44-45; Wilson, Tenants,169.

42

ironing, cleaning, quilting, cutting carpet rags and baking. Then there were theunspecified chores, which would have included preparing all the meals.
During the first few months of 1860 Eliza did not give much detail as to the kindof work that Kneeland, Francis and Charles were doing. Several times during the year
she wrote that they were working "at the hill" or "on the hill farm" which could be theirproperty or Abel's farm which was further up the road; there was a considerable amountof reciprocal labour between the two. Similarly, in later years when Charles and Francis
had their own farms, they all helped one another. The men were often working in thewoods during the winter. Sometimes Eliza specified that they were splitting rails for
fencing, or hauling logs to "the door" where they would be chopped up for firewood forthe house, mostly by Charles. They also needed firewood at "the sugar place" to boil themaple sap until it turned into sugar. It is possible that some of the wood that year was
taken to the mill for sale or to be cut into boards for the family's use; transporting logs to
the mills would have been easier in the winter when the roads were frozen. In 1861,
when a new house was built, Eliza frequently mentioned the men taking logs to the milland bringing back boards.
Everyone helped with the making of maple sugar in March. On March 13 "themen comenced fixing the buckets" and the next day "the girls went to the sugar place andwashed buckets." Three days later "the men tapt the sugar place," which involved
drilling holes in the trees for the spigots and hanging the buckets beneath them. On
March 19 "the men worked at the sugar place and the next day "Frank and Charles boiledsap." They would have been collecting and boiling the sap most days until it stopped

43

running into the buckets when the weather got warmer. In other years Eliza mentionedthat she and her daughters helped with the boiling process.

Figure 10. Location of Charles Garland's house. Photograph by Anne F. Holloway.

Towards the end of March Kneeland made some wheels for a cart, the rail
splitting and wood chopping continued, and they started working on fences. Kneelandalso "laid up stone wall in the stable." Towards the end of April preparations for planting
began with ploughing, harrowing and getting manure out onto the fields; ploughing andmanuring also took place in the fall. In May there was more fencing work as well as theannual chore of picking up stones from the fields. In May potatoes, oats, peas and corn
were planted. There must have been a problem with the corn as on May 21 the men had
to plant it "the second time over." On May 29 Kneeland sheared the sheep and June 1
44Francis and Charles washed the wool. Beans were planted in early June, "the men got in
India wheat" on June 14 and "sowed the turnip patch" on June 18. Also in June there wasmore stone picking, and the hoeing began. On June 15 Eliza wrote that "the men . . .
comenced hoeing for the second time." By the end of the month the cart that Kneeland
had been building was finished, and on June 28 Kneeland "comenced the girls shoes." In
the early years of the journal Eliza mentioned quite often that Kneeland "tapt" boots andshoes, mostly for the family but occasionally for other people. Usually, however, she did
not specify if he was making or mending them. From 1859 on there are fewer references
to tapping boots and shoes and by 1870, though they are still being mended, there are noreferences to making these items.
Towards the end of July the men started haying, and this continued until midAugust. Throughout the journal there is no mention of the women helping with this.
However, in the 1850s both sexes picked hops. In 1852 the White family were helping
neighbours with their crop. On September 9 Eliza noted that "Baley here after the girls topick hops" and the next day Maria, Medora and Marietta all went to Bailey's farm towork. Eliza recorded them being there seven more times before the end of the month.
The journal shows the family growing their own hops for the next few years, and Eliza
and her daughters all helping with the picking.
Eliza wrote on July 17 that "Frank went to the mills and got two sythes" whichsuggests they were cutting the hay by hand. Though some mowing machines were being
used around 1840 in the Eastern Townships, there were not many until the 1860s when
they started to be made in the region.102 In late August and the first part of September
other crops were harvested. Over the summer the men also cut bushes and worked on
102. Kesteman, Southam, and Saint-Pierre, Histoire des Cantons, 291.

45

building a sugar house for processing the maple sap; the wood for this project had been
cut earlier in the year. On September 22 "Kneeland finished drawing the bords for thesugar house from the mills and he and Frank covered it." The men started picking thecorn on September 24, with Dima helping them. It appears that some, but not all of thethrashing was done by hand. Eliza mentioned several times that the men were thrashing,then on October 4 "Frank . . . and his father cleaned the barn floor for the machene" andon October 5 and 8 she wrote that "the thrashers" were there, mentioning also on October
5 that "Abel and Joe helped thrash a little." This suggests that perhaps the men who
travelled from farm to farm with the machine did the work on those days rather thanKneeland and his sons. In October the men also dug potatoes, "got in the stalks"(probably from the corn, which would have been used for fodder), ploughed and helped
the local surveyor "run the line" between Kneeland and Eliza's farm and Abel's. In late
October they started harvesting the turnips which were then cut up. These would havebeen used as feed for livestock. 103 She also mentioned on two occasions that a sheep was
slaughtered. As winter approached they built stone walls, fixed fences, banked the house,
did some more ploughing, and thrashed beans. The hogs were killed in December andthe hauling and chopping wood continued.
Meanwhile, while the men were working outdoors, Eliza and her daughters werebusy in and around the house. In May they made soap, gave the house a spring cleaning,and started working in the garden.104 School started on May 7 and Dima started going
then, but Bell did not go until two days later. The term ended on August 24, but just how
often they went is hard to ascertain, because Eliza may not have always mentioned it. It
103. Kesteman, Southam, and Saint-Pierre, Histoire des Cantons, 295.
104. They made soap again in October.

46

seems also that Bell went away to stay with her sister Martha for a while as on May 21
Eliza wrote that "Bell and I fixed for her to go to marthas" and on May 22 "Royal started
for home this morning Bell went with him" and there is no mention of her until June 13
when "Royal brought home Bell." This left only Dima to help Eliza. No wonder her
June 2 entry started on a pessimistic note. "I am fifty one years old to day" she wrote,"may the good God grant that I may not see so much trouble for the next year or give me
more patience to bear it . . . I got up this morning sick and discouraged," but then "soonafter breckfast mary came and brought me a letter from marietta, saying she would comehome . . . thus has a gleam of sunshine broke in through darkness that has for the last few
days enveloped me." Two days later "Frank got home with Marietta."105 The addition ofanother woman's labour not only freed Dima and Bell to go to school, it also allowed forconsiderably more time to be spent on the production of cloth.
On Thursday, June 7, only a few days after Marietta's arrival, she and Eliza"comenced picking wool," the next day they "finished the wool and greased it" and twodays later Frank took it to the mill, presumably to be carded. On June 13 "marietta
comenced spining" which was a major activity until July 7 when "the girls finishedspining." Marietta appears to have done the bulk of it, though Bell also did some. Eliza
did not mention that she was doing any spinning that year, and as she usually referred toher daughters as "the girls" it cannot be ascertained if Dima was helping with this task.
After the spinning came scouring, colouring and spooling until there was enough yarn tostart the weaving. "marietta and I got in the web and comenced weving" wrote Eliza on
July 20, but she still mentioned spooling and colouring now and then. Marietta and Eliza

105. The journal shows that Marietta married Charles Garland, the son of a neighbour, on
December 20, though she was still living at home at the end of the year.

47spent much of their time weaving until October 12, when "marietta got the loom down."
Eliza did not mention how much she wove on any one day, but she wrote that on both
September 7 and September 20 Marietta wove five yards. In addition to the weaving
Marietta and Eliza were still, along with the Bell and Dima, doing Saturday's work andMonday's washing, as well as sewing, cleaning and mending, and other work around thehouse. Bell and Dima do not seem to have done any of the weaving. From August 4
until August 17 Medora came to stay, and from August 9 to August 15 Martha was there
also, so for a while Eliza had more daughters helping with the chores. The 1861 census
shows that Eliza's family produced over forty yards of cloth.106 Approximately 45
percent of the families on the 1861 agricultural census have entries for cloth production,with an average of thirty-one yards per weaving family.107 Eliza's household is shown on
the 1871 census as producing eighty-five yards of cloth.108 The 1871 census shows 41
percent of all families living in the township making cloth with an average ofapproximately thirty-six yards per weaving family. 109 Eliza's journal demonstrates thatprocessing wool and flax was labour intensive and time consuming. Yet the family was

106. Mss. Agricultural Census, Canada East, 1861, Brome County, Potton Township, Agricultural
Census, 308, lines 30, 31. Reel C1271. This is yardage shown for the land jointly farmed by Kneeland andFrancis.
107. I refer here to families here rather than households as there are family heads listed on the
agricultural census who do not appear on the personal census. This is perhaps because they are managing
land owned by someone else. There are also households on the personal census which do not appear on the
agricultural census, some of which include farmers, as well as some with no farmers but labourers andother occupations. The second page of the personal census, which asks about manufacturing and livestockof "Townspeople" shows a few of such people having sheep, but there was nowhere to record the amountof wool produced or cloth made domestically.
108. Mss. Census, Quebec, Brome County, Potton Township, Census 1871, division 1, schedule 5,8, line 20, Reel 10073.
109. Mss. Census, Quebec, 1871. Brome County, Potton Township, Census 1871, divisions 1 and
2, Reel 10073. This does not necessarily mean a decrease in weaving families since 1861, as approximately
62 households were not included in my calculation for 1861(see footnote 94).

48

still producing cloth in 1874, even though they lived less than thirty miles away from awool cloth factory in Magog that had set up operations in 1825.110
Richard Lyman Bushman points out that by 1830 few farm households in thenorthern United States were still weaving, and Cohen mentions that in Ontario after 1850
the increased availability of commercially produced cloth led to a reduction of domestic
production.111 But Beatrice Craig, in her study of the Madawaska Valley, found that in
Lower Canada and the Atlantic provinces from 1850 to 1870 the amount of clothproduced in the home went up.112 The census figures given above for Potton Townshipsuggest a similar trend. As Craig, Rygiel and Turcotte point out, this was often attributed
to farm families being too poor to buy ready-made cloth or clothing. But their researchshowed that homespun commanded a high price compared to other fabrics, and theysuggest that it was in demand because of its durability and the warmth it provided. 113
Perhaps it was the qualities of strength and warmth that induced local people topay Bell for such work; by the early 1870s she was spending much of her time weavingfor other people, showing that there was still a demand for domestically made cloth
within the community. On August 8, 1871, for example, "Alfs girls brought out a web
for Bell to weave." During the fall of 1872 Bell was very busy. Eliza wrote on
September 12 that "old mrs Bourn [here] to get Bell to weve." Two days later "old mrs
Shubel, brought her web for Bell to weave" and on September 26 Hadlock arrived withhis web. On October 1 "Bell wove seven yards" and the next day she did eight. On
110. Kesteman, Southam, and Saint-Pierre, Histoire des Cantons, 365.
111. Richard Lyman Bushman, "Markets and Composite Farms in Early America," William andMary Quarterly, Third Series, 55, no. 3 (July1998): 373; Cohen, Women's Work, 81.
112. Béatrice Craig, Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists: The Rise of a Market
Culture in Eastern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 182.
113. Béatrice Craig, Judith Rygiel, and Elizabeth Turcotte, "The Homespun Paradox: MarketOriented Production of Cloth in Eastern Canada in the Nineteenth Century," Agricultural History 76, no. 1(Winter, 2002): 29-30, 50-51.

49

October 11 Ella Blanchard arrived with "some yarn for Bell to weave," and on Oct 17"Alfs wife and girl brought another web for Bell to weave." Bell was also weaving forother people, including her siblings, in 1873 and 1874. The increase in the household's
cloth production was facilitated by the presence of Eliza's granddaughter who, along withher brother Willie, had come to live with Kneeland, Eliza and Bell after their mother
Maria died in 1866. The granddaughter, also called Eliza, was now old enough to spin.
However in 1873 help was also needed from outside the family. "Ella Blanchard andwesley came," wrote Eliza on December 2, "she is going to spin for Bell for a few days."
From the summer of 1869 on the journal shows that Bell was a teacher for several monthsof each year, but the weaving took place in the periods when she was not teaching.114
Recent research suggests that from the 1850s on domestic weaving was madeeasier by the establishment of commercial enterprises such as carding, fulling, andspinning mills. 115 Eliza and her household seemed to take little advantage of the local
carding and fulling mills in the earlier years. They used them selectively, perhaps
weighing the cost against the labour and time involved for the earlier stages of theprocessing of wool and linen. On August 26, 1852 Eliza took her "white wool" to becarded, but in the same year there are several references to her carding both wool andflax. Even her younger children helped with the carding. "I and the little girls did
housework and carded" she wrote on October 14 the same year. Unfortunately many of
the carding references did not specify the fibre. There is only one entry about carding at
home in the six months of entries that exist for 1855, but in the same period "Francis

114. On November and December 17 of 1871 Eliza writes that Bell was asked to "keep school"
but both times she refused, perhaps because she was very busy weaving at that time of the year. She did
not start teaching again until February 12, 1872.
115. See Craig, Rygiel, and Turcotte, "Homespun Paradox," 31.

50

went to mill and carried the wool to be carded" on July 21, and on November 17 "Charles
went to the carding machine with the wool." It seems, then, that machine carding was
becoming a viable option for their household by then. There are very few references tocarding at home after that, and some, if not all, of these may be referring to making batsfor quilts. There is, however, an early reference to a later stage of cloth production.
"Francis went to the mills with 10 bushel of india wheat and 1 of corn carried the cloth tobe fulled" on October 1, 1852.
Given the variety of items made, and the kind of purchased textiles that Eliza
mentioned, it would appear that it was not so much a matter of whether or not they could
afford to buy factory-made textiles, as one of making some types of textiles and buying
others. Perhaps they could have provided for all their needs, but desired different kindsof cloth that they could not produce or that were too time-consuming to make. On
December 8, 1852, for example, Eliza wrote "Abel got mari some cambrick to line her
cloak last night" and on August 26 some lawn was obtained. In 1853 on May 14"marietta went to Brocks and got . . . some calico to make her an apron" and on June 10"I and mari went to the store . . . mari got a muslin dress."116 Even as late as the early
1870s the women of Eliza's household had not given up home-weaving, yet they seemed
to be buying more fabric. Calico, alpaca, cotton cloth, print, cloth for overalls, shirts,
cloth for a suit and a coat, silk, drilling, gingham, and flannel are all mentioned.
Returning to the work cycle for 1860, after September 9 there was less labour
available in Eliza's household as Bell and Charles were away at school in Troy during theweek. But even before the weaving was finished, it was time to start working on the116. Though it might appear that Mari was buying ready-made clothing, the entries for June 11
and June 14 show that she was making the dress. On several other occasions Eliza refers to purchasing a
dress when later entries show that it was the dress material that was bought.

51

apples. After they were picked they were peeled and sliced, then threaded onto strings ofcotton yarn and hung up to dry. The picking and processing of apples was an activity inwhich both sexes took part. During the outdoor task of picking the women and girls
helped the men, but in the house when the apples were processed the roles were reversed
as the men were then the helpers. On October 1 Eliza wrote that "we all gathered apples"
and the same day the apple drying process began. The next day "Dima and I . . . helped
Kneeland pick up apples pared apples to night Charles and Joe helped."117 The apple
paring seems to have taken up a considerable amount of time during October and into thebeginning of November. In December, as in other years, Eliza and her daughters madecandles. On December 19, 1872 she noted that "Charley helped me dip candles."A comparison of the 1861 census with the 1860 journal entries reveals two
apparent inconsistencies. The first is that although on May 15 Kneeland "went to
Bedards after flax seed," on August 21 he "pulled flax," and on September 20 "marietta
wove five yards table linin," the column for linen on the census is blank. Perhaps there
was a problem with the crop that year and the thread used in 1860 was either purchased
or grown in a previous year, and of course the enumerator may have omitted to ask aboutflax and linen.118 In the first few years of the journal there are often references to theprocessing of flax. On August 23, 1852, for instance "Kneeland swingled flax . . . thelittle girls spun four skeins of tow mari washed and spun one skean of linen and I . . .

117. Joe Jones was a labourer aged about twenty, who in 1860 seems to be living at Eliza's house,but on the 1861 census is shown as a labourer living with Eliza's eldest son Abel and his family (Mss.
Census, Canada East, Brome County, Potton Township, Personal Census 1861, f. 178, line 5, Reel C-1270.
As there is no mention of Eliza's son Charles for the rest of this week as he was most probably at school,
the Charles mentioned here is likely to have been Charles Garland, Marietta's future husband, who ismentioned in the journal entry for the next day.
118. The journal entries for 1859 unfortunately do not cover sufficient months to indicate if there
was a flax crop that year.

52hecheled flax and carded tow."119 On April 15, 1853, "I fineshed my flax and boiled itout" Eliza wrote. On April 10, 1854 she "comenced spining flax." It seems that all theprocessing of the flax was carried out in the household.
The second apparent inconsistency is that although the census shows the family
owning six milch cows and producing five hundred pounds of butter, the journal for 1860
only mentions trading butter twice and there are also only two references to making it.
One is on May 19 when Eliza wrote that "the girls and I done Saturdays work andcleaned the buttery" (this appears to be mentioned as part of the process of springcleaning) and the other on May 31 when Eliza noted that she churned butter. This labour
may well have been one of the unspecified tasks that fell under the rubric of "chores" or"Saturday's work" so was not mentioned separately. The entries that refer to butter
making in other years make it clear that this was primarily the women's domain becauseof her use of the possessive case. "I worked over my butter" Eliza wrote on February 9,
1854, and there is a similar entry on June 15, 1869. But other people helped sometimes.
On October 4, 1852, for example, she wrote "I and the little girls . . . , churned andworked over butter" and on June 21, 1871 “Charley churned and Bell took care of thebutter." Butter was a source of income throughout the years of the journal.
In 1860 there were days when Francis and Charles worked elsewhere instead of at
home, and sometimes Kneeland helped another farmer but, as in other years, it is hard todetermine the extent of reciprocal labour between the White family and other households
in the community. The journal shows a constant stream of people coming to the farm and119. Swingling is "to clean flax by beating it with a wooden instrument resembling a large knife."
Tow is "the coarse and broken part of flax or hemp, separated from the finer part by the hatchel orswingle." (Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, Revised and enlarged by
Chauncey A. Goodrich (Chicago: Brock and Rankin, 1897).

53

family members, both male and female, going elsewhere; Eliza often does not say why
they came and went, though sometimes their purpose is clear. On October 19, 1860, forinstance, "Frank helped Charley Garland till noon and then helped Jersey with the cart
and oxen till night drawing wheat," and in 1855 on September 12 "Kneeland went to
Pebodys after Sephrona" and "Sephrona comenced picking" the next afternoon. Several
non-family members were noted in the 1860 entries as being at the White farm to work,and members of the White family worked for some of the same people at other times.
But, with the exception of Joe Jones, it is not possible to determine how much of this waspart of a network of reciprocal labour and how much was based on a financial
arrangement. Another problem is that Eliza often omitted to give the reasons for the
comings and goings. On March 1, 1860, for example, "Kneeland went to Chappels
Charles to the Elders Dima to Garlands" and on March 13 Eliza wrote "Jenkins Charles
Garland &c here." As she very rarely mentioned any work taking place on Sundays thefrequent visits to and fro on that day of the week were probably social, and evening visits
on other days might well have been the same, but some of the weekday arrivals anddepartures were probably part of an informal web of labour exchange.
Catharine Anne Wilson's article on work bees emphasizes both the number andvariety of work bees that took place in Ontario, often involving all the members ofdifferent families and a considerable amount of food and alcohol. These were big social
occasions.120 These people might have found Potton rather a dull place. In 1860, forexample, Eliza only mentions bees three times, and none of them involved the entire
family. On June 21 "Frank and Charles . . . went to Alfs rasing in the after noon," on120. Catherine Anne Wilson, "Reciprocal Work Bees and the Meaning of Neighbourhood,"
Canadian Historical Review 82, no.3 (September 2001), 1-19.

54

June 23 "Frank went to Austins bee" and on June 29 "Frank hoed at a bee at George
Garlands." Rarely did Eliza list more than two or three people coming to the farm on any
one day.121 She did, however, refer to members of different families getting together toprocess apples in the fall. At the beginning of October "Frank and tet Bell and Charles
went to the widow Jerseys and pared apples," later that month "the Jersey and Garland
young folks" were at Eliza's house helping with the apples, a few days later Eliza notedthat "Frank and Tet gone to Garlands this evening to apple pareing" and at the end of themonth "the children went to Bedards to apple paring."122 The use of the term apple
paring suggests that this was a social gathering not just a time of work. Also, paring
mostly took place in the evening when the men and boys would not be working outside
because of the diminishing hours of daylight.
The journal also shows that in the early years especially the White familyborrowed and lent an assortment of tools and equipment, such as saddles, horses, wagons,fanning mills, horse rakes, sleighs, ploughs, cradles and kettles, but it is hard to ascertain
which implements belonged to the White family and which ones were borrowed fromother farmers. 123 Sometimes the ownership is clear, as on July 26, 1852, when "abel got
Perkins horse rake" and on July 11, 1853 when Eliza wrote that Levingston had come tothe farm "after his horse rake." But on many occasions Eliza's phraseology makes it
impossible to determine ownership. For example, on February 2, 1854 she simply wrote"John Baley after the auger" which could mean that he was collecting an auger belonging
to him, or borrowing one from Kneeland.
121. Greer remarks in his study of Lower Richelieu that he found no mention of bees taking place
there (Greer, Peasant, Lord, 25).
122. Calkins White Journal, October 6, 18, 22, 29 1860.
123. The horse-drawn rake was used in haying. A cradle was a wooden framework holding ascythe which was used for cutting grain.

55

The activities of 1860 show a gender division of labour similar to the other yearsof the journal, but this was a practical way of achieving greater efficiency as a family
unit. The spacing of the births of her children was such that Eliza, like many othermothers, was probably breast-feeding each of her babies for about two years. The workthat was performed in the house such as weaving, sewing and the regular householdchores could be interrupted to attend to the needs of her offspring in a sheltered space. It
was more efficient to have men do all the outside work which was often undertaken at a
distance from the house, using dangerous equipment and requiring considerable physicalstrength. As the parents worked they also passed on to their children the skills theywould need as adults. But this did not mean that products could always be identified witha particular gender.
As Nancy Osterud points out in her study of rural New York in the nineteenth
century, "farm processes often began in men's domain and culminated in women's; many
farm products had to pass through women's hands before they could be used or sold."
Moreover, "all family members owed allegiance to 'the good of the farm,' which appeared
to them as a matter of immediate and visible necessity. When circumstances seemed torequire it, men and women crossed over the boundaries of gender to assist each other."124
In order to sustain the farm, all members of the White family had to contribute theirlabour and all production was realised with the contribution of some labour on the part ofboth men and women. The women and children's work doing regular household chores
such as washing, cleaning, baking and mending clothes, not only provided for everyone's
daily needs, it also enabled the men to perform their outdoor work more productively.
The work pattern on the farm was determined ultimately by the seasons and for some124. Osterud, Bonds of Community, 147.

56

tasks it was necessary to have all the family involved. The maple sap could only betapped for a brief time in the early spring and then each batch had to be boiled down forhours to turn it into sugar. In the fall the apples needed to be dried before they started todeteriorate. In the summer the women tended to the vegetable garden for the family's
consumption, and the men looked after the field crops which would mostly be used tofeed the livestock that provided milk and meat for the family. The men sheared the sheep
and raised the livestock, and the women processed the wool into cloth and knitted items
and made butter. Ultimately, though some items are seen as the work of women andsome the work of men, usually according the amount and type of labour involved, theproduction on the White farm resulted from the labour of all members of the family andthey performed that work because the farm was their livelihood. Moreover, the items andcash gained by trading and selling surplus production came back to the family.

57

CHAPTER 4
WOMEN AND THE LOCAL MARKET
Women as Producers for the Local Market
The labour of Eliza and her daughters as producers not only had the potential tocontribute to the accumulation of sufficient capital to secure the future of the next
generation, as argued by Cohen. The strategy of deliberate production beyond thehousehold's needs of items such as knitted goods, cloth, dried apples and butter, items
which mostly involved women's labour, provided a certain degree of economic stability
for the family through the seasons. These were readily negotiable items that could besold or traded any time of the year directly to others in the community or to merchants innearby villages. This local market made it easier for the supplier to estimate the demand
for a product, as well as its exchange value, which was determined by the needs of bothproducer and customer. Moreover, these women's products were less exposed to suchrisks as the vagaries of the weather than the field crops that the men were growing.
The Economy of the Local Market
The journal, with its many detailed references to shows items bought, sold or
exchanged, shows how the local economy operated by using cash, promissory notes andbarter. It also shows the extent to which the items bartered were those made by womenwith a view to marketing them and the role of Eliza and her daughters in the marketplace
as negotiators.
Kesteman and his colleagues, when looking at the Eastern Townships in the
period from the late eighteenth century until 1840, describe an economy in which there58

was a scarcity of cash and a reliance on credit and barter.125 Eliza's journal indicates thatthe economy of Potton Township was still functioning in much the same way when thejournal ends in 1874, though in the latter years there seem to have been more cash
payments and trading is not mentioned very much.
The methods of payment in Potton Townships were a jumble of promissory notes,
cash and goods. Eliza often refers to notes written by and passed on to various people.
On October 10, 1871 "Charley went to Brocks and sold Hials note got him someshaveing tools." Some of these notes were for a considerable amount of money. On July
26, 1853 "Boardman and his boy here paid for and took up 150 dollars worth of notes"
and on September 2, 1855 "Abel got home from Hydespark last night and paid Jim two
hundred dollars and fifty and got up his note." The notes were not necessarily paid infull. On December 27, 1856 "Francis went to Roswell Bourn and paid him 52$ dollars
on a sixty five dollar note."
Eliza uses a somewhat confusing variety of terminology for the various cash
payments that were being used in the local economy. On July 17, 1869 for example,"Kilburn . . . paid Kneeland 7 ½ dollars in silver" and on September 18, 1871 Kneeland"got 4 pounds of tea and paid three dollars in good mony." In 1873, on January 9,"Kneeland and Eugene went to the mills and paid Dave, 10, dollars in currency" and On
October 28 "Kneeland . . . carried Gordon ten dollars in states and four in current mony."
Then there was just plain money, as in "Abel paid me two dollars in money,"126 thereby
indicating that she had not been paid in kind, something which featured in many of thetransactions and was usually referred to as trading.

125. Kesteman, Southam, and Saint-Pierre, Histoire des Cantons, 162-65.
126. November 4, 1860.

59

Trading was still an important part of the local economy. Sometimes thetransactions were small, like the one on September 18, 1852, when Francis went to themills and "carried three pounds of butter to get tea," and on July 8, 1856, when "Charleywent to the mills and carried two dozen and a half of eggs and got two spools of thread."
There are few references to trading or selling eggs in the journal, so perhaps they usually
only produced enough for their own consumption. There is also no indication as to wholooked after poultry, though there are several years in which the women were plucking
chickens (either in November or December) which were then traded. On December 16,
1869 Eliza wrote that "Kneeland . . . went to the village in the evening with the chickens
and apples to pay for Eliza‟s shoes and a pair of rubbers."
The apples that dried each fall were a useful form of currency. On December 5,
1860, "Francis carried me to the mills I sold 4,3 pounds of dried apples to Robinson andsettled the book" and ten days later "Kneeland went to mill and got . . . some things at,
Robinsons, paid in dried apples." Then shortly afterwards, on January 9, 1861, "Frankcarried marietta to the mills and got her a wash bowl and pitcher and carried dried apple
to pay." My favourite trade is the one she noted on September 29, 1873, when a man whocame for dinner "bought twelve bushels of apples" and "paid two dollars and a half and alittle dog."
Craig suggests that domestic cloth production generally "did not generate hugesurpluses."127 This seems to be the case in the White family. Though the items taken to
the mills and to Troy to be traded often were not recorded, there is only one specific127. Craig, Backwoods Consumers, 194.

60

reference to domestic weaving being used as a means of exchange. On September 20,
1869, "Bell changed her cloth for a good many things that we need."128
The trading was also somewhat complex at times. On August 26, 1852 Eliza
wrote:
francis and I went to the mills to day and carried my white wool to card andcarried 8 pounds of sugar to pay for carding got a bushel of wheat of Jim and paid
the miller half a dollar in cash for corn went to the store and paid twelve pound 3
ounces of butter credited on book at twelve and a half cents per pound sold one
pair of footings for lawn and bought medora a shawl to be paid in footings andhalf a pound of tobacco charged and came home.
On January 10, 1872 "Kneeland and Bell went to the mill . . . carried ten and a half
pounds of butter to get her overskirt and had two dollars charged, got her sack at
Mansons and let him have a dollars worth of berries, one dollar 85 due."
The trading also took place across the border. Eliza wrote on June 20, 1855, forexample, that "Abel and maria went to south troy yesterday and traded with Parker" andon July 11 the same year "Francis and I went to south troy carried a tub of butter 45
pounds and got some calico and other things." On January 11, 1860, "Charles and I and
Dime went to Troy . . . carried some butter to Gilman and got some calico got two yards
and a half of green silk fringe charged 25 cts."
Women as Negotiators in the Local Market
In the case of Eliza's household at least, it was not necessarily the men that weremaking the economic decisions. The women were often doing the trading, indicating not
only that they could purchase items without male supervision, but also that they wereseen as having good business sense. On November 5, 1852, for example, Eliza "went to128. This may seem surprising, considering the amount of time that Eliza's family spent weaving.
However the needs of the family would be met first, and in the later years, Bell was weaving for otherpeople.

61

Brocks and paid him one dollar in cash and half a bushel of onions and traded some." On
June 8, 1871 "Bell . . . went to the mills and paid Boright and Manson and traded some."
The women also went further afield to trade. On November 3, 1860 Eliza wrote that
"Francis carried me to Troy and I traded for a web of cot cloth with Dorman."Sometimes the purchases were quite substantial. "Francis carried me to Willeses," shewrote on March 17, 1853, "and I bought a stand and stone pot and two wheels and chestof drawers." Further evidence that the women had a certain degree of control overmoney which they perceived as their own can be found in the journal. On May 17, 1871,
for example, "Kneeland went to the mills and got him a pair of new fine boots Bell gave
him the money to buy them" and on November 25, 1873 "Baxter and Lake here withsewing machines, Bell bought and paid twenty six dollars down." It seems reasonable toassume that the money for these purchases came from cash she earned teaching andweaving for other people and that some of it, at least, was considered hers to spend as she
saw fit. In 1864 Eliza paid Abel two hundred dollars for fifty acres of his land in a sale
which was formally registered on March 9.129
The journal thus shows that the women in Eliza's household had considerable
autonomy in their role as participators in the local economy as suppliers, customers andnegotiatiors, and the land transaction between Eliza and Abel, about which we

129. Livre de renvoi official, Township de Potton, Comte de Brome, 1856-66, Potton Registry B,
vol. C, no. 3651. A very rough copy of this document, perhaps a preliminary draft, is one of themiscellaneous pages found with the journal. As there are very few entries for the years 1862 to 1868, there
is nothing in the journal to suggest why this purchase was in Eliza's name and not Kneeland's or where themoney for the purchase came from. If it was Eliza's own money rather than farm income accumulated over
the years, perhaps she inherited some from her mother's or her stepfather's family. Doris White Cameron,when I sent her a copy of this transaction recently, speculated that Kneeland could have been sick or there
might have been a legal dispute of some kind with a neighbour. The 1871 census does not list Eliza as alandowner.

62

unfortunately know nothing more, suggests that this autonomy went beyond trading in
the local market and into the male domain of land purchase.

Figure 11. Gravestones of Eliza and Kneeland, Protestant Cemetery, Mansonville.
Photographs by Anne F. Holloway
63

CONCLUSION"I am sixty five today and it is Bells birth day also" Eliza wrote on June 2, 1874,
and the next day's entry is the last one. Her son Abel's wife, Maria, who had been sickfor some time, had died two weeks earlier. Perhaps Eliza was too busy helping look after
their children to continue with her journal. Although the eldest two were thirteen andfourteen, the youngest ones were only four and one. Bell, now twenty-eight, was still
unmarried and living at home.130 Eliza's grandchildren Willie and Eliza were still livingwith them and doing their share of the work. Willie was now sixteen and Eliza fourteen.
Various entries in the journal over the years and in Cameron's genealogy show that by
1874 Francis was living on his own farm with his wife and their four children.131 The
journal shows too that Charles was also married and living on his own property, and thaton April 22, 1871 Kneeland bought some more land. None of their children had been
forced to migrate out west or move to the city in order to make a living. There weretimes over the years however when family members looked elsewhere for work. On
April 2, 1853, much to Eliza's dismay, Francis left to go and work on the railroad. "Lordhelp me in this trouble also how can I do without him" wrote Eliza, "Lord thou knowest
he was one that I depended on greately." Francis kept in contact with his family andreturned home on April 25. On May 14 he left again for the railroad, this time with his
brother Charles, but it seems they did not find work, as they were back home on May 18.
A few years later, on October 27, 1860, Eliza wrote "Frank talks of going west." As
there are big gaps in the diary in the 1860s he may have left Potton Township for a while,
but he came home to take up a similar life to that of his parents.
130. Bell married Darius Adams in October, 1882, and it was in their son Clinton's house that
Eliza's journal was found. Eliza died in February, 1883. (White Cameron, Private Papers, Genealogy)
131. White Cameron, Private Papers, Genealogy.

64

The journal shows that the family's strategies to look after themselves in thepresent and ensure the security of the next generation were successful. It also shows thatthey worked as an integral unit, with the various tasks distributed according to bothpracticality and ability. They helped and were helped by members of other families, andborrowed and loaned equipment as necessary. The journal also suggests that women like
Eliza not only played an important role in the household economy, they also could havesome power and independence in the marketplace.
It seems that the industrial development taking place in the urban areas of theprovince resulted in little change in the White family's way of life. A few entries, though,suggest attempts to sell to a market outside the community. One of these was in the earlyyears of the journal. On September 25, 1855 Francis "helped Abel start for montreal"and on October 1, "Abel got home from montreal and did not sell his hops." Though thejournal shows that the family was growing hops from 1853 to 1856 there is no indicationthat they grew them after that.132 Perhaps they were discouraged by the failure to sellthem in Montreal. On October 29, 1871 Eliza wrote "Frank here getting redy to go off
with his butter tomorrow morning Charley will go with ours" which suggests that thebutter was being transported to an external market. The next day "Charley and Frankstarted for Sutton flat with the butter." This was about eighteen miles away, and they
were probably planning on shipping the butter by train. The next day was the official
opening of the section of the South-Eastern Counties Junction Railway which passed

132. The 1861 agricultural census shows only four Potton farms with hops, one with only six
pounds. The others listed with yields of from eight hundred to two thousand pounds, suggesting that thesewere being grown for an external market (Mss. Census, Canada East, 1861, Brome County, Potton
Township, Agricultural Census, 307, line 36; 310, lines 3, 6, 10).

65

through Sutton Flat on its way to Richford, Vermont.133 Overall, however, the entries in
the journal suggest that practically all of the products that were not for homeconsumption were sold or exchanged directly from the farm or taken to local merchantsin small quantities. There was no north-south railway through the township until the
beginning of the twentieth century when the section of the Orford Mountain Railway
from Bolton Township reached south to Troy, Vermont in 1907.134
The entries in the journal describing the selling and trading of goods show not
only how women and girls contributed to the household economy and participatedactively in the market, they also show the household's pattern of consumption. Their
purchases over the years did not change radically. Items such as tobacco, saleratus andtea which were frequently noted, as well as matches, salt, and sheets of paper which werelisted less often, were no doubt seen as essentials.135 In the early years of the journal the
majority of the goods obtained were practical. They included items such as leather and alast for Kneeland's shoemaking, madder and indigo for dying, a pocket knife and an axe,though sometimes there were trades that included somewhat surprising items, such as thetwo silk cravats that were part of a trade on February 17, 1854. They were perhaps thearticles that clinched the deal. The other items, "1 pound of tea . . . 4 sticks black linen
thread 1 spool 1 rake 1 thimble quarter grose matches" were more mundane. Eliza did
not seem to be inclined to be self-indulgent, with one exception. On July 26, 1853 shewrote "I bought a gold ring of Plumley mari bought a dimond ring." Over the years thepurchases mentioned remained mostly practical, though different kinds of items
133. J. Booth, Railways, 62. Sutton Flat was later named Sutton. (Taylor,Brome County, Vol. 1,
81).
134 Taylor, Brome County, Vol. 1, 141.
135. Webster's American Dictionary definition of saleratus is "a carbonate of potash . . . used incookery." The modern equivalent is baking soda.

66

appeared. New products, such as rice, raisins, crackers, kerosene and chimney lamps
were noted, suggesting a higher level of disposable income, though they were still
making candles in 1872. Newspapers and magazines were mentioned more frequently
from 1870 on, perhaps because by then they were available in Mansonville. The
purchases made by the family suggest that their lifestyle did not change significantly over
the years.
It seems also that there were no major changes in farming methods. The 1871
census shows Kneeland and Abel with the same acreage as in 1861 and Francis andCharles with a hundred acres each. The census also provides evidence both that there
was a considerable amount of borrowing and lending of farm implements and that muchof the work was being done by hand. Unfortunately the 1861 agricultural census only
asked for the value of farm implements, but the 1871 census requested more detail. The
column for "ploughs and cultivators" lists Kneeland, Abel and Francis as each having
two, probably one of each; a cultivator was a type of harrow, used to break up sod after
ploughing and to cover the seed.136 Kneeland and Francis also had a horse rake each, but
no reapers, mowers, thrashing machines or fanning mills. Charles had none of theimplements listed on the census, and though many farmers had ploughs and/or
cultivators, there were few reapers, mowers, horse rakes, fanning mills or thrashingmachines in use. Similar crops are listed on each census for Kneeland, Abel and Francis,
but Charles, who had acquired his land more recently, has only oats and maple sugar.
Other farmers in the township appear to have grown similar crops on both censuses,
though there was a noticeable increase in hop production by 1871 as that census shows

136. Webster, American Dictionary.

67

thirty-seven hop growers (still only about 10 percent of all farmers) growing a total ofover eighteen thousand pounds, suggesting that this was beginning to be seen as a viable
crop.
The 1871 census indicates a considerable increase in dairy production. Kneelandis shown as having six milch cows in 1871, the same number as on the 1861 census.
Abel, however, is listed as having ten in 1871, as compared with four in 1861.
Kneeland's butter production is shown as five hundred pounds on each census, but Abelhas a hundred pounds on the 1861 census and seven hundred pounds in 1871; neither
household has cheese listed. The latter census shows that the number of milch cows in
the township increased by over six hundred, butter production increased by around 60
percent and that of cheese by over 50 percent. But the increase may not have been quite
this high, as non-farming families were not asked about dairy production in the 1861
census and it is likely that some of them would have kept cows (and other livestock) as
did families in Montreal.137 But only under 10 percent of the farms had ten or more
milch cows, the highest number being thirty-two, and nearly 80 percent had five or fewer,so small scale dairy production remained the norm. It seems, then, that the community as
a whole did not undergo any great change over the time span of Eliza's journal. Under
the 1871 census list for "Industrial Establishments" there are seven saw mills with a totalof fourteen employees, but four of these are shown as operating for six months a year orless and only one as running year round. The other establishments on this census consist

137. See Bettina Bradbury, "Pigs, Cows, and Boarders: Non-Wage Forms of Survival among
Montreal Families, 1861-91," Labour/Le Travail. 14 (Fall, 1974): 9-46.

68

of five blacksmiths with a total of nine employees, a shoe shop and an ashery, each ofwhich has two employees.138
A diary such as Eliza's, with its chronicling of each day's activities undistorted by
the passage of time or the bias of personal opinion, enables the reader to construct theeconomic framework that sustained the household and to see the daily lives of the family
members as they worked, went to church meetings and to school, and visited theirneighbours. But the lack of personal perspective and reflection means that little can belearned about the emotional relationships of the family members with one another andhow these affected or were affected by the functioning of the household economy. The
value of Eliza's journal lies in the picture it reveals of a farm economy operating in aparticular place at a particular time, and given that most of the families living there hadroots in New England, it is not surprising that the lives of the families described by Clark,
Barron and Bruegel were very similar. Clark sees such an economy persisting in theConnecticut Valley even after the rise of external markets. "The old practices persisted,"
he writes, "because they continued to make sense in their cultural and economic context.
The household system had welcomed and complemented market development and notresisted it, and so it was able to continue."139 The increased dairy production between
1861 and 1871 suggests that the farmers of Potton Township were responding to an

138. The ashery was presumably engaged in making potash, a valuable commodity which Day
refers to as "black salts." She writes "so profitable was it at particular times, that at the less busy seasons of
the year, men would go into the woods, fell trees and burn them for the simple purpose of making salts: orin cases of emergency when money was greatly needed, this was the readiest and surest way to obtain it.
For many years pot and pearl ashes were the staple articles which to make remittances in trade, and for along time were the principal products which could be spared from sections of the country where a nonproducing population was rapidly multiplying." Day, History of Eastern Townships, 190-91. Several times
in the 1850s Eliza wrote of men coming to the house to buy ashes and paying for them with cash. But it is
not clear if the trees were cut specifically to sell as ashes. They may have been felled in order to clear landfor crops.
139. Clark, "Household Economy," 181.

69

increased demand for dairy products, but achieving this through traditional modes ofsmall herds, rather than large commercial operations.
Potton Township remained a somewhat isolated community and could not easily
embrace a wider economic system as beyond the basin of Lake Memphremagog theamount of viable agricultural land was limited by the mountainous terrain. There waslittle room for expansion. Though the coming of the railroad and better roads made iteasier to send products to external markets the area remained, and still is, apredominantly rural community.140
Though historians may look for signs that the society of mid-nineteenth century
Canada was working consciously towards a wider market economy, and the women wereseeking empowerment, Eliza's journal suggests rather that the family's goal was to getthrough life as best as they could in the circumstances and provide for the next
generation. It demonstrates the way in which all members of the family contributed to
the farm economy, their interdependence with other members of the community forlabour and equipment, and their involvement in the local market. Moreover, the entries
show not only the value and negotiability in that market of the products to which womencontributed most of the work, such as butter, dried apples and weaving, but also thewomen's participation in the marketplace. Without such journals the work of womensuch as Eliza and her daughters and the intricacies of farm life would remain invisible.

140. The Orford Mountain Railway was abandoned in 1936 (Kesteman, Southam, and SaintPierre,Histoire des Cantons, 579).

70

Bibliography
Principal Manuscript Sources
Canada Census. Canada East. 1842. Stanstead County. Potton Township. Reel C732.
——— .1861. Brome County. Potton Township: Personal Census. 157-197. Reel C1270.
Agricultural Census. 305-311. Reel C1271.
——— . Quebec. 1871. District No. 126 Brome. Sub-District 126 d. Potton Division 1
and 2.
Taylor, Rev. Ernest M. Diaries 1863-1941. Acc. No. 89-24. Brome County Historical
Society.
White Cameron, Doris. Private Papers.
White, Eliza Calkins. Journal and other papers, acc. no. 83-29, Brome County Historical
Society Archives, Knowlton, Québec.
Other Sources
Armstrong, Jackson W., ed. Seven Eggs Today: The Diaries of Mary Armstrong, 1859
and 1869. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004.
Barron, Hal S. Those who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New
England . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Blodgett, Harriet. Capacious Hold-All: An Anthology of Englishwomen's Diary Writings.
Charlotteville: University of Virginia Press, 1991.
Bloom, Lynn Z. “„I Write for Myself and Strangers‟: Private Diaries as PublicDocuments.” In Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, edited by
Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, 23-37. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1996.
Booth, J. Derek. Railways of Southern Quebec. Vol. 1. Toronto: Railfare Enterprises
Limited, 1982.
Bradbury, Bettina. "Pigs, Cows, and Boarders: Non-Wage Forms of Survival among
Montreal Families, 1861-91." Labour/Le Travail. 14 (Fall, 1874): 9-46.
———. Working Families: Age, Gender and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal.
Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 1996.

71

Bruegel, Martin. Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson
Valley, 1780-1860. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002.
Bushman, Richard Lyman. "Markets and Composite Farms in Early America." William
and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Jul., 1998): 351-374.
Calkins White, Eliza. Eliza Calkins White's "Journal of Life"1852 – 1874. Transcribed by
Gwen Davis Morton. Knowlton, Quebec: Brome County Historical Society, 2000).
Cann, D. B., P. Lajoie, and P. C. Stobbe. Soil Survey of Shefford, Brome and Missisquoi
Counties in the Province of Quebec. Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, 1947.
Carter, Kathryn. Diaries in English by Women in Canada, 1753-1995: An Annotated
Bibliography. Ottawa: CRIAW/ICREF, 1997.
———, ed. The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1996.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
Chesnut, Mary Boykin. A Diary from Dixie. Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta
Lockett Avary. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1905. Accessed athttp.//docsouth.unc.edu.
Clark, Christopher. "The Household Economy, Market Exchange and the Rise of
Capitalism in the Connecticut Valley, 1800-1860. Journal of Social History, 13, no. 2(Winter 1979): 169-189.
Cohen, Marjorie Griffin. Women’s Work, Markets and Economic Development in
Nineteenth-Century Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.
Conrad, Margaret. "Recording Angels: The Private Chronicles of Women from theMaritime Provinces of Canada 1750-1950." In The CRIAW reader: Papers on Literary
Productions by Canadian Women, edited by Diana M.A. Relke,1-48. Ottawa:
CRIAW/ICREF, 1992.
Conrad, Margaret, Toni Laidlaw and Donna Smyth. No Place Like Home: Diaries andLetters of Nova Scotia Women 1771-1938. Halifax: Formac Publishing Company,
1988.
Craig, Béatrice. Backwoods Consumers & Homespun Capitalists: The Rise of a Market
Culture in Eastern Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.
Craig, Béatrice, Judith Rygiel, and Elizabeth Turcotte. "The Homespun Paradox: MarketOriented Production of Cloth in Eastern Canada in the Nineteenth Century."
Agricultural History 76, no. 1 (Winter, 2002): 28-57.

72

Culley, Margo, ed. A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from1764 to the Present. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York,
1985.
Curtis, Bruce. The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census ofCanada, 1840-1875. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
Davis, Gayle R. "Women's Frontier Diaries: Writing for Good Reason." Women's Studies
14 (1987): 5-14.
Day, C. M. History of the Eastern Townships. 1869. Reprint, Bellville, Ontario: Mika,
1989.
———. Pioneers of the Eastern Townships: A Work Containing Official and Reliable
Information Respecting the Formation of Settlements; With Incidents in Their Early
History; and details of Adventures, Perils and Deliverances 1863. Reprint,
Sherbrooke, Page-Sangster, 1973.
Errington, Elizabeth Jane. Wives and Mothers, Schoolmistresses and Scullery Maids:
Working Women in Upper Canada 1790-1840. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University
Press, 1995.
Gagan, David. "Enumerator's Instructions for the Census of Canada 1852 and 1861."
Social History/Histoire sociale 7 (1974): 355-365.
———. Hopeful Travellers: Families, Land, and Social Change in Mid-Victorian PeelCounty, Canada West. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981.
Greer, Allan. Peasant, Lord, and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes,
1740 -1840. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.
Hampsten, Elizabeth. Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern
Women, 1880-1910. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
Hassam, Andrew. "Reading Other People's Diaries." University of Toronto Quarterly 56(Spring 1987): 435-442.
———. Sailing to Australia. Shipboard Diaries of Nineteenth-Century British
Emigrants. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.
Henretta, James A. "Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrialist America."
William and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 1(Jan., 1978): 3-32.
Jeffrey, Julie Roy. Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-80. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1979.

73

Jewett, Elizabeth Liane. "Notes on Nineteenth Century Tourism on Lake
Memphremagog, 1850-1899." Journal of Eastern Townships Studies/Revue d/études
des Cantons de l'Est no. 31 (Fall/Automne 2007): 25-43.
Kesteman, Jean-Pierre, Peter Southam, and Diane Saint-Pierre. Histoire des Cantons del’Est. Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l‟Université Laval, 1998.
Little, J. I. Crofters and Habitants: Settler Society, Economy, and Culture in a Quebec
Township, 1848-1881. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991.
———, ed. Love Strong as Death: Lucy Peel’s Canadian Journal, 1833 – 1836.
Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001.
McCalla, Douglas. "Rural Credit and Rural Development in Upper Canada, 1790 to1850." In Patterns of the Past: Interpreting Ontario's History, edited by Roger Hall,
William Westfall, and Laurel Sefton MacDowell, 37-54. Toronto: Dundurn Press,
1988.
McInnis, Marvin. "Marketable Surpluses in Ontario Farming, 1860." Social Science
History 8, no. 4 (Fall 1984): 395-424.
Merrill, Michael. "Cash is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural
Economy of the United States." Radical History Review 13 (Winter 1977): 42-71.
Osterud, Nancy Grey. Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in NineteenthCentury New York. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Ouellet, Fernand. Lower Canada.1791-1840: Social Change and Nationalism. Translated
and adapted by Patricia Claxton. 1980. Reprint, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
1983.
Personal Narratives Group, eds. Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory andPersonal Narratives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Robertson, J. Ross, ed. The Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe, Wife of the First
Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of Upper Canada, 1792-6. 1911; Reprint from
Briggs edition, Toronto: Prospero Books, 2001.
Sandwell, R. W. "Rural Reconstruction: Towards a New Synthesis in Canadian History."
Social History/Histoire sociale 27, no. 53 (May 1994): 1-32.
Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America.
New York: A. A. Knopf, 1985.
Taylor, Rev. Ernest M. History of Brome County Quebec from the Date of Grants ofLand Therein to the Present Time with Records of Some Early Families. Vol. 1. 1908.
74

Reprint, Milton, Ontario: Global Heritage Press, 2009; Vol. 2 1937: Reprint fromoriginal published in Montreal by John Lovell, but no details of reprint given.
Thomas, C. Contributions to the History of the Eastern Townships: A Work Containing
an Account of the Early Settlement of St.Armand, Dunham, Sutton, Brome, Potton, andBolton; With a History of the Principal Events that have Transpired in Each of These
Townships up to the Present Time. Montreal: John Lovell, 1866.
Tilly, Louise A. and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family. New York: Holt, Reinhart
and Winston, 1978.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her
Diary, 1785-1812. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Walworth, Rueben Hyde. Hyde Genealogy: Or, the Descendants, in the Female as Well
as in the Male lines, From William Hyde, of Norwich, with their Places of Residence,and Dates of Birth, Marriages, &c., and Other Particulars of Them and Their
Families and Ancestry. Vol. I. Albany: J. Munsell, 1864. http://books.google.ca/
books?id=rIKhN5aMelcC&dq.
Webster, Noah. An American Dictionary of the English Language. Revised and enlarged
by Chauncey A. Goodrich. Chicago: Brock and Rankin, 1897.
Wilson, Catharine Anne. "Reciprocal Work Bees and the Meaning of Neighbourhood."
The Canadian Historical Review 82, no. 3 (September 2001): 1-19.
———. Tenants in Time: Family Strategies, Land, and Liberalism in Upper Canada,
1799-1871. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009.

75