12/01/2024
I wrote my Naturally Niagara nature column, once a month for 16 years and 8 months until...Torstar/Metroland shut down the Niagara Farmers' Monthly News, October 2023 :(
It was founded in 1970 by the owner of Carruthers Printing, Ivan Carruthers. A few years ago when I asked, his son-in-law Steve Ecker told me “I have a complete set 1970 to 2006 at home. And I donated an almost complete set to the West Lincoln archives in 2006 when we sold." (I was able to facilitate his collection being lent to the Lincoln Archives so they could photo-copy relevant local articles. THEN the collection went to the Brock University Archives. Thank you Steve!) And Mark Dawson who worked for Metroland, donated a partial collection to West Lincoln 2021”
I have a collection from when Erno Rossi and I were hired to write columns in 2005. I lent them to the Lincoln and Grimsby Archives. For a few years I’ve been trying to collate and copy my stories and the good news is, Brock University Archives is willing to take all these papers, have them bound into what look like thick books with hard covers, and put them into their archives. This way they will have the whole 53 years of agricultural life in Niagara/Haldimand. (IF you have any copies you would be willing to let me look at, there are a few missing from my collection.)
I am going to try and post a column from the month we are in, now and again, so they don’t just get forgotten and covered in dust. Nature news is usually always relevant! So am hoping you can get a cup of tea, put up your feet, and read about something local. This one is from December 2021.
Long Lost Letters from the Past
by Carla Carlson Grimsby Lincoln News
Friday, December 10, 2021
4 min to read
An envelope to Carla Carlson’s mom from her days as a Farmerette.
My heart is heavy but it’s also happy as I write this story.
Going through mom’s lifetime of correspondence is a daunting task. When our extended family came to Niagara to help clear our family home after mom passed away three years ago, we found suitcases and boxes full of letters and newspapers clippings.
The family dumped a lot of these papers into garbage bags and I asked them to be brought to my house. (Not going to talk about the bin I rented nor the kind neighbour that took 35 boxes.)
The reason my heart is heavy, is that I knew mom had all these letters and yet while I spent the 13 years after dad passed helping mom and caring for her, I never took the time to sort through our family history while she was alive. Instead, I rushed around organizing doctor appointments etc. If I could ever impart a heartfelt message to anyone else, it is to do this with the elders in your family. Can you imagine the stories that go with each memento? To record them whether it’s on paper or a tape-recording or videos. More precious than gold in my mind.
I also won’t tell you (you can use your imagination) that my friend who took the 35 boxes, emailed me last spring to say that she was moving, and I had to have everything out of her very steep-staired basement – within two days!
So, while I have all these boxes and bags stuffed here and there in the house, the barn and the bin, until I can sort through them, there are also three vintage cigar boxes in a cupboard in the sunroom, also filled with letters. One envelope in the Trump Cigar box stands out because of the ‘trade-mark’ red crest on the left corner for return address: Martin Farms, 1913, Vineland Station. Letter addressed to Miss Emma Stitt, Stittsville, Ont., with a four-cent stamp. Inside was a two-page letter, written on letterhead writing paper. The top left in small black print is L.R. Martin. In the middle top, Phone 615 R 2 Vineland. Far right C.R. Martin.
Below that left side the same red crest, in the middle MARTIN FARMS, growers of “Quality Celery”, Vineland Station. Far right in a small box it lists, “Plants, Vegetables, Fruit, Produce”.
In beautiful flowing black ink dated Feb. 10, 1948, farmer Leo Rittenhouse Martin Senior wrote:
Dear Miss Emma,
While it is a long time since the Christmas Holiday season and the nice remembrance from you at that time you have not been Forgotten. However with busy fellows like myself sometimes ones social interests are a little delayed by ones business interests which I must admit is not the best plan.
We have been wondering what will develop along the plans for a Farm Service Camp for Vineland for 1948 season. It seems that the Experimental Farm think that they need our present quarters for their use, so unless they change their ideas we will have to make other arrangements for camp accommodation. I cannot see how it would be possible to build a new set up for this coming season.
We have started the greenhouse plant growing work by sowing various kinds of vegetable seeds with seeds of annual flowers soon to follow and from now on the job will step up from week to week as the season advances with the peak period of work in April and the first half of May.
We have been having what some people call an old Fashioned winter. This time it does not refer to the quantity of snow as much as it does to the temperatures which have been well below the average of its last few seasons. Several people have reported frozen water lines that are underground supposedly below the danger of being frozen.
The lake here has picturesque formations of ice banks all along the shore and big areas of floating ice well out on the surface but never safe to venture out on.
Best wishes to you for the coming year.
Leo R. Martin
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When I read this letter, I wanted to cry. Every time mom and I drove down the QEW or the North Service Road, past Martin Road, mom would say she would like to go visit Leo Martin. And I never took her there.
During the First and Second World Wars, the Ontario Farm Services Force set up seasonal camps, overseen by YWCA staff (house mothers), where farmers were short on labour because the young men were away at war. During the 1940s my mom came down to Niagara for four years in a row, from the Ottawa Valley. In 1947 she worked on Martin Farms.
The Experimental Farm for horticultural research dates back to 1906 when Canadian-American businessman, Moses F. Rittenhouse donated land and a building for an experimental farm called the Vineland Research Station. In 2007, it was renamed the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre
During my research I learned that Leo’s middle name was Rittenhouse. I was directed to look at www.Geni.com to figure out the Martin family’s lineage. A man named Wilhelm Rittenhausen, born in Germany in 1644, immigrated to Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1682, “at the solicitations of William Penn”. Rittenhausen is remembered as the builder of the first paper mill in the United States. I counted forward four generations to Michael Conrad Rittenhouse born in Germantown in 1768 who brought his German-Dutch, U.E. Loyalist family to Canada, settling near Vineland. He died in 1852 at 83 years of age and is buried in the Old Mennonite Cemetery in Vineland. Three generations after that Etta Honsberger Rittenhouse married a Robert Freeman Martin from Campden and they had eight children. The two boys were Leo and Cletus Rittenhouse Martin. Their grandfather was the brother of Moses Franklin Rittenhouse born in Vineland! So, he was Leo and Cletus’s great uncle. Leo is the farmer that wrote mom this letter.
Clear as crystal?!
I hope he knew one of the young Farmerettes had come back here to raise her family in the Tender Fruit Belt she loved so well.
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stcatharinesmuseumblog.com/2016/10/18/niagaras-farmerettes/
goodineverygrain.ca/2021/11/02/remembering-ontario-farmerettes/
www.geni.com/people/Moses-Rittenhouse/6000000004590641744
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Call Carla at Bonnybank Bed and Breakfast at 906-562-3746 or at Niagara Nature Tours [email protected] for gift certificates or to share a story.
