Fwd: EPISODE 56 EYWOOD PARST TWO: THE IMMIGRANT YEARS OF FREEMAN FAMILY 1905 TO 1914

Begin forwarded message:

From: ALAN SKEOCH <alan.skeoch@rogers.com>

Subject: EPISODE 56 EYWOOD PARST TWO: THE IMMIGRANT YEARS OF FREEMAN FAMILY 1905 TO 1914

Date: May 30, 2020 at 11:42:02 PM EDT

To: Alan Skeoch <alan.skeoch@rogers.com>

EPISODE  56    EYWOOD, PART TWO

Louisa (Bufton) Freeman with daughter Elsie on her one and son Frank by her side.

Photo may have been taken in the Head Gardener’s house at Eywood Estate.

In 1972, I asked mom to explain life as immigrants in Canada from 1905 to 1914

This is  Granddad and is gardeners…ten men and boys and two horses

alan skeoch

May  2020

There was always something strange about the Freeman farm house.  Something different

from other houses as I remember.  And the difference, I now realize, was the picture frames

and the photos fitted therein.  The frames  were hand carved by Granddad out of slabs of 

hardwood.  Then intricately carved.   As below.

 

“How long did it  take you to carve these, Grandpa?”

“Did one ever winter for a few years?”

“Who is in the frame?”

“That’s  to cook from Eywood…your mother’s godmother?”

“I thought you hated Eywood?”

“Too strong a word, Alan.”

“but you said you hated tipping your hat to Mr. Gwyer, the owner of Eywood.”

“Hate is  too strong a word…let’s say disliked.”

“If you disliked Eywood, then why spend your winter’s  doing something

that reminds you  of Eywood.”

“Alan, there is the world of difference between a system I might dislike

and the people working within the system.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Some of those people in service at Eywood became as  close to 

your grandmother and me as our family.   They became family really.”

Winer’s work beside the wood stove in Erin Township,  Wellington County 1930’s.

Elsie Freeman…hand made frame by Edward Freeman

The old Freeman farm house had reminders of Eywood on each  wall of the only room

in the house that was permanently lived in.  The room with the big wood stove. The rest

of the house in winter time was so cold that icicles formed in the rooms.   Just to got

to bed upstairs we had to take a hot brick wrapped in paper.  The brick was heated in

the wood stove oven.  

This was not the home of rich persons.  Yet the walls  were reminders that there was

a place somewhere in England where rich people lived and  were served by servants.

It was all  very confusing.

I thought Grandma and Grandpa came to a better place..Canada.  But the reminders

on the walls told a different story.

Always in the back of my mind were these reminders  of Eywood.  A mystical place

that I thought I would never see.  Time and  circumstances changed things for me.

Remember this point.  I was born in 1938. I was  a teen ager in the 1950’s.  I was

an adult in the 1960’s.  I was to become part of the luckiest generation of humans

this world has ever seen.   I did not know it though.   Nor did  I know that in a few years

I would find myself on the Eywood estate.  Not once, but several times.  I would

arrive there just six years after the grand house was demolished by impoverished

Brits.   I would  arrive just six years after the grand estate home was blown to

kingdom come.  

What of  granddad?

“Will you ever go back to Eywood “

“No.  We will never return…burned  our bridges.”

They left Eywood in 1905.  Sailed  to St. John, New Brunswick. Then train to Toronto.

where  Granddad expected  his wife Louisa to stay  for a few weeks while he checked  out farming

in Manitoba.  That was a non starter.

“You expect us to take Frank and Elsie to a remote wilderness  where there are no schools nearby?”

“For a while that will be so.”

“And no hospitals.”

“Not close.”

“Well…that is  not going to happen…we are not going to Manitoba.”

So grandpa bought a small garden farm in Etobicoke (exactly where Highway 427 sweeps  north

today and crosses Burnhamthorpe  Road.).  He tried to grow vegetable then haul them to Toronto

for sale.  Tough.  Poverty was getting close.

“We will sell the garden farm, Lou.”

“And  do  what?”

“I have a  job as carpenter with the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway.  Big things

happening in Northern Ontario.   We will have a  cabin in Krugerdorf…a village near Englehart.

Start all  over again.”

Around 1985 we drove north to find krugerdorf.  We found it.  All that is left of the

railway village is this  sign.  As  I looked  at the sign, a black bear crossed the railway track

some distant away.

This is the log cabin of Harry Horsman, a friend of the family in Krugerdorf.  His cabin is primitive as was

the cabin belonging to Ted and Lou Freeman.  Theirs caught fire an burned to the ground in 1913 or 1914.  Fires

raged all across Northern Ontario in those years.

Contrast the log cabin above with the majesty of Eywood Estate main  house.

The cabin turned out to be a rudimentary log cabin.  In the summers massive wildfires swept across

Northern Ontario.  Granddad had to ride through at least one such massive blaze sitting on a flat car

with forests burning on each side.   It was tough.  Then their own log cabin caught fire and burned

to rubble.  They managed to save their one t treasure…a small pump organ.  Music was a big 

part of their social life.  But they were burned  out.  So they moved…fled… south.

Grandma wanted something stable.  Not flashy.  For their money was  limited, very limited.

In 1914 Edward and Louisa  Freeman bought a small farm in southern Ontario.  Very small indeed.

The 25 acre farm on the Fifth line of Erin Township, Wellington County, Ontario could hardly

be considered a farm.  Jus to 20% of the land was swamp.  And the fields were oct strewn.

rocks left behind  when the glacial ice retreated thousands  of years ago.  Rocks on the surface.

Rocks below the surface.  But there was a brick house.  Well  really a brick faced house…one brick  

thick.   Really the house was  built like a barn.  Timbers rescued here and there from other buildings

some of them scorched by fire.  No running water.  No indoor toilet than thunder jugs beneath the beds.

There was  a barn.  The builders must have thought  the site for a barn was ideal.  Between two

swamps with ager inning through the stable.  No need to haul water.  Of course the idea was faulty.

In  winter the water froze.  When water freezes it expands with force enough to crack and push cement

foundations out of place.  The barn would not last the century but it would last the remaining lifespans

of Ted and Louisa Freeman.  Room enough for a chicken coop and stabling for a few cows and a horse

to two.  Small.   Self sufficient.  Survivable.

The Freemans set down roots.  Roots that took some time to get established because

the Freemans were Welsh-English.  And Erin Township’s Fifth Line was  overwhelmingly Scottish.

There was no love lost between the English and the Scots.  Tensions dating back and beyond

Robert the True and William Wallace were very real in this small  backwater piece of  rural Ontario.

Photo of the Freeman farm in  the 1930’s as seen from the air.

“We were not liked  at first.”

(Most locals could  not understand  why anyone would try to eke out a living on 2r acres.  An

English family forced by  poverty to buy the small rock/swamp parcel.)

“They won’t stay long..”

“What is  worst is  that they are English.  Odd  they did not get better land.”

“Must be a reason.”

“Wait and see what happens.”

Across the dirt road was the farm of Jean Macdonald, nest to her farm on south side

were Jean and Janet McLean…south of the Freeman farm were the Macecherns, then

the Kerrs.  To the north was a  great wedge of forested swamp that had once been part of

the new Freeman farm.  The land had been sold  to raise enough money to build the 

brick house.  Once the new Freeman house had been built the former owners found

they no longer had a farm.  All of this  did  not bode well.

Did the Freeman’s feel they had made a massive mistake leaving a reasonable comfortable

life in the Gardeners House on the Eywood Estate for the near poverty of life in Canada?

They must have but I never heard a word  of complaint as a boy spending many  free hours

with my grandparents.

“It did not take lone for us to fit in.  A little tension at first.”

“But everyone was poor.  We made our own entertainment

using the one room school for musical evenings.”

“I played the violin along with Frank.”

“Your grandmother played  the pump organ and she

had a lovely singing voice.”

“In not time at all, we were part of the community.  Did not matter that

we were English.”

The Great War began in the same year the Freeman’s bought the farm.  To pay

for it, Edward  Freeman  took a job making eplosives in Toronto.  Elsie, Frank

and his wife Louisa were left to do the farming.  With the money earned the

mortgage was  soon paid in full.  I am guessing when I say the farm cost $6,000

perhaps less than that.

From 1906 until their deaths in the 1950’s,  Grandma and Granddad kept in close touch

with the resident of Eywood.  No complaints.  Granddad even successfully encouraged 

two of his brothers and his sister to come to Canada.  They did not feel poor although they

were poor.   But there was a  richness of  spirit in them.  A great joy of living on their own land.

Security of tenure.

All the same it was wonderful to hear about the happenings on the Eywood Estate. The gossip

of those still ‘in service’.   The letters from the Griffiths were a  kind of  touchstone.

Mercifujlly, both Grandma and Grandpa died  before the terrible news reached us.

The Eywood Estate was gone…the great house had sold everything right down to’

the floor boards and doors and windows.  All gone.  And the final catastrophe was

the demolition…with the help of explosives I was told…the final demolition of the 

great estate house.

IN 1955, this wasalll that remained of Eywood mansion  house.

Odd fact though.  The rest of the estate…the barns, the servants quarters, the dovecote,

the park, the lake, the walled  gardens…and the head gardeners red brick house…all of these

remain.  Mom..Elsie Freeman…was born in that red brick house in 1901.

NEXT STORY:  PART THREE OF THE EYWOOD STORHY

BACK  THEN…THE 1940’S

(MY BROTHER ERIC AND  I DRESSED  AS WE DID BACK THEN…ON THE FREEMAN FARM)

TODAY…YEAR 2020

So here we are in the year 2020…and the 25  acre Freeman farm has survived while thousands of

other family farms have been gobbled up into larger and larger farms with fewer and fewer farmers.

The average size of a farm today is over 500 acres.

We call our farm a farm but is  really not a farm.   Our income from the farm is

miniscule.  So  small that we do not pay farm taxes.  We pay the much larger

property tax of non farming rural residents.  No matter.  The farm has survived.

A wooden horse like this would likely have been present in Eywood.

NEXT STORY…PART THREE OF EYWOOD. …AS FOUND IN 1960

alan skeoch

may 2020