POINT ABINO AND VICINITY

By

META SCHOOLEY LAWS

              “Father can tell you things that you don’t know about, Squire Sloan,” was the greeting I got from a friend the other day, and “I’ve heard father talk about the old sand pit at the Point,” someone else chimed in. Needless to say, I was delighted, because the chief purpose of these letters is to arouse interest in those days, before it is too late for their history to be recalled by one and another of us.-If only we can today “serve our day and generation” (a phrase which would seem to have been a sort of watchword of those days) as well as they served theirs; if we can only build today as firmly and with as good material, as that with which they laid the foundations yesterday!

             Squire Sloan and auntie were certainly outstanding figures. She always wore a velvet hood trimmed with a band and a short cape of mink, and a long heavy black cape in the winter. Her’s was not exactly a bed of roses, for like many of the men of his day, he was rather fond of the cup which “inebriates but fails to cheer,” to paraphrase an old adage. Because of this habit, the stern old Presbyterian pioneer had opposed his daughter’s marriage to the gay young “Yankee,” but Margaret had her way, and when long years afterward her youngest sister on a visit to her, ventured to ask whether she would not have been wise to heed her father’s warning, Auntie said almost fiercely, “If I could have seen every step of the way ahead, I would have done the same. I never had an unkind word, Mary.” And her influence over him was wonderful. Often a neighbour was seized with a sudden need to hitch up and hasten to the village, after watching Auntie walk past the house, perhaps in a driving snowstorm, for they knew her errand though none ever dared mention it to her. She would go to the store and from there to the hotel bar. “Come,” she would say to him. “It is time we went home,” and no matter how much he had been drinking he would turn back to the bar and order-“two fingers” all round. Lifting the glass high, he would say, “Gentlemen, Lady Sloan,” and after the toast was drunk, bow low to her as if she had been a queen, and accompany her out.

             Perhaps she had to unblanket and untie the little bay team that he always drove, but he never refused to go with her. Only once was he known to be angry, but those who provoked him never forgot it. There was a smallpox epidemic threatened. One man, a Negro, had died, and those who had never had the disease feared to attend the burial. Squire Sloans’s pock-marked face attested that he was immune, and after inducing him to drink more than usual, they sent him to the cabin, and he laid out the body and closed the rude coffin. Then he went home with his wife. When he realized where he had been, he returned to the village and strode into the group of men, in a rage. “I would have looked after the man, but you made me expose my wife, and if she dies”- and his look told the threat his lips did not need to utter. Fortunately for all concerned Auntie escaped the disease.

             She outlived him many years and a better neighbor than W.M. Sloan, a more upright man never lived, and to the wonder of the other women his wife would have stoutly added, “No woman ever had a kinder husband.”

             They had no family but one and another of the nephews often shared their home for months at a time and their adopted daughter, still living, cherishes their memory as though they had been her parents.

             But to return to the Point. The winter of 1878 witnessed the last of the lumbering operations on the beach. The Decews, whose name is preserved in the little hamlet of Decewsville on Provincial Highway No. 3, just west of Cayuga, bought all the remnants of the virgin forest in that vicinity available, especially the oak. All through the winter of ‘77-‘78 the operations were carried on. The Dickout Woods was one that was practically stripped. In the spring the logs were hauled to the Beach at Point Abino. Huge rafts were built and tugs came in the early summer and towed them away. The lumbering outfit especially the wagons with their huge hind wheels stand out in memory. The huge logs, which required three teams to haul them, are not forgotten. I only know two oaks as large still standing, they gave their name to my Haldimand farm home, “Two Oaks”-great spreading trees under one of which more than once family gatherings have picnicked.

             If these forests had been even partially replanted perhaps the “Chicago water steal” would not have to make so apparent a lowering of the lake level today, for the depletion of forests without doubt is a very potent factor in this matter, greater perhaps than Chicago’s much mooted drainage canal.

             We have referred to the Dickouts. Squire Dickout was an early local preacher. His wife was one of the Morgan girls, from Morgan’s Point. Point Industry some of the old maps call it. He read “The Country Gentleman,” one of the oldest agricultural papers published on the continent, and one which is still issued. He was lover of trees and the row of beautiful maple trees which border the road along what was his farm are still his beautiful monument.

             He laid out a little park opposite his home and planted the first peach orchard in the section. Red cherry trees bordered both sides of the road east of the house, and the fruit hung there in the summer, purple and luscious. Both Mrs. Dickout and “Grandma” were famed for their “Cherry Bouse.” The recipe is still extant but I fear me that it is taboo these days-too high a percentage of-. But these were the days when the various “moonshine” concoctions were unknown, and it would have been difficult indeed to have convinced these folk that any possible harm could be associated with the pure juice of the grape or cherry as they prepared it.

             Wild berries were abundant. Their flavor is vastly superior to the cultivated varieties of today, though the latter are much more attractive to the eye. Oh, for the taste of the contents of one of the big stone jars of raspberry jam! Those of us who remember them cannot be overly enthusiastic about the manufactured article with its commercial pectin. These people knew nothing about balanced meals. Their tables were an utter defiance of every known rule of the dietician today. No menu card of today is big enough for the list of viands served at their feasts, yet, I wander through the cemeteries and read the names of these old people and their ages, 78, 80, 90 etc, etc, etc. How did they do it? Sometimes we order whether, the necessity for a strictly ordered diet proportioned as to the contents of the proteins and what not, is not laid upon us because we have forsaken the cool sequential vale of life, along which there “kept the even tenure of their way,” rather than for any more easily controlled cause.

             Just north of the marsh, through which was the approach of the Point lived the Parneys (the name is spelled Parnea) and on the opposite side of the road the Pages-or rather Otway Page. The latter farm is still in possession of the family. Old Mr. Page was famous for his maple syrup and sugar. His oldest son, whose widow is still living, was the first in that neighbourhood to obtain the degree of B.A. They were a family of marked intellectual tastes. One daughter still lives, and could no doubt make a valuable contribution to Point Abino here.

             Along the road too, was old Mrs. Tolson’s little home, where she and her one son lived. The little shack in the main road in which he lived after his mother died looked as if the old one had been lifted up and set down again. It was old, even if newly built.

             The neat little Snider home was there too. The Snider girls could doubtless furnish stories of the Point also.

             Then the Sherk farm, now the home of the youngest son, whose mother still lives with him. Chris Sherk always had beautiful horses. He had a half mile track on his farm. One of his horses, a beautiful black animal whose coat shone like satin, passes before my mind’s eye now, though it is more years than one likes to remember, that its master drove it to Ridgeway, passing the gate of Maple Grove farm on which the children swung and watched for it. I can still see him on his “Sulky” carrying the long whip which his horse never felt, I am sure.

             Have you ever read “Aunt Jane of Kentucky?” It is a beautiful collection of pioneer character sketches. “Child” says Aunt Jane to her listener, “nearly all my stories end in the church yard,” and so do these, and yet, remembering the number of pioneers homes which have passed unto the hands of the lesser people than those who braved loneliness, privation as they strove to establish homes in the wilderness, one thinks of the warning crouched in these lines from

Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey

Where wealth accumulates and men decay

Princes or lords may perish or may fade

A breath can make them, as a breath hath made

But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride

When one destroyed, can never be supplied.

             Of course, the word “peasantry” was never properly applied to Canadians. Exchange that word for this coined one “ruralry” and in those lines, is described the real menace of Canada today, for one of the plainest truths taught by the page of history is this “Rural decadence spells national disaster.”

The Welland Tribune and Telegraph

13 April 1926