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HomeMy WebLinkAbout738"Chapter copied from _Inheritance - Ontario's Century Farms Past and Present_ by John and Monica Ladell, 1979. The Miller Family Thistle Ha' Farm Pickering Township Ontario County Occasionally one comes across a farm whose appearance is strikingly different, as if, by accident or intention, the first owners had recreated their new Canadian homestead in the mould of another country. Thistle Ha' is such a farm. John Miller, a native of Dumfriesshire, Scotland, employing stonemasons originally from Yorkshire, built the big field-stone house, ""remembering the stone cottages and castles of his native land"", and the result is a farm that would fit comfortably among the hills and dales of the north of England or the Lowlands of Scotland: dry-stone walling, stone fences reminiscent of Westmorland or of Scottish field dikes, a farm gate that has to be opened to allow vehicles to reach the house, land sloping away to the east in a pattern of fields and trees. Hugh Miller is the present owner of the farm. His grandfather, John Miller, the first owner, was born in 1817 on a croft near Annan in Dumfriesshire in southern Scotland. During the years of hardship following the Napoleonic Wars, the Miller family was so poor that they could only feed one pig a year. They always chose a pig with a large head, it is said, as that was the only part they kept to eat themselves; the rest of the carcase was sold. John Miller left this life of poverty when, at the age of eighteen, he came to Upper Canada in 1835, there to join his uncle, George Miller, on Rigfoot Farm in Markham Township. He worked for his uncle for four years, then drew his accumulated wages, consisting of two cattle and four sheep, and settled in 1839 on a two-hundred-acre lot in Pickering Township. There he continued the back-breaking task of clearing the land, for which he received the deed in 1848. John Miller had only an axe to fell the trees, some of them maple over three feet in diameter, and when the trees were gone, in came the thistles. With wry humour, he named his farm ""Thistle Ha' "" (""Ha""' meaning a ""small hall""). He might equally as well have named it ""Stone Ha'"": the ground was so rocky that one could step" "250 INHERITANCE from one stone to another. John Miller remarked that ""the Devil must surely have intended the farm to be the foundation of his house, but had made the mistake of putting a little dirt between the stones instead of mortar. ..."" It was to take the Miller family over a century to rid the land of the worst of the stones, some of which weighed as much as two tons. Hugh Miller describes how it was done: ""It would take two teams of horses to get them out. Dig a hole round them; make a ramp. Roll them up the ramp. When they had the first snow, they'd move them on a stone-boat. Or they'd keep a fire going around them all day, then at night throw on two five-gallon cans of cold water. The stones shatter with a crunch. I've done it myself."" The first crops were barley and peas, sown by hand and reaped by cradle. The fields were ploughed by single-furrow ploughs, harrowed by a tree branch, and levelled by a log dragged over them drawn by a team of oxen. Threshing was by flail in a barn, usually at night, when it was too dark to work outside. Sacks of wheat were carried through the woods to Markham some ten miles away, there to be ground into flour. One spring when the family was almost starving, they turned the cattle out into the woods, watched them to see what plants they ate — then devoured the same plants themselves. Such was their need that season that they were forced to eat the potatoes they had saved for planting. In spite of all these hardships, it took only a few years for John Miller to establish himself. In 1852 he turned his attention to the importation and improvement of livestock, something for which the Miller family would become famous. The first pedigreed cattle were brought to Thistle Ha' from Kentucky. They were Durham or Shorthorn cattle, descended from those raised in England by the noted breeder William Booth of Kirklevington in County Durham. They were big, rough cattle but very good milkers, and they formed the foundation of the Thistle Ha' herd of pure-breds that is now the oldest in the world. In the 1860s, John realized that the American mid-west and some areas of Canada were eminently suitable for beef production. So he set about adapting the Booth breed to produce a beefier type of animal. To this end, animals were imported directly from Scotland to become the foundation of today's beef industry. One of his great Shorthorn bulls was Vice Consul, bred by Amos Cruikshank of Aberdeenshire, ""a Quaker with an immense genius for improving livestock"". Then were was Young Abbotsford, a beautiful bull, and later two outstanding females, Cherry Bloom and Rose of Strathallan." "FARMING ON THE URBAN FRINGE 251 At the same time as he was importing cattle into Canada, John Miller was bringing in sheep and horses. The first sheep were Cotswolds and one consignment came to grief in a violent storm off the coast of Ireland, as a result of which a number of them died. At the height of the tempest John Miller wrote laconically in his diary: ""I never expect to see land again."" In 1872 he brought the first Shropshire sheep to Canada. These sheep were the ancestors of what would become a famous flock, and their descendants are still at Thistle Ha'. John Miller's son, another John, became renowned as a judge of sheep throughout North America. There were horses, too. ""Americans used to come here to buy horses when they opened up the prairies,"" Hugh Miller relates. ""At first there was a demand for big, rough horses that could pull stumps, and so we had shire horses here then. But when they stopped sowing grain by hand and used seed drills, they needed a different type of horse — smaller, easier to feed, better legs and feet. When the change came, my grandfather and one of his sons saw what was happening. They bought a stallion in Aberdeenshire, a great horse named Boydson Boy. He was a good walker and he produced colts that could step out well and pull wagons. He lived until he was twenty-five years old and left a tremendous number of colts. There's a picture of him upstairs. . . ."" Thistle Ha' farm still has two horses that are hitched up to the wagon and worked when the hay is being baled and drawn. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Miller family, now the firm of John Miller and Sons, emerged as one of the most aggressive and successful promoters, breeders, and sellers of pedigreed livestock in North America. ""They had the confidence and they had the conceit,"" Hugh Miller says. John Miller's son, Robert, Hugh Miller's uncle, helped organize many of the leading livestock associations in North America. His livestock interests took him all over the world, and wherever he went, he displayed the Millers' uncanny knack of being able to apply and profit from their knowledge and experience of breeding animals. He knew, for instance, that breeders of merino sheep in the United States, including the brothers Eugene and John Little, were having trouble with the ticks and fleas that gathered in the folds of skin around the necks of this breed. Near Paris, France, he saw some Spanish merino sheep at Rambouillet, where the noted scientist and explorer Baron von Humboldt bred sheep without the neck folds. He bought five of these sheep — four ewes and a ram — and took them back to the Littles." "252 INHERITANCE Hugh Miller remembers as a boy going round the Royal Winter Fair with his uncle Robert. ""He was getting up in years at the time, but he'd been everywhere, done everything, and seen everything. Pigs, cows, sheep, horses — he knew them all. He'd walk around the Fair and wherever he went, he'd have an audience of twenty to thirty people just hoping to hear what he had to say."" When John Miller married Margaret Whiteside in 1847, they lived in a rough log house. In time they were to have eight children and some larger accommodation would be needed. In 1855, work was begun on a new stone house. The stones from the fields were used as building material and lime for mortar was burned on the farm. The masons were Yorkshiremen, the Pearson brothers of Ashburn, who were paid $1.25 a day, no small amount for those days. By the 1870s John Miller had become a noted public figure: councillor, then reeve and afterwards warden of Ontario County. In 1875 an east wing was added to the house containing a ballroom, an ash-pit, and a brick oven large enough to bake twenty-two loaves. Present-day visitors have been known to comment on the skill shown by the architect who must have designed the east wing, but Hugh Miller says that when the foundations were about to be laid his grandfather was going away on a trip and it was his uncle Robert who was instructed to ""pace them out"". It is a beautiful home, substantially unchanged inside and out. Robert Miller, Hugh Miller's brother, wrote in 1973: ""Today this noted rural residence still stands, one of the finest examples of the stonemason's art, with its arched lintels locked with a central keystone and walls two feet thick. The corners are as plumb as the day they were laid. It is one of the few pioneer homes that has not been remodelled; an interesting landmark in an ever-changing rural scene."" Despite its architectural dignity, the Miller house and the family farm itself have been threatened in recent years with total destruction. On January 30, 1973, Thistle Ha' was expropriated by the federal government to make way for the proposed Pickering airport. There followed four years of uncertainty, distress, and frustration amidst a well-publicized controversy. At considerable cost to themselves, the Millers finally won from the Supreme Court of Canada a decision that rescinds the expropriation order. As a gracenote to this story, it is a pleasure to be able to add that because of the distinction of the Miller family's contribution to Canadian agriculture, Thistle Ha' Farm has been identified as a Canadian National Historic Site. ""This farm was acquired in 1848 by John Miller,"" the text for the plaque reads, ""a Scottish immigrant" "FARMING ON THE URBAN FRINGE 253 who became a pioneer importer and breeder of pedigreed livestock in Canada. . . . Miller's example, as well as the animals bred at Thistle Ha', played an important role in improving stockbreeding throughout North and South America in the 19th century. Succeeding generations of Millers have maintained the farm's reputation for raising fine blooded stock."" These words echo the comments of Robert Gibbons, President of the Agricultural and Arts Association, made over a century ago: ""In any history which may hereafter be written of the introduction of the most valuable breeds of livestock into this country, the names of the Millers of Markham and Pickering . . . must always be honourably mentioned.""3" "Inheritance Ontario's Century Farms Past & Present John and Monica Ladell Illustrations by Bert Hoferichter, mpa Macmillan of Canada Toronto 630.9713 Lad" "Copyright © 1979 John and Monica Ladell All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Ladell, John, 1924-Inheritance Includes index. ISBN 0-7705-1792-7 2. Family farms—Ontario—History. 2. Ontario — Rural conditions. I. Ladell, Monica, 1925- II. Title The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited 70 Bond Street Toronto, Ontario M5B1X3"