United States Influences on the Agriculture of Prince Edward County, Ontario

Abstract

P _RINCE EDWARD COUNTY is located on the north shore of Lake Ontario about 100 miles northeast of Toronto. Rochester, New York, is 60 miles across the lake due south of the western end of the county; Oswego, N. Y., is less than 40 miles southeast from the nearest land in the county, Point Traverse. The county is a geographic as well as a political unit; it is a peninsula tied, on its western end, to the mainland by an isthmus only one and one-half miles wide. The Bay of Quinte, a narrow body of water varying from one-half mile to two miles in width, separates the peninsula from the mainland to the north. Yet the county is by no means isolated; one may enter by road along the isthmus by a bridge across the Bay of Quinte, or by one of three ferries. The area of Prince Edward County is 390 square miles, approximately the same as that of Montgomery, one of New York State's smaller counties. Prince Edward is irregular in shape for a large number of coves and bays increase the length of shore line to about 300 miles, three times the mileage it would possess were the shore line straight. The peninsula has a maximum length of 38 miles and a maximum width of 15 miles; yet its outline is indented so that no point is more than five miles from either the Bay or Lake. This area, a gently rolling lacustrine plain occasionally interrupted by abrupt cuestaform escarpments, has been essentially agricultural since its permanent settlement in 1783. Nevertheless, the pattern of land utilization has changed considerably at several stages in the period from settlement to the present. The underlying reasons for many of these changes are not so much matters of the geographic or economic nature of the area itself or even of the Dominion of Canada, but rather events and influences of an economic nature in the United States, particularly in New York State. The agricultural pattern and life of the people of Prince Edward County from 1860 to 1890 were closely tied to economic factors south of the border. This paper is primarily concerned with this period from 1860 to 1890, a period in Prince Edward agriculture still referred to by natives of the county as the Barley Days. After the initial permanent settlement of the county in 1783, the transition from pristine wilderness to farming community proceeded rapidly. Clearing and pioneering can be considered to have been essentially completed by 1835. The population numbered approximately