Various Veins
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A couple of weeks ago our son Doug drove Martha and me along the Maple Grove Road from Heritage Line. I call that Talbot Street out of habit.
We passed familiar landmarks and unfamiliar houses, remembering many places and faces as we went. When we crested the last knoll before reaching Maple Grove Line, we knew this road as the Eighth Concession, Doug exclaimed, "Hey! the last of the buildings and trees are gone from the Baldwin place!"
Actually the road was the Seventh Line. The land on the north side is the Eighth Concession of Bayham. The house I called home for 18 years is still there. You look directly at it as you roll down the last slope to the sort of italic T intersection with the road running east and west. Almost. Nothing in Bayham runs in a cardinal direction because of the meandering creeks, the Little and the Big Otter, and the trend of the Lake Erie shoreline.
The Mark Baldwin farm is nestled in the reverse L shape of the Bowes farm. The buildings were directly west of the Bowes buildings, 80 rods distant. A pine stump fence marked the line between the two lots until the stumps ended up in the firebox of a steam engine and a wire fence replaced them.
The steamer was used to sterilize greenhouse beds for tobacco seed, and to bring cured tobacco into case to take it out of the kiln without making cornflakes of it.
There was a fruit orchard on the east side of the Baldwin house. It always amazed me when I went over to visit Mark and Ethel and the boys. Looking westward from home it was almost impossible to see people moving over there, but looking eastward toward home everything stood out in stark detail. We could see when Ethel had a line full of clothes out, but we couldn't see Ethel. Ethel could see the spots on our hound dog from her yard.
After Mark and Ethel sold the place the buildings began to disappear. Unused structures keep property taxes high. Different families lived in the house, but in time no one rented it. Local youths, I suppose, oldsters wouldn't trash the free facilities for a party, would they, motivated the demolition of the house. It would have made a good addition to a historical village.
For several years only a single garage remained to witness that families once inhabited this spot of high ground. Ancient maples, they were mature when I was a little tad, stood as sentinels at the corners. Now only stumps mark the place. Even if they are not bulldozed out to make more space for crops, the great grubs of giant beetles will reduce them to loam.
What we are witnessing is the crest of a wave of change that has been going on for over a century. Long ago there was a house and outbuildings on almost every 50-acre lot. A careful scanning of the fields still produces shards of crockery here and there. Most iron artifacts have rusted away.
Before Europeans took up the lots in the Talbot settlement and built log homes, Aboriginals roamed this area hunting cariboo along the shores of the lake that has shrunk to Lake Erie. One ancient lakeshore follows the ridge that cuts across just south of Eden. Another crosses just south of Talbot Street on the edge of Straffordville.
The hunter-gatherers passed away and were replaced by people who planted corn and pumpkins to eke out the wild foods. The bones of this population have been exposed on the ridges by winds and farm cultivation. Probably few if any remain, but the stone artifacts, spear and arrowheads, skinning stones, awls, and rarely a bird stone tells us they were here.
Readers who attended Tillson Avenue Public School may remember the Sorrenti boys, Jim and Hal, who were in my classroom there. Jim's obit is in the London Free Press this weekend. Jim was a mover and shaker whose career is worth a look. He was 70. Hal lives in Honduras.
It tells us something of the Sorrenti psyche that there will be no funeral service. There will be a party at Britt.