“Today was a wash spread to fitful sun and cloud; a mild wind of February, and a sheltered hillside baring; a lone wild duck on wing and a blue jay’s shrill call. It was children off bright and eager to school-by sleigh, and the farmers busy about at the choring and hauling. We saw a grist being taken to the mill, one which will vanish smartly in tins and handfuls to the mangers of the stables about.
“‘Next thing we know there’ll be lambs’ Mack, little fellow of the place came in with the news today. ‘Yes, shortly. Do you know we’re not too far from spring now? There’ll be more calves and kittens too!’ he remembered. ‘I hope’ he added soberly ‘we’ll have good luck with those.’
…
Sugar maple sap collection.
“And through the branches of the maples in the yard, the little breeze played, bringing us tales of a sap-time of young years we knew… of honey-combed March snow in an old woodland where odd sugar maples grew. Not far from the sweetest brook rippled its thawing tunes as between woodsy banks it emerged in a meadow and ran at length to the river and Strait. And the trees tapped and tended by the farmlands thus providing nectar for themselves and any wayfaring maids could not know how far apart the band would one day wander to visit and dwell in separate climes and places.”
The Illustrated Historical Atlas of the Province of Prince Edward Island, colloquially known as Meacham’s Atlas of 1880, was one of the first attempts to map PEI in its entirety. A whole host of information can be found within the atlas; from detailed maps of each of the lots on the island – down to the individual houses, to realistic drawings of prominent citizens and their properties. It is a dream resource for any Island historian!
The Meacham’s Atlas maps before mosaicing.
For us at the GeoREACH lab, the atlas represents yet another opportunity to compile data on energy usage on the island during this period. We can see in the atlas the individual lots that compose our island even to today, each with personalized property information. The cartographers went so far as to outline the individual houses, barns, other infrastructure and property owners for each lot.
The Meacham’s Atlas maps after being mosaiced.
An important step in gathering the data from Meacham’s Atlas was to centralize all the available rasters (individual images) to a single resource. As all the lots were created independently, they would have to be stitched together into a single, geographically accurate map in a process formally known as mosaicing. This is why we have made, using GIS, a comprehensive mosaic of all the lots to easier represent this information.
The building points displayed over the entirety of Prince Edward Island.
Beyond that, we also entered data points for the over 16,000 buildings indicated on the map. Though it is still a work in progress, it is now available to be explored. You can adjust the different layers through the content window to look at churches, houses, mills, or schools, or can zoom in to a region you know well to see what it looked like in 1880!
The following is an excerpt from the Newsy Notes column by Agricola. The article, titled “Controversy over Fertilizers” was published in The Charlottetown Guardian newspaper on January 19th, 1946.
“Agriculture in Britain, given new life under the pressure of war, is engrossing the attention of the public as never before. One evidence of this is the interest taken in the wide-spread controversy between those farmers who favor the use of “artificial” fertilizers, and those who pin their faith on the old standby “muck”, which being translated is manure or dung.
“On the one hand, then, are those connected with “big business”- we have them in Canada too- who maintain that natural manures are not economic, that all farms should be run as factories, and that fences and horses should be scrapped in favor of prairies and tractors. On the other hand there are those who believe with Lord Lymington that “mineral and dung in solution, fused by human sweat, remain the food of civilized man.” They are also convinced that the use of artificial fertilizers is slowly poisoning the whole population, and have named sulphate of ammonia “Devil’s Dust.”
As far as we know, the 1940s were prior to the real industrialization of farming on Prince Edward Island and through much of Canada. Evidently, though, the debate on the development of large-scale operations was a heated one from the beginning. Ammonium sulphate is still a fairly widely used fertilizer across Canada today, despite its clearly long history of controversy and early nickname of “Devil’s Dust.” According to The Government of Canada (2020), 11 000 metric tonnes of Ammonium sulphate were in inventory in the September count in Atlantic Canada alone; this is a number that in actuality has increased since 2015.
“The last statement is a serious charge, and can only be proved or disproved by a series of experiments which must necessarily be lengthy. Something of the sort has been done in New Zealand, and the results were published in 1939.The locale of the experiment was the Mount Albert Grammar School hostel, which housed sixty boys and the teaching staff. The dietary of the hostel was far above the customary standard for boarding schools, yet the boys suffered- as was the case in other N.Z. institutions- from colds, catarrh, septic tonsils, influenza, dental caries, and other ailments. (It must be stated here that all New Zealand’s food supplies are grown by means of chemical fertilizers).
Picture of humus
“In 1936 Dr. G. B. Chapman of the Physical and Mental Welfare Society of N.Z. advised that the hostel’s fruit and vegetables be grown on properly prepared humus instead of chemically treated soil: and an acre of black volcanic soil was put under cultivation. No chemicals were used. The report of the matron of the hostel in 1939, said “The first thing to be noted, during the twelve months following the change-over to garden produce grown from our humus-treated soil, was the declining catarrhal condition among the boys. There was also a very marked decline in colds and influenza. Colds are now rare and any cases of influenza very mild. In the 1938 measles epidemic, which was universal in New Zealand, the new boys suffered the more acute form of attack: the boys who had been at the hostel for a year or more sustained milder attacks with a much more rapid convalescence.”
This influential study by Dr. Chapman was presented to the House Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products in the United States Congress in 1951.
“There is much more to the same effect but we pass on to the Royal Commercial Travellers’ Schools near London, England. In 1939, Dr. E. Brodie Carpenter of that institution, took over the dental care of two or three hundred children whose condition he found “to be (dentally) deplorable.” In Sept. 1941, he again classified his charges and found the percentages of caries was about the same. In 1943 and 1944 there was some improvement, but the Dr. got a great surprise in Sept. 1945: his A class- the best- had increased to 97 per cent (from 50 p.c.); the B class once 32 p.c. was now only 3 per cent; and the C’s- worst of all, and once 18 p.c.- were entirely eliminated.
“Dr. Carpenter set out to find the reason for the improvement, and discovered that a 5 ½ acre field had been taken over in 1939, and a gardener appointed who believed in manure but not in fertilizer. He brought the field up gradually till the school was self-supporting so far as roots and green vegetables were concerned: and he claimed that the humus-grown stuff was responsible for the great improvement cited.
It is important to recognize that Dr. E. Brodie Carpenter was a dental scientist, but he was an active soil conservationist in the Soil Association’s group in Middlesex, England.
“At the College of St. Columba in Northern Ireland they even produce their own wheat and bread! Chemical fertilizers are rigidly excluded, and to this is attributed the very high standard of dental health enjoyed by the students.
“Now these conclusions are certainly plausible and seem to point the way to a change in farming, but it will, I venture to predict, take a long time to convince the farmer that he must farm without chemicals. Overwhelming proof that they are dangerous must be produced, and such proof will be hard to furnish: two or three examples are not enough.
“Chemical fertilizers certainly give the crops, and within certain limits the more fertilizer, the bigger the crop- which is all that the farmer looks for. But there are many chemicals in the soil in very small amounts, which are necessary to the good health of the crop and its consumer as well. The bigger the crop the more the soil is depleted of these necessary elements. We have already got to the stage where we must supply the turnips with boron and the potatoes with magnesia, while there may be other deficiencies not so apparent, or not yet discovered.
“A year or two ago P.E.I. was in the spot-light on account of the longevity of its people. Was the cause of the long life in the naturally raised food which the old-timers ate? Will the next generation live as long?”
The life expectancy in Canada has been steadily increasing over the course of the last century, according to the Government of Canada. So, while perhaps Agricola was a little too enthusiastic on suggesting artificial fertilizers as the cause of the early demise of Canadians, there is still value to noting that there were advocates for organic and sustainable farming in the 1940s, even though the concepts were not yet fully understood.
With the recent weather events in the Atlantic region, some of our student assistants got curious… We dug into Robertson Library, UPEI‘s website, www.islandnewspapers.ca , and found this gem. This piece on hurricanes was published September 12th, 1958 in the Charlottetown Guardian newspaper.
HURRICANES
National Geographic News
“In a single second, a typical hurricane releases more energy than several atomic bombs. In less than an hour, it expends more energy than 50 years’ production of electric power in the United States.
In a day, a hurricane can lift two billion tons of water from the ocean and hurl them back on land and sea as torrential rains. Packing a force of a half-trillion horsepower, it can scythe a path of death and destruction 580 miles broad.
For all its terrible strength, a hurricane is born of little but warm, moist air caught in a calm in the tropics and given a twist to set it spinning. Gradually it becomes a large revolving storm, accompanied by violent winds, heavy rains, and high waves and tides.
FAVOR SEPTEMBER
The same type of storm is called a “typhoon” in the China Sea, a “baguio” in the Philippines, and a “cyclone” in the Bay of Bengal, the National Geographic Society says.
Hurricanes may form at any time of year, but most come in August, September, and October. In an average year, two tropical storms bring hurricane force winds to the Atlantic Seaboard and the Gulf Coast.
The United States Weather Bureau can predict with increasing precision the areas likely to be hardest hit by a hurricane.
The value of warning was pointed up by two hurricanes that passed over Lake Okeechobee in Southern Florida. The first struck in 1928 before the Joint Hurricane Warning System had been set up. Deaths totaled 1,836. The second- with equal winds- followed virtually the same path, but killed only two persons. The chief difference was a warning that gave people time to evacuate.
Scientists have not yet devised a way to stop or divert a hurricane, but researchers have learned how to manufacture miniature cyclonic storms in the laboratory. By studying these pint-sized hurricanes, scientists hope to learn more about how a hurricane develops and behaves. Knowledge gained in this and other researches- such as radar tracking and flying into the actual storms- should lead to even more accurate predictions and perhaps, some day, to control.
BLOWN OFF TRACKS
Weathermen already know that hurricanes usually move from low to higher latitudes with increasing speed, size, and intensity. Winds of a hurricane topple trees, bowl over houses, and even blow trains off their tracks. But the storm takes its greatest toll by drowning. As the hurricane moves forward, it may pile up enormous waves which cover low-lying beaches and islands.”
An area of Bill Glen’s woodlot. The nut orchard is slightly visible in the background.
On Wednesday 18 July, some of the GeoREACH Lab team members took a trip into the field (literally) to visit Bill and Elizabeth Glen’s land in the Bonshaw area of Lot 30, Prince Edward Island. Bill and Elizabeth are well known in PEI genealogical and historical circles, and Bill was formerly a forester with the PEI Provincial Government. He now serves as a forest and woodland consultant, and he co-authored a chapter with Josh MacFadyen in the University of Calgary Press collection on Historical GIS Research in Canada. The Glens have been on their property since the early 1980s, and they were able to provide some real insight into how the land has changed over the last forty years, including how they managed the forest, fields, and hedgerows!
Bill Glen, GeoREACH Lab Director Dr. Josh MacFadyen, and research assistants Nolan Kressin and Abby Craswell.
The team has studied Lot 30 extensively using aerial photos and historical maps on GIS. We were excited to explore the real area that we have been examining from above for the last several months. It reminded us that our research is much bigger than just a computer screen! We could see the changes that have occurred in the land since the aerial photos that we are currently studying were taken in 1968, before the implementation of the Comprehensive Development Plan (for more on that see this post). Some of these changes include hedgerow planting, the appearance of new homes, and a new nut orchard on the property.
Research assistants Nolan Kressin, Nick Scott, and Abby Craswell (L-R) in the field.
While on this excursion, we learned about hedgerow and woodlot composition, as well as the importance of biodiversity and climate change adaptability in wooded areas. White spruce (what we use to plant most of our hedgerows) is incredibly vulnerable to slight shifts in climate! Bill also showed us a hydraulic pump that dates back to 1890, which he still uses to pump water to the tank for his nut orchard. The GeoREACH team would like to thank Bill and Elizabeth Glen for having us to their home and sharing their knowledge of land-use change on Prince Edward Island.
