Reciprocal work bees and the meaning of neighbourhood

Canadian Historical Review

Volumn 82, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 431-464

  Wilson, Catharine Anne ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34547782840     PISSN: 00083755     EISSN: 17101093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/CHR.82.3.431     Document Type: Review

References (168)

1. Bryan D. Palmer, 'Discordant Music: Charivaris and Whitecapping in Nineteenth-Century North America,' Labour-Le Travail 3 (1978): 5-62
2. Allan Greer, 'From Folklore to Revolution: Charivaris and the Lower Canadian Rebellion of 1837,'
3. and Tina Loo, 'Dan Cranmer's Potlatch,' both in Tina Loo and Lorna R. McLean, eds., Historical Perspectives on Law and Society in Canada (Mississauga: Copp Clark Longman 1994), 35-55, 219-53
4. and Pauline Greenhill, 'Welcome and Unwelcome Visitors: Shivarees and the Political Economy of Rural-Urban Interaction in Southern Ontario,' Journal of Ritual Studies 3, 1 (1989)
5. Studies such as those done by Bradbury, Parr, and Marks come close to examining neighbourhood, but still link families only with the larger urban area and economy and bypass the neighbourhood as a unit of analysis. See Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1993)
6. Joy Parr, The Gender of Breadwinners (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990)
7. and Lynne Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996)
8. So far the study of neighbourhood has been the preserve of sociologists. For example, for the study of neighbourhood helping exchanges in modern Toronto, see Barry Wellman, 'The Community Question,' American Journal of Sociology 84 (1979): 1201-31
9. A vast literature exists on community. For the most recent overview of this literature in a Canadian context, see John Walsh and Stephen High, 'Re-thinking the Concept of Community,' Histoire Sociale 23 (Nov. 1999): 255-73. In what follows I have borrowed my approach from economists, ethnographers, and cultural historians. Many of my ideas coalesced in the community studies seminar I co-taught as part of the Tri-University Doctoral Program. Although I cannot benefit from direct questioning and observation of those actually involved in bees, some of the sources left provide something similar to the ethnographer's notebook in that they record people doing things. I have interpreted these actions as statements. The most reliable evidence for rendering the facts are diaries and farm accounts. Bees were carefully recorded as a way of keeping accounts of work owing and as noteworthy social events. Settlers' guides often presented the 'how-to' of holding a bee because of its necessity in the backwoods and because of its central importance as an entry point into community life. Somewhat less reliable, but still very valuable, are the numerous travellers' accounts, memoirs, and late nineteenth-century settlement histories. Bees appear in these sources with regularity as they were memorable events. These stories are usually based on the author's direct memory of events, what they heard from others, or what they thought possible
10. For an example of an anthropologist, see Solon T. Kimball, 'Rural Social Organization and Co-operative Labour,' American Journal of Sociology 55 (1949): 38-49
11. for a Marxist interpretation, see James A. Henretta, 'Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-industrial America,' William and Mary Quarterly, series 3, 35, 4 (1978): 3-32
12. and for a feminist interpretation, see Marjorie Kaethler and Susan D. Shantz, Quilts of Waterloo County (Waterloo: Johanns Graphics 1990)
13. and Nancy Grey Osterud, Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in 19th Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1991)
14. Samuel Strickland, Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West, vol. 1 (1853; Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers 1972), 35
15. Martin Doyle, Hints on Emigration to Upper Canada (Dublin: Curry 1832), 61
16. and George Easton, Travels in America (Glasgow: John S., Marr & Sons 1871), 89
17. John MacDougall noted that the term was not derived from the work habits of bees, but from a word from Ancient Saxon days when danger brought people together for defence, Rural Life in Canada (1913; Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1973), 132. Such forms of reciprocal labour were part of an established tradition from the Old World. Peasants in Norway, Ireland, Scotland, and elsewhere had long used reciprocal work to erect buildings, harvest produce, and create cloth. In South America a distinction was drawn between exchange labour and festive labour
18. Charles Erasmus, 'Culture Structure and Process: The Occurrence and Disappearance of Reciprocal Farm Labor,' Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 12 (1956): 445-6. Exchange labour usually included about ten people who regularly exchanged a day's work for a day's work. Festive labour could include more than one hundred people. The obligation to reciprocate was not so great, but the host was to provide extraordinary food and festivities. No such clear distinction was drawn by settlers in Ontario. Both the big barn raisings that drew large numbers and the smaller occasions when groups of neighbours regularly got together to exchange labour were called bees
19. Queen's University Archives, Walter Beatty Papers, Walter Beatty Diary, 1838-92, box 3057
20. Lucy Middaugh Diary, 1884-87, private possession of Jean Wilson
21. John Tigert Diaries, 1888-1902, private possession of Tigert family
22. Joseph Abbott Diary, 1819
23. reprinted in his Emigrant to North America (Montreal: Lovell & Gibson 1843)
24. and James O'Mara, 'The Seasonal Round of Gentry Farmers in Early Ontario,' Canadian Papers in Rural History 2 (1980): 103-12
25. Cited in W.H. Graham, Greenbank (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press 1988), 249
26. Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (1852; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1962), 156
27. James M. Young, Reminiscences of the Early History of Galt and the Settlement of Dumfries (Toronto: Hunter, Rose & Co. 1880, 43
28. and Strickland, Twenty-Seven Years, 1: 97
29. 'A New Ontario Raising,' Farmer's Advocate 47 (8 Feb. 1912): 222
30. For the most comprehensive study of rural labour in nineteenth-century Ontario, see Terry Crowley, 'Rural Labour,' in Paul Craven, ed., Labouring Lives: Work and Workers in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1995), 13-102
31. For frontier labour, see Daniel Vickers, 'Working the Fields in a Developing Economy: Essex County, Mass., 1630-1675,' in Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1988), 60
32. Immigrant guidebook writers were well aware of the necessity of reducing risk in the backwoods and urged their readers to take part in bees. See William Hutton, Canada: Its Present Condition, Prospects, and Resources Fully Described for the Information of Intending Emigrants (London 1854), 42-3
33. Catharine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada (1836; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1929), 121
34. and Easton, Travels in America, 90-3, 168
35. National Archives of Canada (NA), Emigration Questionnaire, 1840-1, RG 1, B21, vol. 1
36. Doyle, Hints on Emigration, 48, 65
37. Abbott, The Emigrant to North America, 113
38. Traill, Backwoods of Canada, 52-3
39. George Henry Hume, Canada as It Is ( New York: Stodart 1832), 13, 135
40. and Alexander Carlisle Buchanan Sr, Emigration Practically Considered (London: Colburn 1828), 5
41. Peter Russell, 'Upper Canada: A Poor Man's Country? Some Statistical Evidence,' Canadian Papers in Rural History 3 (1982): 136, 144
42. W.F. Munro, The Backwoods' Life (1869; Shelburne: The Free Press 1910), 55
43. John C. Geikie, ed., Adventures in Canada: Or Life in the Woods (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates 1882), 40
44. Barns usually cost a bit less. For the cost of hiring labour for such purposes, see Emigration Questionnaire, 1840-1
45. Edward Allan Talbot, Five Years' Residence in the Canadas (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green 1824), 189-90
46. and Hutton, Canada, 78
47. For the cost and popularity of holding a bee, see Emigration Questionnaire
48. see also Frederick Widder, Information for Intending Emigrants of All Classes to Upper Canada (Toronto: Scobie & Balfour 1850), 4
49. and University of Guelph Archives, Dougall Family Papers, 1844-69, Henry Dougall to Brother, 26 July 1852
50. Isabella L. Bishop, The Englishwoman in America (London: W. Clowes & Sons 1856), 202-3, 206
51. MacGregor Diary, 15 Nov. 1878
52. and Canniff Haight, Country Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago (Toronto: Hunter, Rose & Co. 1885), 214
53. Louis Tivy, Your Loving Anna: Letters from the Ontario Frontier (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1972), 87
54. Doug McCalla, Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada, 1784-1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 243. Starting in 1819, the value of cleared land was considered to be five times that of uncultivated land
55. Doug McCalla, Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada, 1784-1870 (Ibid., 28-9, 69-70, 106
56. Young, Reminiscences, 88-9
57. Thomas Need, Six Years in the Bush (London: Simplein, Marshall & Co. 1838), 96
58. McCalla, Planting the Province, 82, 146
59. see also Tigert Diary
60. Some anthropologists have interpreted the potlatch as a system of credit or a return on an interest-bearing investment. Loo, 'Dan Cranmer's Potlatch,' 231
61. Munro, Backwoods Life, 38
62. A day's work for a day's work was generally the custom throughout North and South America. See Basil Hall, Travels in North America, in the Years 1827-1828 (Edinburgh: Cadell & Co. 1829), 311-12
63. and Erasmus, 'Culture Structure and Process,' 445
64. For what happened when inequalities existed, see Erasmus, 'Culture Structure,' 447
65. and Kimball, 'Rural Social Organization,' 42
66. See also Peter G. Mewett, 'Associational Categories and the Social Location of Relationships in a Lewis Crofting Community,' in Anthony P. Cohen, ed., Belonging (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1982), 103. Mewett distinguishes between balanced reciprocity (return work at the same type of job) and generalized reciprocity (just helping out with anything later), 112-13
67. I first came across the use of 'interaction episode' as an analytical tool in Rhys Isaac's The Transformation of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1982), chap. 'A Discourse on the Method.' My thanks to Richard Reid for drawing my attention to this work. The concept is borrowed from ethnographers and begins with the premise that society is not primarily a material entity, but must be understood as the dynamic product of the activities of its members, a product that is shaped by the images participants have of their own and other's performances. Interaction episodes or dramatic events such as the bee are like knots of encounter in the ongoing social life and are suspended in the threads of continuing relationships. The visual image is like knots in lacework. By studying the converging threads and their nodal events we can better understand the structure, action, and meaning of society. Another useful model is to view the interaction episode as a stage play
68. Contemporary writers urged new settlers to repay the favour: Hall, Travels, 312
69. Talbot, Five Years' Residence, 69
70. See also Paul Voisey, Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1988), 147
71. and Jane Marie Pederson, Between Memory and Reality: Family and Community in Rural Wisconsin, 1870-1970 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1992), 154
72. and Anthony Buckley, 'Neighbourliness - Myth and History,' Oral History 11, 1 (1983): 49
73. Globe, 10 Sept. 1880, 6, and 6 Feb. 1880, 1
74. For other examples, see Ray Fazakas, The Donnelly Album (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada 1977), 10-14
75. For a similar tension between a local social order that stressed harmony and the undercurrent of violence brought on by frontier conditions, see Susan Lewthwaite, 'Violence, Law, and Community in Rural Upper Canada,' in Jim Phillips, Tina Loo, and Susan Lewthwaite, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994), 353-86. Successful work groups could manage disputes by avoiding direct confrontation; they resorted to gossip instead. To avoid recriminations they made the host responsible for decisions involving risk
76. See Mewett, 'Associational Categories,' 112, 116
77. James Logan, Notes of a Journey Through Canada (Edinburgh: Fraser & Co. 1838), 46
78. and Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press 1948), chap. 12
79. Thomas Brush Brown, Autobiography of Thomas Brush Brown (1804-1894) (private printing by Isabel Grace Wilson, 1967, available at the Oxford County Library), 17-18
80. For the importance of whiskey and hospitality, see also David Wilkie, Sketches of a Summer Trip to New York and the Canadas (Edinburgh: J. Anderson Jr & A. Hill 1837), 173, 176-7
81. Hall, Travels, 2: 311
82. and William Thompson, A Tradesman's Travels in the United States and Canada the Years 1840, 41 and 42 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd 1842), 103
83. Patrick Shirreff, A Tour through North America (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd 1835), 125
84. For the usual amount of whiskey per man, see Rev. T. Sockett, ed., Emigration: Letters from Sussex Emigrants (London: Phillips, Petworth and Longman & Co. 1833), 28
85. and Centennial Museum, Judicial Records, Peterboro County, Peterborough, MG-8-2V, Inquest of Charles Danford, Smith Township, Accession No. 71-007, box 5, 1876, no. 30
86. Moodie, Roughing It, 156-62
87. and also Wilkie, Sketches, 176
88. Patrick Shirreff, A Tour, 125
89. Emily Weaver, Story of the Counties of Ontario (Toronto: Bell & Cockburn 1913), 165
90. and Pederson, Between Memory and Reality, 142, 217, 219
91. Brown, Autobiography, 25
92. Charles Marshall, The Canadian Dominion (London: Longmans, Green 1871), 63
93. Alexander Sinclair, Pioneer Reminiscences (Toronto: Warwick Bros & Rutter 1898), 11-12
94. Frances Browne Stewart, Our Forest Home (1889; Montreal: Gazette Printing 1902), 174, 177
95. and Canada Farmer 2, 9 (15 Nov. 1870)
96. Trent University Archives, Court Records of the United Counties of Northumberland & Durham, Coroners' Inquests, Inquest of James Hill, 84-020, Series E, box 49
97. and Judicial Records Peterboro County, Inquest of Charles Danford. A bent was made of two posts connected with a beam. It was laid on the foundation and then raised to form the frame of the barn
98. Geikie, Adventure in Canada, 40-4, 47-8
99. see also Logan, Notes of a Journey, 45
100. Jim Brown, 'Memories of Work Bees,' Up the Gatineau! 21 (1995): 9
101. and Royce MacGillivray, The Slopes of the Andes: Four Essays on the Rural Myth in Ontario (Belleville: Mika Publishing 1990), 90
102. Traill, The Backwoods, 135
103. Archives of Ontario, John Thomson Diary, MU-846, Part 2, 22-4 April 1834
104. Sinclair, Pioneer Reminiscences, 12
105. and Strickland, Twenty-Seven Years, 35-6
106. Stewart, Our Forest Home, 174-6
107. Catharine Anne Wilson, A New Lease on Life (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1994), 110
108. Thomson Diary, 22-4 April 1834
109. For example, see Thomson Diary, July, Oct. and Nov. 1833, and June 1834. John Langton and Moodie sent their hired men to bees also
110. Anne Langton, A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada (Toronto: Clarke Irwin 1964), 167
111. Ex-Settler, Canada in the Years 1832, 1833 and 1834 (Dublin: Hardy 1835), 115
112. Langton, A Gentlewoman, 166
113. Nancy Osterud goes further than most historians in understanding the rural family and community as gendered relationships. While she acknowledges that men participated in cooperative work, she still tends to see men as part of the commercial world and argues that women were the ones who sustained cooperative relations. In fact, she goes as far as to argue that women advocated a model of interdependence as an alternative to male dominance and capitalist social relations. She states that women used mutuality as a strategy of empowerment. Osterud, Bonds of Community
114. John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven: Yale University Press 1979), 112 and 116
115. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, 'The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,' Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, 1 (1875): 1-29
116. Kaethler and Shantz, Quilts of Waterloo County, 12
117. Ruth Schwarts Cowan, More Work for Mother (New York: Basic Book Publishers 1983), 112
118. For gender as a relational system, see Joan W. Scott, 'Women's History,' in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1995)
119. and Royden Loewen, Family, Church, and Market: The Mennonite Community in the Old and the New Worlds, 1850-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993)
120. Geikie, Adventures in Canada, 41-3
121. and for similar accounts of logging bees, see Logan, Notes on a Journey, 45
122. William Johnston, Pioneers of Blanchard (Toronto: William Briggs 1899), 188-9, 227
123. See also Mark Carnes and C. Griffen, eds., Meanings for Manhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990)
124. Bonnie Huskins, 'The Ceremonial Space of Women: Public Processions in Victorian Saint John and Halifax,' in Janet Guildford and Susanne Morton, eds, Separate Sphere: Women's Worlds in the 19th Century Maritimes (Frederickton: Acadiensis Press 1994), 147
125. Cited in West Oxford Women's Institute, The Axe and the Wheel: A History of West Oxford Township (Tillsonburg: Otter Publishing 1974), 17
126. Abbott, The Emigrant, 42
127. An extreme, but nonetheless suggestive, case occurred in 1918 when a young Quebec girl dressed in male attire participated in a log-driving bee, and, when exposed, was sentenced to two years at the Portsmouth Penitentiary in Kingston. Original 11 June 1918, reprinted in the Toronto Star, 19 May 1992
128. Elizabeth Jane Errington, Wives and Mothers, School Mistresses and Scullery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada, 1790-1840 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1995), 96
129. Catharine Parr Traill, The Female Emigrant's Guide and Hints on Canadian Housekeeping (Toronto: MacLear 1854), 40
130. Munro, Backwoods' Life, 55
131. Bishop, The Englishwoman, 205-6
132. Tivy, Your Loving Anna, 89
133. Ralph Connor, The Man from Glengarry (Toronto: The Westminster Co. 1901), 211
134. Stan Cross, 'The Raising,' Up the Gatineau! 21 (1995): 7
135. M.E. Graham, 'Food for Bees,' The Farming World 18 (11 Sept. 1900): 104
136. Strickland, Twenty-Seven Years, 2: 295-6
137. Thompson, Tradesman's Travels, 37
138. Peter Ward, 'Courtship and Social Space in Nineteenth-Century English Canada,' Canadian Historical Review 68 1 (1987): 35-62
139. University of Western Ontario, Regional Collection, William Leslie Papers, box 4178, A.C. Currie to Richard Leslie, 25 December 1841
140. and Thompson, Tradesman's Travels, 37
141. and see also Haight, Country Life, 67-8
142. Traill, Female Emigrant's Guide, 75
143. and Gavin Hamilton Green, The Old Log House (Goderich: Signal-Star Press 1948), 109
144. Marshall, Canadian Dominion, 62
145. The people mentioned in the diary have all been matched with the 1871 manuscript census; Historical Atlas of the Counties of Leeds and Grenville (1861; Belleville: Mika Publishing 1973)
146. and Illustrated Historical Atlas of Stormont Dundas and Glengarry Counties, Ontario (1879; Belleville: Mika Silk Screening 1972)
147. I would like to thank my mother, Mrs Jean Wilson, the great-granddaughter of Lucy, for treasuring our family heirlooms and assisting me in reconstructing the family relationships. The value of using farm womens' diaries is amply revealed in Laurel Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books 1990)
148. Royden Loewen, '"The Children, the Cows, My Dear Man and My Sister": The Transplanted Lives of Mennonite Farm Women,' Canadian Historical Review 73, 3 (1992): 344-73
149. and Ward, 'Courtship and Social Space,' 35-62
150. Munro talks about the importance of grown children in his Backwoods' Life, 56
151. and Buckley, 'Neighbourliness,' 50
152. Fay E. Dudden, in another context, notes that it was often the neighbourhood youth that was shared. Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press 1983), chap. 1
153. Farm/store ledger of John Middaugh, 1816-1850s, in private possession of Mrs Jean Wilson; and J. Smyth Carter, The Story of Dundas (1905; Belleville: Mika Publishing 1973), 449-63
154. Mewett, 'Association Categories,' 110-11
155. See Stephen Innes for his insightful discussion of the need for greater caution when using such dichotomies to describe the past. 'John Smith's Vision,' in Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labour in Early America, 36-40
156. see also the Diary of William Proudfoot, 12 June 1833
157. cited in Edwin Guillet, Pioneer Days in Upper Canada (1933; Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1975), 127
158. and Ex-Settler, Canada, 115
159. John J.E. Linton, The Life of a Backwoodsman; or, Particulars of the Emigrant's Situation in Settling on the Wild Land of Canada (London: Marchant Singer & Co. 1843), 14
160. Langton, Gentlewoman, 155, 166
161. Canada Farmer 2, 12 (12 Dec. 1870)
162. Traill, Backwoods, 122
163. Cowan, More Work for Mother, 117
164. 'Culture Structure and Process,' 456
165. Farmer's Advocate 59 (10 April 1924): 548
166. and Lois Russell, Everyday Life in Colonial Canada (London: B.T. Batsford 1973), 90
167. Mewett, 'Associational Categories,'
168. and James E. Taylor Calnan, '"A Home Not Made with Hands": National Voluntary Associations and Local Community in Prince Edward County, Ontario, at the Turn of the 20th Century' (PhD dissertation, University of Guelph 1999)