“If you don’t know where you came from, how will you know where to go?” asked the voice recording of my Grandma Skinner. I heard versions of that phrase often when spending time in the log cabin south of Mitchell that my paternal grandparents called home by the time I came on the scene.
Grandma and Grandpa took their history seriously… the log cabin was an original settler building that Grandpa refurbished. The shed was full of steam engines and other machines that had been cutting-edge technology in the back half of the 19th century, and it was rare to make it through a meal around their table without a story from local yore being started by Grandpa and finished by Grandma.
They also made sure that we knew how important it was to them for us to make an effort to make it the triennial Skinner reunion that saw descendants of Josiah and Elizabeth Skinner gather together and learn about who we came from. After a pandemic induced a layoff, the reunion resumed this year with over 125 people coming together at the Kirkton Hall for a weekend of good food, good conversation, and an excellent opportunity to learn about our ancestors.
One tradition that is as old as the reunion itself is a talent show on the Saturday night. I’m pretty sure my stage debut was made in that show with a rather interesting rendition of ‘Just Around the Riverbend’ from Disney’s Pocahontas. This year I was planning on just enjoying the show until I was out and about doing chores on Saturday morning.
There is a bald eagle’s nest just south of our farm. Almost every day since the pair of eagles returned, I have had a front row seat to watching their two eaglets, who have doubled in size before my eyes. As I was headed down to do chores that Saturday morning, the young birds were stretching out their rapidly-growing wings in the morning sunlight. One of their parents perched in a nearby dead tree watching while cattle silently grazed the dewy grass.
I was overwhelmed with the beauty and how blessed I was to get to be in this place in this moment.
As I carried on with my chores another memory hit me – a story told to me over a decade ago by my Great Aunt Beth Ferguson. She told a story of how Josiah’s parents, Thomas and Julia, gave shelter to a displaced Indigenous couple who made a doll for the Skinner children as a token of gratitude. I couldn’t help but allow my brain to wonder where the descendants of those people were on that morning. In the midst of a morning in which I was able to see my own blessings all around me, I was reminded that not everyone who called this place home in the 19th century has enjoyed over a century and a half of sustained prosperity. So I decided that my contribution to the show would be to share my novice history work that has been done in my attempt to acknowledge the rich history of this land that started well before the Skinners were carving farmland out of the bush in the 1830s.
In the last 500 years there have been many different peoples to call southwestern Ontario home. When European outposts started to pop up along major harbours and waterways, the Attawandaron (Neutral) had semi-permanent villages across the region.
Less than a century later, a westward push by members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy decimated the inhabitants along with the Huron people to the north. The Haudenosaunee people lost their hold on this land through conflict with the Anishinaabe at the tail end of the 17th century, and by the time of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 (in which King George bestowed ‘borders’ on the various Indigenous nations based on current land holdings) almost all southwestern Ontario was controlled by members of Anishinaabe. It was members of the Anishinaabe that signed Treaty 29, the land purchase that created the Huron Tract, and it included the land just south of Mitchell where Thomas and Julia Skinner homesteaded.
There is a copy of the deed that formalized the purchase of the Skinner Homestead in 1859 following over 20 years of work to prove the claim. The seller of the land on that deed was the Canada Company and the purchase price was just over 77 pounds for 140 acres of land. At the time, the land speculators of the Canada company made an incredible return on their investment. While the amount of back-breaking work to prove that claim is unfathomable for someone of my vintage, that 77-pound investment into 140 acres has spurred an also unfathomable return given it became the root of a family tree that has seen thousands of descendants make positive contributions to the world around them. The land alone (something that can be calculated) cost less than $5,000 when adjusted into 2023 dollars. Today, $5,000 doesn’t even buy you a quarter-acre of prime Perth County farmland.
When Grandma and Grandpa told me stories of where we came from, it sparked a love of learning about my past. Now that they are gone, I have a wonderful opportunity to do the same with the next generation.
If we do this the right way then my own children will have an opportunity to learn not only our own settler history, but also the history of those before us.
Learning about those who paved the way before us does not detract from our own successes. Rather, it provides the context we need to acknowledge that we could not have done it on our own. I simply do not get the opportunity to drive down a lonely sideroad at sunrise, watching the beauty of creation all around me if those Skinners didn’t commit themselves to over a century of honing our farming craft. In that same vein, I don’t get these opportunities if there were not systems designed to see settlers succeed at the expense of Indigenous peoples.
All of those things happened before I hit the ground at Listowel Memorial Hospital and I cannot change a single thing that already happened. All I can do is keep learning more about where I come from to guide the work of being a part of something even better.
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Stewart Skinner is a local business owner, former political candidate, and has worked at Queen’s Park as a Policy Advisor to the Minister of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs. He can be followed on Twitter: @modernfarmer.
