Erratum

In Peter A. Baskerville's 'Chattel Mortgages and Community in Perth County, Ontario' (CHR 87, no. 4, December 2006), on page 612 there was an omission. The missing text appears below. CHR regrets the error.

As figure 10 nicely illustrates, farmers increasingly borrowed from people unlike themselves, people in other walks of life, who on average had money to loan, which, on average, the farming community either lacked or found other places to invest. Indeed, by 1911 it was a virtual toss-up as to whether a farmer would borrow from another farmer, a gentleman, or a private banker. A parallel trend underlines the breakdown of any sense of community in the lending process. Between 1871 and 1891, 11 per cent of loans to farmers involved borrowers and lenders with the same surname. Between 1901 and 1911, that indication of familial credit relations declined to 7 per cent.

Private bankers were especially willing to loan to farmers and others who required capital. At least nineteen private bankers operated in the chattel mortgage market in Perth in the years considered in this study, and between them they accounted for 15 per cent of all loans and 8 per cent of the total amount loaned. Their presence as lenders increased in sync with the decline of farmers as lenders: in 1871 private bankers granted no loans on chattels, in 1879 they accounted for 5 per cent of loans, rising to between 22 and 27 per cent for the remaining three years of the study.

Farmers were their main customers, varying from a low of 70 per cent in 1879 to a high of 78 per cent in 1911. Many in the gentlemen category probably also acted as private bankers. Farmers' increased recourse to these lenders was for them a costly practice. While farmers loaned to farmers at an average interest rate of 7.5 per cent, gentlemen charged farmers an average of 9.2 per cent and private bankers exacted an average of 10.2 per cent. If borrowing from people with similar social backgrounds and interests is an indication of community bondedness —and the differential in interest rates noted could point in that direction —then over the course of the late nineteenth century the borrowing patterns exhibited by Perth's farmers suggest a weakening of those bonds.