The Ordinary People of Essex: Environment, Culture, and Economy on the Frontier of Upper Canada (review)

A reviewer of Clarke’s first ‘monumental work’ on Essex County, Land, Power and Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada, can be forgiven for thinking that that work brought ‘together over thirty-five years of research . . . on the southwesterly tip of Ontario.’ In fact, the book encapsulated some of that research, but not all of it. In Ordinary People, the author’s second detailed and meticulously researched tome on Essex County, Clarke, a historical geographer, shifts his view from the broad context – political, economic, and social – within which rural settlers lived to their actual lived experience, or at least as actual as a forensic analysis of the agricultural and nominal level returns extant in the 1851–2 Canadian census will allow. In a prodigious research effort, Clarke hand-linked those returns to each other and, where feasible, to modern soil surveys, historical land records, and a series of tax assessment rolls in an attempt to explore the relationship between agricultural behaviour and cultural origin.

From the perspective of that goal, studying Essex is a good choice: its population was diverse – 38 per cent of the county’s families were headed by French Canadians, 18 per cent by American born, 15 per cent by English Canadians, 14 per cent by those of English origin, 11 per cent by Irish origin, 3 per cent by Scottish origin, and a scattering of others. While Clarke refers throughout to Essex as a frontier area, in fact by 1851–2 the county was very much a long-settled and well-developed agricultural region, ranking in the top 15 per cent of Ontario counties in terms of land occupied and in the top 22 per cent in terms of land cultivated and cropped. These characteristics – maturity and diversity, rather than any claim to representivity – underlay Clarke’s decision to study Essex. Indeed, throughout the book he emphasizes the need for similar studies of other counties in order to determine degrees of representivity.

Clarke uses his rich data to test a number of dominant themes in Ontario’s social and agricultural historiography. Clarke points to Essex as ‘the prototype of the ethnic mosaic’ in terms of distinctive territorial ethnic groupings, few cross-ethnic marriages, and a concentration of land business within ethnic pockets. ‘There was no real mixing,’ he concludes (113). Did wheat dominate? While Clarke’s answer to this question clearly supports the McCalla/McInnis observation that wheat was less than king, the evidence he brings to support this observation is at times confusing. At one point we are told that 40 per cent of the county’s farms with cultivated acres grew one or more acres of wheat in 1851, compared to McInnis’s figure of 92 per cent for 1861 (174). Yet later we are told that 69 per cent of Essex properties with ‘land in crop’ produced wheat, and again this is compared to McInnis’s 92 per cent figure (206). Which is the appropriate comparison? Clarke carefully explores the relationship of French Canadians to agriculture – an often charged theme within central Canadian agricultural historiography – and concludes that the relationship remains an ‘enigma.’ Available evidence points to ’backwardness,’ but, Clarke notes, this has to be tempered by the fact that the bulk of French Canadians in the county lived on the ‘least sustainable soils’ (294). Clarke also looks closely at the behaviour of Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants as farmers and observes that Irish Catholics acquired a great deal of land but produced relatively smaller amounts of crops. Irish Protestants were better producers and from Clarke‘s perspective, somewhat surprisingly, concentrated on corn production – a crop almost unknown to them in Ireland. He points to this as an example of a culture adapting to changed environments. More broadly, Clarke notes that there was a significant difference in agricultural behaviour between those born in North America and those who were immigrants...