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  • The Ordinary People of Essex: Environment, Culture, and Economy on the Frontier of Upper Canada
  • Joe L. Anderson
John Clarke, The Ordinary People of Essex: Environment, Culture, and Economy on the Frontier of Upper Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2010)

The Ordinary People of Essex is an exhaustive study of the ways in which people shaped the land and the land shaped settlement in Essex County from the early to the mid-19th century. Author John Clarke, Distinguished Research Professor of historical geography at Carleton University, has written a successful follow-up to his Land, Power, and Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada (2002). With 738 pages, including 470 pages of text, 141 pages of notes, dozens of tables and maps, and 34 pages of appendices, The Ordinary People of Essex represents the scholarly mastery of relevant works on agriculture, ethnicity, culture, and settlement in North America and Europe as well as intimate study and knowledge of census returns and numerous other manuscript sources. By focusing on one locale in great depth, the author demonstrates the ways in which settlement proceeded and people adapted to local conditions. Clarke has made a singular contribution to the study of frontier culture and agriculture that will be of interest to historians in many different sub-disciplines, including social, ethnic, rural, and environmental history.

In Clarke’s telling, the people who came to Essex were not profit maximizers. Instead, they first looked to family needs, which reflected their interest in continuity and stability even as they built new homes in a sometimes strange country. Bound by religious and ethnic ties, they attempted to cluster together and, if there were a critical mass of population (as there was for French and English Canadians, Americans, and Germans), married within their own ethnic and religious groups. As Clarke points out, the best land was not always the most productive land. Settlers preferred land in proximity to settlements, kin, or those who shared cultural or ethnic roots to provide maximum support for their families. Most settlers found that land was affordable and obtained a patent in approximately eight years.

The role of origins (defined broadly as ethnic, social, and distinct cultural group) is central to the book. Clarke goes to great lengths to demonstrate that “culture is dynamic and not static” and that immigrants from Europe as well as British and French North Americans made important adjustments to local conditions. (324) The author reveals the truth behind the stereotypes of origins as they related to land tenure, farm production, and income. Did the Americans favour corn and hogs? Were the French Canadians most likely to have horses? Did Irish farmers grow more potatoes than other groups? While there may be some truth in these stereotypes in some settings, members of each of these groups accepted change in Essex County and charted their own course. Irish Protestants adopted corn, all farmers favoured horses, and the Irish [End Page 261] appeared to be no different than their fellow settlers in terms of acreage devoted to potatoes. Most foreign-born settlers pursued a balanced production scheme while native-born farmers tended to prefer a degree of market wheat production.

Clarke engages numerous debates among historians and historical geographers about the nature of frontier society, most notably the role of “king wheat” in the economy of Upper Canada. While wheat was the “dominant cereal” grain in Essex due to the fact that it was a commodity with a ready market, it was less important in Essex than it was in other parts of Ontario. (170) Corn was better suited to conditions of settlement and was grown on more farms than wheat, but the overall acreage devoted to wheat was greater than that to corn. King wheat, according to Clarke, was apparently a much less significant monarch than scholars previously supposed.

A significant portion of the book (much of Chapters 7 and 8) is dedicated to defining and advancing our understanding of mobility and material success in the period under study. To that end, Clarke deals with tenancy and persistence, another longstanding issue for social, rural, and agricultural historians. Tenancy was a...

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