The early settlements of Bruce County had limited resources to carry them through hard times. For example, so precarious was the economy of Southampton in 1851 that the loss of a single boatload of supplies meant that the hamlet had to be partially abandoned so that the rest might eat.
As winter approached in 1851 the shelves were growing bare at McDonald’s store in Southampton, a fledgling settlement of barely a dozen houses. Alexander McDonald was one of the first to arrive at the nascent town, after William Kennedy and John Spence walked in from Owen Sound in 1848.
McDonald made regular trips to Goderich in his small schooner, Saucy Jack, to fetch stock for the store. At the end of the 1851 sailing season, Capt. McDonald loaded aboard Saucy Jack a cargo of much-needed flour and other provisions. He pushed his luck, however, delaying his departure from Goderich into the stormy days of December.
Finally, on December 7th, he left harbour with brothers James and Jonathon Martindale aboard. The Saucy Jack made it as far as the location of today’s Port Elgin when a gale struck and capsized her, drowning the crew and scattering bags of waterlogged flour along the beach.
Both Martindale brothers had lived with their wives in one Southampton house, together with a third relative who had lost her husband a short time before. It became the house of three widows.
The loss of three of its founding pioneers was keenly felt by the townspeople. Moreover, they no longer had sufficient provisions to make it to spring, unless a good number of them left so that the others could survive until supplies might arrive.
The next day ten men crossed the river and battled deep snow and bitter cold for two days before reaching Owen Sound, 21 miles away. Some returned with supplies but, nonetheless, the village experienced a winter of many privations.
Seven years later, was life less precarious? Only slightly. True, the fields were cleared and producing enough grain to carry folks and animals through the winter, but only when the usual 33 inches of rain fell each year.
An unprecedented drought however, struck in the summer of 1858. Historian Norman Robertson wrote, “No rain fell between June 23 and August 11. The result was an utter failure of the crops. The harvest of 1858 was in many cases hardly worth gathering.” All over the county, settlers had no grain to make flour, and faced starvation.
So severe was the harvest failure that the county council took out a loan of £8,500 to buy seed grain, corn meal and other provisions to help relieve the suffering.
The Grand Trunk Railway cut its freight rates in half on provisions sent to towns in need. The steamer, Islander, carried relief supplies through the spring and summer of 1859 from Goderich to Southampton. Contributions also came in from more distant points, including Scotland.
Robertson noted, “Provisions were not only scarce, but high-priced as well. Flour sold at $10 a barrel.” The most destitute received seed grain and flour for free, but the rest agreed to work on roads in exchange for relief, resulting in many miles of new roads being opened up.
A good harvest in 1859 brought an end to the time of hunger. No wonder that the year from the harvest of 1858 to that of 1859 was long remembered as the “starvation year.”
————————————————————
by Robin Hilborn
for the Bruce County Historical Society
