Keeping chickens, geese and ducks in P.E.I.'s Bygone Days
Before commercial farming, most Islanders kept their own flocks for eggs and meat
Reginald "Dutch" Thompson's column The Bygone Days brings you the voices of Island seniors, many of whom are now long-departed. These tales of the way things used to be offer a fascinating glimpse into the past. Every second weekend CBC P.E.I. will bring you one of Dutch's columns.
Just in time for Easter, some tales from the bygone days in P.E.I. when 80 or 90 years ago, most folks had a small flock of backyard fowl for eggs and meat.
People in urban and rural settings kept chickens and also often some ducks or geese, especially if they had a pond or fresh water nearby.
Eggs were a source of not just food, but money for many families — therefore a vital part of the Island economy.
"We'd take perhaps five or so dozen to town, just in the basket," recalled Adelaide Hamm.
She was raised on a farm in the community of Bunbury across the Hillsborough Bridge, just outside what's now Stratford. Back then the area was completely rural, and Hamm remembers when milk and eggs brought in the household's only spending money — although at just 10 cents a dozen, they brought less than a penny an egg.
"You'd have oats in the basket, and eggs in there so they wouldn't get broken. And they were taken then and put in those other containers," Hamm told Thompson.
The "other containers" she refers to were called Humpty Dumptys — wood or wire crates that held up to 15 dozen eggs that would prevent the eggs from rattling around and cracking. The Humpty Dumptys could be found at most P.E.I. general stores that had their own egg-grading station, like MacLeod's in Vernon River and Dixon's in Tryon.
Cooking their geese
Many families used the eggs in barter against the price of goods from the general store, like the staples molasses, kerosene and tea.
The Hamms also kept geese, receiving 10 cents a pound for a 10- to 12-pound goose. That's when a goose was the bird of choice for large holiday gatherings like at Christmas and Easter.
Hamm told Thompson that in later years, her family would rent a freezer at Central Creameries in Charlottetown (which later became Perfection Foods, now owned by ADL) and keep the geese to eat for themselves, because the low prices they fetched made it a poor business proposition.
Sitting ducks
Lester Hickox was raised in St. Catherines on P.E.I.'s West River his father ran a sawmill in Bonshaw and operated a small ferry that ran from the Bonshaw wharf to Charlottetown.
Hickox told Thompson his father, Spurgeon, wasn't keen on farming after but that his mother always kept a flock of ducks.
"When they got older the ducks would go to the river themselves ... and after a while they'd stay there. And they'd just leave them there for the summer and chase them in in the fall," he recalled.
One fall, the family was only able to find about 20 of the 70 ducks they'd released — turns out local hunters had been shooting them.
"It was an easy shot, they didn't fly away! It was easy to shoot them fellas, the tame ones," he said wryly.
Chickens raised by a goat
Keeping flocks was common even in downtown Charlottetown, Thompson was told.
Dorothy Palmer grew up in Charlottetown with two sisters and two brothers. In 1910 the family built a house on Dorchester Street and like most of their neighbours, they kept a few farm animals including chickens and goats in their back yard.
"We had a pet goat, a little billy goat, and it never grew. It slept in the house in the cellar. We used to wind up the phonograph records and set the goat on the plate and start it — the goat would go round and round ... oh he was quite a goat!" Palmer laughed.
A neighbour gave one of Palmer's brothers a couple of chicks, and she says the goat helped raise them.
"The chickens used to sit on the [goat's] back, until they were feathered hens! And one of them, the rooster, became a pet," she said.
At the same time in 1918, her father was one of the first in the neighbourhood to purchase a car — a Model-T Ford — which was the talk of the street, especially when the entire household went for a drive to the beach with the top down.
"Dad would fill the car up with five or six kids and take us out to Dalvay to swim," she recalled. "The rooster on the hood and the goat on the running board, and the goat would never fall off!"
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