Innisfil Videos
Pages
-
-
Bill Gibbins - Accomplishments On Town Council
-
Bill Gibbins discusses what he considers to be his greatest accomplishments while serving on the Innisfil Town Council. Born October 5th, 1928, Mr. Gibbins passed away August 6th, 2015.
-
-
Bill Gibbins - Annexations In Innisfil
-
Bill Gibbins talks about the regions in Innisfil that have been annexed to Barrie in the past. Born October 5th, 1928, Mr. Gibbins passed away August 6th, 2015.
-
-
Bill Gibbins - Centennial Park
-
Bill Gibbins describes the founding, construction, and uses of Innisfil's Centennial Park. Born October 5th, 1928, Mr. Gibbins passed away August 6th, 2015.
-
-
Bill Gibbins - Living In Innisfil
-
Bill Gibbins discusses his experiences as a long time resident of Innisfil. Born October 5th, 1928, Mr. Gibbins passed away August 6th, 2015.
-
-
Bill Gibbins - Meeting His Wife
-
William "Bill" Gibbins describes that he was born and educated in Saskatchewan, but his biggest accomplishment was meeting his wife, who is from Innisfil. He mentions that seeing her in the church choir made him want to come to church, and they eventually met at a corn roast. Born October 5th, 1928, Mr. Gibbins passed away August 6th, 2015.
-
-
Bill Kell and Innisfil's Changing Flora and Fauna
-
Bill Kell discusses his views on the changing flora and fauna of Innisfil over the past 100 years. Interviewed by Marj Mossman and Kathryn Schoutsen on 26 June 2016.
Full transcript is as follows: Bill: Just because my degree is in agriculture and my passion is nature. And how much in my eighty-one years the environment around us has changed. Now when the first white man came here the country was over crowded with passenger pigeons and that’s probably what they lived on the first while because they were pretty easy to catch and they were plentiful. I have a newspaper clipping out of one of the Toronto newspapers telling people for a Saturday outing you go down to the train in Toronto, you get off at either Gilford or Lefroy, you take the jitney out to, whatever some name hunter… the name anyway didn’t mean anything to me but it would be some place between Lefroy and Gilford and you get the jitney to take you out from the station and you go with a pillowcase and a club about this long in the Fall when the beechnuts are plentiful, in this place there were a lot of beechnuts, and the pigeons are so full they can hardly move and you club pigeons ‘til you get your pillowcase full and then you go back to the train and you go home and you got enough meat that you can preserve to keep it going all winter.
Marj: No kidding.
Bill: That was the Toronto newspaper.
Marj: Have you ever tasted pigeon?
Bill: Yeah, no, these are passenger pigeons. And this was 1907 or 1908 and by 1915 they were good as extinct. And by 1921 they were extinct.
Marj: Imagine.
Bill: They were so plentiful nobody cared about them. And when the early settlers came there were wild turkeys. And they disappeared out of Southern Ontario except a few right down at a turkey point in Lake Erie. And about 1990 the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources brought 500 from down in Appalachia in the States and let them loose, two places, along [?] Nottawasaga at the edge of the escarpment and down in the Kendal Hills at the east end of the Oak Ridges Marine and within about 10 years we were overrun with them. And there are still lots if you need any just put in a new order. They’re hard to kill but they’re, I think the population in the last five or ten years has levelled off, but they all of a sudden they are just all over. And they’re hungry. They like crops and they live in our bush in the winter time. And you can see lots of tracks and lots of droppings.
Marj: How do you mean they’re hard to kill?
Bill: Their feathers are, if you hit them with ordinary bird shells, the feathers are hard enough the pellets will bounce off. Pardon the death and pardon the spooky. And if you have a license you can only get the males. So you do your bird call and they, where you think they’re hidden in the trees and they come out and they think there is going to be some excitement and then you try and shoot them. And I think the people that sell the hunting supplies get more than the people buy it, but that’s another story.
But they’ve come back that much that soon. What I was going to say most wild animals live at the edge of the forest and go out into the brush and into the meadows to eat. So there are more deer in Southern Ontario than there are when the first white men came. Because the forest was too dense and they need and not only deer, but the turkeys and a lot of the rabbits and so on have that same pattern.
Now there used to be quite a few red foxes around here that lived on rabbits and the mice and whatever. And about 1950 the first coyotes came in and they had never been in Southern Ontario in human memory. And I think they came down from the prairies through Northern Ontario. The ones that are here now are bigger than the prairie ones and they probably have a little bit of dog crossbred into them. But there weren’t any here until the 1950s and then all of a sudden they were all over Southern Ontario. Just that quick and people were scared that the kids weren’t going to be safe going to school because these things were following the kids to school. And my brother was in Ottawa at that time and people were from the west that were, “well so what? Coyotes have been following kids to school as long as there’s been kids.” They’re very curious creatures. It’s been a bit of a game like cutting hay and they are out in the field with me. Any time I cut the head off a rabbit or a mouse they are there to clean it up. It’s good going. They’ll be out in the field with me for an hour or two. I don’t threaten them and they don’t threaten me.
Marj: And they’re just there?
Bill: They are just there. I’m helping them and I guess they’re helping me by, but I mean when they came out the foxes as good as disappeared.
We used to have a lot of jack rabbits. And I haven’t seen one for forty years, maybe.
Marj: They are quite big aren’t they?
Bill: Yeah they are some kind of a hare rather than a little, whatever you call the, little bunny rabbits. We got one that lives in our backyard and eats the bark off our trees and whatever. But I haven’t seen them in years and that’s what happened to them.
Birds. The last time I saw an eastern bluebird was 1993. There was a pair on our farm and it was a very cold spring. Bluebirds catch insects and I’m sure that they laid their eggs and the eggs hatched too soon and there weren’t enough insects and that’s what happened. But haven’t seen one in Innisfil, I don’t know, for a long time. Right now the people are worrying about nesting grounds for bobolinks and meadowlarks who lay their eggs in hay fields. And if I wasn’t here I might be cutting hay today and disrupting their nests. So the province in their wisdom decided that the birds were more important than feeding the world and you weren’t allowed if you’ve seen a bobolink you weren’t allowed to cut the hay. And then they put a two-year extension on; I don’t know what will happen.
Marj: Is it because their nests are on the ground?
Bill: Their nests are on the ground in the long grass, yes. So do ducks. I uncovered a turkey nest in the field one day. And as it happened my wheels hadn’t crushed the eggs. And I went back the next day and they were still there. And I went back the day after and some raccoon or something had gone in and smashed every one. Something. But I was talking about the birds and the animals who, a lot of them, have to have that meadowland and when this was all virgin forest there weren’t many here anyway.
Same thing with the monarch butterflies. Monarch butterflies live only on members of the milkweed family, some of the cousins, but mostly the basic. And when this was forest there weren’t any number of monarch butterflies here anyway. So, is it our fault they’ve disappeared or is it our fault they came in the first place? I mean everything is in a state of flow.
When they started growing a lot soy beans around here the aphid population went way up and they brought in these Japanese ladybugs, which you have seen, that bite people - the old fashioned five spot, seven spot, nine spot ladybugs didn’t. And they ate aphids, but they didn’t reproduce fast enough. So that was brought in by science to control the aphids. And in large measure it does work.
Praying mantises came in about 1950 to control grasshoppers. And we never really had a problem with grasshoppers anyway; they’re worse in the dry years because there’s some mold affects them when it’s damp. And they are still here and they came in and didn’t do much.
You remember when purple loosestrife, it was going to kill all the wetlands in Ontario and people went out and picked it, and I’ve picked it. I haven’t gone along our road this year to look, but it hasn’t spread any amount.
And velvet leaf was another weed that was going to come in. So everything changes and it finds a level or a new level. Our elm trees back in the late ‘60s we had a, here, a very bad ice storm one winter that, the elm bark beetle lives where there is broken bark and they carry Dutch elm disease virus and within two or three years the whole, essentially all our elm trees had died except for a few very small ones. And those ones have died since, but we still have some. And maybe there will be some resistance building up, but they’re still, the younger ones are still dying.
Now a few years ago there were a lot of English chestnut trees in Ontario, especially in South Western Ontario, but by 1900 they all died and they are trying to reintroduce them. There are some left south of the Great Lakes, but not in Ontario. Some of the old houses have chestnut trim around the doors and beautiful wood.
Marj: And the elm trees were beautiful; they were huge.
Bill: Yeah, well they not huge anymore, but there’s a few. They aren’t quite all gone. Beech trees have some fungus in the bark. Somebody said to me about ten years ago that they were going to be gone in ten years, but they are going. We don’t know if they are all going or if they are going to start. We have this emerald ash borer that they are worried about right now. And they may decimate them. Our maple trees, I’m not sure, but the ones that are [on] the third line there all those young ones, everything, are dying. Might be fumes from the road because they are worse near the road than they are far, like at the back of the farm. So when they go something else will come, I guess. Spruce budworms were a big thing. And they sprayed acres and acres in the Maritimes with 2,4,5-T, agent orange, that they used in Vietnam to kill the trees so they could see the enemy soldiers. A lot of people died from cancer from 2,4,5-T. I used a bit. I’m here. So there’s a whole lot of things happening and changing.
Oh I didn’t do barn swallows. Used to be every farm had a barn, every barn had animals, every barn’s animals had a manure pile, every manure pile had insects. Barn swallows catch insects in flight to feed themselves and their young. Fascinating if you watch them. Once on the 8th Andrew and I were watching, about every 90 seconds the same bird would come back to the nest with another insect, mother and father both, but they were doing them that fast.
And barns are disappearing, manure piles are disappearing, the swallows are disappearing and the pigeons have no place. Isn’t so many years ago that every town had pigeons on the main street and they hated them. Barrie had hired however many companies to clean out and they didn’t do it, but as soon as you got rid of the feed mills and grain elevators you got rid of the pigeons in town. So there’s still some pigeons, but there aren’t near as many. And there are still barn swallows and they are getting fewer and fewer. And I have never in my career seen a barn swallow nest that wasn’t in a manmade building. The cliff swallows and the bank swallows, bank swallows go out in a bank of sand, cliff swallows might be under a barn might be out, but barn swallows go in barns. So it keeps changing. And I wouldn’t say that the total of either plants or insects or animals is lower, it’s just changing.
-
-
Bill Kell and Life on the Farm
-
Bill Kell discusses farm life in Innisfil. Interviewed by Marj Mossman and Kathryn Schoutsen on 26 June 2016. Full transcript is as follows: Bill: Going back to the farm, I’m out of sequence here. Because we had no electricity, no anything, my father would get up in the morning, go to the barn and feed the horses and milk the cows. And then he would come in with fresh milk. And then if we weren’t going to school we had fresh milk on our porridge for breakfast. Never heard of pasteurizing or anything like that. Brucellosis, undulant fever, was going around then too which was one of things that pasteurizing kills. Yeah it was a bad disease. But then the cows were tied in the barn, locked in the barn. And you had to let them out sometime in the morning. And you went back to the creek to get a drink and then bring them back put them in the barn in the winter. And the creek froze so you started down near the bottom end of the creek and took the axe out and broke the ice for them to drink. And then they’d slop enough so the ice kept getting thicker so you kept working up and you went across about the width of a field by the spring to get water and get ice where you could break it.
We had no electric lights. So you’ve seen the old farm lanterns. You had one lantern to do the whole barn. Be awful, awful careful because if it ever got knocked down, by either a human or an animal, the barn would be on fire. Quite a few barns burnt that way. So it was dismally dark, especially when you get into the short days around Christmas. But that’s the way it was and there was lots of child labour. If you were big enough. I used to, not in the morning, but my parents kept telling me how well off I was because some kids had to help with the barn before they went to school. And when I was six I had this one cow we called Strawberry and I hand milked her because she was easy and that was my job. And one day later I made the mistake of saying I got a full pound of milk from that one cow so I had to milk her every day from then on. Well it wasn’t right full, but it was. Don’t ever say anything like that again. *laughs* You learn something every day. Well partly, in war time you couldn’t hire help even if you could pay them. So it was family labour. Old people worked that should have been retired. Not many as old as me because there weren’t many as old as me.
One of the milestones in my life was about a month ago, I passed the age where my grandfather, William Kell, died. And he was an old, old, old man and I was worried coming up, but I made it. But that’s, you know, he was 81.
Everybody had a mixed farm, or as good as everybody. Horses, we usually had about five; cattle we had milk maybe twelve cows that was more than a lot of our neighbours. Separated the milk. Sold the cream. Fed the skim milk to the pigs or calves. Had a few chickens running around and they ate whatever. You weren’t supposed to have chickens where livestock were because they would bring in TB, but people didn’t. Oh there were some pretty coloured chickens because you liked getting the rooster from different breeds you’d see and so we’d have fifty or a hundred chickens with maybe, you’d fatten up some of them to maybe sell if you could find a market for twenty birds, which was no health control. It’s all organic, but it was just what you did.
We never had sheep but a lot of people had sheep.
Marj: So you might have a hundred chickens?
Bill: Yeah
Marj: And you didn’t really feed them, they just fed themselves?
Bill: Oh you feed them, but not much. You gave them a little bit of oyster shell. The laying hens because they needed the calcium, you see, to make the egg shells.
Marj: And then you would eat the eggs obviously. But would you have too many eggs you would sell them?
Bill: Oh whenever the car was going to town you would take some to the grading station and they would grade them A or B or C and if they had been sitting around too long they got graded down, but yeah that’s.
Marj: So then would you have say pigs?
Bill: Yeah we had more pigs than most people, keep whatever grain we grew. Like I started, when I was a kid, we had a hundred acres, and in 1942 my father bought an extra hundred and twenty-five so we had close to two hundred workable when I was a kid. Then we got up to three hundred. And then the rest of the world took off and I didn’t. Like our, my friend blacksmith Don Bickell said one day, “all my customers are millionaires. Well I deal with farmers and the farmers are all millionaires.
Marj: Because of their land?
Bill: Because if you own the land that’s gone up in value. I mean now the farms have got so big and when we first got up to three hundred acres we were one of the biggest farms in Innisfil. Biggest eight or ten anyway. And now we are one of the smallest that tries to make a living out of a farm. And everybody else is a slave to the bank except us. But that’s the decision you make.
But everybody had, some, a few people sold milk and it was, I’m not sure when they started contracts but you would have a commitment at so many cans of milk. And we sent cream, a truck came from Bradford first and then from Tottenham once a week and picked up our cream and one of our neighbours took it down to Lefroy and put a can of cream on the train to somebody in Toronto, they’d pay a little bit better. And then they could send the clean can back and they were supposed to be disinfected. There were lots of flies. You had a strainer on your pail and you had strainers that take them out before the milk went. Milk got pasteurized, the cream really didn’t, but then we lived.
When I was first working up in the north end of the county they had summer milk contracts and they put milk on the train to go to, I’m not sure if it was Bracebridge or Huntsville, to the dairy up there so they had milk for the cottagers. So that only lasted, but you got a bonus for the milk that you send up. But to put it on the train, now the trains don’t even run that stop.
Interviewer: For Heaven’s sake. Oh my gosh. Can you think of anything that, all of this nature stuff is interesting Bill, we don’t think about it enough.
Bill: I can go on forever. You can edit this bit out. On the 9th of July the Simcoe County Federation of Agriculture is having their 75th anniversary and I will have a small part in the programme because I was president 50 years ago. I’m not that old. I was president 50 years ago and a couple, three years ago, I wrote a little bit of history because if I didn’t nobody else would. So I have been going through the evolution since 1941 to now, the evolutions in agriculture.
-
-
Brian Baker - Coming To Canada
-
Brian Baker recounts his emigration from England to Innisfil as a 12 year old, and being one of the first farming families to arrive by airplane (Pan-American Airlines) instead of boat. They first arrived in New York and then took a train to Toronto, and then to Barrie. He and his family arrived on the 18th of April to find everything covered in snow and most roads were closed. They purchased the north half of lot 4 Concession 4 as it was located close to his maternal uncle Stan Winter's property.
-
-
Brian Baker - Farm Life
-
Brian Baker recounts several stories of the daily life of a farmer in Innisfil in the 1940s and 1950s, including the use of work horses, threshing parties, children's chores, herding cows across Highway 400, the community combine, and baling hay. The horses, a black and a roan, were purchased from a Mr. Brown who lived east of the 400 highway and who guaranteed the horses could pull farm equipment. The family also purchased a Ferguson tractor from Graves Brothers on Cundles in Barrie. Threshing and barn building would often be done as a community so wives would prepare meals for their husbands. Brian also describes how children on the farm all had assigned chores, and how there was a 4-H club but he himself never participated. He remembers being able to herd cows across the road that is now the 400 highway, as well as borrowing a combine to combine clover seed and alfalfa seed, which was mixed in with feed for cattle. He also recalls how he helped stook oats, wheat, and barley out in the field by hand, and recalls Bill Kell helping him tossing bales of hay into the family barn. Bill's family now rents the Baker family's farm, where they grow corn and beans.
-
-
Brian Baker - Innisfil Wildlife
-
Brian Baker describes the changing wildlife of Innisfil, as well as cattle farmers dealing with predators. The Cookstown outlet mall is located on a former swamp where he recalls hearing timber wolves and explains that though the timber wolves are gone, there are still small brush wolves in the area that he spots on his property. Brian explains that the wolves are no longer much of a threat, but recalls a story of when a jersey calf went missing and he eventually found the carcass turned inside out. He later discovered this was the work of a black bear.
-
-
Brian Baker - School Days
-
Brian Baker describes his experiences as a youth at Killyleagh school, which had a mostly Irish student body. His teacher was Mrs. Lillian Prince, and he had to walk over 2 km to school through summer and winter. He remembers how many of the girls had to warm themselves from the cold over heat registers after walking to school in the winter because they were required to wear skirts. The students were also all children of farmers. He remembers his first year of school in 1947 there was no hydro or washrooms in the school, and one teacher taught all eight grades. Once every two weeks a music instructor from Hillsdale would visit, and once or twice a month a Reverend from Thornton visited to deliver customary religious instruction.
-
-
Brian Baker - Telephone Lines
-
Brian Baker discusses the arrival of the telephone in Innisfil in 1949 via the Beeton Telephone Company, which had an office in Cookstown. He describes the use of a party line with typically 8 to 10 families on one line, each with a distinctive ring. This of course meant others could listen in on conversations, and Brian recalls a humourous story of one man commenting aloud during a phone conversation that a certain neighbour was listening in, and the eavesdropping neighbour was so startled that she exclaimed "I am not!"
-
-
Bruce Webb - Bathing in Lake Simcoe
-
Lifelong resident of Innisfil Bruce Webb discusses his memories of bathing in Lake Simcoe on especially hot days after working in the fields. Interviewed by Jean Warrington and Kate Zubczyk on 2 February 2016 in his home in Stroud.
-
-
Bruce Webb - Bread and Milk Deliveries
-
Lifelong Innisfil resident Bruce Webb recounts how fresh bread and milk were once delivered door-to-door. Interviewed by Jean Warrington and Kate Zubczyk at his home in Stroud on 2 February 2016.
-
-
Bruce Webb - Changes in Innisfil, and Building Houses
-
Lifelong resident of Innisfil Bruce Webb reflects on how he believes Innisfil has changed over time, and shares his memories of building houses in the area. Interviewed by Jean Warrington and Kate Zubczyk on 2 February 2016 at his home in Stroud.
-
-
Bruce Webb - Driver's Licence and First Job
-
Lifelong Innisfil resident Bruce Webb recalls when he first received his driver's licence, his first job, and the work that followed. Interviewed by Jean Warrington and Kate Zubczyk on 2 February 2016 at his home in Stroud.
-
-
Bruce Webb - Entertainment
-
Lifelong Innisfil resident Bruce Webb recollects the forms of entertainment he had access to as a youth in Innisfil. Interviewed by Jean Warrington and Kate Zubczyk on 2 February 2016 at his home in Stroud.
-
-
Bruce Webb - Farming
-
Bruce Webb, lifelong resident of Innisfil, recounts farming techniques and traditions in the Stroud area. Interviewed by Jean Warrington and Kate Zubczyk on 2 February 2016 at his home in Stroud.
-
-
Bruce Webb - Hurricane Hazel
-
Lifelong Innisfil resident Bruce Webb describes the aftermath of Hurricane Hazel hitting the area in 1954. Interviewed by Jean Warrington and Kate Zubczyk on 2 February 2016 at his home in Stroud.
-
-
Bruce Webb - Introduction and School Life
-
Lifelong resident of Innisfil Bruce Webb talks about his early life in the area, including his memories of going to school. Interviewed by Jean Warrington and Kate Zubczyk on 2 February 2016 at his home in Stroud.
-
-
Bruce Webb - Jerry in the Well
-
Lifelong Innisfil resident Bruce Webb fondly recalls a story of near-disaster involving a horse named Jerry while living on a farm. Interviewed by Jean Warrington and Kate Zubczyk on 2 February 2016 at his home in Stroud.
Pages
