1945, Niagara
In early spring of 1945, I went as a Farmerette from my home in Watford, Ont. to Vineland in the Niagara Peninsula. A high school teacher, Adam Graham, had a family connection to the Government Experimental Farm there and he recommended that I apply.
I went by train early in March, having achieved satisfactory marks in the school examinations to merit being excused from completing the final semester. This was important as I intended to go on to the University of Western Ontario in the fall.
The facility consisted of a large two-story warehouse converted to dining hall, kitchens and several small administration offices on the main floor and a large dormitory above, with single beds along the walls and double bunks down the centre of the room. There were also one or two bunk houses across the lane alongside the main dormitory.
There were lavatories and shower rooms. Several of the showers had privacy partitions but mainly the showerheads were above open areas with a central drain. On a hot day after working in the fields, these open showers were so crowded that one did not know if it was one’s own arm or someone else’s that one was scrubbing.
At one time there were a few French-speaking girls from Northern Ontario, who were not comfortable speaking English, and they showered in their bathing suits in the other shower area where the stalls were more enclosed.
As I recall, at peak demand, there may have been over 100 girls going out in the early mornings to work on neighbouring farms. We would rise early, have breakfast, make our lunches from a bountiful supply of sandwich makings, fruit and sweets (cookies, brownies etc.) prepared by the kitchen staff who were of course, up even earlier that we! I think most of the kitchen girls were Farmerettes as well, with hired overseers, but I’m not certain of this.
The transportation would arrive and we would all go off to our assigned farm. Transportation was by private vehicle, sometimes the back of a truck. We cut fields of asparagus. The farmer I worked for had acres of the stuff and we cut it twice a day during the warm, damp, prime growing period, bending over, wielding a sharp curved knife to reach just below the soil and stacking the resulting asparagus spears in six quart baskets which were trimmed to five or six-inch lengths and packed again for delivery to the canning factory.
We weeded and thinned miles and miles of baby vegetables – beets, carrots etc., just emerging in the newly seeded rows. We thinned newly developing peaches and pears so the remaining fruit would be prime size and reaching toward the sun for prime colour. We picked bushels of cherries – sour red, sweet red, black and a few of the wonderful white Oxheart. Every piece of fruit was money and not one was to be left on the tree!
I recall one day we were picking strawberries. It was a hot day with bright sunshine. Someone wondered what that funny smell was. We decided it was the skin on our thighs cooking, as we had to wear overalls, but of course rolled the legs up as far as far as we possibly could.
On rainy days and weekends when we were not working, the girls from the Vineland Camp would “hit the road’” and hitchhike into St. Catharines. We were forbidden to go alone so we travelled with a buddy. However, there was a place called The Lighthouse just down the road where there was a jukebox and dance floor and young people gathered there. It was a reasonable walk home if one was not one of the fortunate to get a ride with one of the local young men. How the local young women must have hated us.
Courtesy of: The Township of Warwick: A Story Through Time
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