At Your Service
by Rob Fisher, Library and Archives Canada
Every emigrant dreamed of a better life in the New World.
The disenfranchised poor and landless tenants of Ireland and Scotland dreamed
of an escape from extreme poverty and hunger; unemployed labourers in rural England
dreamed of escaping the hopelessness and stigma of parish relief; fugitive slaves
from the American South dreamed of freedom in Canada on their way north with the
Underground Railroad. But most who came to Canada shared the dream of owning their
own land. In an agricultural society, land meant status. Most emigrants had worked
land they did not own and they dreamed of escaping servitude in a country where
they would work their own land.
Land was cheap and plentiful in Canada. The government
provided free grants of 50 acres (20 hectares) to poor immigrants. Larger grants
of land from the Crown could be obtained upon the payment of modest fees and the
fulfillment of obligations like building a home and clearing a set amount of land.
It was a buyer's market, especially when compared with Great Britain. Emigrants
with hard currency or credit could purchase established farms much more cheaply
than in England. Heavy demand for labour and high wages meant that a poor immigrant
could work as a farm labourer for a few years to save to buy land or a settled
farm.
If cheap land for all sounded too good to be true for
many who were emigrating for Canada, they quickly learned the physical price of
landownership: the back-breaking labour required to clear the land for cultivation.
Many willingly paid the price of clearing a few acres of forest a year to live
the dream of establishing a prosperous farm to pass on to their children.
Robert Hume bought a farm in Upper Canada in 1846, realizing
his dream of being a landed farmer. Through years of hard work he built up a thriving
farm. In the 1860s, he branched out into the grain and seed wholesale trade. On
his death in 1878, he passed on a prosperous business to his son John Hume, who,
in the years before 1900, became very wealthy in the trade. In two generations
in Canada, the Humes had fulfilled the immigrant dream.
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