The Shamrock and
the Maple Leaf
Irish-Canadian Documentary Heritage at Library and Archives Canada

Essays

Rural Communities

The Rural and Agricultural Context of the Irish-Canadian Experience

Cecil Houston
University of Windsor, Ontario

The agricultural and resource economy framed most of the Irish experience in Canada. That was as true for Waterford people in the Newfoundland fisheries of the eighteenth century as for the Canadian-born children of Ontario's Irish pioneers who farmed the western grass prairies in the late nineteenth. Read more »

Letters Home to Fermanagh from Nathaniel Carrothers,
near London, Ontario, 1839 to 1867

Cecil Houston
University of Windsor, Ontario

Letters from emigrants to loved ones in Ireland are a great source of knowledge and sentiment about the nature of agricultural and rural life. They reveal the extent to which agricultural knowledge and technology were shared across the Atlantic. The letters of Nathaniel Carrothers, one of 17 Carrotherses who left Ireland, give glimpses of personal pride and the circumstances of his farm life in Canada. Read more »