During the summer while researching some material on Carlisle, summer student Jennifer McNally found an old undated newspaper clipping of a column written by Hamilton Spectator writer Mabel Burkholder and entitled “Out of the Storied Past: Carlisle Beginnings”. It is reproduced here for members to enjoy.
To sit and chat with Mrs. Mary Featherstone, of 38 Hess Street South, is to learn about early days in Carlisle, for that is home to her notwithstanding the fact that she has lived in several other places. The pretty and prosperous village of Carlisle, situated among the hills and dales of the ninth concession of East Flamboro, on the road going over to Cedar Springs from the Guelph Highway, is 12 miles from Hamilton, from which in the early days it was considered an easy run down the Snake Road to dispose of a load of farm produce on the Hamilton market. It is a good farming district, the soil being a mixed loam.
George Bennett, father of Mrs. Featherstone, was a pioneer farmer at Carlisle. He belonged to a U. E. Loyalist family which migrated first to Nova Scotia, where they receive 200 acres of land. Abandoning this in 1792, they moved to Upper Canada. Mr. Bennett’s father settled first on a farm north of Lowville. The family has not been able to locate the spot where this worthy pioneer is buried.
George Bennett became a farmer at Carlisle and was well known in Hamilton for the hackney horses which he bred and sold. At that time Carlisle was a settlement with four hotels, a flour and grist mill and a peg factory. Here Mary Ann Bennett (now Featherstone) was born in 1858. She was told that on the day of her birth, March 16, her father knocked down with a stick a number of passenger pigeons, which in their migratory flight darkened the sky.
The only church was the Methodist, now United, and as soon as Mary Bennett was old enough she sang in the choir. Up until a few years ago that choir always had a Bennett in it.
“Father,” Mrs. Featherstone recalls, “took the first copy of the Spectator, published in 1846. He had stacks of them, as he kept them, fancying himself sitting in his armchair looking them over when he became unable to work. And we have had the Spectator ever since.”
Names of other early comers to the Carlisle district were Vance, Binkley, Mills, Van Norman and Eaton. Some noted families through the years have been Bogles, Gastles, Smalls, Blagdens, Aldersons and Greens.
When the swinging high level bridge over the Desjardins Canal blew down, March 15, 1875, two Carlisle farmers, Mr. Frank Gray and Mr. John Moore, with their team and waggon, were on the bridge. It was during the spring break-up with the frost coming out of the ground. The horses had their legs broken and one of them had its throat cut by a wire drawn tightly across it. Mr. Gray suffered a broken shoulder. Mr. Moore landed on the side, but was more seriously injured than his companion. However, both lived to old age, not much worse for their mishap.
Modern Carlisle is growing fast and many people who work in the city find it satisfactory to have their homes amid beautiful rural surroundings.
Mrs. Featherstone has a clear recollection of the Fenian raids scare. She said many approached her father to see if he would be agreeable to signing the paper they got out advocating annexation with the United States. George Bennett would have none of it.
“If they come, they come,” he said cryptically adding something about their getting out faster than they came.
“Oh, I know something about pioneering,” Mrs. Featherstone recalled, “I remember the farm having so many pine trees that there was scarcely room to set a building. I could plough, I could harrow, I could take the other end of the cross-cut opposite father and cut the logs all day long.”
And, as if that was not enough pioneering, her intended husband, who had been studying to become a doctor, suddenly got the urge to go west and take up land. There was much talk in those days of getting a quarter-section for next to nothing. Maybe that’s all it was worth.
Her fiancé pioneered for a year alone, then sent for his bride. Said Mary’s father, “I’d rather take her to her grave than to the train that’s bound for the west.”
She was driven from the end of steel to her new home in an oxcart. It was dark but she could make out the lines of a low sod house. During rain storms, water entered the house at pleasure, until there was nothing dry to wear or to sleep upon. To render the rest of that day more fearsome, the Riel Rebellion had broken out. They stuck to it for a year or so, but after the birth of her first child, without benefit of doctor or trained nurse, they got up and returned to the east, coming back by rail through the United States.
James Spencer, at the age of 87, still runs the grist mill at Progreston, two miles from Carlisle.
Miss Sibyl Bennett, K.C., who was born at St. George where her father was a minister, is a distant connection. Miss Bennett, who was the fourth woman in Canada to become a King’s Counsel, was called to the bar when Mitchell Hepburn was Premier of Ontario. R.B. Bennett, former Prime Minister of Canada, took an interest in her success and they often compared family records to see if they could find any relationship, but without much success. Mr. Bennett sent his robe for her investiture. Miss Bennett divides her time between two law offices, one in Georgetown and the other in Brampton.
© The Waterdown-East Flamborough Heritage Society 2002, 2023.
