Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [134]
There was one trip John was determined to make before he died. Since the Moodies had left the backwoods for Belleville after the 1837 Rebellion, John had never returned to Lake Katchewanooka and the community now known as Lakefield. However, he and Susanna had heard a great deal about its development during the intervening years from Catharine, who had settled there after Thomas died. Her brother Sam, who lived in a grand brick house and was acknowledged as Lakefield’s founding father, had helped his widowed sister build a small cottage close by. So in July 1865, John and Susanna Moodie scraped together the money to pay a two-week visit.
Susanna and John travelled by train as far as Peterborough. The journey tired the elderly couple, who clung to each other’s arms and hung on to bags filled with their clothes, writing pads and gifts of baked goods and jam for their relatives. A stagecoach collected them from the Peterborough railroad station and took them into Lakefield. They were overwhelmed. “How rapidly the face of this country changes!” wrote Susanna. “I left the woods of North Douro, 26 years ago. Only three houses all composed of logs and of the smallest dimensions were to be found within three miles of us.” Now, the Otonabee River no longer raced and foamed through the dense forest, overwhelming a handful of settlers with the raw power of the landscape. Instead, the water rippled in the calm millponds next to the huge waterwheels of two prosperous sawmills. Clapboard houses, with gardens full of hollyhocks, delphiniums and roses, lined the main street. There were four taverns, a frame schoolhouse where Catharine’s daughter Mary taught, a post office, three stores, a doctor’s office and a bakery. All the scars of a pioneer settlement—the mud holes in the road, the stumps and bare earth around every dwelling, the vegetable peelings outside the kitchen doors—had disappeared. There was even a brand-new plank sidewalk down the main street. It was only eleven years earlier that Sam Strickland had organized the building of the village’s first church—Christchurch, a little stone building that looked as though it had arrived ready-made from an English village—but its congregation had already outgrown it and was in the process of building a larger Anglican church, St. John’s. In addition, the Baptists and the Presbyterians had each built brick churches and the Wesleyan Methodists had built a frame church.
Lakefield would never rival Susanna’s memories of Southwold—there were none of the village trades she remembered from her English youth, such as the wheelwright, barrel-maker and potter. But Lakefield had fulfilled the promise that both Catharine and Susanna had described in their letters home before the 1837 Rebellion: it was a community in which a gentleman could live in comfort. The canal system first promoted in the 1830s, linking Lake Ontario with Lake Huron, would not be completed for another fifty-five years. But Lakefield had flourished because immigration was booming again. A half-century of backbreaking work had pushed the “frontier” dividing cultivated land and wilderness hundreds of miles beyond the town to the north and the west. British North America still lacked men with capital, but the railroads were stimulating the economy and the five colonies were moving towards political union. Among English-speaking Canadians, there was a slowly emerging national identity that combined loyalty to the British Crown with the levelling instinct (what Trollope