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By Root 1110 0

didn’t welcome another pregnancy, both she and John were proud of their rapidly expanding family. Had she wanted to, Susanna could undoubtedly have learned about natural abortificeants (her Indian friends might have told her about the effectiveness of oil of cedar, hellebore or ergot of rye). But birth control and terminations were rarely considered by Canadians of this period. A brood of eight or ten children provided a ready supply of much-needed cheap labour for the farm, even if it did put a huge strain on the mother’s health. Even in larger towns like Belleville, the birth rate remained high until the late nineteenth century, because children were still regarded as insurance for the future. One of the ditties popular in the colony suggested that:

Of all the crops a man can raise

Or stock that he employs,

None yields such profit and such praise

As a crop of Girls and Boys.

The following day, Susanna set off to explore Belleville. She was deeply disappointed, and irritated by what she perceived as its pretensions. She had hoped for a thriving market town like Bungay or Southwold, with cobbled streets and charming stone cottages. Instead she found “an insignificant, dirty-looking place” in which the frame houses were “put up in the most unartistic and irregular fashion.” Large sections of Front Street remained unpaved, and the slabs of limestone on the paved sections were laid so carelessly that pedestrians were constantly tripping and falling. Susanna harrumphed that the “paving committee had been composed of shoe-makers,” because so many shoes got destroyed in falls or stuck in the deep, mud-filled potholes. Her relief at the prospect of regular Sunday worship was diluted by her disgust at the brick-and-frame “eyesore” that was St. Thomas’s Anglican Church. St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, on the same block, was an even shabbier wooden building. John’s assurance that at least five households boasted pianos did not raise her spirits. Only the cedar-fringed banks and “rapid, sparkling” water of the Moira River, which thousands of logs floated down each spring, brought a smile to her face. The river reminded her of the Otonabee. Faced with the gossipy little community of Belleville, Susanna grew quite nostalgic for the privacy of her cabin on Lake Katchewanooka.

Susanna considered St. Thomas’s Anglican Church “an eye-sore.”

As sheriff of Victoria County, John was in a sensitive position. His job was to keep the peace among the various factions. This meant, in his view, staying aloof from the ethnic, sectarian and political schisms within the populace. He might have managed to stay away from ethnic and sectarian squabbles, but there was no hope of avoiding the political quarrels. A chasm separated the Tories, who swore undying loyalty to the British crown, and the Reformers, who felt that the colony should be given a greater degree of control over its own affairs. John tried to stay on the fence, by attending both the Anglican and the Presbyterian churches, and by appointing as his deputy sheriffs one Tory and one Reformer. But “however moderate your views might be,” Susanna discovered, “to belong to the one was to incur the dislike and ill-will of the other.”

While John had to deal with Belleville’s frock-coated lawyers and merchants, who pursued their public vendettas through elections, legal cases and business practices, Susanna had to deal with their wives. Many were the kind of educated women for whose company she had hungered in the wilderness. But now she discovered that Belleville wives “entered deeply into this party hostility; and those who … might have become friends and agreeable companions, kept aloof, rarely taking notice of each other when accidentally thrown together.” Her hands still roughened by field work, she also found them snobbish and superficial: she deplored their love of finery and their sneering disregard for farmers and “mechanics.” In fact, she found herself in the unfamiliar position of scorning their hoity-toity pretensions, which were remarkably similar to those with which she