John A. Turnbull ~ July 1890 - January 1975*

"I have recollections of taking the old horse down to the bush after we came from school and snaking up a tree to cut up to burn that night.  One night we had nothing but a pile of pine logs on the woodpile and they were soggy and wet.  However, we cut a few blocks off them and split and carried them in.  We went to bed with all our clothes on that night."

*My maternal grandfather ~ lbwalker

"In the very early days of bees ~ this district ~ bees were very common, as the pioneers were rather inexperienced.  When they came to the new country the work that faced them first was so unusual to what they were used to at home and as there was no one to turn to for advice or instruction, it was do-it-yourself if it was to be done at all.  The alternative was starve, and so out of necessity a generation of men were produced that were daunted at nothing.
With the bush and starvation on one side and their wives and small families on the other, they buckled right in to the task ahead of them and relying on each others' help and advice, they learned many things that we of this generation have long forgotten if we ever knew them.
When we think of this country as a dense bush, no roads any place, no cleared land, that faced the settlers about 1840, and then remember it as it was about 1890, we wonder how men did so much in fifty short years."


~ John A. Turnbull (1890 - 1975) life-long resident of East Seneca, Haldimand County.


A Bee ~ East Seneca Church

 Photograph:  J. A. Turnbull, second from right.