The Taylors – Part 2
My grandmother, Mrs. Joe Stringer, was one of the most remarkable people that I ever heard tell of. She was as strong as any lumberjack. My uncle, Robert Graham, told me of seeing her one day at the Conroy farm. She watched two young lumberjacks trying to put a barrel of molasses into a wagon. I think perhaps either one of them might have been able to put the barrel into the wagon but they were not lifting together. The barrel was wobbling around. Finally she walked over and elbowed them to one side and heaved the barrel into the wagon and laughed at them.
By land the settlers traveled the old Hastings Road, the Peterson Road and the Opeongo Line. In fact travel was easier on the York River. “ Grandmother could paddle a canoe as well as grandfather.” One day she and her sister borrowed a small birch bark canoe from their neighbour, William Wadsworth. He was the ancestor of all the Wadsworth people. He carried the little canoe the mile to the Little Mississippi River and told them when they returned from their shopping trip from Combermere to leave the canoe at the river and he would take it back home himself. When they returned from the thirty mile round trip to Combermere they just picked up the little canoe which made a dandy shopping basket, and carried it up to his house. Mr. Wadsworth was quite a man to swear so he cursed a blue streak at the idea of women portaging a canoe the mile from the river.
Joe Stringer grew wheat and at first there was no grist mill within 100 miles so they ground the wheat in a stump hole made with a round nosed adze. Later they would take their wheat and buckwheat to the water powered grist mill at Combermere.
My grandmother, Mrs. Joe Stringer, lived the last fourteen years of her life with my dad and mother on the old Conroy farm. She was in her 80’s then, but she couldn’t get around as fast as I could as a small boy, but she had a walking stick with a sharp crook which she used to hook around my ankle, then pull me in hand over hand and rough me up with those little hands of hers.
There was once though that she overstepped her strength, for on the 9th of April, 1861 she carried a heavy iron kettle through two feet of snow to the sugar bush, with the result that my mother was born on the 10th of April, two months ahead of time.
The midwife who looked after her must have been an extra good one for she made one of the first incubators out of a cloth basket with bottles of warm water. Anyway they both lived through that and grandmother mothered fourteen children, and mother ten, and grandmother lived on well into her 91st year.