Gwendoline P. Clarke

Chronicles of Ginger Farm: Life on a Small Canadian Farm During Times of Great Global Change, 1929-1962 Gwendoline P. Clarke

This history-making book gives readers a rare look at a mostly forgotten but dramatically important reality: rural life in the twentieth century. It is a selection of Gwendoline P. Clarke's colourful, richly detailed and heart-warming newspaper columns about day-to-day life on the one hundred acres she and her husband, “Partner, ? farmed near Milton, Ontario.

Gwen filed her stories weekly to the Acton Free Press from April 1929 to August 1962 ? years that drew her and her fellow Canadians into world-changing and nation-building events: the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War and the ups and downs of the economy, of which farming was always a central part. While keenly concerned by those events ? especially the Second World War, with her son fighting overseas and her English relatives toughing out Hitler's bombing raids ? Gwen never failed to entertain her readers with her stories of:

• milking, calving, feeding the chickens, planting and threshing
• the rise and fall of egg and milk prices
• trips to the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto
• the vicissitudes of every weather pattern the country could throw their way
• changes in farming technology, from horse-drawn plough to oil-burning and then gas-powered tractors and from hand milking to the wonders of the milking machine
• and the slow and rare acquisition of modern conveniences, from buggy to car, oil lamps to electricity, and crackly radio to flickering black-and-white TV

GWENDOLINE P. CLARKE moved from England to Canada as a War Bride with her husband after the First World War. Besides being a columnist for the Acton Free Press, she wrote articles for various Canadian and English newspapers and magazines and reported on Halton County Council meetings for the Milton and Acton papers. Gwendoline Clarke was a faithful and active member of the Scotch Block Women's Institute and an early advocate for the preservation of timberlands and local flora and fauna.